I’m working my way through the stack of books.

Dobie I found engrossing, but I have doubts as to his usefulness. His books are filled with elegant passages that I may or may not be able to use. I suspect that I may have more of his books than I strictly need.

The Bryson book was fun but ultimately unsatisfying. He offers a long catalogue of the shittiness of American towns, describing how they suck, but never caring enough to dip into the why. He makes jokes and complains. Often his jokes are hilarious; occasionally his complaints are insightful. He points out that cars have ruined American life; no news there. He raises the question of how America can idealize small-town virtues while letting its small towns go to hell, and he bemoans the overstimulated, overweight American. (And this was in 1988!) But mostly he viciously mocks average Americans. He writes without compassion for his subject matter, and no empathy, which limits his usefulness for my purposes, as well as the number of his books that I might read in the future.

I read two stories from the End of the Trail anthology. They were entertaining. Howard has a good eye for landscape and a gift for action.

In my spare time, I’m still trudging through Dan Simmons’s Olympos - don’t let “trudge” make you think it’s tedious. It’s not. It’s a blast. But it’s 850 pages long. I’m going to be reading this thing into October.

Today I sat down intending to write some notes for my novel, but got sidetracked reading Bertrand Russell essays - “Nightmares of Prominent Persons” and “In Praise of Idleness”, both of which displayed his quiet humor and deep wisdom. The furthest I got in my novel planning was toying with naming my heroine “Porphyria”, an idea I later rejected. I want to live in a world where people are named “Porphyria”. Unfortunately, the physical world has a nasty habit of not conforming to my whimsies, and the nomenclature of humans is no exception. Otherwise, you’d buy coffee from a guy named Prospero, hang out with your friends Phaedra and Sycorax, and watch Clytemnestra Jones on TV.

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“We’ll take this road over the mountain,” I said, tapping the map. “It’s called the 1139 because that’s how many people die there every year.”

That’s not true, of course. The number of annual fatalities on that particular road probably does not exceed nine hundred. The mountain was Hallasan, an extinct volcano and the highest peak in Korea. At a mere 6398 feet, it can’t compete with the Rockies or the Hindu-Kush (everyone’s favorite mountain range), but it’s impressive nonetheless. For one, the peak essentially is Jeju island. It forms the bulk of the island, and there are no other peaks on it. There are a few parasitic cones, but the island is Hallasan. It towers above the coastal cities, clouds always ringing its crown. It throws down rain and thunder on the humans below like cold and angry Crom, whom valor pleaseth, who brings only trouble and misty doom!

The other thing to consider is that one begins the journey at sea level. It’s not like a Colorado peak, where you drive to a trailhead at 10,000 feet and hike up to 12,000. We would drive from 0 meters up to 1000. On the other side lay the subtropical southern coast, with the restful town of Jungmun and the beauteous beaches for which Jeju is known. Also, the sex museum, with giant penes carved of granite. I would traverse any number of mountain ranges to see those.

So, brimming with optimistic naivete, we set out.

We scootered up the mountain, enjoying the beautiful scenery. The pines were dark green against the bright grass, everything lush and shining in the perpetual rain. The air smelled clean and freshly scrubbed. Rain dampened us continually. After making about twenty kilometers up the mountain, Ben announced that - I don’t know - he had misread his gas gauge, or perhaps it was malfunctioning or something, but, essentially, he needed gas right now.

We hadn’t passed a gas station in about forty-five minutes. No one wanted to backtrack, especially with the rain picking up, and us with at least forty more klicks to go (we call them “klicks” now). So we turned down a small road that ought to get us to some semblance of civilization sooner or later. (”Civilization” in this case meaning a place to buy petrol.) We got directions from a giant Korean family who were stopped on the side of the road for some reason. They looked it up in their GPS and told us there was a gas station seven klicks on. Fine, then. Better than backtracking all the way to Jeju City. We drove on, and seven kilometers later, seeing no gas station, I asked directions of an ancient withered woman who glared at me as if she might want to cut my throat. This discomfort was in no way relieved when she burst into raucous laughter at my question. Go seven kilometers more, hang a left, and you’ll find gas, she said. We followed her directions. This essentially returned us to Jeju City, but in the southeastern corner instead of the southwestern.

I’m aware that this isn’t very harrowing yet. It serves to set the ambiance. You must remember that we did this in intermittent but frequent rain, and the whole time rainclouds were massing around Hallasan. This would be the first act in a horror movie; the minor frustration of finding fuel presages the bloodshed to come.

We returned to our trek. Soon after resuming our path (fourteen kilometers back), our scooter began to suffer up the hills. The grade was about 10%, and constant. For miles and miles. We had about 300 pounds of human and luggage on the bike, which itself weighs 200 pounds, and this was more than our 1/2 mulepower engine could cope with. We ground along. The problem worsened. Soon we were chugging along at 20 mph. Then 15. Then 12. A burning scent reached our nostrils.

I looked at this for hours.

We took a break. By now the downpour was constant. The bike reeked of burning… matter. Ben, who knows these things, examined the inscrutable outside of the engine and theorized: “The clutch might be going out.”
“What the devil is a clutch?” I said. My learning has been confined to classical paths. I can tell you all about the reign of King Cnut and the building of the Notre Dame and the reign of the lady pirate Lai Choi San - you know, important things - but I am confused by the workings of internal combustion engines. Ben explained: “The clutch is like the phlangeometer of the megasphinxtrix - when the granger grobulates at a certain RPM, the flanx will shift to the next circoid. Savvy?” I sucked my teeth and said, “So… expensive, then.”

We now had the option of turning around and choosing a less hilly way to the south side, which would add hours to our time and mean the ultimate defeat of our spirits by the mountain, or continuing onward at a snail’s pace and possibly destroying the clutch. About this time a motorcycle gang passed us. Ten Korean dudes (not men - dudes) on Harleys or Harleyalikes, grinning and waving. They seemed very friendly. I wanted to know where they were going, and hang out with them. I wanted to do shots with them in a sketchy soju tent. They swept out of sight. “Let’s keep going,” I said with grim determination.

We pushed on. Our scooter protested. We stopped to rest it; it had renewed enthusiasm for a few minutes after resting, and then slowed back down to 12 mph and resumed burning. We stopped again. Rain poured down. I was ready to turn around. Ben scouted ahead while Randi and I waited in the pouring rain. He came back a few minutes later - the monument marking the high point is just ahead, he said. We pressed on. This meant pushing the two hundred-pound bike up the highest damn mountain in Korea. Ben drove ahead, and came back on foot to lend his firefighter muscles to the work. I was wearing flipflops, which are not ideal shoes for this sort of thing; I was slipping and skidding with every step, thanking the Crocs corporation for building a quality product.

We reached the highest point. We stopped a moment to whoop our victory and rest our aching calves, talked about how glad we were that the hard part was over, and plunged down the other side - into the thickest fog that I’ve ever seen.

Let me elaborate on that. I have been in fog in Japan so thick that we couldn’t see a waterfall we knew to be about forty feet away. We couldn’t see a lake in front of us. This fog was thicker. It collected on my goggles until I couldn’t see through them; I flipped them up and it collected on my glasses until I couldn’t see through those; I slid them down my nose and looked over them, and then I just plain couldn’t see.

Have you ever driven a scooter? Cars use their bulk to protect the human; motorbikes use the human to protect themselves. You are sitting astride two hundred pounds of metal and plastic. The wheels are a little smaller than a dinner plate, yet they shoot you along at speeds up to 65 mph. The slightest movement is amplified tenfold through the mass of the scooter. A wreck even at low speeds is quite capable of destroying your stupid fragile bones. If you hit the asphalt at 40 mph, you will lose your skin. “What’s cow hide good for?” “To hold the cow together.” So true. You need skin to live these days. At the best of times, a scooter is ridiculously, stupidly dangerous to drive. If only it weren’t so fun and convenient! But in the fog, driving down a volcano - you gain a keen appreciation of your own mortality.

We crept along. Visibility diminished. I kept expecting to descend below the clouds, but, no, the clouds apparently went all the way down to sea level that day. Occasionally fog-colored cars without their lights on would materialize and roar past. Once Ben scared the hell out of me by putting his foot down as we carefully rounded a corner, making a skidding sound and making me think they were shooting over the edge and into the foggy oblivion beyond. My joke about 1139 people dying there every year came back to me in a far less funny form. We stopped at a very abandoned shack, cleaned our goggles, and dove back in. Soon the fog became fog mixed with rain, which I didn’t even know was a meteorological option. Heavy gusts of wind knocked us from one side of the road to the other, without blowing the fog away. It seemed that the fog was setting, like cement. I was glad we could still penetrate it. I expected it to lock us in and slowly melt our flesh beneath our raincoats.

That didn’t happen, of course. We survived. No one was hurt. No one was even discouraged or annoyed, for which I must congratulate my crew. We were, I admit, in combative frames of mind by the time we reached our hotel. We saw the motorcycle gang a few days later. They smiled and waved again. I’m so glad that Korea has motorcycle gangs. They’re out there, keepin’ it real for us poor sinners.

The fog lifted, giving us the parting gift of stifling humidity. We made our way to the Sex Museum and got some pictures with the incredible sculptures. That made the whole crazy time worth it.

Art.

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Spotted on Locus:

Fred Pohl, 89, was awarded an honorary high school degree on August 20, 2009, from Brooklyn Technical High School. Pohl dropped out of high school at the age of 15, during his junior year. “I largely stopped paying attention,” Pohl admitted. His parents were divorcing, and, due to Depression-era financial troubles, he felt he was unlikely to go to college anyway. However, his almost-alma mater is now eager to claim the famous writer as a graduate. Pohl says, “I do sort of wish I’d stuck it out. I like having learned all the stuff I did learn there; I just didn’t like the business of learning.” Pohl speculates that perhaps, if he had finished high school, he might have gone on to spend the rest of his career at American Car and Foundry, instead of writing multiple science fiction classics.

Twain dropped out of school, too.
That is a deeply ironic way of putting it; with a diploma, he could’ve gone onto a blue-collar job, or a mid-level white-collar job in an uninspiring, unexciting field, until an obscure, quickly forgotten death. Instead he collects awards and wrote classic books. Take chances, kids! Education is not the be-all end-all.

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My review is up. Is the second installment worth your time and hard-earned dinero? CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT!

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My Diablo II write-up is LIVE at toastyfrog.com. Is this nine year-old release any good? Head over and find out!

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Is it possible I just love taking pictures of books? Just.

These are the books I’m reading for research for my next novel. What the hell kind of novel will this be? I want it to be a western - sort of - but about westerns. A meta-western. I’ll make it meta by removing it from the traditional western context by putting it in a modern context, with horror and scifi mixed in. I’ll actually be pitching this as a scifi book - I love westerns, but I want to be a fantasy/scifi writer, not a western writer. I want to sneak the western in.

The book will also be about the death of small-town America. Why have our small towns dried up and blown away? Can anything be done to reverse this, and should anything be done? Also, I want to look at questions of consciousness and identity, which I will address through the handy metaphor of a worlds-devouring nanobot-god.

Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me. The books are:

• The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson, and America’s Back Porch, by Daniel Jeffreys. I’m hoping these books can tell me how small-town America went to hell.
• Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. I’ve never been too impressed by McMurtry’s skills; I found Streets of Laredo turgid, maudlin, and manipulative, and Dead Man’s Walk underwritten, but he’s pretty much the most renowned Texas writer. I’m hoping this book will give me some perspective on modern ranch life.
• A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. I think Descartes wrote about concepts of consciousness and identity, and the History may point me in the right direction.
• Unknown Texas and Lone Star Literature, by various. Compilations of Texas writers, fiction and non. I’ve read around in Lone Star Literature a good bit and been edified: Molly Ivins is funny. Kinky Friedman and Katherine Mansfield have a lot to say.
• The End of the Trail, by Robert Howard. I’ve often spoken of my admiration for Howard; I think he’s one of the few true literary gems produced by the pulp tradition, and often written off as “the Conan guy”. He had a lot to offer. I’m constantly fascinated, too, by the interplay of his fiction and his own tragic, tortured life, which may give me a level of enjoyment that most others don’t get from his works. Not that it doesn’t stand on its own merits; Howard had an eye for the epic and heroic, a keen sense for brutality and honesty. (I wish I could say here, “I’m confident literary history will vindicate him,” but, no, it probably won’t. Goddamn academics!) The End of the Trail is a compilation of his western stories. It’s a slim volume. He only started in the genre towards the end of his short life. More’s the pity; his western stories are supposed to be among his finest work.
• The Virginian, by Owen Wister. One of the pillars of western writing.
• The Men Who Wear the Star, by Charles M. Robinson III. A history of the Texas Rangers, who will figure in my book. The cover proclaims that “the author aims at fairness and hits it squarely” or somesuch. It’s a bit strange to see an unexciting virtue like “fairness” touted on the cover, but it’s a very important virtue in light of the subject matter (”the extermination of the native peoples of the American continent at the hands of bloodthirsty scalp-taking adventurers”, or “the defense of the homes of brave pioneers against the depredations of marauding, torturing rapist Comanches”, however you want to put it).
• A Helluva Lot of J. Frank Dobie, by J. Frank Dobie. These are collections of essays, humorous, zoological, cultural, political, on their various subjects. I’ve read a bit of Voice of the Coyote, and I am surprised at Dobie’s liberality, compassion, and intellect. For a Texan of 1888-1964, he is remarkably conscious of the environment and man’s place in it; he is sensitive to wild beauty, and he quotes Tennyson, Shakespeare, Wordsworth casually, not to show off (as I would!), but as if they’re just as much a part of his life as the dusty Texas landscape. Dobie had the wild, weird kind of education and life that gave him the skills he needed to teach at Cambridge and ride a horse alone across the Mexican desert. The Dobie deserves its own picture, because these are really beautiful books:

Sent by my grandfather, to aid me in my research. (I owe him big!) That’s about 3000 pages of J. Frank Dobie. … I’m not sure I’ll read all of them. I love the cover art, and the interior art is even better - lots of luscious ink drawings. These are the books that one enjoys simply because of their heft, their scent, the nature of their manifestation on the physical plane. (And that’s why I will never get a Kindle!)

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I didn’t quite get through the giant stack of books. When you vacation with friends, you can’t ignore them like you ignore your wife. There is a certain obligation to talk with the people who came thousands of miles to visit. That’s fine. Books will wait. People shrivel up and die. Enjoy the people while you can, folks.

What I did read:

• Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Par for the course, that is, a well-plotted, character-driven beauty of a book. I think it was in this entry that she began to experiment with genre; there are definite elements of court intrigue and mystery here. The elements blend. I’m a bit nervous about A Civil Affair, though, which promises to blend military scifi with … Georgette Heyer Regency romances. What? You don’t even know what those are. You had to look at wikipedia for it. I knew, but only because I read George MacDonald Fraser’s Mr. American, which is described as “macho Georgette Heyer… and fun!” on the back. I was hoping for gunfights and sex. It’s telling that the cover quote had to include “and fun”.
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. Wow. I didn’t want to like this one. I hated Card’s “Iron Man” work, I hate his politics, and I’d heard that he had never released another work of value. I had this book penciled as a future entry for my “Hugos that Suck” series of essays that I’ve written and will release after I’ve become famous and powerful. And it started off unlikable, sure enough, appearing as a nonsensical exercise in brutality. It stayed brutal throughout, but eventually Card began to inject sense, until the end, when it made so much sense that I almost couldn’t stand it. The 20 pages of grace at the end completely redeemed the preceding 300 pages of brutality. I spent most of the novel wondering how serious Card was, how much he believed in the necessity of the violence and cruelty in his book; he pulled it together in the end, dropping the much, much, much-needed catharsis at the last moment and creating a thing of beauty from very ugly materials.
• Ilium, by Dan Simmons. For the first 350 pages I couldn’t keep reading; for the final 350 I couldn’t put it down. What sort of world do we live in where we can say, “Oh, just stick with this for the length of an entire other novel, and then it gets really good”? Whatever. It was a thrill. “Insanely ambitious” says the cover. Yes. Not as brain-meltingly intelligent as the Hyperion series, but still quite good. I took a small break, and then dove into Olympos, the back half; I’m afraid it’ll take me a while to get through that one, for research is going to gobble up my time.
• The Quick and the Dead, by Louis L’amour. “I can’t believe Jens would read that potboiler,” you say. “Quel bourgeois!” You know what else? Screw you! It was fun. We can learn a lot from potboilers, and L’amour wrote a damn fine one. No, he’s not a superb writer, but he is an excellent storyteller, and he has a better eye for the American landscape than any other American writer I’ve read. Especially Cormac McCarthy, who would have you believe that everything west of the Mississippi is an unbroken range of active volcanoes, open pits of sulfur and lava, or heaps of jagged bone.

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Iä! Iä! Cthulhu ftagn!

Yes, you read that right; I’m back from vacation, and now the erudite, pellucid, otherwise sweet-ass blogging for which I am known can resume.

Vacation was a whirlwind; we spent almost two weeks in Japan, lodging with our most hospitable friend Kacie, and the night we returned to Korea, met up with my oldest friend Ben and his wife Vivienne; we showed them around Korea for the next two weeks. It was a blast getting to show this country in which we’ve lived for almost three years to friends; it was fun to tour it with my parents, but I couldn’t really get drunk with them the way I can with Ben. Which we did. And how.

In brief, we:
Bar-hopped in Mokpo.
Noraebanged in three different cities.
Screen-golfed in Gwangju.
Ate Indian food in two different cities.
Took a five-hour ferry ride to Jeju, wherein everyone got sick but me.
Defied death biking over Hallasan, Korea’s tallest peak.
Stuck our toes in the frigid waters of three different beaches, whereupon everyone got sunburned but me.
Ate: gamchatang, samgyeopsal, tangsuyuk, galbi, bibimbap, mandu, ramyeon, etc.

And, finally, we waved at their bus until they pulled out of sight around the corner.
We had a grand time. They were good guests and very easy to cohabit with. They were good sports about eating Korea’s vast array of horrible foods. See you in eight months, guys!

Our faces after they left:

I was pleased with the response to my agnostic journals. There were some good comments, both here and on the facebook feed, especially from Alex and Kerry. Thanks for reading, everyone! A 12,000-word diatribe is not an easy thing to sit through. I know. I’ve read [insert pedant here]. I’m pleased, too, that some folks actually read my stories. Hurrah!

I bought two notable souvenirs on our trip. First, in Akihabara, the “electric town” in Tokyo:

I fought through the forty hours of Dragon Quest V with one of these little guys at my side. When I saw the figure, it triggered a powerful emotional response, a response that demanded nothing less than a purchase. Now we’ll always be together.

And, in Seoul:

It’s a traditional mask of some kind. Like a Coen brothers movie, it’s sometimes funny, sometimes scary. It can change in a second, depending on the lighting, background sounds, meteorologia. Right now he’s funny.

Yes, I’m shirtless in that picture. This is to fuel your fantasies.

Now I’m gearing up for the next novel. I’ll spend a few weeks reading and pre-writing, then - into the breach!

Congrats to my friend Jason, who recently finished his first novel. It clocked in just under 100k. No small accomplishment! Just by completing it, he’s above 99% of attempted novelists. Can’t wait to read it.

Congrats, as well, to Talented Friend Erin Kinch for birthing a less metaphorical creature - that is, an actual human larva, Summerlyn. I’m sure she and Stephen will be excellent parents. I’m trying to come up with some hilarious piece of cultural reference here, but sometimes … I am … overpowered by sincerity. Felicitations, guys.

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This was published in the excellent, beautifully illustrated Sails & Sorcery collection by Fantasist Enterprises, and is my first professional sale. I was paid a whole five cents per word for it, coming to about $450. Wow! If I could sell two such stories every week, I could make something of a living. But of course no one can do that. Anyway, it’s about pirates. It’s a bit by-the-numbers, but I like the ending.

The Bokor

Miles Redmond, governor of Green Turtle Cay, sliced open the yellow envelope. It was light, which was puzzling, and it was from Bartholomew Nolan, which was damned bewildering. He had not heard from Nolan in twenty or twenty-five years. “Let’s see what this portends for our little corner of the Caribbean,” he said, smiling wryly to his footman. The smile masked his trepidation well; no news from Nolan could be good news. Redmond extracted a single sheet of paper, and read it, murmuring to himself. His face went blank, then white, the color drained in an instant.

“Sir? Are you well?”

“Leave me,” he croaked, waving at the door. The letter fell to the desk. The sum of the missive was two lines: The bokor has returned. Perry is slain. Redmond fumbled in his desk and produced a bottle of rum. He gulped two quick glasses and returned the bottle. He inhaled deeply, feeling the warmth of the liquor wash over him. He made a circuit of the room, locking both the doors and all the windows, pausing at each one and peering into the tropical night. When he was finished, Redmond returned to his desk and fumbled in the drawer again. His hand found the thing he wanted: a flintlock pistol. He primed and loaded it, his eyes darting from window to window. He finished and laid the pistol on the desk. “O, God…” he began. “The Father of Heaven. Have mercy upon us miserable sinners. O, God, the Son, Redeemer of the World…” His memory failed him. “I have never prayed as I ought to,” he said, and lifted the pistol to his temple and fired.

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This was published in Black Sails, one of 1018’s anthologies that they managed to publish before pulling up stakes and heading - wherever. It’s a very early story, and it now strikes me as maudlin at points, but even so, I think it deserved better treatment than it got - 1018 cut sentences, rearranged sentences, cut paragraphs, and generally mauled the hell out of it. Here it is, original, unmauled as a virgin bride. This is the longest completed story from me and Joel’s dark fantasy world of Aetheria - maybe I’ll revisit it someday.

On the Old Dabreu

After two days in darkness, the dull, despairing nightmare gave way to one of dazzling pain.

Caleb grunted as the man hit him again. Knuckle smashed into flesh, and Caleb felt his jaw move in its socket. He dropped.

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It’s a summer of Westerns! Maybe we’ll have some pirate stories, too. That’d be fun.
This originally appeared in “Out West”, the western mag of now-defunct 1018 Press, which was apparently run by a guy entirely under a fake name; his real name was too closely tied to extremely right-wing Punisher fan fiction, I found out later after the press folded and he stopped answering emails. Ah, world!
Anyway, it’s another early story.

A Spider

Gordon waded into the water. He sucked in a breath. It was snowmelt coming down from the Tetons, and it was cold. The stream widened at this point into a small wetland. Aspens rose through the clear water, and the sun filtering through created a green and gold chiaroscuro on the shifting surface. Here and there the trees truncated in gnawed stumps.

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This originally appeared on a webzine called “The Deepening”. It’s an early story of mine, so pardon any stylistic primitivenesses.

Cavalry Cap

Frank woke to a dirty knife and a grinning face. Comanche bolted through his head. He had slept that night under the capacious prairie sky, leaning against his saddle, Colt in hand. Five straight days of aching cold compelled him to build a fire, and the blaze had drawn the heathen across the frozen plain. No time for thoughts – Frank jerked the trigger of his Colt. The gun roared in an evanescent blue-white plume of flame and Frank howled as the bullet tore away a chunk of his left forearm. The Comanche recoiled.

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… is up at SFReader.

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Structure

Don’t tell me that one bows down to find structure, to find a purpose in life. If you really must have an ancient book and harsh, contradictory dogma to determine your life’s direction, then you need to seriously examine your life. Fundamentalism is tempting. Freedom is scary. I know. But freedom is the highest ambition, purpose, and fulfillment of human existence. The world is overwhelming. It offers a myriad of options and possibilities. It is so very simple to ignore these and choose what you perceive God wants; it is much harder to think for yourself. It is easier to attribute the vicissitudes of life to an ineffable God; much harder to take responsibility for your own setbacks (though we’re usually ready to take credit for our accomplishments). Signing your life over to God requires a curious combination of resignation, incuriosity, and delusion that, in America, puts young couples on “God’s plan” for birth control (that is, none - because they have so few ideas as how to fill their days that they must have children to give them a purpose) and in the Middle East puts young men in line to sign up for suicide bombings. I feel I understand the temptation, even though this kind of resignation revolts me. If the next life is so much better, why bother improving this one? And, if God is perfect, why would we not serve him?

From the end of “Why I am not a Christian”:

“We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”

I don’t pretend that this is not a daunting proposition. But the rewards are tremendous, certainly much better than the vague possibility of an afterlife.

Morality

Obviously, atheists are not murderers. And, as I discussed earlier, having religion does not perfect one’s behavior, nor does not having it enable one to no longer distinguish between right and wrong. This is why: when God is thrown from his throne, what’s left? What can we see? Humanity, and, by extension, life. Life is the thing most worthy of respect and veneration. So one acts in accordance with humanity, to be good to others, one tries not to be a jerk. If you define your morality in terms of how you relate to others rather than how you relate to God, I guarantee you will be a better person. The morally perfect atheist-humanist would be a much more agreeable person than the morally perfect Christian (or Muslim or Jew). He would be more interested in his fellow man, in improving his world rather than in hurrying on to the next. He would be more tolerant of dissenting viewpoints. He would not believe his opponents are hellbound, which one must say of even the most benevolent religionists. He would have a greater interest in other ways of experiencing life. Of course, specimens of these types are rare.

First, a humanist respects all other humans. He affirms the worth and dignity of every individual, even the assholes. He grants them intellectual and moral freedom and expects them in return. He takes nothing for granted, he questions everything, and accepts only the things in accordance with reality and logic. He is skeptical. He takes nothing from tradition, revelation, or mysticism, but accepts only information via the scientific method.

(Here, it is worth observing that “science” is not limited to laboratories and men in white coats. What I mean is simply trusting observable phenomena over unobservable. Science deals only with the present and observable. Theology attempts to map the spiritual dimensions with creeds rather than facts. The humanist is wary of these things.)

Secular humanists believe in universal morality; if something is wrong for you to do, it’s wrong for me. They believe in making this life meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our culture, our history and intellect. … and now I’m mostly just rephrasing from the website. Visit www.secularhumanism.org and learn all about it for yourself!

Secular humanism isn’t easy for everyone to accept. The emotional factor of religion is deeply ingrained in our culture and our personalities. Putting that down can be a difficult, even traumatic experience for many. A world without God also requires a good deal of emotional fortitude; there’s no one on whom to rely except yourself and those around you. Even if God never did one bit of good for me, it was nice to think that he kept my airplanes from crashing on landing – but why would I trust in that, rather than in the skill of the pilot and the principles of physics?

The most difficult part is that a humanist’s faith in humanity often goes unrewarded. Most people put very little thought into their interactions with others, and don’t take the time to cultivate manners or principles of courtesy; in short, people are assholes. Not only on a personal level: our history of brutality and warfare shows us as disappointments on the global level as well. But, to borrow from Christianity (and a humanist is free to form his creed from whatever dogma is compatible, and bits of Christianity are), one hates the sin and loves the sinner; one rejects rudeness, discourtesy, impropriety, cruelty, and reaches out to the human behind them.

With this mindset, one also risks becoming high-handed or self-righteous. That is another matter calling for vigilance and humility.

Below I’ve listed the tenets of secular humanism. They’re hard to argue with.

• We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

• We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

• We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

• We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

• We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

• We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

• We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

• We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

• We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

• We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

• We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

• We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

• We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

• We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

• We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

• We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

• We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

• We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

• We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

• We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

• We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

I think, if God existed, and he were a kind and merciful God who really wanted the best for his creatures, he would not disapprove of these tenets.

In Conclusion!

One of the lesser reasons I clung to Christianity was for its superstitious aspects. I liked thinking that all the miracles really happened, that Samson killed six hundred men with the jawbone of a donkey, that Christ walked on water, that Elijah could summon bears. That was my fantasy/scifi inclination, my fascination for the strange. I did not believe in ghosts, dragons, ESP, or magic, but I wanted to; I wanted these things to be real. If the Bible and all its crazy miracles were true, if impossible, unnatural God really existed, then maybe there was room for ghosts, dragons, ESP, and magic.

But I now understand that our world is none the less fantastic. On this one planet, we have giant squid, colossal squid, and vampire squid from hell. We have rat-kings and geckos with microfiber feet. We have millions of tiny matter/antimatter explosions in our atmosphere daily, as cosmic rays bombard our atmosphere and shoot off in particle jets. And this is one planet, around one star. There are about 240,000,000 stars in our one galaxy, one of perhaps 87,000,000,000 galaxies containing a total of maybe 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, stretching for 46,500,000,000 light-years in every direction. The universe is inconceivably vast. It’s a pretty fantastic place after all.

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Went to Akibahara today; bought a Slime Knight figurine; felt like a nerd; didn’t care.

Reading “Ilium”. Is good.

Drinking: Kirin and Sapporo and Asahi beers. Are good.

Singing: lots of karaoke. Fun.

Now: sleep.

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Church History

Russell refers to the numerous wrongs committed by the Church, which anyone with a smattering of history can verify. Of course, as all you Protestants know, that was the old, corrupt Catholic Church, which has nothing to do with modern good ol’ American Christianity. But – this is the counter to the argument that, without God to guide us, we will fall into evil. The witch trials, the Inquisition, the countless condemned to death for heresy, religious wars, the sheer repression of thought and the prohibition against intellectual freedom prove that we are quite capable of falling into evil with God. Religion is no proof against evil: good Protestants gave poxy blankets to Native Americans, good Muslims committed the Armenian genocide, the good Christian wife of Hulagu Khan encouraged him to burn Baghdad and put its hundreds of thousands of Muslims to the sword. In fact, Russell points out, the Church, and most Christians, have stood in the way of every significant advancement in equality and justice. To quote:

“Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says, “This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life,” and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children. This is what the Catholic church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. “What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

The Pope tells the residents of AIDS-stricken, overpopulated Africa not to use condoms. Right-wing Christians love the hell out of Sarah Palin, whom we can say, objectively, factually, is not only an imbecile but also a hatemonger, because she loves Jesus. Baptists murder abortionists. The Ku Klux Klan included many Bible-thumpers – thus the cross. There are plenty of Bible verses to prohibit women’s suffrage and gay marriage. Baptists and Methodists gave us Prohibition, the decade when organized crime ruled America and the President himself routinely broke the law.

These examples are not to say that Christianity is allied with these various causes; most Christians acknowledge that the Ku Klux Klan was a bad thing; they are to show that sin is not the exclusive province of the nonreligious, and virtue doesn’t belong to the religious alone.

Another quote:

“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

Belief in your own correctness breeds intolerance, and intolerance, history shows, breeds evil. The only way to avoid this is doubt. Science is the very essence of doubt – “We can take nothing for certain, and we must discover it for ourselves.” Why would we apply that principle to aeronautical engineering and microprocessor manufacturing, but not to religion? Reject what we think we know, but merely believe, and see for yourself what can be proven.

Agnosticism

But, of course, very little can be proven in the realm of metaphysics. Rejecting Creation and morality as proof of God, we have nothing left, and that is precisely the point. The agnostic says that there is insufficient proof one way or the other for the existence of God, that you can’t know.

There are problems with this term, primarily that “agnostic” is less often perceived as “we can’t know” and more as “I don’t care”. One accepts the “agnostic” (or, sloppily, “atheist”) label and stops thinking about religion, ethics, and morality, and simply does what he pleases. Another problem is that this not-knowing is perceived as vacillation – you don’t have the guts to declare yourself an atheist, or your choice is uninformed, and you are easy prey for evangelists. For this reason Douglas Adams called himself a “radical atheist”, to make it clear that he had thought about his choice and made an informed decision. For the purposes of this journal, we’ll use the term “practical atheist” – that is, there is insufficient proof for the existence or nonexistence of God, and in light of this insufficient proof, we will live our lives as if he does not exist. God almost definitely does not exist, and if he does, his plan is unfathomable and unfathomably cruel; so we’ll assume he doesn’t, and get on with our lives.

One of the arguments I heard in church, which my preacher got from a persuasive little brochure, is the “Can I ask you a question?” argument.

Christian: Dear friend atheist, can I ask you a question?

Atheist: I don’t see why not.

Christian: Is there a pencil in this room?

Atheist: Ah…

Christian: You see, for you to know there is not a pencil in this room, you must know the contents of every drawer, every pocket, and every other such container that could hold a pencil. You must know that no one has secreted a pencil under the carpet, or in the piano, or hidden one in their rectums in the manner of pencil smugglers. You must know that there is no pencil behind a ceiling tile, or broken into tiny bits and dispersed through the atmosphere; in short, you must know everything about this room. Meanwhile, if I seek to prove that there is a pencil in this room, I must know only the location of the pencil. Tell me, dear friend atheist, do you know everything about the universe?

Atheist: Of course not.

Christian: Then how can you know there is no God? For me to prove his existence, I must only know that there is a God. For you to disprove it, you must know every crevice in the many unfolding galaxies, and know that there is no God in any of these places.

Atheist: I am confounded.

The fallacy here is that a pencil can be seen with the eyes, touched with the hands, chewed by the teeth. We can know of its existence as much as we can know of anything. No Christian has this amount of knowledge of God, only conviction and belief. These are intangible things. It is a very simple-minded Christian who is never bothered by doubt of his God’s existence. But I am never bothered by doubt that the acceleration of gravity near Earth’s surface is 9.8 meters per second squared, or that trees are made of wood, because these things we can know and prove. If God could be proven, then every being on Earth would have no choice but to worship him. Obviously, we don’t. He is a powerful and persistent delusion, but no more than that.

So here my narrative has brought me to the point where I am dispensing with the idea of the necessity of God for either moral or logical purposes. The world could have created itself as described by science; I rejected the idea that matter exists because God willed it, and God exists because he exists, and moved to the simpler, more elegant, more logical: matter exists because it exists. I had lingering trepidation; even though I had long left behind strict Christianity, my perception of the world had always required a divine intelligence that ordered it, and it would require reconsideration of everything I knew. I was surprised to find how easy and how liberating this process would be.

First, my guilt and fear over abandoning the idea of God. Russell addressed this same in his essay; people believe in God simply because they have always been taught to do so, and because of the emotional response. It feels good to have a “big brother” looking over your shoulder, to have someone to punish the bastards in the afterlife, and to provide an eternal paradise after you leave this vale of tears. I had to put down this idea manually, as you shed a heavy backpack or, perhaps, a giant turtle-shell costume. I felt pounds lighter. The ideas of heaven and eternity had always bored me, and hell always appalled me. As far as the big brother, most Christians do not practically believe in a guardian angel. They still die by accidents and violence, same as anyone else. If God is divinely guiding the world through world wars and nuclear weapons development and pandemics, his track record leaves something to be desired.

I was reluctant to embrace atheism and the atheist culture. Atheists had always seemed to me be to one of two things: intellectually lazy or smug. I didn’t want to be either. I put aside reading on atheism and humanism and spent some time figuring out things for myself.

Simplification

If God does not exist, if there is no spiritual or supernatural dimension to existence, how much simpler and freer life becomes! I began to understand why humanists are either jolly or serene.

There is no fate. There is no guilt. There is no sin.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s still right and wrong, but the division is less arbitrary than in Christianity. But “sin” itself, when an action is not merely harmful, but somehow fundamentally wrong, is gone – Russell says this of what sin and good and evil mean to the agnostic:

“The Agnostic is not quite so certain as some Christians are as to what is good and what is evil. He does not hold, as most Christians in the past held, that people who disagree with the government on abstruse points of theology ought to suffer a painful death. He is against persecution, and rather chary of moral condemnation.

As for ’sin’, he thinks it not a useful notion. He admits, of course, that some kinds of conduct are desirable and some undesirable, but he holds that the punishment of undesirable kinds is only to be commended when it is deterrent or reformatory, not when it is inflicted because it is thought a good thing on its own account that the wicked should suffer. It was this belief in vindictive punishment that made men accept Hell. This is part of the harm done by the notion of ’sin’.”

(From another article that you really should read for yourself.)

The theme here is mental and moral freedom. People ought to determine right and wrong for themselves. Of course, one should not murder rampantly just because one wants to. Agnosticism is not madness. But it means that you don’t need to feel bad for, say, masturbating, fornicating, having one or two or six beers, or refusing to humiliate yourself before God. There is no Sky Bully frowning on all you do.

Ideas of fate and destiny evaporate, leaving only free will. Virtue no longer becomes the imitation of God, but its own reward. Right and wrong are no longer divine or infernal impulses, but your own. Practical atheism enables you to take charge of your own life in a heady, empowering way that Christianity does not; in Christianity, you may choose to be a good Christian or not. With practical atheism, you determine what you want to be. Your life is your own, to live as you see fit. You serve no one, are slave to no deity; human history is no longer a long procession from creation to the apocalypse, but our own pageant to direct and play out. One wonders why anyone would give up this sort of liberty and throw one’s free will at God’s feet.

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