Watch Out! Here Comes Unitarian Jihad

A writer friend sent this to me while we were discussing my penchant for heresy. I thought it was so perfect, I’m posting it (aside from the introductory paragraph by Jon Carroll) in its entirety. Let the revolution begin!

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism — 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to … you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for “balance” by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: “Sincerity is not enough.” We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it’s true doesn’t make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn’t mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he’s pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

Thanks again, David!

Biological Underpinnings for Spirituality

Because I recognize that our consciousness is centered in the brain, I always figured they’d eventually figure out how spirituality and the brain are related. Well, this article reports how they’ve shown that when an area in the right parietal lobe is suppressed (whether through lesion, injury, or meditation), one is more spiritual. It’s the “me-defining” area, so it makes sense, considering that the key to spirituality, as the various scriptures point out, is selflessness.

It’s way cool, imo, that they’re proving this scientifically. I was talking to my daughter yesterday about how important it is to fight our instincts for selfishness. Of course, Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave, and it’s true that martyrdom and survival are opposing goals, but it’s also true that for those for whom greed is a value, happiness is an unattainable goal. When one focuses constantly on the self and acquisition, enough is never enough, and happiness recedes from your approach like a mirage in the desert.

I also like it because it shows how even atheists can practice a beneficent spirituality (good for themselves and for others) without requiring them to subscribe to a belief in the supernatural that they find irrational and therefore unacceptable. The article also points out that this egolessness is sometimes experienced by appreciating — and “losing oneself in” — the beauty of nature or art, something I’ve long found to be personally rewarding.

Sam Harris on the Importance of Breaking Religion’s Spell

Here’s an excellent bit from the question and answer period after a debate with Rabbi Wolpe. I’ve been watching a lot of Mr. Harris on YouTube, and I have to say that I like him even more than Richard Dawkins. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dawkins, but, as an American, Harris is more aware of the need to speak with the religious politely and without snarkiness. Dawkins can come off a bit smug, which is a mistake when dealing with the American religious, who already feel beset and belittled, and whose defense mechanisms thereby fly up as soon as the subject is broached with any sort of superior attitude.

Here’s another bit: Sam Harris at the TruthDig conference, talking about how beliefs have consequences, and why the taboo on not examining religious beliefs needs to be lifted.

Here he is talking about the relative morality of various books of the Bible and what would happen if as a society we actually followed it.

And one more, at the Idea Festival in Aspen, where he disputes a lot of common misconceptions about atheism:

If you’d like to hear more of what he has to say, here’s the link to his website, which includes links to a number of articles and videos (including the full debate with Rabbi Wolpe). His thinking is even more in line with my own than Richard Dawkins’s. Dawkins and the rest of the recent crop of atheistic authors turn their backs on mystical experience, whereas Sam Harris, while approaching it as a skeptic, acknowledges that there’s something there to examine that could prove worthwhile, perhaps yielding up that which religions seek but never truly find, tied up as they are in their supernatural superstitions and dogmatism. He’s experienced contemplative states and acknowledges that they can lead to an increase in the ability to experience empathy and compassion, which are clearly in short supply these days.

A neurobiologist, he was motivated to start writing by the events of 9/11, and his focus is on the affect of beliefs on behaviors. Some people have painted him as some sort of warmonger Islamophobe, but that’s hardly the case when you read the suspect passages in context. Does he say that people holding the beliefs indoctrinated by Islam can be led therewith to bad behavior? Absolutely, but that’s hardly the same thing.

Campbell Brown Nails It Again: So WHAT if He WAS an Arab?

I’m really starting to love Campbell Brown. When the ignorant lady at a McCain rally recently said she couldn’t trust Obama because he’s an Arab (she didn’t quite manage a sentence as complex as that, but it’s what she tried to say), McCain corrected her by saying that no, Obama is a decent family man (that’s the opposite of Arab?). Ms. Brown decided that the underlying assumption that Arab and Muslim are slurs finally needed to be addressed:

Now, anyone who reads this blog knows I’m not keen on religion, and that one of the things I am keen on is the separation of Church and State. And key to that separation is the idea that it shouldn’t matter what religion someone is (despite the fundies’ paranoia and Turkey’s misunderstanding of what secularism means, it does not mean getting rid of religion entirely) when they run for public office. It also shouldn’t matter what ethnicity someone is, which is more to the point with the word Arab, though I know for the ignorant folk like this McCain supporter Arab and Muslim are synonymous, since they’re clueless of the fact that there are actually secular and Christian Arabs, and, for all I know, Buddhist and Hindu and Wiccan and Zoroastrian Arabs, as well, especially here in America where they are free to choose.

America is not a Christian country. America is a free country where people of all religions or no religion can and must coexist, and I’m glad some people in the media are starting to speak up about it.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin Having the Nuclear Codes

I liked Matt Damon as Loki in Dogma, which is one of my favorite movies (like that was a tough guess). Now I really love him. Here he is on YouTube, expressing how absurd it is that Sarah Palin is as close to becoming President as she is. He compares it to a bad Disney movie, which I think nails it. (Kudos to Kate for finding this one.)

The Futility of Fiction

I once again had some extra time on my hands, and I vainly tried to fill it by reading fiction. I have had a lifetime struggle with fiction. In school, it is always assigned and held up as an essential human academic venue. But I could see only it’s futility, and furthermore, I derive no pleasure from it. Feeling, however, the pressure of public opinion, I periodically try to force myself to appreciate fiction and literature. I have tried the Dickens, Twain, Melville, as well as the Vonnegut, Dick, Asimov, etc. Whatever genre or time period, I make it about 1/3 of the way through any fiction before I am irritated and bored. Now, I do appreciate music, visual art, and poetry, and by extension cinema (which is mostly visual and musical with the thinnest butter of story), but fiction per se has always remained opaque to me.

Well, having some time on my hands, I set about to read fiction. Since I like movies and science, I figured maybe science fiction would be more successful, so I attempted to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, said to be one of the greats of speculative fiction, with three pages of glowing critical reviews as a preface. About a third of the way through, the book is already in the recycling/donation bins outside. As to the specifics of this book and why it tired me so, I shall go into some detail. First, it must be remembered that this book is supposed to be 12,000 years in the future. It must also be remembered that this book was written in 1951, and I will judge his “world-building” according to that time frame. In the beginning, there is a trial of the psycho-historians. These historians are predicting a doom (sort of like global-warming scientists), and the government is accusing them of having political motives rather than scientific for their studies. They are cross-examining Hari Seldon as to the number of scientists in his employ, to prove that his actions are political and not scientific. The government asks him how many scientists are in his employ. Seldon replies with a small number, and the government quotes a figure four or more times that. To this (in paraphrase) Seldon replies that those are just women, children, and support staff (other races/slaves). So, even though Asimov should have been aware that M. Curie won Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, and women had won the right to vote in his youth in the twenties, he goes on to create a world 12,000 years in the future where women are mentally incapable of being scientists and have no political power? And though Gauss made important mathematical contributions as a pre-teen, children cannot make contributions to mathematics in 12,000 years? And the same lack of consideration of the intelligence or political weight of non-white races is still present so far in the future despite Asimov’s awareness of folk such as Langston Hughes, the Harlem renaissance, and the earliest blooms of the civil rights movement in a decade? This is not a credible world. In the very next section, a great worker on the Galactic Encyclopedia is cataloging his findings on paper with a stylus, even though the first computers with punch cards are already in play in the 50s, and Max Mathews is already doing his early acoustic research on early IBM machines. This is not a credible world. Furthermore, despite the 50’s fascination with the glorious future of plastics and synthetic materials, which is well known to a man well-versed in science such as Asimov, there is a grave discussion regarding mining and the necessity of steel for every construction paragraphs later. This is not a credible world 20 years in the future, let alone 12,000 years. Also, the aliens gather into a Christian church with a Reverend next. When we live on a planet where few people give a shit about a psychotic Jew who lived 2000 years ago, we are expected to believe that distant planets 12,000 years in the future will embrace Christianity? Furthermore, at one point a character mentions that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that the ancient wise man who discovered this (Einstein) has been forgotten. But a meaningless Jew 3000 years prior to Einstein with no contribution to human knowledge is remembered and revered? Talk about Mr. Asimov’s distorted personal lens. The fact is that this great of science fiction creates a sloppy, unbelievable and tiresome world with no credibility heavily weighed down by his lack of vision, racism, sexism, failure to understand ecosystems or holism, and a genuine lack of appreciation of the true nature of scientific research or the interaction of science, society and government. Not to mention that the two-dimensional characters, lacking convincing psychological motivations, sexual or self-affirming actions, stuck in a third-world industrial hell, are mere cardboard cutouts to move a facile plot of no significance forward. Like most speculative fiction, it seems to be the play-world of pre-teen power fantasies projected at large with a curious disregard for other people as people versus mere manipulations for the author. I feel sorry for these people’s families.

To me, drama or supposedly realistic fiction suffers from the same problems. The characters are often abnormally aware of the importance of their mundane action, like visiting the parson for tea. In real life, when you go to someone’s house for coffee, you don’t know that very act is part of some grand drama. Some days it may be mundane, some days it may be the beginning of a complicated drama involving the bombing of some buildings in New York with airplanes. You can’t savor the moment a priori with psychic awareness the way novelists do. In some ways, the comic book American Splendor by Harvey Pekar is much more convincing than any work of literature, as the mundane, like finding a jazz album we are searching for, is the drama and grand event to us individually, though absolutely mundane to everyone else. Furthermore, the characters in literature, due usually to the narrator’s grand god-like awareness, have entirely too much knowledge of the contents and motivations of other people’s heads. Whereas, in real life, I am often unaware of the contents of my wife’s head while we speak about some grave and serious matter. Also, there is the constant plague that none of this is real. The people aren’t real. The events aren’t real. They certainly aren’t going to help me build a fence or feed my children. And given the lack of verisimilitude of the characters, their awareness of others, and their prescience of the significance of the mundane, I question as so many blindly accept, that such input could in any way help you deal with real people in real life with any authenticity. I believe fiction sets up an arrogant, solipsistic world for the heavy reader that is flagrantly anti-social in that other people are mere objects for the manipulation and enhancement of experience of the self-centered.

I suppose that is why I think religion is stupid. Religion is fiction. The Bible is fiction. The world was not created in six days. The circumference of a circle is Pi times the diameter, not three times (1 Kings 7:23). Hare do not chew their cud. (Lev 11:6) There was no world-wide flood. Bats are not birds. (Lev 14:11) The sun does not move or go around the earth, but as we know from Copernicus, vice versa. (Joshua 10:12, judges 5:31 and many others) The earth rotates on its axis. It is not still. (Chron 16:30) Human thought is in the brain, not the heart. (Esther 6:6) And that is a short list of Biblical errata, as everyone knows. These are just stupid, made-up stories by pre-scientific people. The Koran is fiction. There are not eleven planets. (Koran 12:4) The sun does not move, the earth is not flat, and the sun does not go to bed in a muddy spring. (18:86, 90) The earth is not still, but rotates on its axis. (27:61) The moon is not its own light, but reflects light of the sun. (71:16) Again, the Koran is a fiction. The Koran is just more stupid, made-up stories by a backward, pre-scientific people.

Only fundamentalists try to say the Bible or Koran is true, the word of God. But for a omniscient being, God doesn’t seem to know much about the world he created, suggesting these are not God’s stories, but the stories of men who lived in ignorance of reality. Many believers, understanding the need to not fly in the face of reality, prefer to say that these stories are poetry, and while not literally true, still have an important core message. Let us look at the core message of both the Bible and the Koran then. They, fortuitously, have the same core message, so we may dispense with both of them at once. Both the Bible and the Koran say that God exists and created the earth and man. When you die, you will be buried and stay there. At some future time, God will blow the whistle for “end of game,” the dead will be pulled out of their graves, and the living and the dead will be judged on their actions and belief affiliations. The good will go to paradise or reward, and the bad will go to the good ol’ lake of fire. First of all, there is no god. Second of all, the dead will not be resurrected. Third of all, there is no punishment or reward. Both scriptures said the end was very near, but it never came and it never will come. If there is an “end of game” for the people of earth, it will be when the sun red giants or subsequently supernovas, and we will all be in a lake of fire, regardless of what book you read or what club you belonged to. And this time of demise for the planet and the heavens is so far in the future that it is entirely possible that we may simply colonize a habitable planet or man-made space colony. So I suppose the scientists who take to the stars will be saved from the lake of fire, and the religious scrabbling with their old books on a crumbling earth will burn in the lake of fire. The real core message of Islam and Christianity, the resurrection and judgment, is an absolute utter fiction. And this intelligent, non-material being called God is a pure fiction. The only intelligence comes from firing neurons in a nervous system, something a non-material being couldn’t have. Furthermore, there is the old “ghost in the machine” problem of how a purely non-material being could interact with a material world.

Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are utter fictions and nonsense too. There is no reincarnation, as our personality and identity is a by-product of our human brains. There is no human intelligence transferable to a non-human brain such as a roach. The number of species and beings is not a constant, so are some souls being made fresh and some recycled? Buddhism is absolutely contingent on belief in reincarnation, because seeking Nirvana or freedom from rebirth is the sole point to the Noble Eightfold Path. As to pantheistic notions such as Taoism or Hinduism, there is no universal spirit or connection between all things no matter how close or distant. If Alpha Centauri explodes today, the only effect that would have is a peculiar twinkle in the sky some thousands of years hence, because no communication or effect can occur faster than the speed of light. So there can be no instantaneous, magical connection. The only connection between us and something else must occur through the exchange of bosons that determine the four fundamental forces of nature. Any object too distant is limited by the universal speed limit of the speed of light, and therefore such interactions are negligible and slow, and most certainly completely material.

Why people persist in maintaining the utility of fiction is beyond me. We live in a real, vibrant, and beautiful world, full of wonder and greatness. These religious fictions are simply for the control of others, for generating fear and misery. We should embrace reality and the wonder it is.

Kabbalistic glyphs in Masonic Baal-guided scrying

Session V

Since the last time I used DMT and had the realization that it was my own brain that was imposing the consistent narrative of sexuality, I realized the need to have an effective means of controlling this astral plane as well as some means of stocking it with new narratives so as not to fall back on old patterns. Relying on a stereotyped vision of reality that has always been comfortable to me, I fell back on the use of kabbalistic meditation techniques. As I understand it, the kabbalah is, most simply put, the art of viewing the universe as made entirely of atoms, but rather than like the atoms of the physical materialist being merely physical balls or entities, the kabbalist has the universe made up of vibratory thought-energy-atoms. This allows the practitioner of the kabbalah to, in theory, utilize her thought energy to manipulate matter, or to utilize matter to manipulate the practitioner’s thought energies in precise ways, and would also allow the practitioner to have special insight into reality by understanding the relationship between reality, sound, and thought at its deepest level.

When I find it necessary to pursue mystic paths, though being a physical materialistic atheist myself, I find it most satisfactory to fall back on kabbalist paths as they require the least compromise of my daily conscious beliefs. This necessity to rely on spiritual techniques despite a philosophical unwillingness to the contrary reminds me of a statement made by William Burroughs during an interview shown in the movie The Source. At one point, William Burroughs is describing the terrible physical side effects of the drink yage, which contains DMT and an MAOI. The interviewer asks why a person would punish themselves in such a manner. At this question Burroughs gets quite angry and says, “If you’re going to take yage, you take yage!” Therefore, by analogy, if you “smoke DMT, you smoke DMT!”; you may have to utilize spiritual techniques alien to your waking consciousness to have that special experience you seek. You must accept the negative as an expedient means to a joyful end. If these techniques become sufficiently and consistently useful for survival as to seem more necessary for a comprehensive world view than mere appendages of expedient means, then it becomes mandatory as a scientist to modify one’s daily beliefs and move on with a new world view. However, for now, it was still an expedient means to utilize kabbalistic techniques to begin to control the journey.

I initially thought about using the Hebrew letters, from which I learned about the kabbalah. But there is a lot of baggage with this culture’s letters, and I have always found it difficult to remember Semitic letters made of brush strokes and points. Furthermore, never really understanding the kabbalah in past study, I set about researching the origins of the Hebrew alphabet and came to learn about proto-Canaanite, proto-Sinaite, and it’s descendant Phoenician, from which we get ancient Hebrew and subsequently Biblical Hebrew. Furthermore, the Phoenician alphabet influenced the Latin (therefore the Germanic and Romance languages), Greek (Cyrillic and Slavic), Semitic (Arabic and Hebrew), and even Indian (Sanskrit) languages. It can certainly be argued to be the primal alphabet of all magical cultures and traditions of the mid-East and West. In examining the forms and glyphs of the original letters, which are quite like the Egyptian hieroglyphs by which they were inspired but from which they were not copied, or Druidic runes, the proto-Sinaitic glyphs and those chronologically before are quite clear as to what they represent in nature. An ox is quite clearly the head of an ox, etc. While there is some occasional argument, for example as in gimel, as to whether it is a crescent, camel or boomerang, the use of any one of these will suffice, and a narrative that links all three will suffice as well if that suits the experience better. I set about using the Phoenician alphabet because it is well-standardized, whereas the prior alphabets require some interpretation and reconstruction subject to the investigator’s personal bias, well defined (due to the survival of a fair number of scripts over time), and while the identity of some letters is in question still, by combining the interpretation of previous reconstructions, I found it possible to settle on a personally satisfying explanation for each glyph. There is also tremendous agreement over time as to the meaning of some letters, for example, Mem, as ‘water’. I set about learning the Phoenician alphabet and it’s letter signs and associating them with the Hebrew, which gave me great inspiration as to how Hebraic and Arabic scripts, and Semitic scripts in general, function. After sufficient practice with the glyphs over days, I was ready to scry.

I then prepared a dose of DMT in scrying range ~ 50mg. I took a small warming dose to make sure I could control the imagery of the letters through a slight rush. Then I took a deeper dose. On doing so I entered into a psychedelic space, but a very comfortable one. The sense of a being was there, same as before, but only as a helpful guiding female voice, not visually. I could peer through a triangular doorway into another world made of a pale blue sky with a pillar of white, non-stormy, fluffy clouds at the center, like a UFO of clouds. There were multiple psychedelic rainbows dripping from the entry way. It was the epitome of blue sky and peace. I realized I was peering through the shape of daleth like a doorway. I heard the voice urge me to try other letters and I did. Each one opened up another hallucinogenic space. For example, vav opened up a flaming yellow desert-like hallucinogenic space, with burning orange trails, a hot Mars-like environment. Shin opened up a crystalline world, each of the three points serving as seeds of extensive crystallization. At one point I utilized lamed and had a beautiful vision, which does escape me, because it wasn’t anchored with the symbol’s meaning, which I couldn’t remember at that moment. Now I remember it means ‘goad,’ ironically. I had remembered the letter by a mnemonic with ‘L’, so the voice chided me in the future not to utilize such mnemonic tricks and to remember the meanings. I nodded. As usual, she reminded me not to criticize myself overly much, assured me of universal love and benevolence, and encouraged me to move on to other glyphs. I moved on to mem with great success. By the time I reached nun, I could feel the effect of the neurotransmitter beginning to leave. With characteristic and usual sadness, I wished I could never go. She encouraged me to practice as long as I could, especially as the drug was leaving, so the ability might stay more permanently. I did so until the scrying no longer had the sense of reality, but pushed fantasy. I came to and delivered this narrative.

I feel I was encouraged by the female spirit of DMT to continue using kabbalistic meditation techniques based on the Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters as doorways to different hallucinogenic spaces. I saw them as vibratory spaces or levels, co-existent, adjacent or interwoven with our own, somehow participating or interacting with ours on a perpetual basis in some important manner. My questions now are what are the nature of these spaces? What is the nature of their interaction with our space? And how is mastery, control or vision of these spaces useful to my character, development, or identity as a human being? I suspect the answer to the latter question is probably the easiest. To know the real situation one is in is always of greatest value.

Majutsu sez…

“Americans want science confined to a money-making box, not wandering in church asking questions.” We had a big discussion about labels today, whether I ought to call myself an atheist or a secular humanist, or one of my own making, which I’ve been using and which my former mentor says he likes: agnostic secularist.

And it’s not that I’m not sure whether or not there’s a personal deity. I know that’s not so. Or at least I’m confident enough to consider people like Richard Dawkins to be perfectly reasonable, if somewhat impatient with people who value their heritage more than the need to feel 100% rational. Personally, for example, I think it’s just fine that some Christians and some Jews and even some Muslims have managed to pare away the extraneous BS of superstition and ignorance and cultural overlay to find the core of their faiths, which have enough truth to them (the smallness and insignificance of the individual as compared to the Whole, the importance of kindness and the other virtues, etc.) to be valuable when taken with a grain of salt (and never, ever insist that anyone agree with your take! enough evangelism, already, which ought to be called dominionism, at this point…let’s call a spade a spade). Heck, we even used the Bible recently to illustrate a point to our kids (the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has political connotations lost on most of us…). But I like using “agnostic” to say that I am not certain. That I’m not saying I know what happens when you die, or how the world came to be (I mean, I know life evolved, but I’m talking about what happened in the millisecond preceding the Big Bang), but that I do not know and further I don’t consider it important. What IS important is secularism. That religion and government remain forever separate. Religion is just too personal a choice to be legislated. Period. And the problems we all face together as one species on this beleaguered planet, problems of our own making that require solutions other than war OR prayer.

But back to Maj’s statement about science, it’s so true. These folk love science so long as it’s making them money. They gladly embrace it while it fills their coffers, but badmouth it if it seems to contradict the religious tenets that give them power. Another six weeks or so, and we escape the Bible Belt. I can’t tell you how eager I am.

The Importance of Beauty (and Freedom is Nice, Too)

Here’s something I typed up when we drove up to see Maj.’s parents:

So we’re rolling through the mountains of Tennessee. I’m looking out the window as I type this, thinking how lucky we are to be free to move between earth and sky, even pressed as we are by gravity, confined to the ground. Still so many directions we can move in, and so very much to see. The trees are almost all awake, though their leaves are mostly still in miniature and glowing that bright green of spring. The woods here are a tapestry of mounded forms and color: chartreuse, olive, kelly. And the bright white and deep pink of flowering branches, redbud and pear and apple and still some dogwood, though nothing like in Alabama, where they glowed in the darkened under-story that is their natural habitat.

In this setting, with the earth rising up in undulating waves of these diverse greens, everything man-made looks so ugly. It’s our modern building methods, the cheap materials we use, the lack of any aesthetic in utilitarian architecture.

Now we’re moving into Knoxville. The beauty of trees has receded. The highway is four lanes in each direction. Billboards proliferate. The flashing light on a radio tower glares against the grey sky. In the mountains, the drizzle felt nurturing. Here, it’s just messy, and the sky creates a monotone with the concrete, rather than a neutral backdrop against which the colors of life could shine.

After we’ve gotten our heads out of our asses, after we’ve finally rejected religion as anything but a private choice and united in the struggle to fix our forbears’ horrendous mistakes that have led to the immanent ecological crisis, one of the challenges facing the modern human is how to create cities that nurture the individual’s sense of beauty. I may not believe in a soul, but I do believe in a psyche that can be strongly influenced by its surroundings.

One of the things I’ve noticed on this trip is that a lot of trucking agencies have begun putting Biblical passages or religious phrases on the backs of their trucks. We just passed one that quoted a bit from Romans, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Well, someone who thinks God is for THEM. Another said “Jesus is LORD.” Lord of what? That’s a silly word a lot of Christians don’t think much about. It’s left over from the feudal system. Your lord was the nobleman to whom you, as a serf, paid rent (usually a significant part of your crops). So how, exactly, is Jesus my Lord? And why shouldn’t I, instead, be free?

God is Not Great: Excellent Excerpt at Slate

Here’s one of three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I haven’t read the other two yet, but this was so good I had to post it here.

A little bit to whet your appetite:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.