Monthly Archives: July 2012

Quote-Mining Makes Baby Jesus Cry

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in General

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Mean to da Kitty!

…and I’m a bad man.

…Okay, I really do hate quote mining, at least when it masquerades as serious scholarship. But the collection of quotes on my Facebook page is not serious scholarship, or at least that’s not what I had I mind when I collected them. I just thought they were cool. So presenting (for your entertainment) a few of my favorite things:

***

“It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously.”
– Alan Greenspan

***

“The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”
— Will Rogers

***

“Tables, chairs, and open chests would have suited Jesus best. He’d have caused nobody harm. No-one alive.”
– Judas (Jesus Christ Superstar)

***

“You’re a Eurotrash colon lying down.”

Open Letter to Umlaut

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“If wishes were horses, we’d all be eatin’ steak.”
– Jane (from Firefly)

***

(Kitty's Revenge!)

Kitty’s revenge!

“Who died and made you suck?”
– The Vandals

***

“Supporting Israel doesn’t mean you’re pro-Jewish. It just means you want all the Jews a half a world away to fulfill our Biblical prophecy.”
– “Reverend” Jim Osborne (of the Landover Baptist Church)

***

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
– Author Unknown

***

“A great many things are dying very violently all the time. The best days for violent deaths are Tuesdays. They are the yellow paint days. Saturdays are second best, or worst. Saturdays are red paint days. The great death game is therefore a contest between red paint days and yellow paint days. So far yellow paint days are winning by 31 corpses to 29. Whatever the color, a violent death is always celebrated by a firework.”
– Smut, Drowning by Numbers

***

“America! You’re an unfriendly waitress with bad cappuccino.”
– The Foremen

***

“He said, that’d be the last thing I ever do is shoot mahself, …which it was.”
– Vernon Florida.

***

“I’d rather be damned if I don’t.”
– Robert McNamara

***

“right after daddy gets home from the bar
visits his bookie and steals a new car
he’ll drive to the strip club
and if daddy plays his cards right
he’ll bring home your new mommy tonight”
– Lullaby, Stephen Lynch

***

“We’re raising up our standard, so you can lower yours.
We’ll see ya slashed and slandered and abandoned on the shores.
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Bring on the media whores!”
– The Foremen

***

“When you get in bed with ultimate evil, my friend, it always takes the covers.”
– The Tick

***

“Neither party ever gains any insight or learns from these encounters. They never sit down and discuss their differences. Repeated defeats do not teach Bluto to honour Olive Oyl’s humanity, and repeated pummellings do not teach Popeye to swallow his spinach before the fight.”
– Walter Wink, Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence

***

“”Jesus… ah, son, let me tell you about Jesus. You see, son, Jesus is a man, but sometimes, he’s also an idea – kind of like Salvadore Dali painting. You ever see a Dali painting, son? You ever see that melting clock face picture? Jesus is like that. Like a bunch of clocks, melting against various wood finishes. Jesus is like… well, it’s kind of like this, son. Picture an apple covered in a layer of smooth butter, and lacquered with sweet syrup. Now picture this candied apple resting upon a melted clock – you know, like that one in the Dali painting. Now picture the melted clock spinning, and slowly turning, and in the background, the Moscow Red Army Choir is performing Ave Maria.

“You see, son, Jesus, well, Jesus is kind of like that. Now you go and reflect.”

– Mithie (from rpg.net)

***

“I’ll fold you into my wallet and spend you on a whore.”
– The Terror

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“Every time a child gets health care, an angel loses its virginity in a rather inventive manner.”
– Mrs. Betty Bowers

***

“And if I want to eat your soul, I’ll just throw it on the griddle. Don’t need to make a deal. I don’t need to tell a riddle. And fuck Charlie Daniels! I don’t care if he can fiddle. I’m Satan.”
– Stephen Lynch

***

“There’s a mackerel of a cornflake for you.”
– Line cut from A Clockwork Orange

***

“The position that private action, however deplorable, is not a fit subject for government action puts libertarians in the position of repeating simultaneously all the things that are wrong with the world and their resolute determination to do nothing about them.”
– Andrew Sabl

***

“You could call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re dropping Hamiltons!”
– Lazy Sunday

***

“Every Time I see your face. Every tie my shoes.”

– The Butthole Surfers

***

“In the Beginning there was nothing, not even time. No planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme. Then there was a bang like the sound of my gat. The universe began and the shit was phat.”

– M.C. Hawking, A Brief History of Rhyme

***

“Start wearing purple for me now.”
– Gogol Bordello

***

“Shout-out to the girl who wanted the Japanese kanji for “luck” to represent her Irish heritage.”
– S.K. Williams (employee at a tattoo shop)

***

“A bit more violent than Brahms, but it’s pretty good.”
– Lemmy

***

“Vilmar, a traveling salesman, whose 10.4 year old Opel became stuck in a 3 meter deep snow bank during blizzard in rural Schleswig-Holstein. It took Vilmar several hours to trudge through the deep snow drifts to the nearest farm house with a light on. Frozen half to death, Vilmar finally reached the front door and knocked on it. When Berke, a grizzled old farmer, answered the door, Vilmar pleaded for a place to spend the night. “Sure, young man, I can give you a place to sleep,” said the hospitable old man. “But, I have no daughter for you to sleep with.”
– Dingfod from Freethought Forums

Mitt and McCain On Gay Marriage, Or Hell No, We Can’t Just Get Along!

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Justice, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

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What does it take to make the words “agreement to disagree” work? I’d say at minimum, it requires a certain understanding of each others’ position, but perhaps that is a point for a different discussion. At present I am wondering just how much such an agreement can cost one of the parties before that respectful disagreement turns to shit.

Case in point, this conversation between John McCain and Ellen Degeneres:

I hear McCain frame this issue as respectful disagreement all the while diminishing a woman’s love to her very face, and I just can’t find the words or how I feel about it. You can see how uncomfortable he is about it, but that doesn’t stop him. I wonder if his words sick to the bottom of his own stomach the way they do mine? Or if he has words to explain the painful look on his own face?

But of course, history repeats himself.

See how respectfully Mitt Romney denies this man the same rights that he himself enjoys. He looks almost pained as he says this. Luckily he respects the mans right to disagree with him over the issue.

…and once again, I am at a loss for words.

And then of course we have the controversy over today’s Twitter comments on Sally Ride. It seems rude to throw it back in Romney’s face that her partner of 27 years will not now be entitled to spousal benefits, an option his stance on gay marriage would deny her as a point of principle.

That really does seem,  …No, wait a minute, what’s rude is the part about denying  someone the right to marry the love of her life on principle. What’s rude is the fact that someone surviving a 27-year relationship is denied the dignity as well as the benefits available to the rest of us.

That’s rude!

No, “rude” doesn’t even come close.

If the folks who so carefully frame this as respectful disagreement would drop their own sense of entitlement and show some decency for a change, then maybe, we wouldn’t have to bring up such issues AT THE END OF SOMEONE’S LIFE.

Anyway, I think I just found the words I was looking for. They come from Greta Christina  at the Freethought Blogs. She wants to send Mitt a memo; it simply says “Fuck You.”

In Reno With a Camera – Trouble Ensues!

21 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in Bad Photography, Justice, Street Art

≈ 26 Comments

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So, I have this brand new camera, and I have been busy confirming my lack of photographic skills whenever I get a chance. Alone for a day in Reno, NV, I decided to go check out some of the artwork around town.

So, I figured these pics might go up on Facebook, but this isn’t a photo-blog, so I really didn’t think my trip to Reno would end up here at the northy place.

That was before I got to the Bruce R. Thompson, United States Courthouse & Federal Building. It had kind of an interesting sculpture in front of it, so I tried a few times to get a decent pic; zoomed in and out, turned the camera 90 degrees, tried it again, …you know the drill.

Enter the security guard.

He walked up rather briskly and asked me if I was doing this for commercial purposes? I answered ‘no’, and he proceeded to explain to me that if I had been doing it for commercial purposes, then I would need to get a permit. As long as I was just doing it, because I thought it was an interesting building I was okay, but taking a picture for commercial purposes required a permit. Asked why this was the case, the guard simply shrugged and said the politicians always have their regulations. What they were, he didn’t seem to know.

I had my pictures, so I walked off.

…but this has been eating me. Oh, the guard was perfectly nice about the whole thing, but still it’s eating me. I’ve studied enough legal conflicts to know just how complicated and counter-intuitive these matters can get, and normally I like to sort through the particulars before saying anything. Still! Somewhere in the scope of the First Amendment, I just can’t help thinking there ought to be room for taking a picture of a perfectly public building from a perfectly public sidewalk.

…and it shouldn’t require a damned permit to do it.

At this point I have no idea what the regulation is, or how broad its scope happens to be, much less how its framers envision its relationship to the rights of citizens. Nor do I know how much may have been lost in the translation from the particulars to what that guard said to me at that particular moment. But this is one case where I just can’t help thinking that no matter how the particulars shake out, it shouldn’t lead to exchanges like the one I had there with that guard.

Perhaps I am being unreasonable; I just don’t think so.

Since I’m thinking about it (airports and free time, you know how it goes), and since I now have story (however brief) to go with my bad photography, I am now going to inflict my pictures on those of you unfortunate enough to stumble across my blog today.

What did you expect? I’m a bad man!

Primitive Superstition and Proxy Fundamentalism: Further Reflections on Native American Spirituality

17 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Anthropology, atheism, History, Native American Themes, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

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Stephen Hawking and Leonard Moldinow
The Grand Design

It always bends my thoughts a little sideways to hear my fellow unbelievers dismiss Christianity as primitive superstition, but it isn’t Christianity or Christians that I’m worried about (sorry). It’s the ‘primitives’ that concern me.

Having spent most of my career working with indigenous people, people who until recently might well have been dismissed as primitives, I can’t help but bristle a bit when the cultural heritage of my friends and coworkers (or their grandparents) is used as an insult for someone else. More to the point, I can’t help but feel the comparison is deeply misleading, not just as to the nature of ‘primitive’ people and their customs, but as to the whole shape of human history. In the end, references to primitives and/or superstition always strike me as a bit of self-indulgence, or even an ironic expression of faith.

The notion here is that Christianity (and most if not all of the world’s great religions (certainly the Abrahamic faiths) are essentially trying to explain the world about them much as preliterate peoples are presumed to have done in the remote past. Actually, “non-literate” would a better term, but for the present, I am taking the notion of things-primitive to refer to those who haven’t developed writing systems. That’s putting a rather complex topic into a simple formula, but of course this is a blog, not a book, so you are either with me or not at this point; we’ll see what happens. Anyway, the point is that folks comparing Christianity to primitives are essentially suggesting that Adam and Eve, are for example, erroneous attempts to explain human origins much as Australian Aborigines might explain local geography as the concrete result of events in Dreamtime narratives; just as Norseman might explain the shape of a salmon’s tail as a result of Thor’s powerful grip; …and so on. The idea, as I understand it, is to treat religious beliefs as a subset of erroneous explanations for the world around us, explanations that reflect the ignorance of those doing the explaining.

Take for example the following excerpt from Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design (2112):

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Hawking goes on to explain that the development of modern science has displaced such explanations, and as science progresses these sorts of beliefs should essentially fade by the wayside. Thus, we have the germs of a grand historical meta-narrative, one in which humanity tries various means of explaining the world only to commit numerous errors before settling on modern scientific methods.

***

Paul Zolbrod
The Navajo Creation Story

So, what is the problem?

Let me start with an example. When I first headed into Navajo country in 1996, I hired on as a research assistant for a study of local youth gangs. I can’t say that the study yielded much of value, but we did manage to not get anyone killed (…I think). At any rate, one of the items we were supposed to investigate was the question of why gangs had appeared in Navajo country. In the days just before the study kicked up I recall asking an elder that very question. He looked right at me and said; “The separation of the sexes.”

So, what was he talking about?

It was a reference to a specific phase in the Navajo emergence narratives. The most thorough retelling that I’ve looked at would be the book; Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story by Paul G. Zolbrod. A portion of the narrative has been reproduced here on the website for the Twin Rocks Trading Post, and it’s definitely worth a read, but I’ll paste in a small stretch here. You could just as easily entitle this passage; “Where All The Trouble Began.”

Altse’ hastiin the First Man became a great hunter in the fourth world. So he was able to provide his wife Altse’ asdzaa’ the First Woman with plenty to eat. As a result, she grew very fat. Now one day he brought home a fine, fleshy deer. His wife boiled some of it, and together they had themselves a hearty meal. When she had finished eating, Altse asdzaa’ the First Woman wiped her greasy hands on her sheath.
She belched deeply. And she had this to say:
“Thank you shijoozh my vagina,” she said.
“Thank you for that delicious dinner.”
To which Altse’ hastiin the First Man replied this way:
“Why do you say that?” he replied.
“Why not thank me?
“Was it not I who killed the deer whose flesh you have just feasted on?
“Was it not I who carried it here for you to eat?
“Was it not I who skinned it?
“Who made it ready for you to boil?
“Is nijoozh your vagina the great hunter, that you should thank it and not me?”

To which Altse’ asdzaa’ offered this answer:
“As a matter of fact, she is,” offered she.
“In a manner of speaking it is joosh the vagina who hunts.
“Were it not for joosh you would not have killed that deer.
“Were it not for her you would not have carried it here.
“You would not have skinned it.
“You lazy men would do nothing around here were it not for joosh.
“In truth, joosh the vagina does all the work around here.”
To which Altse’ hastiin the First Man had this to say:
“Then perhaps you women think you can live without us men,” he said.

…and things get worse from there.

Ultimately, the fight between this Ur-couple will lead to the separation of all men and women from one another. The longing that each gender feels for the other will in turn lead them to unnatural sex acts, and these will in turn lead to the birth of monsters (really the story does get quite interesting).

So, what was the elder telling me? On the one hand, he was suggesting that the gangs were themselves the sort of monster that had its ultimate origins in the time of separation, just as had the giant and all the other beasts slain the by Hero Twins later in this same set of legends. On the other hand, he was suggesting something more subtle; he was calling attention to a high divorce rate on the Navajo Nation. In effect, that brief response served to point out not just one but two answers to my question, and to suggest some sort of relationship between them. Either way the separation of men and women from one another was, in this man’s view, the reason that gang violence had begun to appear in Navajo country.

The first of the two answers presented above could be classified as mythology. It is an attempt to explain a known fact by means of a reference to an old (and quite unverifiable) legend. The second approach treats the story in question as an allegory about the importance of marriage, and the elder’s answer becomes a direct social commentary on the relationship between changing family conditions and the rise of gang-related violence in the area. Right or wrong about the issues at hand, this interpretation would suggest the elder had been directing my attention to real world behavior. It would not have been difficult to measure that behavior, and even to formulate strategies for testing the causal connection he had asserted. But the most interesting thing about this whole fashion of speaking is really the interplay between the two forms of explanation. The elder did not choose which approach to communicate; in fact he chose language that suggested both lines of thinking to anyone familiar enough with the issues to know what he was talking about.

***

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation
(September 2011)

So what, right? Thus far, what I have presented is fairly comparable to untold other religious texts. What is the difference, you may ask?

Well, for a start, there is no catechism here. Neither is there any equivalent to the Apostle’s or the Nicene Creed (or any other). Recourse to the emergence narratives presents no set doctrines about which one must agree, nor are there mechanisms for establishing what those would be. Until folks like the early anthropologists make it into the southwest, these stories were not written down at all, and until Zolbrod one could find no single text to unite them all into a single Holy Text. In the old days, as they say, this story might well have been a complete performance in its own right, one told for reasons specific to those present, and adapted a little for that precise purpose. Folks would have understood how this little story related to a number of other stories, but no set canon could be found against which to measure each individual performance or determine its precise meaning. In short, thesignificance of the text above ought to be understood without recourse to any of the mechanisms by which mainstream religions streamline their message and create a uniform set of doctrines.

To understand the elder’s reference one needn’t start by assuming he literally believes in the events described in the narrative above, or even that such a belief is relevant to his answer. One need only recognize that he found the story to be a useful reference point, and that he chose to use that reference point as a means of communicating a sense of the current state of his community.

I think this is the sort of thing John R. Farella must have had in mind when he said in his book, The Main Stalk, that one ought not to assume all natives are fundamentalists. It isn’t even that such folks aren’t out there, but they do not necessarily control the traditions in question. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that a literal interpretation of things drives every reference to native oral traditions. That is what people raised in the Abrahamic traditions (whether we have accepted those traditions or not) tend to do when encountering the oral traditions of various people around the world, or even when we read ancient texts (such as Genesis) with an eye towards understanding something about the oral traditions incorporated within them.

Understood in these terms, the literal value of mythic events loses a lot of ground to the other implications of the narrative. A god of lightning ceases to be an explanation for lightning, and the lightning becomes a convenient means of letting nature call the name of the god to your mind. References to actual geography in mythic narratives cease to be a means of explaining those geographic features and become a variety of social conventions from territorial claims to moral lessons. The oral traditions become less of an attempt at understanding nature and more of an attempt to use nature as a means of expressing principles of social organization.

***

And where does that leave us?

I think it leaves us without a coherent central theme for the grand meta-narrative. Absent the assumption that every story is supposed to contribute to a single coherent theory (much less the assumption that that theory is a truth the recognition of which all mankind is obligated to acknowledge), we lose any clear reason to treat such stories as pre-scientific explanations of the world around us.

No, this does not mean we must accept any and all religious assertions after first checking to make sure they are offered in a less than literal spirit. What it does mean is that we lose one religious tenant to which not-a-few atheists seem quite prone, namely belief in uni-lineal Progress with a capital P. We lose that tenant, both as a short-cut to understanding the past of humanity, and as a promise of future success.

This does not mean giving up reason as a value, just letting go of the illusion that this value is the axis mundi around which all of human history turns.

Hawking is perfectly right to insist on the superiority of scientific approaches to explaining the world; he is wrong to think that explanation is the key to all those other traditions now conveniently (if quite inaccurately) summarized as a god of this and a god of that.

If there is an explanatory feature to religious tradition, it is largely a function of the means by which religions derive actual doctrine from such narratives and demand that others acknowledge the truth of those doctrines. In this respect the Abrahamic traditions do not merely carry forward the problems of earlier, so-called primitive, traditions. Instead they bring with them a brand new sort of problem, an effort to realign all the creativity one finds in oral tradition with a single obligatory and highly inflexible paradigm. We ought not to be too quick to let the God of Abraham share the blame for this problem with the figures of oral tradition from around the rest of the world. Nor should we be too quick to assume the course of history has been driven first and foremost by the values of scientists and philosophers.

Fragments of Skepticism From My Youth

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in atheism, Childhood, Religion

≈ 36 Comments

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I have been reading some of the why-I-am-an-atheist stories over on Pharyngula, and it has led to thoughts about the various moments in my younger days which might have led me down that path. I wouldn’t say that any of these stories could really constitute an adequate answer to the question of why I am an atheist. Taken together, I’m not sure they do add up to such an answer either; instead they form a record of the impressions made by various skeptical thoughts in my youth. Some of these were my thoughts; some came from others, but each of them has made a lasting impression on me.

As to others, well we shall see…

***

A CARTOON BIBLE AND AN EAGER YOUNG MIND: No sooner had I learned to read than I decided to tackle the cartoon Bible sitting beside the bed. In fact, I think the ability to read that bible had been one of the major selling points for learning to read to begin with. Cartoons or not, this was a thick volume and it took a lot of time to work through it, just a little reading every night for God knows how long!

…well, no he doesn’t, but you get my point.

Now my choice of early reading material ought to tell you something about my youthful priorities, but please let me assure you that I was every bit as boring and straight-laced as you might have gathered from this fact. Anyway, I loved that book, and I loved it for the right reasons, as some might say; I wanted to learn about God.

So, you can imagine my surprise when my father told me he didn’t believe in the story of Noah and the flood. I was shocked. The mere possibility that any detail of that sacred cartoon filled bundle of Godly goodness could be wrong was beyond me. So, I did what any properly annoying first grader would do. I asked why? Dad told me that the very notion God would need a flood to clear away so many bad people would mean that God made a mistake in the first place, and that seemed unlikely. This is where I must admit I failed in my childhood duties and let Dad off with a single ‘why’. Seriously, I should have pestered him for hours after that. Instead, I just sat there dumb-damned and trying to soak up this new possibility. The Bible could be wrong about something.

Wow!

***

A CHICK IN THE BOY’S BATHROOM: I remember the first time I ever saw a Chick tract. For those of you blessed with ignorance about these things, let me sully your mind with a brief explanation. A chick tract is a cartoon sermon produced by Jack Chick publications. Back in the mid-seventies, it would have been Chick himself who did the one I saw that day. Chick Tracts typically follow the life of some character engaged in a sinful activity such as believing in Evolution, Practicing Paganism, Celebrating Halloween, Playing D&D, or Going to a Catholic Church, for example. The tract will normally include graphic threats of hellfire and damnation before introducing the good news that all of this can be averted by embracing Jesus Christ. It’s a pretty standard script from which neither Chick himself nor those who have filled his shoes deviate by much.

I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I found one of these in the school bathroom. I don’t remember a lot of details, but it definitely followed the familiar script. I don’t think the positive Jesus-loves-you theme made much of an impression on me at the time; I was still tingling in horror at the thought of Hellfire and damnation, and at the thought that someone could be perverse enough to believe in such things. For a kid raised in a Spiritualist household (just think New Age, but not quite as marketable, at least not on the cusp on the 80s) this was quite a shocker. I had heard of people that believed in Hell, but I hadn’t to my knowledge met any of them. And I didn’t know which scared me more; the fantastic thought of actual hellfire, or the very real prospect that someone who embraced the concept had been at my school.

It was shortly after this that I began talking about my ‘beliefs’ (and those of my family) with some classmates. I quickly discovered that my parents were not comfortable with this. I also discovered that I actually knew quite a few people who believed in Hell; I might even have known the person responsible for putting the tract in the school bathroom. And thus I grew to understand my parents’ reluctance to engage in open discussion of the topic.

…and before moving on, let me just say that I think it very fitting that my first encounter with a chick tract would be finding one of them in a bathroom. I could only wish it had been properly disposed of.

***

SASQUATCH, WHERE FOR ART THOU: The highlight of my 6th grade year was the big field trip to somewhere with cabins (I want to say Big Bear). Yes, that’s right; it was that sort of field trip. In the days and weeks leading up to the trip, I heard talk of bunk-beds, long hikes, campfires, and roasted marsh-mellows. …and something else.

Bigfoot! …of course.

Now, you have to remember this was Southern California, and it was the 1970s. Bigfoot was big (pun intended), as was the Devil’s Triangle, and UFOs were everywhere. I even remember a popular movie about reincarnation, and another one about the discovery of Noah’s Ark somewhere in the Himalayas. All of this seemed much more plausible to me as a 6th grader, but more than that, I think it seemed much more plausible to people in the 70s.

I blame it on disco!

The trip would include all the things we talked about, including at least one encounter with Bigfoot, or at least one of our teachers dressed up like him in the dark. It didn’t really fool anyone, …well not after word got out about the zipper.

But the next day…

I don’t remember exactly what we were all supposed to be doing on that day, but apparently it amounted to a stretch of free time. I was near the edge of the campground when some of my classmates began to point out into the trees, just up the mountainside a little. I can still hear them talking; “What is that?” “It’s moving!” “Holy crap!” and “That thing is big!” There weren’t any teachers around this particular spot in the campground, but more and more children (myself included) made our way to the edge of the trees to see what the others were looking at.

I couldn’t see a damned thing!

Like a lot of my classmates I was scared, and I was curious, and those two emotions fought for control of my soul (or at least my feet) in that little spot near the edge of the forest just below the side of a hill. I really wanted to see Bigfoot, and I wanted to live through the experience. In an effort to satisfy my fear while edging closer to the unknown danger I picked up a rock, as did a few of my classmates (because of course Bigfoot would have been no match for 6th graders with rocks). I then stepped as close as I could bring myself to the forest.

When someone said it was moving towards us (whatever it was) we all took a step or three back, but we didn’t quite run. And then of course nothing happened. I grew more and more frustrated, because I still couldn’t see a damned thing. …dammit!

Several of my classmates had surpassed the what-is-that stage and begun to claim with absolute certainty that they were looking right at a Bigfoot. They pointed, and I looked, and I just didn’t see it. A couple kids pointed more and proclaimed still more loudly, and I still didn’t see a damned thing. I edged closer to the forest. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t see him, but I may well have been the kid there who most wanted to.

And I just didn’t.

I’m not entirely sure why, but a few kids began to throw rocks into the forest. When one of the rocks came bouncing back down the side of the mountain, we all took a few hurried steps back. …only most everyone else took a few more than I did, and suddenly there I was out ahead of anyone else. To fully appreciate this you have to understand that I was a pretty flighty kid. (Seriously, my sister and a few of my old classmates could tell you stories, but thankfully this isn’t their blog). For the moment, I was well out ahead of my classmates, rock in hand, ready to confront Bigfoot all by myself if need be.

And damned mad, that he wasn’t making an appearance.

He never did.

When the teachers finally broke up the whole thing and called us inside, I became completely disgusted with the matter, and especially at my classmates. I had recently become acquainted with the phrase; “mass hysteria,” and in the wake of the absentee Bigfoot incident, I made damned sure that everyone within ear-shot was became as familiar with it.

…I could be a really annoying kid.

***

BAD AIM: When I was 14, my Dad and I attended the Daisy International BB-Gun Championship held that year in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Seriously, I think it was mostly the states that supplied teams, but Mexico and Canada sent teams, so I guess that made it an international event. Now I was a budding young gun-nut (seriously, I was), so I hope you will understand that this event was Disneyland, Christmas, and my birthday all rolled into one as far as I was concerned. And I did reasonably well, not well enough to win anything mind you, but, …what the Hell! I was 1 point 1x off a tie for third in prone (he says beaming with pride). But, what the Hell is this story doing here, you may ask?

Well, the contest included a Sunday.

As I recall, there were three options for activities on Sunday morning. One of them was a movie, I do remember that. The third option, I don’t recall, but you’ll never guess the one I chose. I chose to go to a church (or at least a sermon held in the great ballroom that we called church that day). This was my chance to witness mainstream religion in all its glory, and to do it without much effort. For half an hour I could peer into the lives of my Christian classmates and learn what God meant to them, at least on Sundays.

The sermon?

It was about how sin is like missing the mark and failing to hit the bullseye. For half an hour this minister told us all about the nature of sin; it was, in his view, essentially bad aim. I couldn’t believe my ears. I don’t think I had quite mastered the word ‘patronizing’ yet, but as I sat there struggling with the icky feeling in my gut, I knew there had to be some word for the utter stupidity of this man’s sermon. And I came away wondering; is this what mainstream preachers do? …make up lame analogies based on the presumed interests of their target audience?

Suffice to say, I wasn’t dying to repeat the experience.

***

ABSOLUTELY! …OH, WAIT A MINUTE! The words were quite familiar, Hell I had probably said them myself a time or two; “You can’t just expect God to walk up and greet you in person.” It was High school and one of my classmates had just said this in response to another person. I remember nodding in earnest, because everyone knew you couldn’t just expect that, …and then a thought struck me like a bug in the mouth while riding a skateboard.

Why not?

Was that really so unreasonable? Why couldn’t you just say; I’ll believe in God if I actually meet him. And if God failed to pass this test, would He really hold it against someone for having adopted such a standard? Or would he say; oh that’s just So&So; he wants more evidence than I  feel like giving. He’ll learn when I get around to it.

I can’t say that I made this my standard just then, or really that I ever have taken such a stance (it is a bit of a caricature), but in that particular moment, I simply ceased to think of it as an unreasonable position.

Course the fact that my mind was on this while talking to a really cute girl is the rally sad part of this story.

Really, it is.

***

SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE! I was a freshman in College when my friend Joe told me there were factual errors in the Bible, and I did a double-take. Joe may be surprised to know this, but that was a pretty powerful moment for me, not because I was enamored of the Bible, but because I had grown accustomed to the notion that religious beliefs were vague and fuzzy and didn’t really leave anyone with enough leverage to say; “no that’s just incorrect.” Even my Dad had been talking about moral themes back in that discussion over the cartoon Bible; that left room for disagreement. Joe on the other hand, he was suggesting the Bible could just get its facts wrong, and that blew my mind. This may well have been the first time that I heard any religious matter described as a simple factual error.

Surely, the whole thing was much more complicated than that, I thought, …unless it wasn’t.

This conversation renewed my interest in scripture; but this time it had me wondering just what would happen if you approached the text with more straight-forward expectations than I had grown accustomed to. I think that conversation might have been what led me to read The Age of Reason and to take that “Bible as Literature” class. Having been raised in a world of spirits that may or may not manifest themselves at any given time and Auras that you can see if you’re in the right mind and hold your eyes just like so, the notion that religious matters could raise clear questions of truth value was a little novel to me. …A few years and one article by Anthony Flew later, I even had a word for the problem Joe had just set me to thinking about.

It was ‘falsifiability’.

CNN Runs an Article on Wikileaks’ Release of Syrian Emails, …Wait a Minute, No it Doesn’t!

05 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Politics

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Yes, this is the photo they used as well.

I don’t have a lot to say about this news story, but it’s worth a look. …a look at the three paragraphs that CNN devotes to the stated topic of the article before reverting to a bog-standard narrative about Wikileaks and the legal troubles of Julian Assange.

I suppose we could learn a thing or two about media bias here.

– Perhaps a bit about the limits to the oft-cited left wing bias of the media, which is certainly true for a certain range of issues in the culture wars of the U.S. That bias quickly reverses course when substantial features of the world political economy are at stake. Wikileaks does far too much to threaten those interests.

…which is why the topic makes a much better sex scandal.

– There may also be a lesson in here about the way that news stories get their titles. Seriously, you click on a link to an article entitled; “Wikileaks Releases 2.4 Million Syria emails,” and you get a story about its founder’s legal troubles. It isn’t all that uncommon, and the author may not be at fault. Still someone is responsible for this. Someone chose to run a story under a false flag. And that someone ought to get noogies from his boss every morning for the rest of July.

…unless, it is the boss. Then he gets Indian burns.

– Or perhaps there is a lesson in here about editing? Who knows what interesting information might have been in the original piece. The 3 paragraphs on the initial topic certainly hint at interesting and juicy information, shortly before reverting to old news. I think there is a pretty good chance there was something worth reading in that original story.

…and I wonder if they will ever let us read it?

– And most of all, I suspect what we have here is a story about the economics of news reporting and the growing tendency to regurgitate the same old shit, all the while calling it news. It will take time and work to sort through the Wikileaks material, and it will take some knowledgable folks to do that. Why put out that effort when you could just take some old stuff about a long-running story and slip it under the sexy new title about a genuine news development?

…cut corners much?

But hey, I’m sure that with good sound journalistic practices like this, CNN will quickly put the whole Supreme Court ruling fiasco behind them! And seriously, this may be yet another extension of that story. Is the misleading title an attempt to finesse the issue of time, a means of holding off the story while they look over the material? Possible.

…but still damned foolish.

Please pardon me now. I’m off to see if I can find someone who actually did a story about the Syrian email leaks.