Bertrand Russell

I enjoyed Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It explained that impenetrable subject to this neophyte quite well; Russell’s style was clear, erudite, and humorous, and I wanted to read more. He has an essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian” around which I circled warily for some time, knowing fairly well that it would dismantle my comfortable quasi-Neo-Platonist ideas of God and universal salvation. It did, thoroughly. I’ll tackle its points in reverse order.

The Problems with Jesus

I often liked to say that, while I disagreed with much of Christianity, I appreciated the teachings of Jesus, a pacifist in an exceedingly cruel time. (C.S. Lewis said, very effectively, [paraphrased from memory], “Let’s have none of this ‘good teacher’ nonsense. Jesus was either evil, insane, or the Son of God. You do not claim to be the Son of God unless it is true, or a malicious lie, or an insanity.” I stuck to that for a long time.) And Jesus did have several very excellent ideas: turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, give all your belongings to the poor. The first two can be followed vaguely, but there’s no room for doubt as to whether or not you’ve given all your belongings to the poor. But this kind of hypocrisy (strictly speaking, that’s what it is) seems almost rude – of course Jesus didn’t mean that seriously!

But in his essay, Russell points out that Christ promised hell for the unbelievers. I had always thought that Christ said nothing specific about hell, that it was the imposition of Paul and the later writers, or a holdover of Old Testament cruelty. This was probably the result of having not read the New Testament for a while. But there is ample evidence that he believed in hell. Matthew 23:33: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.” Matthew 13:40: “The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” These are not the words of a humane man. As Russell says, no really, profoundly humane person can believe in eternal punishment. It cannot be considered reformatory. Hell may be a deterrent, but only through fear; and cruelty is always, always the product of fear, whether fear of hell, fear of the different, fear of the mysterious, fear of death. The brevity of Russell’s essays prohibits examples, but I’ll dig up a few:

• The hundreds of thousands of women burned in the Middle Ages as witches; in his excellent book Misogyny: The Oldest Prejudice, Jack Holland explains that the witch trials, which largely came in the spiritual void after the Black Death, were an effort of men to convince themselves that the Devil was real, so they could believe that God was real. They feared hell, and sought to convince themselves of the necessity of God, and hundreds of thousands of women suffered for it.

• The Inquisition. Often, through the vast remove of history, we lose sight of the enormity of these events.

• The religious wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Politics played their part, certainly, but Luther’s crusades against his own people, and the counterattacks of the Church, were compelled by fear of Hell, which fed their conviction of their own right.

• The Turko-Islamic conquest. (The Arabs were less interested in spreading Islam by the sword than in acquiring loot and territory, but once the Turks entered the picture, things changed.)

• The massacres of Jews throughout time.

• The Crusades – again, we’ve lost sight of how ruinous and wasteful these wars were.

• The modern jihad.

To digress. Christ believed in hell, and belief in hell can breed nothing but fear, cruelty, and narrow-mindedness. If you are lucky enough to be a Christian or Muslim or whatever, and the other guy is not, then he is hellbound; God has chosen you; from here, it’s not hard to get to the position that whatever you may do is justified. Belief in hell, belief in rightness, is tied inexorably to intolerance. The briefest look at history shows how tolerant societies flourish and intolerant ones stagnate, contract, and die. Muslim Cordoba, Christian/Muslim Sicily, pre-Mongol Baghdad, pre-Christian Rome, Pericles’s Athens, 20^th century America, were all basically tolerant societies.

The intolerance in Christianity wasn’t really apparent to me until I starting reading the Koran. I’d often heard that Islam is the religion of peace, and the violence associated with it is a purely cultural or historical attribute, but the Koran is lousy with the slashing of jugular veins, the gnashing of teeth, the burning of the infidels in the fire of Hell. I took a second look at Christianity, and while it is less vivid with its imagery, there is a good amount of wild-eyed delight at the torment that is to be the lot of the unbelievers. It is often expressed by modern Christians as sadness at what God is going to have to do to the unbelievers; this can take the extreme form of agony at the plight of the billions of unsaved; but in that case, the injustice and cruelty of God for sending these people to hell should be apparent. Is feeling agony over their plight, yet still worshiping God as merciful, another cognitive dissonance?

As Russell points out, Christ’s anger at those who did not like his teaching is not the mark of a good teacher. When my kids express disinterest in learning English, I try not to smite them. Socrates and Buddha treated their critics with blandness; they knew, or believed, that they had the Truth; their reactions seem much more mature than holy fury.

The Necessity of God

Russell quickly discusses and disproves the classic arguments for the example of God. You really should read the whole essay for yourself, but I’ll summarize his points.

• First cause. Creation is the proof of God. Where did the universe come from, if not God? My friend Joel always told me that Occam’s Razor demands that the simplest explanation is always the true one; this isn’t exactly accurate; Occam’s Razor states that nature never employs two devices when one will suffice. Well, obviously, thought I, one device wouldn’t suffice when building the universe. Joel’s case was that it was simpler, and therefore truer, that the universe created itself; I countered that the universe was too dang orderly to be an accident. Some intelligence must have ordered it. But, says Russell, who made that intelligence? He quotes John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?” He then says: “There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.” Basically, we can’t comprehend that the universe may not have been created just for us, that it may have existed for billions of years without us and will go on existing for billions of years after us – or we don’t want to comprehend that.
  This convinced me of the lack of necessity of God. (Sorry, Joel, Bertrand Russell was able to convince me when you couldn’t; guess that’s why he has the Nobel Prize!)

• The Natural Law Argument. When Newton was describing the shape and operation of reality, early physicists saw God in natural laws, in the uniformity of rates of acceleration by gravity on the Earth’s surface, or in the fact that even in the coldest depths of space three feet equals a yard. However, when Russell gave his lecture (1927), this was quickly breaking down as our understanding of the universe became more complex than in Newton’s time. We knew, at that time, that natural laws are more like statistical averages generated by events happening at random, and less of laws than descriptions of the activity of the natural world. They are not laws mandated by an authority, but statements describing how things happen.
  This argument has grown more valid since 1927, as we’ve explored things like quantum physics, which reveals that rules change wildly over the breadth of nature. Discoveries of antimatter, strange matter, tachyons, and black holes continually challenge our definition of natural laws.
  Furthermore, Russell says, one must question why, if God determined these laws, he made them one way and not the other – if he did this from his own whim, then we have something that cannot be described by natural law (God’s whims), and so no need of laws. If he did this to create the best universe, then we have God being subjected to physical necessities, and then he is not omnipotent and therefore not God.

• The Argument of Design. Everything is made just so, to accommodate our existence. I believed this for a long time, particularly when studying the miracle of the human body and its myriad self-regulating systems that keep this incredibly complex machine ticking. It always seemed to me that the world was too orderly. Of course, this was from looking only at the beauties and not the misfires, the aberrations. We know from our study of evolution that organisms seem so well suited to their environment because they have grown to fit it, and not vice versa – the nose was not made that way so it could better fit spectacles, as Voltaire observed.
  The uglinesses of the natural world defy religious justification. There’s my earlier example of the mosquito, and Russell’s example of the tapeworm. There are more – the pain and hazard of childbirth, the preponderance of disease, which has claimed more life than all of history’s wars put together. Let’s look at the insidiousness of a single disease, Yersinia pestis, also known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague. It infests the flea and causes it to be unable to swallow blood; blood pools in its little flea-throat. When it bites, it gags and vomits infected blood into the bite, spreading the disease with great efficiency; furthermore, its inability to digest blood maddens it with hunger, making it bite much more frequently than an uninfected flea. If you’re assigning moral values to creation, this could only be an evil, given out by a loving God. But there is no moral weight to it; it just is.
  Christianity offers the example of Job as the explanation for seemingly pointless suffering. God is testing you. But what kind of God would test you to death? At what point is the test itself morally unacceptable? At what point do you shuck this whole shoddy bargain? The tenth tale of the tenth day of the Decameron tells about a Marquis that marries a beautiful woman; to test her love, he treats her like shit for a decade, heaping abuse on her, hiding her children and telling her that he has executed them. He throws her out, saying he’s going to marry someone else – she remains patient and loving throughout his horrible abuses, and he finally reveals that it’s all a test, and rewards her by making her his proper wife and Marchioness. Lucky her.
  A modern reading of this tale shows a relationship marked by physical abuses and abuses of trust almost unfathomable to us. No one would stand for this sort of treatment even from a king – why take it from a God? Even if he did create us, and we owe him existence, then that allegiance is forfeit by the abusive treatment that the horrors and suffering that his natural world entails.
  To sum up, the natural world is not so perfectly ordered, and if it is divinely ordered, than its imperfections are tantamount to abuse.

• The Moral Arguments for Deity. I’ll just quote Russell:
  “One form [of the moral argument for God] is to say that there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.”
  Basically, do good and bad exist independent of God? If they do, we don’t need God. If they don’t, then God is subordinate to some greater laws, as in the natural law argument. Experience has shown me that humans are quite capable of figuring out right and wrong without the Bible, if they so choose, and that the Bible isn’t always the source of the best ideas of how we ought to behave. We’ll revisit this topic later.

• The Argument for the Remedying of Justice. Without God, who will punish evildoers and reward the just? No, not in this world, in the next. When Stalin stomps all over his countrymen and kills more humans than Hitler ever did, and then dies in bed at age seventy-five, or when Bush orchestrates a series of destabilizing wars that have claimed half a million lives, and counting, then retires to an $8 million house in the Dallas suburbs, or when Charles Manson receives only life imprisonment rather than the death penalty – we can comfort ourselves knowing that they’ll get theirs in Hell. Conversely, the virtuous who go unrewarded will get their rewards in Heaven – sometimes they even chase this to martyrdom, the allure is so powerful. This is ludicrous in its own right, and harmful to the world in which we must meanwhile live. Ludicrous because there is no evidence of any kind to support the belief in the afterlife, notwithstanding the constant, determined probing of thousands of years; there is only the say-so in a few ancient manuscripts of Semitic shepherds, or Arabic merchant-cum-warlords. It is desperate wishful thinking; there must be something better, because this world is pretty crummy. (There is also the issue that it is vengeful, spiteful, and cruel to wish eternal damnation even on the thoroughly wicked.)
  It is harmful because it removes one’s sight from this world and places it on the next. Instead of working on improving this, the only life we’ll have, we ‘store up our treasures in Heaven.’ But, as Russell, says, there’s no indication that this will ever come to pass; if you open a box of oranges and find the entire top layer rotten, you don’t assume, “The rest of the box must be good, to correct the imbalance.” You assume that the entire box is bad.

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Augustine: Murderphilia, Coitophobia, and Hot Saint-on-Slave-Girl Action

Late last year, I read Augustine’s Confessions, and then I read the Cliff Notes, and I began to understand how sick, how corrupted from the roots, my hereditary religion is. Augustine, of course, was a Catholic, and Protestants reject Catholicism, but his beliefs were crucial in shaping Christian doctrine, and they seep into even the most Modern Somewhat Liberal Non-Denominational Christianity.

First, let’s talk about his concept of the “just war”. We’ve seen this dusted off most recently for Operation Iraqi Clusterfuck, but it’s been trotted out and abused to justify the most egregious assaults on humanity for the past sixteen hundred years. He developed it most thoroughly in City of God, the treatise he wrote to explain why God would allow his holy city of Rome to be sacked. (Punishment for their sins, it turns out.)

We can wage war when we 1) minimize the violence, permitting the war to go on no longer than necessary, and 2) kill with love, not anger.

I don’t think it’s particularly novel to suggest that war is never, ever justified, or that war is the failure not only of diplomacy but also of humanity, but it is nonetheless true. Nor can war be controlled; Steinbeck describes it in East of Eden as the time when the biggest rule (don’t kill humans) is reversed (please kill humans), and the idea of doing it in moderation is a fallacy. Pope Urban brought up just war for the Crusades; when the Crusaders took Jerusalem, they killed almost everyone in the city – Muslim, Jew, Christian. Some reports say blood was up to your ankles, others that it was up to your thighs. There were “piles of heads and hands” everywhere.

And Raymond Chandler, in “The Simple Art of Murder”, refers to the taking of another human life as an act of “inhuman cruelty”. It is incompatible with love, and it is lunacy to think it could be otherwise.

“Just war” seems so ludicrous an idea that it hardly bears discussion. I bring this up as an example of Augustine’s fundamental inhumanity, and because it is a prime example of the cognitive dissonance that many Christians happily bear.

“Coitophobia” is perhaps an inaccurate term for Augustine’s obsession. He loved sex. He loved it a lot. He obtained the long-term services of a human female specifically for sex, his mistress of his adolescence, with whom he fathered a child. He indulged in it at every opportunity, and was apparently ruled by its demands. His writings reek of his guilt over this; it was his primary obstacle to accepting Christianity. When he did, he immediately broke off his engagement and became celibate for the rest of his life.

This has an unfortunate parallel to his concept of “original sin”. Eve ate the apple. Romans: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All? Even babies? Yes, even babies, says Augustine – sin is passed from parent to child in utero. Children come out of the womb as limbs of Satan, and women are to blame for perpetuating this cycle of sin.

First: this concept is inherently unfair. Can one sin before one has the capacity to understand sin? Of course not. Is one damned from the get-go? How can a kind and just God create this sort of set-up, this trap, and call it anything other than a sham?

Second: this is inherently misogynist. It is impossible to underestimate the damage this belief has wreaked on western civilization. Men love to have sex with women, but the women are responsible as temptresses; they are doubly wrong for bearing children and thus perpetuating our sinful existence, bringing another evil baby into the world. Never mind that men have something to do with this.

Augustine’s writings entered Christianity at the ground floor, so to speak, and were hugely influential. He wrote brilliantly – his Latin verses are some of the finest ever composed in that language (I understand), and his philosophy was quite sound, if errant. But he was obsessed with guilt, and his guilt has seeped down to corrupt a religion that, before, was not so bad. His guilt has perverted and twisted Christianity; it makes women, as sources of sex, sources of temptation and sin; it makes the biological and natural sex act into a source of shame, which then causes people to hate themselves for their own urges, urges (ostensibly) given to them by God. Augustine crippled Christianity in the cradle, but everyone pretends not to notice.

In Philip Jose Farmer’s A Woman A Day (originally Day of the Timestop!), a character explains why their oppressive government uses religion to prohibit sex – “Anything that interferes with personal development makes people easier to control.” I’m not suggesting that there’s a religious conspiracy to control the world, but pointing out that, if you repress your sexuality, if you fear and flee it, you are not a complete human being.

Pride, Rigidity, and Abuse

In “Free Man’s Worship,” which is dense and not exactly a joy to read, Bertrand Russell talks about “Moloch worship”. An excerpt:

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch — as such creeds may be generically called — is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But sacrifices to Moloch can take the form not only of virgins or burnt rams, but also dignity and free will. Something rebels within me at bending a knee or bowing my head, telling God how I am a dirty, despicable sinner, and begging him to lift me up from my degenerate state of sin. I am no fan of vanity, but a bit of pride, as Jane Austen carefully delineates it, is essential to a fully developed human being. (Vanity is caring what others think about you; pride is what you think of yourself.) Christianity would debase any sense of pride or self-worth, invalidating any virtues that you may have acquired as worthless in light of Christ’s absolving love. At worst this destroys personalities, as Nietzsche pointed out in the example of Pascal. Another may be Nikolai Gogol; his work is my favorite in all the Russian canon, with a Dickensian sweep and satire; then he fell under the influence of a monk, who tormented him with Christian guilt, to absolve which he burned his manuscript of Dead Souls. Another example: T.S. Eliot’s best work was published before his conversion to Anglicism. Swinburne remarks in “Hymn to Proserpine” on the stultifying effect of the death-cult of Christianity; any religion is a formalized way of thinking, it forces your mind to act within certain barriers (which are increasingly incompatible with our actual knowledge), it restricts thought, it limits you to a narrow compass. It does not provide a moral framework; it provides a mental shackles.

The fallacy that God has wrought this world for us is delusional and egocentric on a radical scale. If God gave us beautiful existence in exchange for our servitude – if in fact he is the master/Moloch that we worship – he is hardly worthy of it. The aforementioned examples of lunacy in the natural and historical world have no shortage of company. Consider the mosquito, diseases spread by which have killed hundreds of millions throughout history. God created it to fill a niche in this perfectly ordered world, to feed fish and bats and anchor the food chain. (Set aside the issue that an omnipotent God would not need an ordered food chain; he could simply have animals live on perpetual energy, like the angels do.) If God wished to spare us misfortune, he could have made its bites disease-free, or itch-free, or had it feed exclusively on animals. But it does none of those things, and millions of people die every year from malaria, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus, etc., that do not, in any conceivable divine plan, need to die. Science provides simple, logical, though emotionally uncomforting explanations for this; the mosquito follows its programming to perpetuate itself, as do the viruses, at our expense; just as we do, at the expense of, say, the Atlantic cod, the North American wolf, the Siberian tiger.

Here’s another one. When Adam and Eve leave the garden, they’re cursed with, respectively, toil and pain in childbirth. Yet, when God decides to change the rules with Jesus, these curses are not rescinded. Not only are we cursed with original sin, but also with these horrible burdens – how many billions (of an estimated eighteen billion females that have ever lived) have died in childbirth? The logic of Christianity puts these deaths on God, which begs the question of how beneficent a bargain worshiping God really is. If God built this world for us, he might have done a better job. There are too many arbitrary sources of pain and horror.

As Terry Pratchett (humanist) said: “There’s nothing wrong with man, except his tendency to bend at the knee.”

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This originally appeared last January on Everyday Weirdness.

<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>Currently, there is a scurrilous and deleterious vein pulsing in popular thought, a vein that declares the gentleman’s profession of novel-writing an easy one indeed - simply, as the late Douglas Adams said, the matter of getting a hundred thousand words in exactly the right order. Nothing, declares this humble scribe, could be further from the truth.
This author acknowledges that every writer has his own method of taming the muse. Some write only at cloistered desks, in backyard woodsheds or in mountain cabins, in hidden monasteries devoted to the Pulp Pantheon, in secreted Shangri-las in the Heirophantic Himalayas. Others seek popular intercourse, bringing their tablets or “notebook computers” into the public realm, there to display the glorious, glorifying process of birthing stories, of generation pure and simple, such as was once the province of the gods. Some authors demand stimulation from caffeine, nicotine, or ethyl alcohol, while still others require music, candlelight, animal’s milk, or bombardment from rarefied tachyon streams. But this author demands no such trickery. All I need is pen, paper, and my zeppelin fortress.

Some say it is elitist to soar above the Earth, scorning to tread the polluted soil. However, I maintain that this is the only way one can produce real art. The scribblings of minor artists like Emile Zola, Tolstoy, Dickens, Joyce, and Faulkner show a distinct deprivation of zeppelinity. This lack pollutes their work as thoroughly and irrevocably as misplaced apostrophes, marring otherwise fine books with earthbound clumsiness and stupidity. I knew by my first page of Hemingway that the so-called “genius” never had the intelligence to invest in one of your finer dirigibles; his books reek of it. I can open any tome and instantly determine whether the work was composed in the course of lighter-than-air travel. The works of Phineas Thrushengruppen are a fine example, as are those of Zebediah Gradgrinder; W. Somerset Maugham and Sir Conan Doyle, it is known, both worked in zeppelins, and their books are stronger for it. Dostoevsky, that great, woolly Russian bear, had the misfortune to be born before the advent of Atlantic airships; he worked in the basket of a Montgolfier-style balloon, the best one could do in that time and place, and every day he passed down reams of lucid prose, fairly glowing with brilliance and erudition.

But - I caution you, dear reader! - ownership of a zeppelin, or zeppelin fortress, is not a guarantee of artistic excellence! Gertrude Stein invested heavily in mid-war German zeppelins, sinking all her ill-gotten fortune into a certain LZ 129, popularly known as the Hindenburg. I cannot read a single page of her drivel. We are fortunate to have gotten away with only thirty-six dead.

Once aloft, you may expect your mind to soar along with your two or three million cubic feet of helium, and for words to fairly leap from the inkwell. This is a fatal mistake, dear readers! Discipline is still required. Though you are in a better situation than when plodding along on the ground, on your stupid feet that are not remotely like propellers, you will find yourself besieged by an entirely new set of distractions.

For instance, there are matters of international airspace to consider. Preposterous as it may seem, the “sovereign” nations of the world occasionally object to being overflown by my humble forty-five-ton writer’s getaway. It is true that for my own security the Xanadu (forgive the fanciful name - Coleridge was a pioneer in aeronautic poetry, you know) is armed with a complement of thirty-millimeter miniguns, as well as nine to twelve biological warheads capable of obliterating a mid-sized city. Necessary, too, are air-to-air countermeasures; so many would-be novelists complain of distractions when writing, yet do not take the simplest steps to ensure that they can work uninterrupted!

Ennui is another danger. I remind you of Verne’s Nemo, conqueror of Earth’s oceans, who surrendered himself to the maelstrom. (A cheap creative shortcut - Verne famously wrote from the ground.) Do not fall into this trap. The Xanadu carries, for my private amusement, a cellar well-stocked with bottles from Chateaux Letour, Lafite, and d’Yqueum, as well as a minimum of nine hundred thousand grams of Columbian cocaine and four canvases by Fra Angelico.
I warn of the peril of surveying illimitable Arctic or Antarctic landscapes, where the unbroken stretches of ancient ice may hold an unflattering mirror to one’s soul; likewise the raging sea. You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that the pastoral lands of North America, Argentina, and even some stretches of the Russian steppe have a soothing effect in times of Weltschmerz, to which we writers are too often prey. Contrariwise, when mania grips, the majestic Canadian Rockies or the Hindu-Kush will prolong and enhance your fits of beatitude. I do my best writing when skipping above the jagged peaks ringing the Tibetan plateau, awake and attuned to what the medievals called the musica universalis, what the Hindus call the Shabda. The best writers have their finger on this pulse. Steinbeck’s East of Eden came from a pan-Asian dirigible tour, and Melville’s Moby-Dick from a circuit of the Indonesian volcanoes in a homemade Rozière balloon.

But the life of a writer is a solitary and weary one, and the pressures of publishers, critics, and air traffic controllers are ever hemming one in. It is a hostile environment for the true individualist. The next generation of prosesmiths must seek a new frontier. I have purchased tracts of land in the desolate reaches of Arizona, where a man can build a three-stage interplanetary rocket in peace; who knows but my next manuscript may come via satellite?

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Doubt

In college, I developed the notion of free will. Like most people, I’d never thought about it, until I read of its inverse – the elect, as described by the pilgrims in American History 101. This, again, poses another puzzle of motive. Why would you develop a philosophy that will damn almost everyone, regardless of their efforts to be good Christians, say their prayers, bring not one but TWO buckets of fried chicken to the occasional potluck dinners? Lately, my research into the medieval has shown me how widespread this belief was – it’s not just Calvin or the Puritans who believed it. In the Middle Ages, most people believed they were going to hell regardless. Why? Why would you want to believe in such a thing? At least my family’s modern non-denominational brand of Christianity believed in a fair shake for everyone who would bend a knee to the Almighty.

The doctrine of the elect isn’t terribly important these days. But it did cause my doubt to pursue different avenues, more complex doctrinal splits beyond just our quarrel over sex. I came to the issue of free will.

We have free will, says Modern Somewhat Liberal Non-Denominational Christianity, so that our choice to worship God will have meaning. If we have no choice, if God demands our love, then it means nothing. As Bertrand Russell imagined God saying, (he might have been quoting from Doctor Faustus, I’m not sure): “The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured?” Basically, not only does God want our obeisance, but he wants our love. We not only have to do what he says, we must want to do what he says. (Where else have I seen this? …. Communism and the corporate world! It is not enough to acquiesce, you must believe.)

But, I wondered, if we accept God’s salvation, we do so under the threat of hell. Hell is not a viable alternative. It is hell, eternal torment. (Don’t give me any ‘Hell is the absence of God, and therefore terrible nonsense. That’s not a fair answer.) So our love for God is still coerced. If he really wanted to give us the choice, he would create a viable alternative, perhaps an eternal “pretty good but not quite Heaven” semi-paradise where we would eat porterhouse instead of filet mignon, read Anthony Trollope instead of Dickens, play the Xbox instead of the Xbox 360, watch Star Trek instead of Star Wars. That would be a pretty good way to spend eternity. But, no, it’s either slavery in Heaven or eternal torment in hell. I began to empathize with Milton’s Satan. The old chestnut about the superiority of reigning in Hell rather than serving in Heaven sounded better and better. Seriously. As an American, we’re raised to revere freedom above all things. Spending an eternity kowtowing to God was unacceptable. This gave rise to a sort of indignation - “Who does he think he is?” The Almighty, of course, but still. Why would he give us free will, and then punish us for using it?

The unfairness of this bothered me for years, but never went further than a general disillusionment. At this time, I became more familiar with the dichotomy between Old Testament God and New Testament God. It’s almost banal to refer to this now, but the personality shift is so abrupt and total as to indicate either two Gods, or one God with multiple personalities. Throughout the Old Testament, he vacillates between loving the Jews and tormenting them for having the temerity to complain that following his commands has led them to sickness, hunger, and death; he orders them to commit genocide upon the inhabitants of Canaan; they sack Jerusalem and with his divine aid put every man, woman, child, donkey, chicken, and cow to the sword.

Then, suddenly, God is interested in love and mercy, and we get Jesus, and everyone knows how that goes. The Gnostics explain this schism quite tidily – the Old Testament God is the Demiurge, the evil Satanlike being that created the world. Jesus is an emissary from the real God, who was powerless and imprisoned all this time, but still loves you. I did not rush out to join a Gnostic temple.

Deism

One day, while talking with my father, whose opinions I will always respect, he confided to me his growing religious liberalism. It was the day of the vote that would determine whether or not Texas would allow same-sex marriage. My parents, who voted for Bush in 2000, voted to allow it. I was pleased and surprised. My father told me that Jesus said nothing one way or the other on homosexuality, and he personally had no problems with it. Really, when you got down to it, my father suspected that hell may not be real – there’s a sectarian Jewish belief that says that when you die, regardless of your creed or acts in life, you appear before God, and God is totally cool about everything. Everyone gets into Heaven.

(Later I would consider the arbitrary use of death as a barrier. If God is real, why this period of not-knowing? Why force us to make uninformed decisions?)

This idea meshed rather nicely with my nascent concerns about the billions of non-Christians in the world, particularly if I was going to be one of them. Certainly there are virtuous Buddhist, Jainists, Zoroastrians, and even, maybe, atheists. Are they going to hell? (Dante charitably put them in Limbo.)

I could not accept God as a tyrant who condemns anyone for rejecting his one chosen religion; this idea, though, was compatible with tolerance. It frightened me at first to apply this idea to every religion – even Satanists? Even people who never think about religion for more than twenty seconds on Christmas and Easter? Sure, why not? I plunged ahead, committed to this idea.

But if acts are independent of salvation, which is universal and assured, then how do you determine a morality? I chose, uncontroversially, the teachings of Jesus, which I thought were pretty handy. (Later Bertrand Russell poked that full of holes.) Peace, love, tolerance – anyone can get behind that.

Earlier this year, I refined this idea somewhat with my first cautious forays into philosophy. I read of the Neo-Platonists in Russell’s monumental History of Western Philosophy. They believed that at the center of existence, we have the Real, the Good, the Source of Being. It/he creates everything via emanation, simply by existing. All existence radiates from it/him, including this world of ours, and religion is just a way to return to that initial Good. I saw the links between this and Gnosticism, and Gnosticism and Catharism, and Catharism and Buddhism, and Christianity and Islam, and for once I saw and understood, on a granular level, the commonality of religions. Not merely that all religions are a road to God, but how they are a road to God. I was satisfied with this.

I felt God, I thought, in the beauty of nature. In settings as diverse as the cool clear air of the French Alps, a frosty January morning on the ranch in Texas, the beach of Gili Meno with the volcanoes of Lombok towering across the water, I felt the majesty and perfection of creation. I did not notice, however, the absence of majesty of creation in the piles of garbage outside our apartment, in the twenty-five million dead of the Taiping rebellion, in the Armenian genocide, in that one water parasite that lodges with barbed hooks in your urethra, in cholera, in the bubonic plague, in supernovae that consume and crush billions of stars at one gasp. (Bertrand Russell favors the example of the tapeworm.) I sat on the porch of the ranch house, watched the sun rise over the cottonwoods and oaks past the frosty pasture, sipped coffee, and thought, “What a beautiful world God has made!”

I still think it’s a beautiful world, but I hope my appreciation for it is a bit more leavened with sense and perspective.

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Note.

Over the past few months, I have changed my religious stance from a lapsed Christian, comfortably Neo-Platonist deist to an agnostic, or practical atheist. I de-converted later in life than most people, I think, and did so from a fairly religious, though hardly fundamentalist, background. Much of this will come as no surprise to many of you who have been in the agnostic camp for years already. But it’s my experience.

From “There are many roads to God” to “There is no supernatural dimension to existence” is a large shift, requiring the reconsideration of systems of morals, ethics, and living. I’m hoping that writing this out will get my thoughts in order. Questions to answer: why the change? What does it mean? And where does one go from here? How does one regard other religions, and how does one find moral direction in a world without God?

Lapsing Christianity

From Randi’s “Texas Talk” book:

“One thing I learned going to church in Texas: Jesus loves you, and you’re goin’ to Hell!”

When I was five years old, as my mother was tucking me in, we had a conversation that went something like this:

“What happens when you die?”

“Well, if you’re good, you go to Heaven. If you’re bad, you go to Hell.”

“I sure don’t want to go to Hell!”

“Then ask Jesus into your heart. G’night.”

So I did. Five years old, and I was making, or thinking I was making, a decision about behavior and mentality that would govern me for the rest of my life – based on fear. Fear of Hell, fear of exclusion from the community of Christians, too – but mostly fear of eternal physical torment if I refused to “ask Jesus into my heart.”

A five year-old can’t comprehend what that means, either in the context of religion or ego. Regarding religion, it is an admission that salvation is not possible without the grace of God; by admitting that, we accept salvation from our sins, and go to Heaven, hurrah. I understood that early enough. In terms of ego, though, the repercussions are much more insidious. Essentially, debase yourself before this deity, acknowledge your inherited flaws – which are no fault of your own, but Adam and Eve’s – accept the dominion of this superior being. You are not good enough. You cannot earn salvation; that is, you will never be good enough. How absurd, in light of America’s uber-individualism and the worship of self-esteem (often to deleterious extremes).

My parents are hardly to be blamed. They were raised religious, and they were married in a dyed-in-the-wool, Bible-thumping Southern Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, the hotbed of southern evangelism. Half the radio stations will scream at you for repentance; surfing the channels while driving through the panhandle of Florida on childhood vacations always left me with a giddy sense of imminent apocalypse.

I think I can also say, objectively, that my parents are two very sensible people, of above-average intelligence and uncommon wisdom and patience. (Raising Jens cultivates patience.) My father has a theology degree from Arlington Baptist College. He used to be a deacon in our family church, but resigned over a debate on the literal interpretation of the Bible. (He thought there was room for evolution. The church thought otherwise.) Their Christianity is quite liberal by north Texas standards, and I have always been impressed by their flexibility and tolerance, their willingness to learn and expand their world-views, even into their fifties, when most people are content to listen to WBAP or watch CSI until they die.

The point here is that intelligent, compassionate people are quite capable of following a religion fundamentally based on fear. My parents, of course, are not the paragon of Christian thinking – there’s Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Francis of Assisi, and many more brilliant people who have worked to develop the theology of Christianity. (I am forever impressed by Lewis’s intellect and Francis’s titanic, uncompromising virtue.)

So I went to church throughout my childhood, and hated the hell out of it. At best it was dull. Sunday school held nothing new for me. I read the Bible several times over, and got a kick out of all the rape and murder, but the adults trying to tell us about why “lying is wrong” could never get close to the grandeur and hubris of Samson or David, or the mystery of Solomon, or the thrilling galimatias of Revelation (every child and Baptist preacher’s favorite book). At worst it was maudlin. I watched unsympathetically our preacher’s ability to bring himself to tears before two hundred people, I disdained with mild revulsion those who lifted their hands while singing, swaying back and forth, like Jesus would want, I guess. The casual production of such blatant emotion seemed cheap to me. By high school, I settled into what I called a “cooler, more intellectual approach to faith,” which meant skipping Wednesday night youth group in favor of driving around the countryside with Ben. I figured: I understand the whole bargain of salvation, I accept it, God and me, we’re good.” I didn’t feel the need to contort myself in histrionics of prayer before an audience, and I distrusted those who did.

Sex

Also from “Texas Talk”:

“The other thing I learned from going to church in Texas: sex is a horrible and filthy thing, and you should save it for someone you love.”

And then adolescence hit, and hormones began to bombard my body as cosmic rays bombarded the Fantastic Four, and I was seized by the average teenage male sex drive; that is, I wanted to have sex with everything with curves, tall ones, fat ones, skinny ones, red ones, blue ones, at all hours and in every way imaginable, multiple times, and no amount of furious masturbation would quell my urges. For those of you who are eunuchs, female, or saintly, let me compare teenage male sex-urges to Ahab’s obsession in Moby Dick; Ishmael says you can see, in Ahab’s pacing, the power of his thought (obsession), until it seems like it is the thought that moves the man and not vice versa. Such is the lot of half the human race. We become penes on two legs, and it is a small miracle if ever a jot of energy goes to our studies, our hobbies, our families, any social duties beyond gettin’ some action.

Until this point, God and I had never had cause to quarrel. Thou shalt not murder, or steal, or covet, and I had no problems with that. Then, suddenly, the church was telling me to save sex for marriage, which, at fifteen or sixteen, is an impossible time away. It was almost as if God was picking a fight with me – the one thing you want more than anything, you cannot have.

(If this seems juvenile – well, I was a child. But can’t the prohibition itself also be juvenile? Why forbid sex if you don’t fear it, if you are comfortable with it? The most fiery teetotalers are former alcoholics. Furthermore, this is hardly the main contention I have with God – rather, it was the first crack in my religious foundation.)

The vague verse “Remember the marriage bed and keep it holy” never satisfied me. (That seemed more a prohibition of adultery.) Nor did the “God has a plan for you” argument. What sort of sadistic plan would saddle me with these urges and forbid me to indulge them? The climbing rate of divorce seemed another rebuttal to “God’s plan”. Nor could I find any Biblical evidence that God’s plan called for abstinence.

(This, my own personal struggle, is just a tiny slice of America’s struggle with sex, inherited from the Puritans. It’s impossible to underestimate the damage that sex-fear has had on our culture. Our approach to it in media is juvenile. We can murder a man on-screen, but we can’t show biological functions?)

Jens: Hey, Ali, what’s a good word for “fear of sex”? “Coitaphobia”, maybe?

Ali: Protestantism.

As my sex-urges grew and boiled over and transformed me into a rampaging hormone machine, the absurdity of Christ-mandated abstinence became more and more apparent. What possible interest could God have in the activities of my penis? In fact, when you think about it, that interest is really quite inappropriate, especially when he’s free to go around impregnating virgins. (Rather like Zeus and Danae.) What difference could it possibly make to him if I have sex with any of the numerous and willing young ladies? None. To me? All the world. God gave us these bodies – should we not use them?

Because, stupidly, most of the girls I was interested in were from my church, or from other churches, I became quite versed in the various arguments for and against premarital sex, and each time I was flabbergasted at the flimsiness of the arguments against, and confounded by the determination with which their adherents adhered. To make time with these ladies, I had something of a religious revival. I must say, I was much more disgusted with myself when I feigned religious rapture at youth group for a chance at hand-holding, than when I actually engaged in premarital sex. As it happened, I held onto my virginity – or it held onto me – until senior year. When I finally attained that coital Holy Grail, I felt – no guilt. None at all. My lady-friend and I were alone in the back of the car, and Jesus was nowhere to be seen. No thunderbolts smote me, the sky did not crack open, the world did not end, I did not plunge into a downward spiral of sin and shame – and it has been happening that way, for billions of teenagers, since the beginning of time.

Transcending this dilemma of coitophobia (or “Protestantism,” if you will) still begs the question: what the hell? Why would members of not only Christianity, but Islam and Judaism and almost every other culture, work so hard to take the fun out of something so fundamental to the human experience? Well, I’ll talk about that later, when I talk about Saint Augustine. Whom I hate, as if he killed my parents and stole my wife.

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We’ve got three hours on the train to Seoul, three hours on the plane to Japan, and then probably two hours every day on trains in Japan. I’ll get some reading done.

• Ilium/Olympos, by Dan Simmons. I’ve enjoyed his previous books enough that I’m willing to trust him for an 1800-page commitment.
• The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. Returns to the heroes of the first book, but now they’re regular ol’ mortals instead of super-powered genetic aberrations. Interesting! Scalzi writes an entertaining scifi adventure like no one else - looking forward to it.
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. I admit to hating his “Iron Man” work, but this won a Hugo. We’ll see! Hugos are by no means a guarantee of quality (American Gods), but they have the potential for it, at least.
• Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold. The next piece in the Vorkosigan saga. This volume contains another novel and a short story, grouped under an unfortunate title which seems to promise - wackiness! Hijinks! I don’t know. Let us discuss it no more.
• Realms of Tartarus, by Brian Stableford. No clue. This is what happens when I pick books at random. Don’t waste my time, Stableford!
  Let’s look a little more closely at the cover.

Yeah, I don’t see how this couldn’t be great.

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Tomorrow we’re off to Seoul. We’ll screw around there for a few days, enjoying foreign foods and going to the Science Museum - I hope it exists this time - and generally just enjoying the city. Then we’ll fly to Japan for ten days. We’ll go to Hakone and ride a pirate ship in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and go to Nikko to enjoy peace and quiet. We’ll go to Akiba to look sidewise, discretely, at the nude anime sculptures, and we’ll see a sumo match! I’m pretty excited.

And then we’ll get back August 5th; an hour after we land, our friends Ben and Vivienne will arrive for a two-week visit. We’ll go back to Mokpo the next day, and hang out here for a few days; visit an island, have a cookout, hit the town, et cetera. Then we’ll go to Jeju for four nights, back to the ‘po, then up to Seoul for a few days. I like playing the tour guide - “What?” you say, “You like showing off your vast knowledge to an eager and captive audience? I don’t believe it!” Believe it.

And then we come back to the ‘po on the 20th of August. Randi returns to work, but I’m off until September 1st, during which time I’ll be reading a giant stack of books in preparation for my next novel. It’s going to be a full, exciting summer, and it’ll go by in a flash.

But, you wail in despair, what of the website? Worry not, dear reader! I’ve queued up an amount of material to auto-publish in my absence; if anything, there will be even more content than usual. First is a journal of my conversion to agnosticism. It’s the most intensely personal thing I’ve ever written, an exploration of faith and significance in the modern era. There are some good jokes, too. The first installment will go up Friday. Then I’ll post, in installments, some stories that have been published in print, and the rights of which have reverted to me. Which, I don’t know yet. But you’ll love ‘em.

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… is up at RevolutionSF.

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I typically wear a brown corduroy driving cap. It’s stylish and comfortable. Unfortunately, July humidity was turning it into a sort of sauna-cap, a device intended to draw my brainwaves out through my scalp in the form of sweat. It juiced me like a lemon.

So yesterday I bought a cream-colored summer fedora. It was a bit pricey at 25,000 won (about $18), but worth every penny.

Why did hats ever go out of style? They are like the dot of a reverse exclamation mark, sitting atop one’s head and saying, “I am confident. I am suave. I am not merely stylish; I am style.”

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We got Jjang, our Maltese, shaved a few days ago. A summer cut.

He’s always been fairly stupid, for a canine, and his hairlessness seems to exaggerate his stupidity. His goofy grin is enlarged, as more of his mouth is exposed, and now it seems to go from ear to ear; the shaving also reveals folds of loose skin around his neck, which, with the now-broader mouth, give him a weird toadlike appearance at times. His eyes are exposed, too, emphasizing their vacancy. His skin is pink, and his body much too fat for his tiny head, evincing the relative lack of brain-mass. He looks like a fat grub with a dog’s head welded on.

Still adorable!

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We’ve been watching NBC’s “Chuck,” and while it occasionally suffers the symptoms of lowest-common-denominator television, it’s still pretty good. By the end of the first season, it’s managed to (finally) strike a balance between humor and gravity, and it no longer makes me wish I were watching “Alias” instead.

(What do I mean by lowest-common-denominator? Simple! Rather: simplicity. Shows like “The Wire” and “Deadwood” require you to use your brain while watching TV; “Lost,” “Heroes,” “Chuck” are aware that you are watching TV to escape your brain and the attendant existential hell that we call the human condition, so they work hard to make things easy for you. For example, characters have a tendency, not often found in the real world, to broadcast their emotions and intentions, so the viewer doesn’t have to guess; they also like to spell out twists for you. Let’s say a character whom we thought dead is in fact alive. The show will not only give you his name, but remind you that it’s shocking that he’s dead, with one polished line, something like this: “Bryce? What? You’re alive! No - you’re dead!”)

Unfortunately, the show’s portrayal of nerd culture is quite broad. It was created by Josh Schwartz, creator of “The OC” (I know, I know), and it’s pretty clear that, while he might have been within spitting distance of nerds at some point, he has, in fact, never been a nerd himself. I advise him to hire some kind of “nerd consultant,” or, failing that, some “Buffy” writers.

Accuracies:

• Nerds do in fact like Red Bull. Good guess.
• “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” is actually a game that nerds do play. However, they don’t refer to it by the full name every time it’s mentioned. “Hey, man, let’s play some ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”! Furthermore, you’ve mentioned this game four times in the first ten episodes; there’s more than one video game in this world. Find out what they are!
• Kudos for showing Halo 3 and Gears of War on screen, and using actual gameplay footage rather than prerecorded Mario or Tetris tapes. But you can do better than that, show! Halo and GoW are not actually restricted to nerds; in fact, you could call them “lowest common denominator games”. Why not show something like, I don’t know, an RPG, the nerd’s genre of choice? It’d blow my mind to see “Lost Odyssey” or “Tales of Whatever” on network TV.
• Nerds do drink Red Bull.
• The movie posters in Chuck’s room: Dune, Tron, and Oldboy. Good calls - it’d be even better if he compared Oldboy (negatively, of course) to the original manga.

Inaccuracies:

• How about some books? Nerds are known to read a lot, yet Chuck’s house is totally bare of books. Nerds buy a lot of them and show them off, or at least have them easily accessible.
• Music? We don’t know much of Chuck’s personal taste, but the soundtrack seems to favor the Shins, Spoon, and other just-barely-still-indie fare that works equally well on pop radio. Nerds scorn this with white-hot intensity; even if they like the music, they must hate that other people like it, which means not playing it on the soundtrack. Chuck should listen to the pre-Capitol Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Tom Wait, Neutral Milk Hotel, or at least prog-rock, which is 1980s nerd shorthand.
• Nerds DO NOT drink Budweiser. Really, the thing that distinguishes nerds is their passion and discriminating tastes; whether or not their music or books or games are terrible, they care deeply about them and put a lot of thought into them. And anyone who puts a lot of thought into the beer he drinks does not drink Budweiser. Sorry.
• Attractive people. Chuck himself is TV-attractive, and his former friend Bryce is jeans-model hot. I can barely accept Chuck as a nerd, and certainly not Bryce. Bryce has the face of sneering ignorant superiority that nerds hate on sight; it is the face of the schoolyard bully who hates the nerds for being uglier, smarter, more socially awkward than himself. Chuck’s comic relief friend Morgan is merely short and bearded, but his TV-attractiveness shines through.
  However, don’t think I’m saying that nerds can’t be attractive; myself, Colin Meloy, China Mieville, Felicia Day, Joanna Newsom all disprove that misconception. Rather, I dislike the weird pop-culture approach to nerds in the context of this show - at first, they are considered unattractive, second-class citizens almost, merely because they use their imaginations and are interested in things in a world where it’s not cool to use your imagination or be interested in things. When Chuck flirts with the hot chick, at first there’s an element of novelty to it, as if he has no right to be approaching the hot chick. This is… 1980s campus-comedy thinking. Nerds have ruled the world for a decade now, for so long that “nerd” itself cannot be considered derogatory.
  So the weird dichotomy is this: we’re supposed to consider these guys unattractive because they’re nerds; yet the actors are attractive; yet many real-world nerds are quite attractive, and even date other attractive people. But the show doesn’t seem to understand how to deal with that. At the worst, this leads to two purely comic-relief characters entering a relationship that seems like a charade, which mocks not only the characters but also the demographics they’re targeting - fortunately, later, the writers pull it together and give this a little depth and humanity. I attribute this (and anything else good that the show does) to Phil Klemmer, former “Veronica Mars” writer.

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That is, an “uncontrollable flood of articles.”

Well, just one, I guess. I enumerate, irrefutably, the eight best adventure games of all time.

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Review’s up! I liked it.

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Last Tuesday, I began a short story, a dark fantasy based loosely on the penultimate chapter of Papillon, telling the story of the demon-fed plague, but from the Rat King’s point of view. It was a blast to write, and I got down 4500 words in one day. Then I was hit by a truck, and I haven’t been able to write very much at all.

But this is the first paragraph. I’m pleased with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Watching: “Chuck,” Season One, recommended by nerds. It’s okay so far - sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it misfires, but there are enough good ideas here to keep me interested. Its portrayal of nerd culture is a little broad, but they’re trying, at least.

Reading: The Iron Council, by China Mieville. It’s grabbed me. His fantasy world is bizarre, vivid, and engrossing. More importantly, I can tell that he loves language and loves putting words together; he’s a writer who writes, rather than merely telling a story. He’s got style, and I’m not just saying that because he looks like a professional finger-breaker.

“I will break your fingers if you do not enjoy my use of language.”

Playing: Sam and Max, Season Two - just played the first (superlative!) episode of their Monkey Island, and it reminded me that I have a few episodes of this game to finish. Telltale is great at crafting puzzles that make you think, but are logical and not unfairly difficult; add smooth presentation and superb writing.

Wrist: Still sprained, still typing single-handedly.

Posted in Games, Reading, The Glass Teat | 1 Comment »

A truck chose to place itself in my space/time continuum, particularly the tiny slice of it through which I was driving my scooter to work. Now I’ve got a cast on my sprained wrist, so typing is slow, so I may not update much. I’ll be back in a few days with a very hilarious description of my horrible pain.

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… is up at ZTGamedomain. Suffice to say, I liked it.

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I don’t know if I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I like their song “Maps”. Can someone please tell me how to feel about them? Thank you.

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.. never ceases to shock, amaze, and delight me. Ali Heep alerted me today to the existence of the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, literally, the “vampire squid from hell”, a six-inch deep sea cephalopod that looks like an escapee of Monster Manual IV. Listen to this little monster’s superpowers. It’s covered in photophores, light-emitting organs, which it can use to cloak itself by emitting a low level of light to make it blend in with the sunlight in the water; it can use these lights to hypnotize prey; when threatened, it shoots a bioluminescent mucus that creates a cloud of light in the water to dazzle its opponents. Yes, it is a laser-vampire squid.

From there, Ali pointed me to the “toe biter“, the sort of creature that atheists like to point to as proof of the nonexistence of a loving god. The thing grows to twelve centimeters; it has one of the most painful bites in the insect world. When it bites, it uses this giant curving beak to inject a venom that liquifies muscle tissue. It sometimes plays dead, emitting a fluid from its nasty little insect anus to complete the illusion. You think, “Oh, it’s dead, I won’t bother crushing this horrible thing,” because deep down you were terrified. You turn your back to forget it - and that’s when it LEAPS.

It can kill a woodpecker by boring through its skull.

Here it is eating a frog.

(Photo removed at the request of the photographer! Don’t screw with copyright law, kids!)

From there, we went to the Schmidt pain index, devised by a witty entomologist - possibly the wittiest, it isn’t a crowded field - to describe the levels of pain inflicted by insect stings. If you think a fire ant is bad - woo! It’s a lowly 1.2 of 4. Try tangling with a bullet ant or tarantula hawk. But the fun part is Schmidt’s colorful descriptions: “3.0. Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.” Or: “2.0. Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

Ho ho! We must keep an eye on these entomologists, lest they become too cocky with their metaphors.

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It’s the 4th of July.

Patriotism always embarrassed me. I hated saying the pledge in school; it seemed like making prayers of devotion to an omnipotent god: “If America’s so great, why does it need our pledge?” So I adopted a hands-off, laid back approach to patriotism, something cooler and more intellectual than flag-waving. Then, of course, we had eight years of Bush, and I began to genuinely dislike my country and the army of rednecks that had conquered it and turned: intellectualism into “intellectualism” in the Cold War Soviet sense, meaning “one who has failed to understand life”; common human decency into weakness; anything less than flag-waving fist-pumping jingoism into anti-Americanism.

But two years abroad has given me a new perspective on America. I value how incredibly wealthy the country is, and how we don’t even realize it. I appreciate how, though vestiges of racism linger, we really do try our best to integrate people from many different cultures. (Korea wants foreign money, but not the foreigners; they can never decide if they want to join the global community or not, so half the people here are overjoyed to see us, and the other half less so. The press hates us, and so do the politicians.) I appreciate how we do things right the first time. (Witness the earlier post about Korean workmanship.) I appreciate how most Americans are open-minded and curious about the world.

So, America, despite:

- your overflowing, hellacious prisons

- your enthusiasm for the death penalty

- your war on drugs, that is, your war on your own lower class

- your shambling, outdated health care system

- your noxious car and truck obsession

- your annoying waiters

- your uneasy, juvenile relationship with sexuality and alcohol

- your paralyzed political system

- your public pride in ignorance

… you’re still a pretty good country. I think Ben Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson, one of those guys said: “Democracy is the worst of all governments, except for all the others that have been tried.” Yes. So true.

Happy 223rd!

Posted in Anomalous | 2 Comments »

This looks wonderful. If you grew up on Monkey Island, as I and all other right-thinkers did, then this will have you quivering in delight.

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Everyone’s interested in toppling governments these days. No one wants to topple my heart.

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Sarah Palin appears to have committed career suicide.

Remember when she ran, how everyone said she didn’t have the experience? She wanted to be VP with 18 months’ experience, and no one bought it. I highly doubt she’ll be able to sell President with 24 months under her belt. Now, in 2012, she’ll have three years of doing nothing on her record. I understand the urge to get out of Alaska, though.

Maybe someone will give her a daytime talk show as a consolation prize.

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Reading: My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I got it because I love Umberto Eco, and this seemed the closest thing in the bookstore. Also, the recommendation of the Nobel Prize committee means a lot to me, even if their recommendation sells fewer books than Oprah’s. The book’s interesting so far. The author switches narrators every chapter, so you know it’s Literature.

Playing: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I loved the first one, and the second improves on it in almost every way. I’ll be reviewing this one for ZTGamedomain, so it’s work, so I have to play it for hours a day.

Watching: Pushing Daisies. We watched the first seven stellar episodes of the second season, then quit when it went on hiatus; now we’re finishing up the remaining six. Last night’s episode, “Comfort Food,” was poignant, delightful, wonderful, weird, touching, hilarious - all the things that only this show can do. Dammit, people, why didn’t you watch this? Now it’s dead.

Loving: Firefox 3.5. Life gets better every day.

Two more weeks of school, and then we’re off to Japan!

Posted in Games, Reading, The Glass Teat | 3 Comments »