No Free Speech in India

Here’s an article about a writer and her publisher being held for “offending the religious feelings” of Muslims (which is apparently a crime there) for an article in which she wrote “I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.” The title of the piece is “Why Should I Respect These Oppressive Religions?” Personally, I think that’s a good question.

I understand Muslims’ desire not to have thrown in their faces the fact that Mohammad was a pedophile and a genocidal maniac. And I understand India’s desire not to stir up their Muslim population, considering their tendency to violence when their religious feelings get hurt. But they’ll never progress as a democracy if they don’t embrace the concept of free speech. If someone can’t handle hearing someone else point out the problems with their religion, they need to examine their beliefs more closely, not silence the offending speaker.

It’s high time the fundamentalist Muslims of the world got their heads out of their collective asses and joined the present, rather than clinging to their past. There’s a reason Muslim countries are among the poorest, least developed places on the planet, and that’s the way in which they suppress dissent. New ideas, so necessary for progress, can’t flower in such a climate. Not to mention the fact that they cut off half (the female half) of their population from participation. That’s a lot of brains to leave out of the problem solving.

Some Muslims actually fantasize (the evidence of this litters the internet) that one day Islam will cover the globe, so we all may as well just give in to it. They don’t understand how great it is to live in a place where we are free to use our minds, and to speak our minds. We’re not going to give that up to go back to some medieval era when the church and the state were one (we experienced that already, when Christianity was as oppressive as Islam is now, in its own adolescence). Instead, if they don’t give up on the idea that they’ve got a firm grip on the truth and some divine mandate to shove it down the world’s throat, they’ll find their religion stamped out like a brush fire. The more they resort to violence and repression, the more opposition they’ll find among the world’s free thinkers. Already the events of 9/11 caused in this country public discourse, with writers like Sam Harris, questioning the validity of religious belief. With any luck, with their continuing idiocy, they’ll cause the death of religion altogether.

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.

Sarah Palin Linked to Second Witch-Hunter and Spiritual Warfare Network That Sees Catholics As Demonic

Nevermind Hindus, Muslims, or Jews. Even most Protestants don’t have it right, and a civil war among the protestants will be necessary to purge the churches of demonic influence before Jesus will come again. I just read this article over at HuffPo, and I have to say that I think Sarah Palin should be kept as far away from power as possible, not just in this election, but for forever.

These do not seem like nice people.

Although the terms ‘intercessory prayer’ and ‘prayer warrior’ are widely used in Christianity, Sarah Palin has been been claimed, as a member, by one very specific and well defined prayer-warfare network: the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, formerly called the “Spiritual Warfare Network”. This ‘prayer warfare’ network considers Catholics, and everyone else who does not share its particular interpretation of Christianity to be under demon influence and damned to hell; it hunts witches and is mapping out “demon influences” in cities and towns across America.

Global Apostolic Prayer Network leaders compare Catholicism to Freemasonry and have conducted prayer warfare which they claim may have helped to kill Mother Theresa. One top leader and apostle of this spiritual warfare movement endorses the activities of church-based Central American death squads.

On September 6, 2008, Norwegian Spiritual Warfare leader Jan-Aage Torp confirmed that Sarah Palin was currently a ‘prayer warrior’ in Mary Glazier’s prayer-warfare network.

Glazier has claimed that in 1995 her network drove an employee of the Alaska State Prison System, whom Glazier had accused of witchcraft, out of Alaska with ’spiritual warfare’. As Glazier told Spiritled Woman Magazine,

“As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer.”

And just in case any of you kind, forgiving Catholics want to pray that these people actually hear Christ’s message of the brotherhood of man, don’t bother:

The Global Apostolic Prayer Network…claims that a planetary-level demon spirit blocks prayers of Catholics from reaching Heaven.

All I can say is, wow. What century is this? Even after this election (which I’m pretty optimistic will NOT land Sarah the Prayer Warrior anywhere near the White House), I think we need to be vigilant that this Global Apostolic Prayer Network not continue to subvert democracy and rationalism around the world.

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.

McCain’s Spiritual Advisor is a Nut Who Wants Holy War

Here’s a scary video for you. This guy is a total nut. (He’s also quite wrong about the founding of America, btw, since our founders were actually Masons who, as their iconography shows, are very sympathetic to Islam.) At one point he says, in a frenzy, that “we were created for the conflict; we get off on warfare.” That sounds a lot more like Constantianism than Christianity to me.

“Spare Me Your Reverse Snobbery”

Here’s a fabulous article from The New Republic about the anti-elite snobbery, written by someone from a small town who’s tired of hearing that Sarah Palin represents her. A must read for anyone who (like me) comes from a non-privileged background but doesn’t think that means we’ve got to agree with folk like the divine Ms. P.

Here’s a teaser:

Now I appreciate the effectiveness of insulting stereotyping as much as the next pundit, but I’m getting exceedingly tired of hearing about how much I scorn Sarah Palin because she is a hick chick from a hick state who didn’t go to Harvard. Please. I grew up in freaking Southeast Tennessee, in a smallish suburb of Chattanooga known as Hixson. (That’s right, pronounced hick-son.) I have spent more time at mudbogs, tractor pulls, county fairs, pig-roasts, dirt-bike races, and Wal-Marts than most of the anti-elite conservative whiners flapping their gums and wringing their hands over poor disrespected Sarah. I attended public high school, and the bulk of my classmates had Appalachian accents so thick they make Palin sound like a network anchor. The boys were hunters. The girls–myself included–had absolutely enormous hair. If any of my friends wasn’t a Christian, she had the good sense not to mention it to the rest of us, lest we try to save her soul at the countless revivals, church camps, and youth retreats we all attended. I was always smart but have never been an in-tel-lec-tu-al. (Shhhhh. Don’t tell my bosses.) And despite graduating second in my class, it never even occurred to me to apply to an Ivy League university. I went to college at Vanderbilt in Nashville–on scholarship, lest anyone assume that my family was upper-crusty.

Just like Ralph Peters, I KNOW Sarah Palin. Hell, in my younger days, I WAS Sarah Palin. (Well, minus being a crack shot.) The difference is I don’t fetishize my regular-gal roots and assume they make me special–much less qualified to run the country. And while I have indeed witnessed my fair share of cultural snobbery from some of my better-credentialed, coastal colleagues over the years, I’m not so defensive about where I come from that I feel the need to champion a wildly unqualified fellow hick whose politics I disagree with as a way to get back at everyone I know who has ever made a sniffy comment about big hair or small towns.

LHC The Large Hadron Collider, Creationism and Destroying the World

The Large Hadron Collider was designed to accelerate particles at such speeds to reproduce the Big Bang, the formation of Dark Matter, and to uncover the God Particle, or Higgs Boson. Today, the Large Hadron accelerator was hacked into. This means that some computer geeks compromised the security of a device that can attain energies simulating the very formation of universe. They left the message “We are 2600″, an old hacker number favorite, from the days of compromised phone lines. Fortunately, the breach was in the detector network and the result a harmless bit of geekery. But the same breach of security could have been malicious, designed to unleash Dark Matter and God particle level-energies so as to crack the earth to its fiery core like a walnut. Now, I am not the nut branch who thinks it shouldn’t be built since 1) I’m all for science, and 2) since it’s in France and Switzerland, it’s not our country to have a say, unless we are denying Europe autonomy? I for one am very excited about the knowledge of our universe to be gained from such experiments.

My issue is that few Americans knew the LHC was built. Fewer still could tell you why it was built. Yet many European, Chinese and Indian secondary students, that is children, could tell you why it was built. American scientific education is so poor that we are drastically behind the rest of the world in the physical sciences and biological sciences, to a degree that we have to import students in droves from China, India and Europe to fill the void. These same students often take their education home when they’re done. A gap in the physical sciences will one day mean a gap so ridiculous in National Security technology, that no amount of technology stealing or teenage playground aggression tactics can fill it. On top of it all, most Americans were unaware of the hack on the LHC, so that while worrying about lipstick on pigs, few Americans knew that their last thought, the end of life on earth perhaps, could have been yesterday, if someone had tampered with subtleties of the collision controls in a knowledgeable way with malicious intent at the right time.

And here is where we come to McCain and Palin. Not only should we be working with the world, as Barack Obama says, to communicate and work together, such as to help police the LHC and secure it, or to work together and talk with other nations to end conflict. But the Bible has no place in a national science education system already riddled with inadequacy. The Bible can be taught in religion, philosophy or cultural history class as an important part of American cultural and religious history. But the Bible has no place in science. We are threatening our National Security with such nonsense. We must put an end to what McCain and Palin represent: cowboy diplomacy, religious fascism, a backward anti-intellectual view of the world, and an actual threat to the physical and economic security of every American. Obama represents real ideas about real issues. He represents America taking its place as stalwart country and potential inspirer of the nations of the globe. He represents America looking forward to the future by putting our children first with comprehensive health care, a country free of debt, and an educational system centered on giving our children skills needed to succeed in the real, not to navigate as plumbs an ancient mythology.

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.)

PUMA Needs to Get It’s Collective Head Out of Its Arse

Some of the commentaries on this youtube video are really disturbing. Apparently McCain’s shallow attempt to appeal to disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters is working. I’m so depressed! Are some women so stupid that they think anyone with a vagina is the same as any other? Ms. Palin is a theocrat of the worst kind: against reproductive rights, opposed to abortion even in cases of rape and incest; for banning same-sex marriage with a constitutional amendment; and for teaching creationism in schools in blatant violation of the anti-establishment clause of the first amendment to our constitution. (Don’t get me started on her willingness to abuse power or her environmental record.) Apparently she not only doesn’t know much about anything to do with national government, she doesn’t know much about what our founders intended our government to do.

I’m not crazy about Barrack Obama or Joe Biden, but they beat the heck out of an idiot who graduated near the bottom of his class and whose claim to heroism starts and ends with getting shot down and surviving torture and a beauty-pageant contestant who seems to care more about producing children than raising them.

These PUMA (here’s the wikipedia article on this PAC) fools need to remember what Sen. Clinton stands for, and it’s not a woman in office by any means necessary! It matters WHICH woman, and most importantly, a woman who thinks rather than bending over for big business or following the Bible instead of the Constitution.

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.