Monday, November 30, 2009

Misrepresentations About The War Against Christmas

I, frankly, am sick of the misrepresentations about the War Against Christmas. And I am herewith attempting to set the record straight.

As a pagan worshipper of nature, it is galling for me to watch the Christian Supremacists take an invention of the Catholic Church and attempt to co-opt the rich legacy of pagan symbolism and ritual and christianize them in order to obfuscate the matter.

Let me make clear that I have no problem whatsoever with Christians taking December 25th (or any day for that matter) and making it a day of celebration and observation for their religion.

But this business of demanding that the rest of us put Christ back someplace where he wasn't to begin with is bromidic. Not to mention that it makes these Supremacists look historically ignorant.

Also, there is a resplendent legacy of Christmas as a secular holiday.

Father Christmas/Santa Claus IS the true symbol of this holiday, not Jesus.

The real fathers of the modern American Christmas are Clement Moore and Charles Dickens, in my opinion.

Clement Moore's A Visit From St. Nicholas - or as it is commonly known, 'Twas The Night Before Christmas - is the quintessential American Christmas tale. So much of what is now proper Christmas lore came from this poem, including the names of Santa's reindeer.

Dickens of course was British, but the influence of his 1843 masterpiece A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was felt both in Britain and America, doing much to popularize the occasion. Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, representing his understanding of the true spirit of Christmas, was obviously based on Father Christmas (who was eventually merged with Saint Nicholas to create the modern Santa Claus).

Honorable mention must also be made of the artist Thomas Nast for his work on Christmas iconography. Using Moore's classic poem as inspiration he established the norm for the character Santa Claus.

The above are the main sources of the traditional American-style Christmas, not the New Testament. For all of Colonial America's entrenched Christian religiosity, Jesus as "the reason for the season" was noticeably absent. History is on our side against the religious nuts.

These Christmas warriors are answering a false reveille. They should look into a mirror and meet the real enemy.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sarah Seeks Out America's Evangelical Oracle

While scanning the news I find that GOP celebrity and rumored presidential contender for 2012 Sarah Palin has recently sought the counsel of "America's Pastor," Billy Graham.

Those of us who don't happen to care for apocalyptic politics could not help but be annoyed that one of the items on Palin's agenda was to quiz him on "what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq," according to his son Franklin.

Isn't it odd that an ancient book which has absolutely nothing to say about God's chosen nation of modern times, the United States, could be considered by some to be useful in understanding modern day Israel, Iran, and Iraq?

While Graham was never one of the worst offenders in spreading end-times panic, he did write a book about prophecy nearly a quarter of a century ago, Approaching Hoofbeats. Therein he wrote:

Virtually everything has been fulfilled that was prophesied in the Scriptures leading up to the coming of Christ. We know His coming is near.

Obviously Palin didn't read the book. Taking his statement at face value, there would seem to be little for her to ask him about.

It might be suspected that Graham didn't tell her that the Jews "don't know how [he] really feel[s] about what they are doing to this country" and repeat his suggestion that they are the "synagogue of Satan," as he was recorded saying to then President Nixon.


He pulled a Reaganesque memory lapse when asked by reporters about these sentiments, and even offered an apology. What would there be left for him to tell Palin about Israel?

If Sarah Palin sought to increase her political stature with this visit, it certainly didn't do it in my eyes.

But for the Religious Right, who for some reason can't get it through their concrete skulls that the Bible makes poor foreign policy, it probably did wonders.

That is sad.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Image Of Guru Soham Swami Appears On Woman's Iron

Well, actually, according to this story on AOL News, Mary Jo Coady believes it is an image of Jesus and interprets it as a good omen for her. Please click the link and view the accompanying picture.

But I see Soham Swami when I view the picture of her iron. Can't you see the resemblance?


That's the problem with these "mysterious images" - and for that matter with faces in clouds and profiles in rock formations - they're just so darned subjective.

Now that I think about it, the image on her iron might very well be the Great Sphinx of Giza. What do you think?

Hey, I just noticed in looking at the picture of the Great Sphinx that it bears a striking resemblance to George Washington. Astounding! How did the designers of the sphinx make such a startling likeness of a man who was millennia away from arriving on the world's stage?

The human imagination is an incredible thing when unleashed.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Investing In God?

A Christian friend of mine was talking to me about her finances. She tithes because, she tells me, "somehow" she always manages to have enough money to meet expenses when she does this.

"How," I asked her, "is this supposed to work?" By what mechanism is it even feasible that you can pay out money and then end up with more money than you had before you started paying out? I mean, talk about eating your cake and having it too!!!

For the tithe-giver, it goes something like this: by showing your faith through the act of "giving to the Lord" (and here I have to tell you that I have BIG reservations about any deity that needs something of mine), He in turn "rewards" this behavior, this act of faith, by giving you what you gave in the first place ("seed-faith," one famous preacher called it ... I won't say who, but his initials are O. R. and he has a university named after himself) PLUS multiplied monetary blessing.

This is usually in the form of unexpected monies ... an unexpected gift of money from a friend or family member, sudden overtime on the job, a winning lottery ticket, found money that had been misplaced, the sudden sale of an item for more than its worth, reimbursement for an overpaid debt - in short, anything that is above one's regular income.

To the payer of tithes, such coincidences have divine implications.

I pointed out to my Christian friend that I am not a tithe payer and yet I occasionally get little extra dividends, just as she and other tithe payers do.

But then I dug deeper with my friend into her finances and we found that a lot of the problems she was encountering (as with most people) is that she is spending unwisely, at times frivolously, and not budgeting her money so that she is saving enough for emergencies.

Say whatever you will about tithing, it won't and can't overcome the basic rule of budgeting: outflow cannot exceed inflow.

Some Christian ministers have made successful - by that I do mean lucrative - careers out of "shaking down" their flocks. And the people fall for it out of a sense of duty to God.

I constantly hear the idea circulated, thundered from the pulpit and over the religious airwaves, picked up and spread among the "sheeple" like some pernicious virus, that one can somehow give their way to riches - provided, of course, that one is giving to the appropriate "Godly cause"!

If a person wants to believe in magic, which is what this crazy idea really is for it has no visible means of support, more power to him.

But I want to do everything I possibly can to discourage this inane idea that God somehow needs people's money, or needs them to show their piety by giving away their money foolishly (which is what giving money to "ministries" that are little more than businesses - non-profit organizations that reap big profits for their star CEOs really is).

It is strikingly odd that the same folks who complain so much, so vehemently, against the government "stealing" money (in the form of taxes) from the haves in order to provide a little help to the have nots have no problem at all with the government providing tax-free status to religious fleecing operations and the protection of lack of proper oversight regarding these "ministries."

May I be so bold as to suggest that everyone who thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme should quit being hypocrites and step up to declare that tithing and "sacrificial giving" are the biggest Ponzi schemes of all time?

Organized religion is about power, greed, and control. God doesn't need our money and preachers should try getting their money the old fashioned way: by earning it.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

On Giving Thanks Where Thanks Is Due


Right off I want to wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Of late I have begun to post more on my religious views. Actually, I prefer "spiritual" over "religious." As I indicated in Monday's post, my view of God leans more towards a pantheistic, maybe panentheistic, concept than anything else.

Prayer is a subject I haven't tackled much yet, though I intend to do that in the near future. But I will go this far now ... to ask if someone like myself, who doesn't find the concept of a personal deity satisfying, feels that prayer is purposeful.

In a word, no ... if petitionary prayer is meant.

However, I regard prayer as a useful spiritual exercise for the person doing the praying. In prayer and meditation we are putting our feelings into words and thoughts. And that practice is quite helpful to us, I believe, because it helps us to understand ourselves a little better.

I "pray" quite regularly in the sense that I verbalize my deepest feelings about the world around me. So maybe I'm just talking to myself when I do this. If so, so be it. Sometimes my joy at the beauty of the universe and the blessings nature has bestowed on me is just too much for me to contain - so I just let it out in praise and thanks. At these times I am the most at peace and at home in the cosmos. (I like the word cosmos: it defines the universe as an orderly, harmonious system.)

This leads me right into the subject at hand: Thanksgiving prayer.

To whom should we direct our prayers of thanks? A patriarchal Sky God who, as Albert Camus once put it, "sits in silence?"

Okay, if that is your choice it is fine by me and I certainly respect your right to that viewpoint and hope you respect my right to mine as well. For that matter I wish we all could respect everyone's right to think as they wish about the subject.

But for my part, I believe Mother Nature has given us solid proof of her nurturing spirit. This is something for which we should all be thankful. Mother Nature seems more real to me than a hidden deity in some Beautiful Isle Of Somewhere.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in Homer's Hymn To The Earth: Mother Of All:

O universal Mother, who dost keep
From everlasting thy foundations deep,
Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee!
All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea,
All things that fly, or on the ground divine
Live, move, and there are nourished--these are thine;
These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee
Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree
Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity!

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Turkey Day Is Almost Here


I know only one poem by heart. The stupid thing about it is that I learned this poem when I was in the fourth grade, age 10.

Out of the scores of poems and other things I had to commit to memory during my school years, this poem alone has stayed in my memory to this day. I'll never know why.

I have been unable to determine who authored it. But with Thanksgiving Day coming, I thought I would share it with you now:

The Pilgrims Came

The Pilgrims came across the sea,
And never thought of you and me;
And yet it's very strange the way
We think of them Thanksgiving day.

We tell their story, old and true
Of how they sailed across the blue,
And found a new land to be free
And built their homes quite near the sea.

Every child knows well the tale
Of how they bravely turned the sail
And journeyed many a day and night,
To worship God as they thought right.


And so the radical religious nuts came ashore and are with us still to this day.

And, honestly, I never think of the pilgrims on Turkey Day unless someone else brings it up.

Incidentally, according to the accounts I have read, God "blessed" over half the pilgrims by taking them home that first winter via starvation and disease!

By the way, I will be here tomorrow with another post and hope you will visit me here. I want to try to try explain a little bit of what Thanksgiving means to me.

And now a sad personal note. I lost another friend yesterday. My best friend's little weenie dog, Sassy.

God, how I loved that little dog! That isn't a picture of her (I don't have one), but it is the same kind of dachshund (there are several varieties).

Ours was a friendship from our first meeting, just short of two years ago. She barked at me, waddled over to me (she was quite overweight) and let me pet her. I loved her at first sight. Many is the evening she spent in my lap as we all watched tv.

My friend and I and Sassy went for quite a few walks last summer. And Sassy loved riding in the car. Once we all went to the Sonic Drive-In and had dinner. She was my best friend's constant companion.

Sassy was 15 years old, and we knew the end was very near for her. Her health declined all during this past year, with frequent bouts of sickness. Her arthritis got worse and made going up and down the stairs a real hardship. Finally she developed a severe kidney infection with a high fever and chills, and my best friend had to have my little friend, her close companion, put to sleep. I wasn't there to say good bye, having already gone to bed for the night.

When I found out the next morning, I was devastated. I hummed Old Shep all day long at work and reminisced about Sassy. If only dogs did have a heaven....

Then the thought occurred to me that I did indeed say goodbye to her - in a fashion.

A couple of weeks ago, during one of her sick times, I was visiting my best friend (who lives across the street from me) and suggested we take Sassy for a ride in my truck in order to make her feel better. So away we went. Sassy got into my lap and I held her in my arm as she leaned out my window. Usually she rode with her "mama," but this time she rode with me as I drove.

We rode through the neighborhood and after about twenty minutes I brought them back. The first thing Sassy always did after a car ride was take a leak. So I got out of the truck and sat her down to use the bathroom. Instead she ran to my deck to chase my cats - the most activity she had had for a while.

The was the last time I spent time with her. And it was quality time.

Funny how close I can get to little animals when I tend to be distant with most people. I will miss Sassy tremendously.

Most People Don't Understand The Bible


If you don't believe the Bible, why don't you go out and kill someone or rob a bank ... why don't you just do whatever you want?

Those were the words of my frustrated mother after I had told her that I didn't accept as true something (now I can no longer remember what it was) that she was alluding to in the Bible.

I didn't answer other than to shake my head. It was just too ridiculous a question. She obviously hadn't thought about it before she blurted it out.

When Christians ask if me if I "believe the Bible," it's really hard to give a brief answer.

What I don't believe is that God wrote the Bible through men. I can't believe it is, as the fundamentalists put it, inerrant. Anyone who has ever studied the Bible in depth must realize what an insult those claims would be to any self-respecting God.

If the average Bible believer knew the whole story of how the Bible was assembled, not only would they be shocked, but honesty would compel them to be skeptical of claims for it of infallibility.

But what I do believe about the Bible is that it records the history of a people in the Old Testament, and in the New the history of a movement - histories that are replete with legends.

There are both good and bad to be found in the Bible. God is often portrayed as somewhat bipolar and at times quite unfair. The case for a God who predestines the fate of man is unmistakably clear, pretty much as Augustine and Calvin presented the matter. The Hebrew wisdom literature is helpful, Ecclesiastes above everything else in the entire Bible.

The Christian who asks the question "What would Jesus do? is obviously unfamiliar with fact that he was an apocalyptic prophet who expected an imminent overturning of the then world order and its replacement with God's kingdom on earth, literally.

The past two thousand years, what has commonly been called the Church Age by Christians, was totally unexpected and unforeseen by Jesus. Therefore his teachings are not practical for the long haul. It follows that no Christian or group of Christians today consistently practice what Jesus taught.

The Bible is a fascinating book. One that I have spent my lifetime reading and studying. It is fair to say that no one who fails to understand the popular interpretation of the Bible can fully understand our nation's history or the mind set of those people today who have married politics to Christianity.

But the popular interpretation is far from what one will find by taking off the blinders of presupposition and reading it in its historical context.

My contention is that the Bible is the most misunderstood of all books, and will remain so as long as critical study of it is discouraged by the forces who seek to use religion to control people and to enrich themselves financially.

To use one of Jesus' phrases, we mostly see "the blind leading the blind" in the matter.

Monday, November 23, 2009

The Real God Of My Youth

My earliest memory of thinking about God - and here I mean really thinking about the subject rather than just rehashing what I had heard in church - occurred when I was about eight or nine years of age.

I remember that day when climbing into my mother's car that I suddenly announced to her and my brothers that I believed the wind blew the dust around in the heavens, eventually forming God.

It wasn't that profound, and I remember clearly where my ideas originated. This business of God having existed "from everlasting to everlasting" never made sense to me. Supposedly before creation there was nothing but God. Well do I remember as a child trying hard to imagine nothingness. I just couldn't do it.

But the dirt of the good old terra firma beneath my feet seemed real enough and maybe eternal enough. Nature seemed real enough to me, and, evidently seemed creative enough as well.

This part is a little embarrassing, however. The image in my mind of my "creation of God" scenario was based on the opening segment of the Rankin/Bass animated feature Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. Remember how the wind blew the snow into the opening credits?

My mother dismissed my theory as childishness and then explained again to me how that God had always existed.

Well, this is one child that never asked his parent, "Who created God?"

Somehow, even as child, it seemed more sensible to me that the universe was more likely to be the brute fact rather than God.

And, read rightly, I believe the Hebrew mythology contained in the first chapters of Genesis points not to an ex nihilo creation, but rather a fashioning out of existing material.

What I do know is that as I got older, as I learned more about the universe and more about ancient mythology, as I slowly cast off the fundamentalist religion of my youth, God became less of person in my thinking and more of a power or force.

I came to believe the old saw that man made God in his own image rather than vice versa. Or rather that men have made their Gods in their various images: warring Gods, anal retentive Gods, misogynistic Gods, emotionally distant Gods, insecure and jealous Gods, etc.

It just makes much more sense to me.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

A Freethinker In The Bible Belt

There is a freethought association near where I live - but I'm not a joiner, so big deal. While fellowship with fellow freethinkers is occasionally (very occasionally here where I live) enjoyable, it isn't something I need in order to keep from relapsing into religious fundamentalism.

The roots of fundamentalist Christianity run deep here. It is quite common for local television and radio personalities to speak openly and loudly about their religion. One anchorman, after a story about the testing of what effect prayer might have on illness, made the comment, "I don't know about all that, but it sure does make me feel better to pray." Okay; I'm happy for him.

Bumper stickers proudly proclaim that "God Is My Co-Pilot," "In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned," "Jesus Is Lord," and various other gems of wisdom everywhere you look (along with slogans glorifying gun ownership, attacking welfare, and supporting the overthrow of Roe V Wade).

My dentist and his personnel apparently are all Christians. I have had the misfortune of being treated to a mini theology lesson while having my teeth cleaned. I have a hard and fast rule against debating religion with anyone who has dental instruments in my mouth, but hopefully silence is golden.

My doctor, too, is a Christian. At my last prostate exam I made the mistake of saying - with, I thought, more than sufficient sarcasm - "Oh, boy, my favorite part of my physical." He obviously didn't find the intended humor and said, almost with a sense of urgency, "I hope you aren't serious!"

"No, I'm not serious; now let's get it over with!"

The letters to editor section of the local newspapers are forums for fundamentalists and Christian Supremacists to spread their vile idiocy and anti-science stances. I used to make efforts to offer an alternative viewpoint, but I don't have that much time to write that many letters, even if the editorial policies permitted me to submit frequent rebuttals (which they don't).

My place of employment has a distinctively Christian flavor about it. I know of but one atheist and one doubter, and of course there is yours truly, who are not Christians. We had our annual company Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday. We always have a prayer before eating, always offered by a Christian fundamentalist.

This time it was offered by liberalism's biggest critic at our plant, a man who once admitted to me when I questioned him about his frequent use of salty language (when not saying grace, of course), that he was mostly a backslidden Methodist.

The number of people I work with who have told me they believe in God, Jesus, the Bible, and yet admit when I ask them that they don't belong to or attend any church is staggering.

You see, down here even the sinners pay lip service to religion. It is a tradition.

There is a reason for that. Unbelief is considered by most around these parts to be the equivalent of rank evil. Few seem to be able to grasp the concept of personal morality apart from belief in the Bible. Oh, and the theory of evolution is the same thing as philosophical atheism, which is itself considered a religion here! (Yes, I actually had that argument with a co-worker a couple of years ago.)

While I try to do what little I can to promote freethinking, I would be darned happy and quite satisfied too if I could just get Christians to be more tolerant. But it isn't likely to happen very often because, sadly, to the fundamentalist, tolerance is akin to compromise and apostasy

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Who Needs The Devil?

The other day a friend of mine asked me if I believe in the Devil. I told her, that, yes, as a symbol of evil, I do believe in the Devil. If, however, she was asking if I believe in a literal, supernatural person known as Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, etc., then, no, I told her, I don't believe that.

"Then how do you explain all the evil in the world?" she asked me.

Coincidentally a day or so later I was reading a fundamentalist newspaper when I came across a book review that dealt with prophetic Bible interpretation. Those familiar with the subject are aware of the teaching that there will be a golden age on earth, known as the Millennium, a period of one thousand years when Jesus will reign as King and the Devil will be bound for the entire time.

There is a school of biblical interpretation, especially popular among Reformed Christians, that "spiritualizes," or interprets symbolically, the Millennium passage, Revelation chapter 20, and teaches that this period refers to Jesus's present reign during the "Church Age" and that Satan is already bound (symbolically, in the sense that his influence in deceiving the nations is limited).

In disputing this the Reverend Doctor book reviewer wrote:

If Satan is bound during this church age in the bottomless pit ( Revelation 20:1-3) "that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled," who in the world is causing the tsunami of wickedness - murders, adultery, wars, false cults, pornography, profanity, pedophilia, blasphemy, lying, heresies, terrorism, etc. - If Satan is bound now, what will it be like when 'after that he must be loosed a little season' (Vs. 3)?

I quoted this because he asks the question more starkly than did my friend. And he seems to put quite well into words the general idea of what the Devil supposedly does.

The answer I gave my friend and which I want to give here is that Darwin would be more helpful than the Bible.

Once it is thoroughly understood that man is an animal and is ruled primarily by his animal instincts, the need for a personal Devil evaporates.

The idea that the Devil goes around enticing people to do evil is childish.

Anger is a better explanation for murder than the Devil tempting us. Our sex drive explains bad sexual behavior better than the Devil's persuasion. Likewise, the motivations for telling untruths are easily understandable without reference to a supernatural being.

A sick mind is a better explanation for the likes of Adolph Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer than is demon possession. If therapy and medication can't make better a sick mind, exorcism will not do it.

No, my friend, we need look no further than within our monkey minds to find the solution. The kingdom of the lower animals, "bloody in tooth and claw" as Tennyson put it, is the precursor to the reign of humans upon the planet. They lack our more complex brains, but we share their bestial tendencies.

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Hell Of It

Lots of people believe in Hell, but hardly anyone goes there it seems. Maybe someone else's relatives, but not yours. Or so it seems from the conversations I've overheard or had with believers.

Maybe Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Pol Pot ... a few of those guys probably went to Hell. I would have said Jeffrey Dahmer, but apparently he became a Christian in prison (of course after all the pain he inflicted on others).

It isn't polite to preach a funeral and speculate that the deceased is likely, at that very moment, writhing painfully in Hell's flames. That "death bed repentance" scenario is always brought up. There's always the hope that at the last moment the sinner might have asked for forgiveness and escaped divine wrath.

The staunchest fundamentalist, the one who insists there is only "one way," will insist that no one can know for certain the fate of the dead. No matter how vile and loathsome a life some person may have lived, there is always the chance, we are told, that at the last moment they asked for forgiveness.

If Jesus is regarded as an authority on the subject, you have to admit that he gave a very gloomy assessment of the situation: "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matt. 7:14).

Ouch. How many is a few?

Churches, I've noticed, don't seem to like to preach it that way, because ... well, let's face it ... such a theory would be very, very bad for business.

Let a pastor open his Bible and try out Matthew 7:14 for a text at his next funeral, and I'll bet you he would soon be looking for another church to pastor.

Billy Graham built a career out of preaching about Hell. But not the way Jesus taught it. Graham's Hell was easy to escape from. And thousands upon thousands claimed to escape Hell through his preaching. Just by uttering the "sinner's prayer." I wonder why Jesus never hit upon that idea?

No one has ever been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the question: How could anyone be happy for eternity in Heaven with knowledge that some of their loved ones were being tortured for eternity in Hell? Some have attempted an answer.

A famous evangelist of a generation ago tried to explain that in Heaven we would be perfected and able to see the wisdom of God's judgement on sin; that we would be able to say "Amen!" to it. In other words, that one day we would be less sympathetic and caring than we are now, and more into revenge, just like the God of fundamentalism is.

Include me out of that, please.

Modern theologians seem to have extinguished the fires of Hell somewhat. It seems that, according to some Evangelicals (Graham among them), Hell actually means no more than separation from God. The fiery biblical language about Hell is symbolic; so bad as it is, it is nothing like the fundamentalist version.

Even at that, most people don't seemed to be bound for this symbolic Hell, according to Evangelical preaching.

So it seems that we are finally making progress in the long climb towards making Hell what it really is, merely an ancient myth.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Know-It-Alls Are Bores


The reason I blog is to get things off my chest. My blog is a place where I can throw out my thoughts at will. Mostly, blogging is just a way for me to scratch an itch. (As you can see: I itch a lot.)

A blog needs a name and so I came up with Groping The Elephant. I hoped it would get across the point that I don't consider myself an oracle or an authority on anything in particular, let alone an authority on everything. I'm just throwing out ideas here. Trying to serve a little food for thought. I'm not trying to start my own religious movement, political party, or school of philosophy. I'm saying: Here is what it looks like right now from this vantage point. If I grope somewhere else, I may come up with another interpretation - and I then I will write a post about that!

Now I hope this little bit of humility on my part does not lead my readers to think that I am groping in the sense of searching, aimlessly lost and confused, adrift at sea without a compass ... as if I'm somehow "trying to find myself." That's not it.

Oh, I have opinions. Strong ones. Well thought-out opinions. But I always reserve the right to revise my opinions when more light is available to me. And I'm always thinking. But when I write a post, that is my considered opinion. Agree or disagree with me. That is fine. We may have a hold of different parts of the elephant. We may both be a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

I'm not sure my general outlook can be better put into words than it was in a well known editorial written by Francis Pharcellus Church, who said:

All minds ... whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Therefore, I try not to take myself or my opinions too seriously. Neither should you. Neither should you take yourself too seriously either.

The truth may indeed be out there. But that doesn't mean any one of us can lay claim to the certainty of having found it.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

At Home In The Universe

I have learned a new word recently, which is always fun.

The word is "cosomophobia," which the Urban Dictionary defines as: "Morbid dread of the cosmos and realising ones true place in it."

Many of us for years and years have known about the alleged prediction that, according to the Mayan calendar, the world will end in the year 2012. There is a new movie about the subject, and, as the dreaded year gets closer, the hoopla is getting thicker by the day. Cosmophobia is tied to the increasing 2012 hysteria.

NASA scientist David Morrison of Ask An Astrobiologist has said:

Two years ago, I got a question a week about it. Now I'm getting a dozen a day. Two teenagers said they didn't want to see the end of the world so they were thinking of ending their lives.

His website (link above) has received over 2,500 questions on the subject!

I can somewhat sympathize with those teenagers. As a child I was tormented by a relentless torrent of wrath-filled apocalyptic sermons in the church my family attended. Not only did I carry a constant fear of being left behind at the rapture to endure the horrors of "The Great Tribulation," there was an underlying feeling of "what's the use?" I didn't expect to grow up, marry, to have the chance my parents did to actually make a life for myself, because the time was "at hand" and the rapture was expected, literally, any day.

Naturally, with that worldview, I didn't put much emphasis on getting an education and learning a profession. I was too eager to get in as much living as I could before the end came, and I am surprised the results weren't more disastrous for me than they were. But believe me, this was a major setback in my life.

No longer am I cosmophobic. A little education has taken me a long way from the gullibility of my youth. Now I do everything I can to help others overcome similar fears. I get accused sometimes of trying to "tear down people's faith." However, my feeling is that a "faith" that causes undue anxiety and fears should be torn down.

Fear and worry rob life of its enjoyment. Learning about this wondrous universe of which we all are a part has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has given me what Einstein called a "cosmic religious feeling." And that, my friends, has brought more serenity into my life than the religion of my youth ever could.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Living End?


Death was on my mind yesterday. I found out about the death last week of a friend of mine. We used to work together but he left the company a year and a half ago to take another job. He was just a little younger than I am and died of liver cancer, 31 days after being diagnosed.

The death of someone I am close to is always a time for me to reflect on the subject. In truth, the subject is never far from my mind. Some of those closest to me think I have a bit of an obsession with death.

Perhaps.

But death is what keeps it all in proper perspective for me.

I don't fear my own death. But I would be a liar if I told you I don't somewhat dread it. That is because, despite all the hardships, I enjoy living. It is all I know.

This anxiety (for some fear) and the grief of losing loved ones are what make the notion of immortality attractive to most people.

Death is a part of the cycle of life. Death is natural, not a punishment for sin. It is hard for me accept that in death we humans are more alive than when we were alive before we died.

Just as I have no problem accepting that the universe got along quite well before my I arrival, there seems no reason to suspect it won't get along quite well without me.

Honestly, now: can anyone make a serious argument why our continued existence for all eternity would be of importance to God? Is it not possible the whole idea of immortality is a ridiculous egotism on our part?

I think so.

Knowing that all this will come to an end one day is what makes every single day precious to me.

Would not living an endless succession of tomorrows eventually become tedious?

I think so.

If the thought of nonexistence is a less than pleasant one ... and I confess that it is for me ... it is fair to note that it is at most a temporary unpleasantry, as Qoheleth wrote a very long time ago: "For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing..." (Ecc. 9:5a).

Monday, November 16, 2009

Read Not; Think Not


It all started for me at age 12 when a Bible teacher recommended Kenneth Taylor's paraphrased The Living Bible. My mom wasn't keen on this as she had always told me what her mom had always told her: "never read from anything other than the Authorized King James Bible."

Honestly, I had no idea what that meant when I was child, and it was only years later when I understood that the Bible was, literally, a foreign book that was available in many different English translations.

"But Mom," I asked, "what's the difference in reading a "Bible" that puts the KJV in more modern wordage and having a preacher read from KJV and then tell us what the passage means?"

She thought about it and admitted there didn't seem to be much of a difference.

From there I examined many different translations, even those my denomination considered "liberal" and "infidel" translations - translations that supposedly called into questions such cardinal doctrines as the virgin birth of Jesus.

Once, as a teenager, I checked out Augustine's City of God from the public library. This was a bold move for me as he was a Catholic scholar, and so, according to the understanding of theology I was brought up in, was not really a Christian at all.

I read his entire massive tome from cover to cover.

Actually, I found much that squared with what I had been taught from youth. Saw things that I recognized as the "false teachings" of Catholicism. And I found what came to be my favorite quote from Augustine: "Some have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of singing."

Wow! Imagine that in a theological treatise.

I'll condense the story of my journey of mind expansion and just say that since I had come that far, I saw no reason not to go all the way. After all, I hadn't become a convert to Rome after reading Augustine, nor a Lutheran after reading Martin Luther. I eventually decided to branch out and study those "idiotic" infidel works of "Old Tom Paine" (more commonly known by his real name, Thomas Paine) and that "fiend" Colonel Ingersoll.

Well, it became readily apparent why Christian ministers and teachers do their best to steer people away from freethinkers like Paine and Ingersoll. They are absolutely devastating at pointing out the weaknesses and inconsistencies of Bible Christianity.

I found that Thomas Paine was no idiot. In fact, I steer as many people as I can to his Age Of Reason, as it has stood well to the test of time and is still helpful today. Paine did believe in God, even a personal one. That is why I have found his book helpful for those who have problems with the Bible and Christianity, but are not willing to give up on God.

And Robert Ingersoll was no fiend, but was a man of high character. His lectures are a breath of fresh air to anyone brave enough to shake loose the bonds of controlled thinking and let his mind soar.

No other freethinkers have had the impact on me that these two had.

Christian leaders have much to fear over honest inquiry into the doctrines they put forth. Thinking people will not allow themselves to be controlled through fear and ignorance. When one is allowed to step outside the box of his religious indoctrination and breathe the fresh air of freedom of thought, the change is phenomenal.

Compare the writings of Moses (supposedly) and Darwin side-by-side and you immediately see that mythology makes very poor science.

I'll bet you that not one Christian fundamentalist in a hundred has ever read any more of Charles Darwin than the out of context quotes of his contained in their "Creation Science" books.

It is high time that people started to do their own thinking instead of leaving it to their preachers and theologians, whose vested interest it is to "keep watch over their souls" keep them in line.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Unbelievable Believers

What do Bible believers do with passages of Scripture that just don't fit into the reality of the world all around them?

Most seem to more or less ignore them; pretend as if they aren't there at all. Maybe the majority are so biblically illiterate they really aren't aware of passages such as this one:

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen (Mark 16:15-20).

My parents were Pentecostal Christians and I was raised in a Pentecostal church. But they didn't carry their miraculous beliefs to this extreme. In fact, our denomination looked down on the "snake handlers."

Yet even as a youngster I wondered what exactly was wrong with the theology of the snake handlers. I mean, there it is in black and white, right there in the book you say you believe is God's infallible word.

Of course there is the scholarly opinion which holds that these verses are not an authentic part of Mark's gospel. But I rarely encounter that argument from rank and file Christians. And if I did, I would be tempted to ask why they don't go further with their argument and examine the many other interpolations contained in their book.

Some believers believe that these were "sign gifts" unique to the Apostolic Age, which served to authenticate the new message of Christianity, and that these gifts passed away with the Apostles, as being no longer necessary once the New Testament Church had been firmly established. To which I would reply that such skullduggery is not plainly stated in the Bible, but is instead an apologetic ploy to explain away a theological embarrassment. And I would further reply that in this day of the so-called New Atheism, they would be extremely useful for the demonstration of the truth of Christianity.

I suspect most believers aren't even willing to put the promised gifts to a test, which is a very good thing.

But if the above Bible verses are controversial because of their authenticity, let's notice the following verse, purportedly from the lips of Jesus:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father (John 14:12).

If we are to believe the Gospels, Jesus raised the dead, restored sight to the blind, healed all manner of sickness and disease, restored an amputated ear, fed thousands with a boy's small lunch, walked on water, and calmed a raging sea.

Who among the believers have even matched the performance of such feats, let alone done greater ones?

It seems to me that the only thing modern day preachers have done to a greater extent than Jesus is turn their preaching into a huge money-raking racket. And that is not a matter of faith but of unscrupulousness.

As for me, I had to walk away from all this when I got old enough to accept that I was trying to live in a world that existed only in my Sunday School classes and in the high soaring rhetoric of dishonest preachers in "worship" services.

I like some of the teachings and sayings of Jesus. I accept as true what conforms to my understanding of reason and logic. But I see no virtue in attempting to uphold the unbelievable.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

This Is A Superstition-free Zone


No paraskevidekatriaphobia with me. I made it through yesterday without a scratch, without the least bit of bad luck.

I can say I am not the least bit superstitious because I absolutely believe the law of cause and effect rules nature. I've broken my share of mirrors, stepped on cracks, walked under ladders, opened umbrellas in the house, spilled salt, and have even befriended two black cats here in my neighborhood (which if there was any bad luck involved, it involved them, as they both came up missing quite young), all without any discernible pattern of bad luck in my life.

I have known quite a few superstitious people. I wrote about the most severe case here, and they almost strike me as being like children who have not reached mental maturity. That sounds mean I guess. But the truth is that too many people are scientifically ignorant. So most people I've met seem to be at least a bit superstitious.

Superstition overlaps religion as well. Much of religious thinking is magical thinking in disguise. The majority of humankind has transcended ideas such as a volcano being the exhibition of an angry deity or thunder as the pounding of Thor's hammer. But most have not gotten past the idea that God can be cajoled into becoming a cosmic Santa who can give us the things we wish for.

In the end the laws of nature have the final say.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Getting To Work On Time


It starts with breakfast. It is really hard to describe the feeling I get when dropping a piece of bread upon which I have just slathered butter or spread and watching it - almost as if in slow motion - fall and then belly-flop spread-side-down onto the floor. You would think by now, after all these years, I would have learned to stand a little closer to the plate I have on the table. But that would be too easy, I guess. Deduct five minutes from the time available to allow for cleanup and starting over.

Don't know about everyone else, but I'm a bit clumsy first thing in the morning when I'm getting ready for work. I sure do hate when I loose my grip on something like a toothbrush, razor, or comb and have it bounce around the sink, the counter, and then fall with bullseye perfection into the toilet bowl. Why, out of all the available space, does the object always land in the toilet? Deduct another five minutes for cleanup.

To add variation to this type of already annoying morning, I sometimes manage to spray myself in the eye with either my body spray or the light touch of hair spray I use before going out. Rarely my mouth or my ear mind you ... I usually hit my eye. Take away a minute so I can grab a rag and wash off my face.

I have to precisely follow the same routine getting dressed each morning or I will unfailingly forget something. If put on my pants before my shirt I somehow forget the deodorant (now I keep deodorant in my desk at work for such a situation ... but annoying still). If I put my shoes on before I put on my belt, somehow I will forget the belt. If I don't first grab my work shoes from among my shoe collection and place them beside the bed where I am getting dressed, it's even money I'll absent mindedly reach over and grab the wrong pair of shoes. I always wear black clothes to work ... I was a real hit the day I grabbed my solid white tennis shoes by mistake instead of my black work boots. These irritations rarely cost me time ... unless I remember the forgotten article as I am driving down the road and choose to turn around. There is a point beyond which I wouldn't turn around and go back, unless I were to notice I had forgotten my pants.

Finally, getting out the door smoothly isn't at all easy for me. Out of the handful of last minute things that should be done before leaving, there seems to be at least one thing that I will always forget to do. I seem to alternate as to what to forget to do. One day I will walk out the door and leave the television on; the next day I may forget to adjust the thermostat; I may forget to turn off a light; if it's warm weather I might forget to turn off the ceiling fan as I go out the door; or if in the cooler weather I might forget to open the blinds to allow the sun to heat the house up. I have walked out and left my lunch sitting on the table. My favorite is when I suddenly remember something I forgot just as I slam the door shut. Nothing like fumbling around in the dark for the front door key, unless maybe fumbling around for it in the dark AND the rain. Take away another minute or two, depending on the amount of fumbling I have to do.

Oh, and Monday is garbage day. If I don't take my can to the road Sunday night, the odds are even I will forget to do it on the way out Monday morning - unless I remember to leave myself a note reminding me to do it. Unfortunately, the odds are also even that I will forget to remember to write myself the note. Somehow the odds of my forgetting to set the garbage out increase to 4-to-1 if it's raining, even if I somehow remember to write the note. No time lost on this, but always galling when I get home and realize what I did.

Yep, making a routine really does the trick for me, so long as I remember the routine. And getting up two hours before I have to be at work gives me plenty of time for miscues, false starts, repeats, and still allows me to get to work five to ten minutes early!

Someday I post about my bedtime routine.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Coulter Curse

Last night I was reading a story about medical examiner Dr. Stephen Erickson's testimony at the trial of Curtis Vance for the murder of Anne Pressly.

The graphic details of Pressly's beating, grisly almost beyond imagination, are unsettling enough to decent people who read it. People with a proper sense of empathy can't help but be horrified at that lady's fate.

And then out of the sewer which is humanity at large there are would-be wits (actually sick nitwits) who trouble us by openly displaying the disrepair of their minds.

Out of many gems of imbecility in the reader's comments section of this story, one in particular arrested my attention.

The comment, exactly as written:

so sad, she suffered the Ann Coutler curse by portraying her in that movie.

If there is a Coulter curse, I would suggest the commenter is the one affected by it rather than the late Ms. Pressly.

The commenter shares Coulter's knack for cramming the maximum of offensive idiocy into a single sentence.

Any one of us is the just luck of the draw away from having a similar fate to Pressly's befall us.

Update: After writing the above I went back to check the link. I no longer see this comment. It has thankfully been deleted, I suppose, as a public service to those of us more fully evolved.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

It's Nice To Commercialize Christmas


Liberty Counsel sent out an alert this week promoting their Seventh Annual “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign.”

Now what this is a list they put together of businesses they consider "Friends" obviously because they specifically mention Christmas, and "Foes" because, the alert asserts, they "censor it." You can find the list here.

At page top is their name and logo, and then directly underneath is their motto: "Restoring the Culture One Case at a Time by Advancing Religious Freedom, the Sanctity of Human Life and the Traditional Family."

Now it doesn't seem to me to be "advancing Religious Freedom" when you more or less lead a boycott against businesses that don't explicitly mention your preferred holiday. Those who don't specify so as to not offend anyone or appear presumptuous seem to be doing the more to promote religious freedom.

And far from being censors, there are businesses listed under "Naughty" solely because they "don't mention Christmas except items named by manufacturers." Now if they really were naughty, wouldn't they not carry those items or maybe black the word out? I mean, that would be censorship, right?

KB Toys made the "Naughty" list because their web site says “To Receive by Dec. 25 ...,” but doesn't name the day as Christmas. Talk about picky ... I say that is close enough!

Businesses are "Nice" so long as they mention the word "Christmas," regardless of how much commercialization there is of the holiday.

For example, I had to chuckle over one business that made the "Nice" list for having, as Liberty Counsel puts it, "'Christmas' everywhere!" That business is the ChristmasPlace. Chic-fil-A was applauded because Christmas was played in their stores (actually restaurants), and not only that, but we are told "[o]ne song referenced 'God.'” Wonder how many referenced Santa? T. J. Maxx is "Nice" for “'Our Christmas Spirit' and 'Merry Christmas' gift cards." Well, praise the Lord!!!

This whole thing strikes me as puerile and hypocritical at the same time

And if you look

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there is a footnote stating: "We cannot always verify the current accuracy of all reports submitted to us." Really, now? If you're gonna make a stink, at least make sure you get it right.

One last thought. I clicked on their Online Store button and was taken here, where there is also no mention of Christmas. Although if you go here to order their Help Save Christmas Action Pack you can see the word "Christmas" on an item named by the manufacturer. Guess they need to add their online store to their "Naughty" list. Maybe they would explain as Dunham's Sports did, that "they are not a Christmas store.”

Shallow-minded hypocrites!

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Buddha And Me

I love to study great teachers. As far as I'm concerned, had Buddha taught nothing more than the forthcoming saying (of course he gave us many more pieces of his enlightened mind) he should be considered a great teacher:

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

That's my favorite Buddha quote. I use it often.

Once, as a part of my membership fulfillment in a book club, I ordered Franz Metcalf's little work, What Would Buddha Do? It was a great bedside book, short, easily digested, just the thing for reading myself to sleep.

Recently I made a gift of that book to a Christian friend of mine that I thought would appreciate it as she had expressed a curiosity about Buddhism, although she didn't know a lot about the subject.

Boy, talk about the egg hitting the fan! She told me that when she took the book home, first thing, her son looked at it and said: "Mama, you know you aren't supposed to be reading about false Gods!" One of her daughter's rather liked it and immediately began thumbing through it with chip-oiled fingers ... until Mama snatched it back. My friend's brother, who is a deacon in a Baptist church, thundered "you know our God is a jealous God!" and demanded that she give it back to me.

But she didn't. She kept it, is reading it, is enjoying it. And a little more light and a attitude of tolerance is seeping into her mind.

Believing as I do that "all truth is God's truth," I do whatever I can to taste the water from as many different wells as I can. I urge others to do likewise. I'm not a proselytizer, except for the concept that one should be using one's mind for its intended purpose: gathering information and then using it to live better.

I told my friend that Buddha's basic approach was not so different from the one stated by the Apostle Paul, who wrote to the Christians in Thessalonica that they should "prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The difference is that the Buddha obviously practiced what he preached while Paul only wrote about it.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Further Thoughts On Our Ailing Nation

In yesterday's post I expressed my disgust over the current U. S. health care system, and also stated my lack of enthusiasm for the passage of the House's health care reform bill. My fear is that it was more of a political victory, a symbolic win, than a practical victory for the American people.

We need nothing less than what President Franklin Roosevelt proposed back 1944 in his address to Congress, The Economic Bill Of Rights; one of the rights he mentioned is: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health."

Attempted reform of the insurance industry will not accomplish that. It is almost impossible for me to believe that the insurance reforms contained in this bill will not be met with further chicanery on the industry's part in order to maintain their stranglehold on the system.

That, of course, is provided the bill even passes the Senate in anything like its present form. The government health insurance plan that is part of the bill may be its Achilles' heel once the matter is debated there. A compromise idea is that of only allowing the government plan if, in the words of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, "the private market fails to reform."

Well, what are the odds of that?

Sara Robinson well wrote in her defense of Canadian Healthcare:

Any system that has people spending more and getting less is, by definition, not efficient. And these efficiency leaks are, almost entirely, due to private greed. There is no logical way that a private system can pay eight-figure CEO compensation packages, turn a handsome a profit for shareholders, and still be "efficient." In fact, in order to deliver those profits and salaries, the American system has built up a vast, Kafkaesque administrative machinery of approval, denial, and fraud management, which inflates the US system's administrative costs to well over double that seen in other countries -- or even in our own public systems, including Medicare and the VA system.

Not incidentally: one of the benefits of single-payer health care is that it largely eliminates the entire issue of "fraud." You can only "cheat" a system that already views its primary business as rationing and withholding care. In Canada, where the system is set up to deliver health care instead of profits, and medical access is considered a right, this whole oversight machinery is far cheaper and more compact. In general, the system trusts doctors and patients to make the right choices the first time. As a result, people generally don't have to lie, cheat, and grovel to get the system to deliver the care they need. They just go and get it -- and walk out without a moment's dread about the bills.

Pardon my cynicism in saying that the reason nothing meaningful is going to get done, that our representatives in Washington will continue to avoid "fixing" the health care crisis, is because they are blinded due to their being up to their hairlines in money from lobbyists and special interest groups who seek to maintain the status quo as much as possible.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Our Ailing Nation

I've been watching with interest as the flatulists in our nation's capital wrestle with idea of "overhauling" our healthcare system. Frankly, it is nothing short of a damned shame that a nation as great, as innovative, and as prosperous as ours cannot assure all of its citizens decent, affordable health care.

Last night, the House passed a 1,990 page bill that will hopefully assure that 96% of us will have insurance. In legislation with that much verbiage there are bound to be some surprises and unexpected consequences, but supposedly there are some crackdowns on insurance practices that have more or less made the industry into one giant game of Blotto, with them winning hands down!

I haven't had health insurance for many years now. Oh, I (as a single person) pay nearly $900 per annum in insurance premiums for a high deductible plan ($2,500) which has absolutely zero prescription coverage. But I'm doing what most everyone does. I'm self-treating everything I can with home remedies and over the counter meds. I've been carrying this insurance for only two reasons: to make sure my preexisting conditions remain covered (hopefully, if they don't slip through some arcane loophole) and in case something really big happens to me. In other words, I don't have health insurance ... I have health calamity insurance.

Wish I had what our legislators have in the form of health care. I don't see a stampede among government employees to do something about government being involved in their healthcare. Strangest thing that hardly anyone decries the socialization of our national defense (our military) that helps protect us from natural disaster and foreign intrusion, but so many of those same folks go ballistic when it is suggested that health care - which would help keep us safe from disease and premature death from disease - should be socialized. I don't get it.

Okay, we now have a healthcare bill passed by the House; next we have to have more antics and wind from the Senate to see if it can pass there. But really, it seems to me, we are only trying to protect a system that is rotten to its core and should be discarded. We need a universal health care program that will insure that everyone gets the care they need. Until then, I can't get excited.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

On The Biblical Doctrine Of The Submission Of Women

(Image courtesy of www.godecookery.com)

There are certain things well known to the conservative Christian male of which the Christian female may not be fully aware.

For example, there is the "Prayer of Thanks of the Christian Male" which, though varying somewhat in exact wording from man to man, basically goes something like this:

I thank Thee, my Heavenly Father and Creator, that Thou hath given me woman, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, to serve as a scapegoat for my manly transgressions, and as a shield to hide behind from Thy divine wrath. Amen.


While the principle that the man should "wear the pants" in and be the head of the home is well known, what is not quite so well known is that this wasn't Plan A. Originally male and female were more or less equals. Plan B only came about when God bestowed upon man the right of superiority after it was discovered that man was no match for the woman's mind.

Now don't take Doug B's humble word for it. Crack open your Bible (if you happen to know where it is), Genesis 3, and read it for yourselves.

Briefly put, man was lonely, so God made a woman for man out of the his rib, put them both in a garden of plenty, and gave them but one simple rule to follow: DON'T eat fruit from the tree of knowledge. Then a serpent - who apparently not only could walk but could talk as well (and not only talk, but talk truth) - came along and persuaded the sharper of the two (the woman) that eating the forbidden fruit wouldn't be such a bad thing, would certainly not result in death for the pair, but would instead open their eyes and give them the knowledge of the gods. The man, no doubt, would have been content to plod along in ignorance, lounging around on his lazy buttocks, eating the fruit that grew wild and that probably was gathered and appetizingly arranged for serving by his companion - and that not as a duty, but out of her sense for finer thing. Knowledge was deemed a finer thing by the woman, so she did eat the forbidden fruit; then she nudged her dozing mate awake and persuaded him to take a bite and wise up a little too.

God saw this and it made him angry. So angry, in fact, that he cursed damn near everything he had just created and pronounced good. I won't take the time to go into every detail of that here, but I do want to pause just a little over the fact that Plan B, mentioned above, came into effect at this point in time.

Because the man was so convincing in passing the buck back on to the woman ("The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," verse 12), God immediately recognized this leadership quality and cursed the woman by making her fertile - and just to keep her straight, now made it hurt when she gave birth - and giving man one of his most (at least until recent times) valuable tools for controlling his woman: the ability to keep her either pregnant and/or busy at home rearing kids.

And one more thing. In verse 16 God tells woman: "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Now every righteous male knows that God was being judicious when he put it this way, so it is rightly paraphrased thusly by the Godly male: "thou shalt obligingly and unceasingly kiss thy husband's hinder part always."

Oh yeah. God "cursed" the man too. Notice the quotation marks, indicating a word used in a special sense? This "curse" was not on man himself, as was the case with the woman, but a cursing of the earth for man's sake. Now it would be necessary for man to go out and earn his living by the sweat of his face (verse 19). Need I point out that this "curse" is what made place for that later innovation know as the "workplace affair," best performed while the wife is back home pregnant or busy raising the kids?

So now it is clear that woman was hoisted by her own petard!

I know, I know, you think I'm just being facetious. I'm really not, and could give many examples where Godly, conservative Christian males have repeatedly spelled all this out for us (I admit, however, I may not have done so as discreetly as they). One quick example must serve here. There was a leader among Christian Fundamentalists last century by the name of Reuben Archer Torrey, a highly educated Bible scholar, evangelist, and first academic dean of BIOLA University. He wrote a tome dedicated to defending the inerrancy of the Bible, Difficulties in the Bible: Alleged Errors and Contradictions, in which he set out to rationalize, among other things, the strange behavior of God in relation to his ordering the genocide of the ancient Canaanite people. In that particular section, regarding the need to exterminate the Canaanite women, he bluntly wrote:

The women were the prime source of contamination (Numbers 31:15–16). Though true women are nobler than true men, depraved women are more dangerous than depraved men.


Plain enough for you?

It hardly seems fair that the bringer of knowledge to the human race should be cursed so and put into subjection to her duller counterpart. But subjection was the only way to keep these uppity know-it-alls in their proper place.

And when the Apostle Paul, that perverter of Judaism , the true founder of Christianity, established the New Testament Church protocols he continued the tradition that wisdom and knowledge would continue to be drowned out by the testosterone laced blatherings of the egotistical male. And this would be done, again, by subjugation:

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression (1 Timothy 2:11-14).


I rest my case. There it is in black and white. Man didn't transgress; woman did. It is all her fault, and we could have remained blissfully ignorant had she just stopped trying to find out things. No one likes a smart aleck, least of all the Almighty, and woman has proved herself unworthy of leadership by virtue of the fact that she isn't stupid enough to lead.

That's correct. The greatest leaders, down through history, have been ignorant males, dumb enough to realize that force and bloodshed are more decisive and quicker than thoughtful persuasion or skillful negotiation. Furthermore, no one, I suppose, will dispute that the most successful churches and denominations, those that wield the biggest influence and make the loudest racket in our nation today, are those where the woman is denied ordination or disallowed to teach and spread her posion, which would force church members to think and to rationally discuss matters that should be dealt with by simple prooftexting, such as I've demonstrated above.

It is a great and grand scheme, no doubt, but I'm not quite finished yet. Male leadership has so botched things that now he has passed a little of his "curse" on to the women. Now it is necessary in the majority of cases that two must go out to earn bread by the sweat of their brows in order to have enough for the family. But here is the corker: though this is now an accepted procedure, the woman's curse is still in full effect and the additional duties she now bears must be borne IN ADDITION to homemaking (or what males commonly refer to as "woman's work").

Great is our God, and greatly to be praised!

Friday, November 6, 2009

Forgotten God Syndrome

To revisit a theme I wrote about on Wednesday concerning our allegedly heathen nation: there are some people, who believe in simple "one size fits all answers," like the letter writer I referenced, who think that God is on the decline in our nation and that is the reason for the calamities we face as a nation.

In defense of the thesis that "AMERICA'S greatest sin and the real cause of the present depression is forgetting God," a Christian evangelist wrote the following:

By largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation. False cults numbering nearly ten million are sweeping the land with propaganda of denial, deceit and devilish doctrines....Pleasure, newspapers, magazines, business and society have largely taken the pre-eminent place that God and Christian living ought to take. Crime gets the eye, not Christ! Society not salvation, business and not betterment of souls, money and not missions, earth and not Heaven is foremost in thinking. True, there are a few million Christians in America who still adore, worship and serve Him; but they are like salt in a rotting nation.


The thing is, those words were penned over seventy years ago by Joseph T. Larsen and were his thoughts concerning the then present economic depression.

Not a lot has changed. Like a one-note samba played with increasing vibrancy, Christian moralists have urged us to acknowledge and remember Almighty God (the Christian version, of course) as a safeguard against national crisis. As Secretary Of The Treasury Salmon P. Chase wrote way back in 1861, "No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense." His solution: "The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins." That motto is on our currency to this day, as testimony that as a people the U. S. has not forgotten God.

Our presidents and Congress, right from the beginning, have payed lip service to the national mythology of America: God's Country through many of their proclamations, declarations, and addresses to the people. Although the United States was NOT founded as a Christian Nation (though some of our forefathers sought this, but were wisely overruled), with God being absented from our Constitution, there can be no gainsaying that our country has been - from the beginning and continuing right up to this very day - a nation of Christians.

Acknowledgement of the Almighty is indeed the opiate of the people here in the good old USA. And what the more militant of the Christian moralists really mean is that we haven't gone far enough in legislating Christian behavior into law. That is how, they think, we have "forgotten God."

Almost a quarter of a century ago the late Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote:

...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of "In God We Trust" as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow's apt phrase, as a form a "ceremonial deism," protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly BECAUSE THEY HAVE LOST THROUGH ROTE REPETITION ANY SIGNIFICANT RELIGIOUS CONTENT.
[Emphasis Mine]

Uh, maybe.

But the battle rages among the secularists (those who, like yours truly, think we would be far better off keeping God and religion out of government, the ceremonial Deists [I think that really should be "ceremonial theists"] (who just feel warm and fuzzy inside with all the God talk and theistic trappings surrounding us, even though they really don't mean a thing), and the militant Christian moralists (who would legislate morality according to their understanding of the Bible).

Forget God? How can we when the militants, like the Energizer bunny, keep pounding on and on and on and on...?

Thursday, November 5, 2009

And Now: The Evening News

I watched the network news yesterday. I got election results plus more ... too much more ... I had it all broken down to me, as if I were a small child, what the results supposedly mean.

The constant mixing of news with analysis annoys the hell out of me. In following political news, I find that the reporter/pundit (God, how I miss old fashioned journalists and their clipped "who, what, when, where" approach to reporting! ) has roughly the accuracy of a 1-900 psychic hotline, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT they are able to shape the news they report.

News reports should not, like soap operas, have story arcs, cliff hangers, and unexpected twists (an example of the latter would be how the "public option" was confidently reported as dead, only to have it unexpectedly resurrected later).

I submit that the majority of the United States citizenry is intellectually lazy. We, as a people, are like lost sheep, in need of direction, I suppose, Otherwise we would rise up and turn off our television newscasts. And the all news channels - with their 15% news content and 85% filler, fluff, and, of course, advertising - would go the way of the dinosaur.

My advice: read a good newspaper instead. You get more straightforward reporting there, the editorials are appropriately placed in a designated area, and you can skip over the ads if you choose.

But it seems we just aren't ready to think for ourselves.

I once heard an old-time radio preacher, the late fundamentalist Lester Roloff, as I recall, scream into the microphone: "THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS WRONG!!!" I won't go quite that far. But there is a very good reason why our founding fathers set up a representative form of government, rather than a basic majority-rule-democracy. Human nature is such that there is a tendency to be led, Pied Piper style, by the stirring of our emotions.

That spell can be broken by the vigorous use of the gray matter within our skulls.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Our Great Heathen Nation?

Killings, beatings, rapings ... why? What is back of these perilous times we live in? And please don't think I'm making light of the gravity of life in our modern, "civilized" nation. I'm not.

Here is what I do find funny. Check out this angry letter-to-the-editor writer who has it all figured out. The simple solution:

"The nation that forgets God shall not prosper."

Are people who think that way for real? Where I and that author live, you can hardly travel a mile in any direction without passing a church. The overwhelming majority of Americans are believers in God. Our leaders? We have had some of the most outspoken of Christians sitting in the White House during the past three decades. Forget God? The Christian God of the Bible? No Way. The nation hasn't forgotten God.

Whatever one may say about the current state of our society, it is what it is in a nation full of Christians and Christian leaders. That evil Supreme Court that allegedly keeps doing its best to boot God out of government is, believe it or not, completely made up of Christians. I'm not aware of any infidels that ever sat on the Supreme Bench.

Again, dear Christian friend, we have all these problems in our God-intoxicated nation.

Perhaps it's time to try another approach. How about more education, less superstition, and a reasoned, less hysterical, effort to understand and deal with the problems we face?

Monday, November 2, 2009

The Problem With Certainty


The cause of so much strife in life is stubborn dogmatism.

A former coworker of mine, a dogmatic skeptic, once boasted to me: "I believe only what I can see, feel, hear, or taste." "Do you not believe in flatulence?", I asked. "Well, or smell," he quickly replied. The five senses, in other words. I told him I still could sneak one by him, and it would be as real as a punch to his nose would be. A silent, non-odiferous flatus would be real, even though beyond my friend's senses (but not mine, of course).

John Lennon is quoted as saying:

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Ah, such is life.

There will be disagreement as long as humans have the freedom to think. Imagination is the mother of art. And art, according to Kahil Gibran, "is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."

Something Stephen Jay Gould wrote on pages 169 and 170 of his book Rocks Of Ages strikes a chord with me:

We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have distinctive ways of knowing, valid in their proper domains. No single way can hold all the answers in our wondrously complex world.

The "defenders of truth" overlook the power of myth, mirthfully oblivious to the fact they are only defending their own mythology. The "defenders" need more humility and more imagination and less arrogance.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Next Up: Turkey Day

The end of year holidays rush is now in full swing. We made it through Devil's Night, looking forward to Turkey Day, but the stores are even now all ready for the big push for Consumermas, or as I like to refer to it, Xmas (not really ... I just like to stoke the fundies now and again).

But about this so-called Thanksgiving. To whom are we thankful?

Many of us are extremely thankful for a chance to have an occasion to indulge in a food orgy, and at the same time be paid for it. Actually, I'm doubly thankful because my company grants us both Thanksgiving and the Friday after as paid holidays! Thanks, my dear employer of the past sixteen years.

That life is no worse for any of us than it is - by that I mean, most of us can imagine it being worse - may be, I suppose, cause to thank: (1) the God of our choice; (2) fate; (3) our lucky stars; (4) all of the preceding.

However irreverent, I can't help but love that wit Bart Simpson's simple table grace: "Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing." My observation is that most deeply orthodox religious people do not give themselves nearly enough credit.

Let us face it: Our nation is overflowing with a false piety that rears its ugly head during the last quarter of every year. The Pagans in our nation of Christians seem to me the only ones who come close to getting it right. So allow me to come out of the closet now as a Pagan. No, I'm not embracing Wicca. But, in truth, I have far more in common with them than with the Christians. Despite their best efforts, Christians are unable to cover over the fact that they took Pagan festivals and Christianized them, with few if any original contributions of their own.

During this harvest season, it seems more than appropriate to be thankful to good old Mother Nature for her many blessings. If we can embrace that thought, Turkey Day will be brimming with meaning. It also would put that much fictionalized "First Thanksgiving" into proper perspective. While the early Native Americans could whole-heartedly embrace thankfulness for nature's bounty, they could have hardly (for very long at least) been thankful for the "British invasion."

It should be said that many of the things we have done with the country since we took over are things we hardly should be proud of. The "American Indians" were considered "savages" in desperate need of Christianization. I think it sad they weren't able to Paganize the early settlers.

What our modern nation really needs is a holiday to commemorate its unbridled greed and arrogance.