Exercise in Futility

The Assault on Religion

2012-01-21T01:21:00.002-05:00

An article in the January 18, 2012 edition of Newsday titled "Parents push back on school closings" highlighted the efforts by parents of children who attend six Catholic schools in the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island that are slated for closure at the end of the school year.

As an atheist, I don't normally have a personal interest in such stories. I can empathize with the parents in the sense that they are very disappointed, and in some cases, distraught, that the schools they want their children to attend are closing.

But what caught my eye in this story was a quote attributed to one of Long Island's representatives in the New York State Assembly.

The article quoted Alfred Graf, a Republican (of course!) from Holbrook, as saying, "With the onslaught of attacks on religion, I feel it is important for parents in my district to send their children to a religious-based academic institution."

An onslaught of attacks on religion? What the hell is he talking about? The last time I checked, there hasn't been any wave of vandalism against churches, synagogues and mosques on Long Island. Religious people are not being physically prevented from going to their houses of worship. Bibles, Torahs and Qurans are not being confiscated from peoples homes.

Want to know what an attack is, Assemblyman Graf, ask Jessia Ahlquist.

Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House and a current contender for the Republican presidential nomination, declared not long ago that an atheist has no business in the White House, and went on to add:

“Does faith matter? Absolutely,” Gingrich said. “How can you have judgment if you have no faith? How can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?” He continued, “the notion that you are endowed by your creator sets a certain boundary of what we mean by America.” Gingrich said that Americans should value religion first, above morality and knowledge.

This from a guy who couldn't be trusted to honor his marital vows to his first two wives. I think the only reason why we shouldn't expect him to cheat on his third wife is because at his age and physical shape no other woman would be remotely interested in sleeping with him.

No, religion is not under assault in America. What is being challenged (I think assault is hardly the right word to use) is the notion of religious privilege in this country. And history shows that whenever people believe that their privileged position is threatened, they lash out, sometimes violently, though more often it is confined to verbal vitriol.

Witness Jessica Ahlquist's state representative, Peter Palumbo, referring to the 16-year old girl as an "evil little thing."

If you look at the press release page for Palumbo's web site, what would you think of him had you known nothing about Jessica Ahlquist and what he said about her? One conclusion that you would draw is that he is an advocate for parents of children with autism.  Another area he focuses on is strengthening laws against sex offenders. Palumbo also regularly goes on volunteer humanitarian missions, most recently to Nicaragua.

If you are an atheist and all you knew about Palumbo was the terrible things he said about Jessica Ahlquist, you might think that he is one of the biggest assholes in the world. I would be more nuanced about it and say that Palumbo overall is probably a good guy, but because of his religious beliefs, he reverts to being a knee jerk asshole when the religious privilege he supports is challenged.

Where does this anger and hatred stem from? I intend to do a fuller post about it at some point in the near future, but in summary, I would attribute it to the ceremonial deism that suffuses this country, the notion that we are a "nation under God", or as I like to call it, one of the bullshit stories we tell ourselves. Because we supposedly have some special connection to a deity that is said to have created the entire universe, it's taken for granted by a segment of the population that having "In God We Trust" on our money, "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance, and having Christian denominated prayers and sayings on display in our schools and court houses is not only normal, but obligatory.   People don't like having their cherished myths challenged. It is that myth that is starting to be challenged, and, which I would argue, should be replaced by a better reality, one that acknowledges that we are a diverse, pluralistic nation of believers and nonbelievers that can and should serve as a beacon to the rest of the world.

Indonesia Sucks

2012-01-20T23:11:00.000-05:00

Many in the atheist blogosphere by now know that an Indonesian man has been arrested for writing that God did not exist on a Facebook page.

According to the Indonesian Embassy website, "Six world religions are formally recognized in Indonesia: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism." Of course, atheism isn't a religion, but the Indonesian government doesn't even give you the option to opt out of having to select any religion at all.

The problem with Indonesia is more than just the fact that atheism is not legally permitted. Even adherents of officially recognised religions are facing increasing discrimination at the hands of militant Sunni Muslims.

The following excerpt from this article from Human Rights Watch tells the story:

Religious tolerance in Indonesia is in danger. There has been a surge in deadly sectarian attacks against religious communities and dozens of mosques and churches have been forced to close. In the first nine months of 2011, the Setara Institute, which monitors religious freedom in Indonesia, documented 184 incidents of religious violence — a higher rate than the annual average of 204 such attacks over the last four years. About 80 percent of these attacks took place on Java, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and targeted Christians, Shia Muslims, Bahai, and the Ahmadiyah, who consider themselves Muslim but whom many Muslims consider heretics.

Attacks against the Ahmadiyah have gotten increasingly violent because perpetrators know sectarian violence is not seriously prosecuted in Indonesia. In a deadly attack in February, a 1,500-strong mob of Islamist militants beat three Ahmadiyah men to death and seriously injured five others in the village of Cikeusik, Banten. Although the brutal violence was captured on film, only 12 of the attackers were tried and they received prison sentences of just three to six months. The prosecutors claimed the Ahmadiyah provoked the attack and sentenced one victim who nearly lost an arm to six months in prison for assault and disobeying police orders.

The Ahmadiyah are not the only victims. This year, militants have burned down Christian churches in Temanggung, Central Java, and a suicide bomber targeted a church in Solo, killing himself and wounding 14 churchgoers. Churches in Riau were burned down in August and now, perhaps in retaliation, a mosque in predominantly Christian West Timor is facing similar pressure to close.

The situation will only get worse unless the Indonesian government starts to take this problem seriously. No pluralistic society can survive if the fanatic members of one group start engaging in discriminatory and violent behavior against the other groups. My fellow atheists should condemn those who seek to denigrate, by their words or by their actions, people of other religions just as they would condemn those, like a certain presidential candidate, who attack atheists.

The address and contact info for the Indonesian Embassy are as follows:

2020 Massachusetts Ave. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036, USA
Phone (202) 775 - 5200; Fax. (202) 775 - 5365

The Bahamas Trip - Closing Thoughts

2012-01-20T21:30:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know. The trip was nearly six months ago and I'm still writing about it.

If you are looking to go scuba diving on a live aboard, you can't go wrong with the Aqua Cat. For myself, it was a different experience than most divers, as I took my two kids with me, aged 10 and 8. Unlike my Belize trip in 2009, this wasn't going to be a complete escape from the daily humdrum of life.

Still, I am glad that I took my son and daughter along for the trip. It was a chance for them to experience something totally different from what they had done before. For my son in particular, it proved to be an opportunity to push his boundaries and do things that I never thought he was capable of. My son is normally a timid child who is hesitant to take chances or do anything outside of his comfort zone. But on this trip, as I believe I wrote in an earlier post, he took me totally by surprise. Not only did he take to snorkelling, getting the hang of it quickly in a rather calm lagoon, he took the bold step of going into waters filled with Caribbean Reef sharks.

Andrew might even go so far as trying his hand at scuba diving when we go on our trip to the Caymans in July.

Where my kids are concerned, I have to give a special shout out to Aqua Cat crew members Nathan and Stacey. Nathan in particular spent a lot of time with my kids and keeping them occupied with fun activities. My kids each got to captain two of four teams in a series of contests that required participants to engage in some silly and sometimes embarrasing tasks. My daugher's team The Goofballs ended up winning, and in the video below Kellyanne gets her prize.

Stacey was the crew member kind enough to take my son snorkelling while I was away on my diving misadventure. She is the one pictured in the photo above with the yellow finds swimming alongside Andrew. Stacey also was in the awkward position of being the lone female in a crew of ten. I hope that future voyages had some better gender ratios for her.

For myself, it was a wonderful trip. Our group included a lot of friends I made from the Belize trip and some great new people. When I made the decision to go to Belize in 2009 and take up scuba diving, it just opened up a whole new world for me and changed my life for the better in so many ways. When I hit middle age, I had a yearning to do something adventurous in my life, and scuba diving really fit the bill.

Exercise in Futility at Reason Rally on March 24, 2012

2012-01-20T20:02:00.000-05:00

I've just recently become aware of the Reason Rally scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, March 24. Barring anything unexpected that might come up to prevent me from going, I am planning to attend.

If you haven't heard about it yet, here's the website for Reason Rally.

The Reason Rally is an event sponsored by many of the country’s largest and most influential secular organizations. It will be free to attend and will take place in Washington, D.C. on March 24^th, 2012 from 10:00AM – 4:00PM at the National Mall. There will be music, comedy, speakers, and so much more.

If anyone from the New York area wants to go and is interested in carpooling, let me know and we'll see what we can work out. Just leave a message in the comments. I imagine some people will want to head down there Friday evening, though I'll more likely drive down very early in the morning and either return Saturday night or stay the night and return early Sunday.

Exercise In Futility Drunken Blogathon

2012-01-20T19:49:00.000-05:00

In a sort of tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens, I will be doing a blogathon tonight while under the increasing influence of alcohol. It's a cold Friday night, I'm stuck in the house, so why the hell not. Let's see if the quality of my posts goes up or down as the night progresses. Alright, here we go!

Shifting Attitudes on Gay Marriage and Abortion - The Personal Factor

2012-01-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

I finished Putnam and Campbell's Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us last week. In Chapter 11, titled Religion in American Politics, the authors look at how attitudes towards gay marriage and abortion have changed over the recent decades.

The authors cite a 1988 General Social Survery in which only 12% of respondents supported same-sex marriage. In the 2006 Faith Matters survey, 34% of respondents supported gay marriage while another 30% supported civil unions. Support for same-sex marriage rises among younger generations.

Putnam and Campbell attribute greater acceptance towards gay marriage among people to two main factors. First, younger Americans "have become politically and socially aware during a period in which homosexuality has been increasingly featured positively in the popular media. Gay characters are common in TV programs and movies and many prominent gay celebrities project an image of respectabilty."

Second, "[y]oung people are also the least religious age group. Since religiosity is such a strong predictor of attitudes toward same-sex marriage, and homosexuality more generally, it comes as no surprise that the most secular cohort of the population is the most accepting of gay marriage."

The trend towards increasingly liberal views among younger Americans with regard to social issues like gay marriage or premarital sex is not matched by increasing acceptance for abortion. The authors note that this does not mean that younger Americans are increasingly supportive of banning abortions completely, but rather are more in favor of restricting abortion in certain circumstances.

Putnam and Campbell do offer "another hypothesis for young people's unease with abortion that...remains a plausible hunch rather than a tested proposition - the prevalence of in utero ultrasound images."

This could explain why the anti-choice movement has its best successes when it aims to chip away at abortion rights a piece at a time here and there.   For example, Texas passed a law last year requring women seeking an abortion to view an ultrasound image of the fetus before getting an abortion. Other states, like South Dakota have sought to impose mandatory waiting periods and to require women seeking an abortion to visit a crisis pregnancy center. But when the anti-choice movement tries to go for the whole enchilada, as with the Personhood ballot initiative that was shot down by voters in Mississippi last year, they tend to lose badly.

Another factor cited by the authors, and one that I have seen mentioned elsewhere, is that younger voters today are far removed from the era of backalley abortions that existed prior to Roe v. Wade. In a way, the very success of the pro-choice movement to provide safe, legal abortions for such a long period of time has seen the coming of age of a generation that knows almost nothing about the conditions that gave rise to the pro-choice movement in the first place.

While probably true, there is another reason that attitudes towards abortion have not matched the increasingly liberal views towards gays and same-sex marriage, and that would be the personal factor. In this day and age, I think it is safe to say that an overwhelming number of people in the United States who are heterosexual have a family member, friend or acquaintance who is gay and who is known to that heterosexual to be gay.

It is a lot easier to demonize homosexuals when they are some abstract other, reduced to crude stereotypes of parading drag queens and limp-wristed sissies. It is not so easy to be homophobic when the person who admits his/her homosexuality to you is your beloved sibling, uncle, close friend, popular teacher or someone else you have long admired. A person with negative attitudes towards gays in such a situation finds themselves faced with a dilemma. Does one's loathing towards homosexuals outweigh the high regard held for the person who has come out to you as a homosexual? Or does one's love and affection for that person tip the scales towards acceptance?   If this person will be a part of your life for years to come, the realization seeps in that not only is this person a homosexual today, he or she will still be gay tomorrow, next week, next month, next year and so on.

Of course, having a family member or close friend who is gay does not automatically translate towards acceptance of homosexuals. Think Newt Gingrich and his lesbian half-sister Candace. Phyllis Schlafly, one of America's longest serving right wing culture warriors, who has a gay son. And then there's Alan Keyes and his lesbian daughter Maya. What probably does happen for most people in such a situation is a gradual shift in attitudes towards gays. Accepting a close family member or friend who is homosexual might result at first in a grudging acceptance, sort of "Well, this one is okay, but the others are still just a bunch of queers!" to gradual feelings of repulsion at hearing homophobic rhetoric when one realizes, "Wait a minute, my best friend is gay, so how can you say that?"

With abortion, the personal factor greatly diminishes. As I wrote above, a person who is gay today will be gay tomorrow and for the remainder of that person's life.  Abortion, on the other hand, is something a woman who opts for the procedure might need once or at most twice in her life. Unplanned pregnancy and abortion is generally a private matter that a woman in such a situation will keep entirely to herself. No woman will tell her boss, "I need to have next Thursday off. I just found out I'm three weeks pregnant and I need the day off to get an abortion." She won't walk out of the clinic after the procedure sporting a button on her shirt that reads "Be Nice To Me. I Had An Abortion Today."

Because abortion is such a private matter, the personal factor does not come into play like it does with gays. We probably all are related to or are friends with women who have had abortions but have no idea that they have had an abortion. It probably makes it a lot easier to support restricting or even banning abortion when you do not know of any women who have ever had one, and just as importantly, why they felt they needed it. The secrecy of abortion might also contribute to the phenomenon of women who have gotten abortions themselves but who still believe that abortion is wrong.

One of the reasons why acceptance of homosexuality increased in recent years was due to an active campaign by the gay community to encourage gays to come out of the closet, which forced many heterosexual Americans to face the choice that I described above. With a record number of abortion restriction measures being introduced, and in some cases passed, by state legislatures in 2011, perhaps the time has come for a similar Out campaign by women who have had abortions. I'm sure that there are some women who are pro-choice activists who do speak about their own personal experiences when lobbying and advocating for abortion rights. Indeed, when I was at a Planned Parenthood rally in downtown Manhattan last February, several of the women speakers did say that they themselves had an abortion at some point in their lives. Still, I don't think it is as easy to form a large scale campaign for women who have had abortions that could match the gay Out campaign. As I reiterated already, gay people will always be gay. A 47 year old woman who had an abortion when she was 20 because she didn't want to have kids before she finished college and who will likely never need to have an abortion again at her age might see it as something from her past better left undisturbed.

That being the case, with the anti-choice movement trying to push personhood amendments and fetal hearbeat bills in state legislatures, there is going to have to be a strong pushback from the abortion rights to put the focus where is belongs, back on the women whose bodies the forced birthers want to hijack with the backing of the coercive apparatus of the state. One way of doing that would be a vocal campaign made up of large numbers of women who have had abortions, thereby putting a true human face back on the debate instead of ceding the debate to ultrasound pictures.

God's Quarterback Part 2

2012-01-15T14:42:00.002-05:00

The picture above basically sums up what the New England Patriots did to Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos yesterday in an incredibly lopsided 45-10 win. If it weren't for the one pass that Denver intercepted in Patriots territory putting them in good field position to score their one touchdown, the score likely would have ended up being 45-3.

In last month's post, God's Quarterback, I put forward what I call my Tim Tebow Challenge. If Tebow could win three consecutive Super Bowls, one for each part of the Trinity, I would become a born again Christian. Thanks to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, the Denver Broncos won't be in the Super Bowl this year, thus earning me a one year reprieve. If Tebow is ever going to notch three Super Bowl victories in a row, I'm good until at least February of 2015.

In an interesting irony, the Denver Broncos this season were 1-4 when Tebow took over as starting quarterback, and in Tebow's last five games, the Denver Broncos are 1-4. A reversion to the mean, perhaps?

Still, because I strive to be fair-minded, I'm happy to give Tebow and the Broncos their due. They achieved far more than their critics predicted. During Tebow's time as their starting quarterback, the Broncos went from being in the basement to being in the playoffs. As I wrote in my previous post on Tim Tebow, the part of me that wants to root for the underdog got a kick out of seeing Tebow defy his critics who said he couldn't cut it in the NFL. I know a lot of his critics like to dismiss his winning streak, chalking it up to injuries on the opposing team, the other team playing not to lose in the 4th quarter, or just dumb luck, among other things. While there is validity to these criticisms, ultimately, a win is a win is a win.

On the other hand, what I cannot abide are the Tebow fans who accuse his critics of being motivated by Tebow's religiosity. While clearly some are, as I've written before, this atheist couldn't give a shit about Tebow's ostentatious religiosity. In fact, I love it, precisely because when he and the Broncos get their asses kicked by top tier teams, it shows how ridiculous Tebow's Bible thumper fans are to claim he is some kind of divine instrument when the Broncos win in overtime on a Matt Prater field goal.

I like to think I see Tim Tebow for what he really is, a mediocre quarterback given to public displays of Christian piety who is sometimes somewhat better than his critics give him credit for.

With Denver knocked out of the playoffs, thankfully we won't be hearing much about Tebowmania for the next 8 months until the 2012 season gets under way. My prediction for Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos is that they won't have an awful season like this season's Indianapolis Colts, nor will they have any six game winning streaks like they managed this season. Tebow will probably have a season like Mark Sanchez of the New York Jets had in 2011, he'll win a game or two, then lose a game or two, and so on until the end of the season. Not exactly what one would expect or hope for if Tebow really was God's quarterback.

Revelling In His Own Douchebaggery

2012-01-08T20:37:00.001-05:00

With the exception of Jon Huntsman, when I look at the batch of candidates campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, I see a collection of vile, meanspirited assholes. For a while, I felt that Newt Gingrich was at the head of the pack in terms of prickery. But with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum's near win in the Iowa caucuses last week, he is finding himself more and more in the spotlight, propelling him ahead of Newt in the douchebag department.

Santorum's had quiet a few juicy nuggets lately to rile the masses. His message to children with gay parents is that they would be better off with a father in prison. He was booed by members of an audience when he declared that gays weren't entitled to marriage or military service. And here's what he had to say when a woman complained about the cost of her prescription medication:

I had a woman the other day who came up and complained to me that she has to pay $200 a month for her prescriptions…I said, in other words, this $200 a month keeps you alive, she goes yes. I said, and you’re complaining that you’re paying $200 a month and it keeps you alive? What’s your cable bill? I mean, what’s your cell phone bill? Because she had a cell phone. And how can you say that you complain that you have $200 to keep you alive and that’s a problem? No, that’s a blessing!"

ThinkProgress has a collection of some of Ricky's outrageous statements here.

It almost seems as if Ricky gets off on pissing people off. And then as I read more about him, I understood Rick Santorum perfectly. He's the "bad guy" that you see in those professional wrestling matches on tv. He's the one who taunts the crowd and gets them to boo him.

This excerpt from a recent article from The New York Times is rather telling:

People in both parties over the years have accused him of hotheaded name-calling, reliance on immature antics and attempts to reduce politics to steel-cage matches between people cast as heroes or heels.

“He would attack people in a smug way that was harder-edged and more insulting than was necessary, said Mark Salter, the former chief of staff to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, adding that lawmakers in both parties shared this view. “He was a bully who was not a potent enough force to be a bully.”

Not surprisingly, Rick Santorum has a connection to professional wrestling, as "prior to getting involved in politics, Santorum worked at a law firm, where he once argued in court—successfully—that pro wrestling should be exempt from steroid regulations because it's staged (and therefore not a sport)."

From what I have read so far, Mitt Romney will likely win the New Hampshire primary by a comfortable margin, so Santorum will be looking to the more socially conservative South Carolina voters to give him a boost. I suspect that Santorum knows he doesn't really have a chance to win the Republican nomination. But he will stay in the race anyway because it will give him the chance to do what he loves the most, stand in front of a camera and an audience so he can rail against abortion and butt sex.

Measuring Generosity - Charity and Food Stamps

2012-01-08T00:21:00.000-05:00

Because of the length of space devoted to addressing the Boy Scouts and why secular Americans are largely not involved in it, I decided to address my second critique of Putnam and Campbell's American Grace in a separate post.

Again, my intention is not to dispute in its entirety the authors contention that religious people are more generous than secular people, though if any atheist bloggers reading this want to take on the whole enchilada, feel free to take a crack at it.

Putnam and Campbell write on page 448 of the hardcover edition that "Regular churchgoers are more likely to give to secular causes than nonchurchgoers, and highly religious people give a larger fraction of their income to secular causes than do most secular people."

If that is indeed the case, then all I can say is bravo to you generous religious people. In a society where donating time and money to worthy causes is a metric for measuring the positive contributions of individuals, those who contribute more than the average are certainly to be commended for their efforts and good works.

As a full time employee and father of two young children, I wish I had more free time to volunteer for causes that were important to me. During my college years, I was a hotline counselor and I did a stint as a volunteer firefighter around 10 years or so ago before dropping out because my parental responsibilities made it impossible for me to meet my alarm requirements. I do try to donate blood at least once a year, and last year managed a record five times, one shy of the maximum persmissible in a one year span. For 2012, my New Years resolution is to repeat the feat (rhyme intended!). I also make an effort to contribute monetarily to charities such as Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, as well as local hunger relief organizations like Island Harvest and Long Island Cares.

So yeah, volunteering and donating to causes that genuinely help people like hunger relief is wonderful. In these difficult economic times when so many people are out of work and struggling to put food on the table, food banks here on Long Island, among many other places, are being taxed to the limit to meet the increased demand.

While people volunteer for altruistic reasons, it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of volunteers are motivated in part by the feelings of self worth they derive from helping others. In other words, in order for them to derive the satisfaction of helping the needy, they need a pool of people who need help in order to provide them with this experience.   When you are volunteering at a soup kitchen handing a tray with a meal to a hungry person, the volunteer can feel a personal connection to the person who needs that meal and know that at least that night, that needy person will not go hungry and that you were part of the process that made that happen. But is it the best way to address the problem of hunger in America?

Of course, volunteer food pantries and soup kitchens are not the only ways we try to feed the poor in this country.

One of the best known government programs to provide food assistance to low income Americans is the Department of Agriculture's SNAP program, more popularly known as food stamps. In order to be able to apply for food stamps, one has to meet certain eligibility requirements, which can be found here.

The Food Stamp program, as you probably know, is funded by our tax dollars. It is probably precisely for that reason that makes it impersonal to us, unlike volunteering at a soup kitchen or food pantry, where you may very likely be giving the food to the person in need and getting that personal connection. Unless you have been on food stamps yourself, or know someone personally who has, the only personal involvement you might have is seeing someone using them to purchase groceries ahead of you at the checkout counter at your local supermarket once in a while. I doubt very many people in this country, when they look at their paystubs, think to themselves "Wow, I'm so glad I am able to contribute a portion of my salary so that the less fortunate in this country can have food stamps and be able to feed their children!"

In Chapter 8, titled The Women's Revolution, the Rise of Inequality, and Religion, Putnam and Campbell note that "68 percent of the most secular Americans favor government action to reduce the gap between rich and poor comprated to 57 percent of the most religious fifth of the population. Roughly two thirds of secular Americans favor increased government aid to poor people compared to 46 percent among the most religious fifth of the population."

The authors go on to add that "highly religious Americans today are somewhat less supportive than the general population of public policies to address poverty and inequality, and they prefer private provision to public action. They have not worked to stem the growth of inequality, unlike past religious people who, as we have seen, often campaigned passionately for greater equality and social justice."

One can see that reflected in the rhetoric of at least two of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Gingrich derisively referred to President Obama as the "food stamp president" and recently declared "the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps" as if the choice was between food stamps and jobs, when eligibility for food stamps is based on income. The Frothy One, on the other hand, claimed food stamps were not necessary because so many low income people were obese.

Gingrich and Santorum are among the more vocal culture warriors in the Republican presidential pack, and they were both avidly seeking the evangelical vote in Iowa.   Putnam and Campbell note in their book that the Republican Party is perceived by a large swathe of religious voters as the religion friendly party. It's rather telling, therefore, that Gingrich and Santorum felt that attacking a well known government program to provide food assistance to needy Americans was part of their message to these voters.   Please note though that I am not trying to say that being an evangelical Christian or devoutly religious person means that such a person is inclined to support eliminating food stamps, but rather that Gingrich and Santorum seem to think it is a message that "values voters" want to hear. While such a message may not resonate with all of them, unfortunately, it probably does appeal to some of them.

Because of the influence of the Tea Party movement and elements of the Religious Right, advocating government assistance for the needy in the Republican Party has become toxic.   Raising tax rates back to what they were under President Clinton is condemned as class warfare, while shredding the social safety net is praised as fiscal responsibility. What ends up happening in all of this is that real people, vulnerable people, get hurt.   But you can feel better about yourself if you hand them a can of chicken noodle soup and a box of Cheerios at the food pantry.

Measuring Generosity and Community Involvement - The Boy Scouts

2012-01-07T21:33:00.003-05:00

First off, Belated Happy New Year to you all.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading American Grace: How Religions Divides and Unites Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. American Grace examines religiosity in America and how it impacts so many aspects of our lives, including how we vote in elections and how we relate to one another. Putnam and Campbell also have a blog connected with the book at here. It's a very good read filled with lots of interesting information. The book has also provided me with some topics for future blog posts, but there a couple of critiques I wanted to make to address one of the later chapters in the book.

In Chapter 13, titled Religion and Good Neighborliness, the authors claim that the data from the Faith Matters Survey of 2006 show that people who attend church frequently are better neighbors, that they are more generous in donating to charity, volunteering for charitable causes, more likely to be involved in community organizations, and are more engaged in local and civic political life. One reason the authors suggest this might be is that people who attend church frequently develop stronger social networks that facilitate greater involvement in civic activities outside of church than either religious people who do not regularly attend church or those who are secular and do not attend religious services at all.

I don't intend to dispute this, though of course I am sure even Putnam and Campbell would agree that some secular people are more generous and involved in their community than some regular churchgoers.

One bone I have to pick with them though is when they cite the involvement of religious people in youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts. The authors don't address a very important reason, at least in their book, why secular people are not involved with the Boys Scouts (and presumably the Girl Scouts) anywhere near the level of involvement as religious people. And that is because the Boy Scouts have a mandatory religious component to their programs. (Emphasis mine) I know this because a couple of years ago I enrolled my then 9 year old son into the Cub Scouts. At the time he expressed an interest in joining. When I was filling out the application form, I noted a reference to religion and raised it with one of the Boy Scout parents there. He tried to assuage me by telling me that the religion part only really comes into play later on. So, I suppressed my concerns and submitted the check and the application form.

At the orientation that night, they also provided a list of items that we needed to purchase for our children from the Boy Scouts store in Massapequa, including the uniform. My son, because of his age, was supposed to be at the Webelos level, so I also had to buy the Webelos Handbook.

The handbook advised that if your son joins the Scouts as a Webelos, he first has to earn the Bobcat badge. Okay, I thought, let's get that out of the way.

Item number one for earning the Bobcat badge is learning the Cub Scout Promise, which appears on page 43 of the handbook. And that's where my first problem arose. Here are the words to the Cub Scout Promise:

"I [say your name], promise
To do my best
To do my duty to God
And my country,
To help other people, and
To obey the Law of the Pack."

Further down the page, each line of the promise is explained, with the "duty to God" part explained as follows:

"Your duty to God is done with God's help. That means you practice your religion at home, in your church or synagogue or other religious group, and in everything you do." (Bolded in original)

Right off the bat I was faced with a conundrum. As an atheist parent, I was put in the awkward position of asking my son to memorize a pledge to perform a duty to a god when I am not only not raising him in any religious tradition or belief, but do not believe in the existence of a deity that wants or requires us to owe it any duty. Furthermore, how could a 9 year old child even develop an informed opinion about whether there is a god and what, if anything, it wants from him? One might as well ask my son for his opinion about a complex topic such as health care reform.

But then it got worse. I read the Webelos Handbook further to see what else might lay in store down the road in the religion department. I did not have to go very far. Seven pages later, the handbook listed the requirements for earning the Webelos badge. Item number eight concerned "Faith." Jump to page 68, which had the following under the heading "Your Religious Duties":

"Webelos badge requirement 8 concerns your religious duties; it helps you learn more about your religious beliefs and how to commit to and practice ways to be closer to God." I couldn't help but think, "That's BULLSHIT!"

Back to page 50, the handbook went into more specific detail about the religion requirement. Among the choice items:

"KNOW: Tell what you have learned about faith."

"COMMIT: Tell how these faith experiences help you live your duty to God."

"With your religious leader, discuss and make a plan to do two things you think will help you draw nearer to God."

I raised these concerns with the local Scout pack leadership. I asked if my son could recite the Cub Scout Promise with the God language omitted, but they said they could not accomodate that. The one sop they offered was that we could decide ourselves what God meant. They even said that my son could fulfill his religious requirement through a humanist organization such as the Ethical Culture Society of Long Island. But that didn't even cut to the heart of what I felt the real problem was, that there was a religious requirement at all. My secondary objection to the religious requirement was that it only serves to reinforce societal prejudice against atheists in America by equating good citizenship with being religious and going to church. Is it any wonder that atheists often find themselves as one of the least trusted groups of people in the United States in surveys? Why couldn't the Boy Scouts have a character requirement of which religion could be an optional part?

After maybe six months, I pulled my son out of the Scouts. The religious requirement issue was the main reason, though not the only one. Several times a month my son's den had meetings at one of the elementary schools in the district. Because it was a school at the other end of town, I often stayed in the cafeteria where the meetings were held. Even though there were only about ten kids at the most, several of them were frequently very rowdy and poorly behaved, resulting in the Scout parents conducting the meetings to lose their patience and sometimes blow their stacks. I couldn't help but wonder what was so great about the Boy Scouts being some kind of conduit for teaching kids good citizenship and values when the meetings of my son's den were frequently disrupted by poorly behaved children.

I will check out Putnam and Campbell's Amazing Grace blog to see if the issue of religion and the Boy Scouts is raised, and if not, I will bring it to their attention and see if they address it.

Protesting the Jewish Taliban

2011-12-27T23:00:00.000-05:00

I was very pleased to read that thousands of Israelis rallied in response to Haredi extremists in the neighborhood of Beit Shemesh.

One of the catalysts of the rally was "television coverage last week showing ultra-Orthodox extremists harassing Na'ama Margolese, 8, the daughter of immigrants from North America." They also assaulted a television camera crew and tried to prevent the removal of a sign in the neighborhood that called for men and women to use separate sidewalks.

These Haredim are no better than the Islamic fundamentalists who harass women for not being sufficiently modest. I hope that the Israeli public will remain galvanized in standing up to them and that the countermovement will have the support of all three of Israel's main political parties. Such misogyny has no place in the modern world, and if it can't be stopped in Israel, then how can we expect it to be stopped in Saudi Arabia?

Oh, and one more thing. Orthodox Judaism is a mental disorder.

Hey Fox News! This Is What A War On Christmas Looks Like!

2011-12-25T19:22:00.001-05:00

The way right wingers describe it, Christmas is on the verge of becoming declared illegal in the United States and inadvertently saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" to a Jew or a Wiccan will get you thrown in prison.

Maybe it is precisely because they are not being persecuted that the Faux News crowd has to sensationalize relatively trivial incidents and blow it up into an all out assault on the celebration of Christmas. Contrast that to what happened in Nigeria, as shown in the picture above, where Muslim militants bombed three churches and killed at least 7 people.

I would say to Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly that they should be ashamed of themselves, but they do not appear capable of feeling ashamed.

Quote of the Day

2011-12-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

The following is from a letter by a Boomer Pinches of Northampton, Massachusetts, printed in today's edition of The New York Times in response to this column by Ross Douthat about the death of Christopher Hitchens:

One need not believe in God to believe that life has meaning. Indeed, when one considers the abundance of meaning and fulfillment to be had in art, literature, friendship, love, family, and respect and compassion for one’s fellow human beings, the whole concept of God starts to look superfluous.

Congrats to Boomer for getting the letter published in the Times.

God's Quarterback

2011-12-18T23:43:00.001-05:00

He had his detractors. Some people said he just didn't have it in him to be a good NFL quarterback. But then a miracle happened. He took over as starting quarterback for a hapless team and led them to victory. That's right, Kyle Orton and the Kansas City Chiefs won against the hitherto undefeated Green Bay Packers today in Orton's debut as the Chiefs quarterback.

And then there's Tim Tebow. Alas, after an impressive six consecutive victories, Tim and the Baby Jesus were powerless against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. To be honest, with the Patriots ahead by 11 points with about eight minutes left to go in the 4th Quarter, I envisioned Tebow running the ball into the end zone for a touchdown, followed by a 2 point conversion to put the Broncos within 3 points of the Patriots. Then Matt Prater would kick for a field goal to tie it up with under a minute to go to bring the game into overtime.   We would then see another field goal by Prater to win the game, just like the Broncos managed to do in their previous two games. But this time it was not to be, as the Patriots scored another touchdown to give themselves an insurmountable 18 point lead.

This year has probably been the first in a long time where I really paid any attention to NFL football and watched the Jets and the Giants on a regular basis. I had heard of Tim Tebow last year. I knew that he was an openly evangelical Christian who liked to brandish Bible verses on his eye blacks when he was the quarterback for the Florida Gators college football team. While he won the Heisman Trophy, he also had his share of doubters and detractors who claimed he wasn't quite NFL material.

So, when Tim Tebow took over as quarterback for the Denver Broncos after achieving a dismal 1-4 during Kyle Orton's tenure, the time had come for him to prove if he had the goods. His first game against the winless Miami Dolphins set the pattern for many of the Broncos victories to come, a come from behind effort in the 4th quarter to tie the game followed by a field goal winning kick in overtime.

As an atheist, I was somewhat conflicted about Tim Tebow. I would be less than honest if I didn't admit that part of me (as well as quite a few other atheists) wanted Tebow to lose more than he won because a lot of Bible thumpers would claim his winning streak was the power of God at work. Indeed, I remember reading the comments thread to an article in Yahoo News (and curses for my not preserving the link!) and one commenter even went so far as to compare Tebow to the scientist Stephen Hawking. I don't remember the exact words, but it was something to the effect that Tim Tebow was in such great physical shape because of his belief in Jesus Christ, whereas Hawking, an atheist, had a shriveled body that was confined to a wheel chair.

Then I read this article about Tebow's pastor.

Tim Tebow’s pastor, Wayne Hanson, says he knows why the Denver Broncos are 7-1 since installing Tebow as quarterback – it’s the player’s faith.

“It’s not luck,” Hanson said according to TMZ. “Luck isn’t winning six games in a row. It’s favor. God’s favor.”

Hanson, who runs the Summit Church in suburban Denver, said the Broncos wouldn’t be winning games if God hadn’t decided to reward Tebow’s religious beliefs.

I guess God liked Aaron Rodgers better, with the Packers having won 19 games in a row.   And God's favor was apparently absent when Tebow and the Broncos faced off against the Detroit Lions and the New England Patriots.

That being said, a part of me couldn't help but root for Tebow as well, seeing him as something of an underdog. As I mentioned above, he had his share of critics who claimed he wasn't quite ready for prime time because his passing stats were mediocre.   Regardless of his skills as a quarterback, what is undeniable is that the Broncos are 7-2 since he became their starter and the Broncos managed to salvage what had been a horrible season.

Many of the Broncos games would be broadcast here in New York (though oddly, today's game wasn't), and to watch them come from behind time after time was a fascinating spectacle. Unfortunately, one of those victories was against the New York Jets.   Even my wife found herself getting caught up in the Tebowmania. Last week, we were watching the Broncos play the Chicago Bears. Without Jay Cutler, I fully expected the Bears to lose. With the Bears ahead 10-0 in the 4th quarter, my wife was fretting that Timmy wouldn't be able to pull off a win. I told her, "Honey, this is what's going to happen. The Broncos will score a touchdown and then tie it with a field goal. Then they'll win it in overtime with another field goal." And sure enough, they did.

Personally, I really don't care how much Tim Tebow parades his religiosity on and off the field. It's his right to do it, regardless of how I feel about it. I wonder though if he ever prays to Jesus to cause an opposing player to miss a field goal or fail to complete a pass. Seriously though, when the Broncos win a game, it does not validate that Christianity is true, just as their losses do not invalidate it.

That being said, I'll make this wager. If Tebow can lead the Denver Broncos to three consecutive Super Bowl wins (one Super Bowl victory for each part of the Trinity!), I will become a born again Christian.   Sorry, one Super Bowl is just not enough for me.   I can't just make such a major change in my life on a whim! So I can enjoy the atheist life at least until February of 2014.

There are two more games left in the regular season for the Denver Broncos. Next week, they play the Buffalo Bills, who appear to be caught in free fall, having lost their last ~~five~~ seven games. I don't think Tim Tebow will require any divine intervention to defeat them.***

The last game of the regular season, however, should be quite interesting, as the Broncos will find themselves facing the Kansas City Chiefs once again.   When they last played each other on November 13, the Broncos easily dispatched the Chiefs 17-10, having never lost their lead throughout the entire game. But on New Years Day, Tebow will be matched against his former teammate Kyle Orton. If Orton and the Chiefs can pull off a win against the Raiders next week, he will be going up against the Broncos with something he hasn't had all season, a two game winning streak. That should definitely give Orton the confidence he needs to take on God's quarterback.

*** Boy, was I wrong there. That was probably the worse defeat they have suffered since Tebow took over as starting quarterback.   God must have been resting for the Sabbath.

Guess This Means I Can Never Visit Thailand

2011-12-10T21:03:00.000-05:00

This is a rather disturbing story out of Thailand.

"Thailand has jailed a US citizen for two and a half years after he admitted posting web links to a banned biography of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Joe Gordon, a used car salesman from Colorado who was born in Thailand, admitted lese-majeste, or insulting the king, at an earlier hearing.

Gordon, 55, reportedly translated parts of the widely available biography, The King Never Smiles by Paul Handley, several years ago and posted them on a blog while he was living in the US.

He was arrested in May when he visited Thailand for medical treatment."

Think of the ramifications of this. The Thai government can throw you in jail, even if you are a citizen of another country, for what you say about the Thai monarchy outside of Thailand. The person in question here didn't even write original content criticizing the Thai king, but merely linked to and translated portions of someone else's writings.

This means that if the Thai government reads this post of mine and discovers my true identity, they can arrest me and throw me in jail if I ever visit Thailand.

To that, all I can say is that King Bhumibol is still a dick.

"A Great Blemish Upon The Instrument"

2011-12-10T15:17:00.002-05:00

My recent post "An Absurd Supersition", related how a motion by Benjamin Rush that the Pennsylvania convention on ratifying the Constitution appoint a minister to open the convention's business with prayer was shot down.

I am further along in Pauline Maier's Ratification, and have since read the section on the Massachusetts convention. In a stark contrast from the opening of the Pennsylvania convention, in Massachusetts, the well-known American patriot and convention delegate Samuel Adams introduced a motion "that the Convention will attend morning prayers daily." The motion passed. All I can say is that I'm glad I wasn't attending that convention.

What was of interest to me in reading about the Massachusetts ratifying convention was whether there were objections raised to the portion of Article VI of the Constitution, which states "no religious Test shalled ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." In a nutshell, yes, there were quite a few objections raised.

Maier touches on the dispute in her book, but the lack of a religious requirement in the Constitution was just one of many issues that opponents raised in their objections to ratifying the document.

In terms of the debate over the language in Article VI of the Constitution, one of the biggest villains, at least from a secular perspective, is a man named Amos Singletary. Maier describes him as "a man in his Sixties whose Protestant faith was influenced by the preaching of the revivalist Jonathan Edwards." He would have been quite at home in today's Republican Party representing a district in the Bible Belt. Maier quotes him several times fuming about "Infidels", "Mohammedans" and "Papists" Even when the discussion was about giving Congress the power to tax, Singleton fretted that such power may end up in the hands of "an atheist, pagan, Mahommedan."

Reading such things, I can't help but wonder how many atheists, pagans or Muslims there could have been in the new nation that the Bible thumpers of the day displayed such concern about it. Or perhaps Singletary and his ilk were just thinking ahead to some time in some future era that would see the likes of the ACLU and Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

Clearly, the explicit lack of a religious in the Constitution was considered controversial at the time, particularly when many state constitutions contained religious requirements to hold office. Therefore, it is interesting to read what supporters of ratification said in defense of the language in Article VI.

The quotes I cite below come from this website, which features the debates from the Massachusetts convention. Several of the defenders of the Article VI language were themselves pastors and ministers and some of their arguments were couched in Christian language, which may have assuaged the fears of some that the Constitution would open up the floodgates to having the country governed by atheists and pagans.

One of the defenders of the Article VI language was Daniel Shute, a Congregationalist minister. Below are his remarks reproduced in full, with portions underlined and bolded by me for emphasis.

Mr. President, to object to the latter part of the paragraph under consideration, which excludes a religious test, is, I am sensible, very popular; for the most of men, somehow, are rigidly tenacious of their own sentiments in religion, and disposed to impose them upon others as the standard of truth. If, in my sentiments upon the point in view, I should differ from some in this honorable body, I only wish from them the exercise of that candor, with which true religion is adapted to inspire the honest and well-disposed mind.

To establish a religious test as a qualification for offices in the proposed federal Constitution, it appears to me, sir, would be attended with injurious consequences to some individuals, and with no advantage to the whole.

By the injurious consequences to individuals, I mean, that some, who, in every other respect, are qualified to fill some important post in government, will be excluded by their not being able to stand the religious test; which I take to be a privation of part of their civil rights.

Nor is there to me any conceivable advantage, sir, that would result to the whole from such a test. Unprincipled and dishonest men will not hesitate to subscribe to any thing that may open the way for their advancement, and put them into a situation the better to execute their base and iniquitous designs. Honest men alone, therefore, however well qualified to serve the public, would be excluded by it, and their country be deprived of the benefit of their abilities.

In this great and extensive empire, there is, and will be, a great variety of sentiments in religion among its inhabitants. Upon the plan of a religious test, the question, I think, must be, Who shall be excluded from national trusts? Whatever answer bigotry may suggest, the dictates of candor and equity, I conceive, will be, None.

Far from limiting my charity and confidence to men of my own denomination in religion, I suppose, and I believe, sir, that there are worthy characters among men of every denomination — among the Quakers, the Baptists, the Church of England, the Papists; and even among those who have no other guide, in the way to virtue and heaven, than the dictates of natural religion.

I must therefore think, sir, that the proposed plan of government, in this particular, is wisely constructed; that, as all have an equal claim to the blessings of the government under which they live, and which they support, so none should be excluded from them for being of any particular denomination in religion.

The presumption is, that the eyes of the people will be upon the faithful in the land; and, from a regard to their own safety, they will choose for their rulers men of known abilities, of known probity, of good moral characters. The apostle Peter tells us that God is no respecter of persons, but, in every nation, he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him. And I know of no reason why men of such a character, in a community of whatever denomination in religion, caeteris paribus, with other suitable qualifications, should not be acceptable to the people, and why they may not be employed by them with safety and advantage in the important offices of government. The exclusion of a religious test in the proposed Constitution, therefore, clearly appears to me, sir, to be in favor of its adoption.

Another minister who spoke in defense of Article VI was Samuel Phillips Payson, who also couched his defense in religious terms, and who also provided me with the title for this post.

Mr. President, after what has been observed, relating to a religious test, by gentlemen of acknowledged abilities, I did not expect that it would again be mentioned, as an objection to the proposed Constitution, that such a test was not required as a qualification for office. Such were the abilities and integrity of the gentlemen who constructed the Constitution, as not to admit of the presumption, that they would have betrayed so much vanity as to attempt to erect bulwarks and barriers to the throne of God. Relying on the candor of this Convention, I shall take the liberty to express my sentiments on the nature of a religious test, and shall endeavor to do it in such propositions as will meet the approbation of every mind.

The great object of religion being God supreme, and the seat of religion in man being the heart or conscience, i. e., the reason God has given us, employed on our moral actions, in their most important consequences, as related to the tribunal of God, hence I infer that God alone is the God of the conscience, and, consequently, attempts to erect human tribunals for the consciences of men are impious encroachments upon the prerogatives of God. Upon these principles, had there been a religious test as a qualification for office, it would, in my opinion, have been a great blemish upon the instrument.

A third religious defender of the Article VI language in the debates was a Baptist preacher named Isaac Backus.

Mr. President, I have said very little in this honorable Convention; but I now beg leave to offer a few thoughts upon some points in the Constitution proposed to us, and I shall begin with the exclusion of any religious test. Many appear to be much concerned about it; but nothing is more evident, both in reason and the Holy Scriptures, than that religion is ever a matter between God and individuals; and, therefore, no man or men can impose any religious test, without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ministers first assumed this power under the Christian name; and then Constantine approved of the practice, when he adopted the profession of Christianity, as an engine of state policy. And let the history of all nations be searched from that day to this, and it will appear that the imposing of religious tests hath been the greatest engine of tyranny in the world. And I rejoice to see so many gentlemen, who are now giving in their rights of conscience in this great and important matter. Some serious minds discover a concern lest, if all religious tests should be excluded, the Congress would hereafter establish Popery, or some other tyrannical way of worship. But it is most certain that no such way of worship can be established without any religious test.

Another prominent defender of Article VI was Theophilus Parsons. Parsons was a jurist, not a clergyman, though his father was, so Parsons' rhetoric was also couched in Christian terms.

It has been objected that the Constitution provides no religious test by oath, and we may have in power unprincipled men, atheists and pagans. No man can wish more ardently than I do that all our public offices may be filled by men who fear God and hate wickedness; but it must remain with the electors to give the government this security. An oath will not do it. Will an unprincipled man be entangled by an oath? Will an atheist or a pagan dread the vengeance of the Christian's God, a being, in his opinion, the creature of fancy and credulity? It is a solecism in expression. No man is so illiberal as to wish the confining places of honor or profit to any one sect of Christians; but what security is it to government, that every public officer shall swear that he is a Christian? For what will then be called Christianity? One man will declare that the Christian religion is only an illumination of natural religion, and that he is a Christian; another Christian will assert that all men must be happy hereafter in spite of themselves; a third Christian reverses the image, and declares that, let a man do all he can, he will certainly be punished in another world; and a fourth will tell us that, if a man use any force for the common defence, he violates every principle of Christianity. Sir, the only evidence we can have of the sincerity of a man's religion is a good life; and I trust that such evidence will be required of every candidate by every elector. That man who acts an honest part to his neighbor, will, most probably, conduct honorably towards the public.

It should be clear that the prohibition of a religious test in the Constitution was not put there because the drafters and the supporters of the document at the time specifically intended for atheists to be allowed to serve in public office. Rather, as the defenders of Article VI spoke above, a religious test would not serve as an effective bar to dishonest men while potentially keeping out honest and capable ones, and that such a test would cause disputes about which was the proper form of Christianity in a country filled with diverse denominations and could turn the country on the path to tyranny. Still, the explicit language in Article VI forbidding a religious test for public office, as well as the lack of any language that requires a candidate to profess any religion at all, does create a space for atheists to be eligible for public office in the United States. And for that, those of us who are atheists are indebted to those religious supporters of ratification of the Constitution who played a vital part in creating that space.

The Bahamas Trip - July 26 and 28, 2011 - Drift Diving

2011-12-10T12:42:00.000-05:00

In addition to getting to do a shark dive, I also got to do another kind of dive I had never done before, a drift dive. Well, two of them, actually.

The first drift dive was on July 26 at a site called Wax Cut Drift between Normans Cay and Shroud Cay in the Exumas.

As I listened to divemaster Ian's briefing about the dive, I felt my stomach getting knotted.   Having never participated in a drift dive before, his description of the dive seemed rather complex and intimidating to me.   We would all have to position ourselves on the dive deck so that all of us could enter the water within a matter of a few seconds. It would be a negative entry, which meant that there could be no air in our bcd vests.   That means as soon as we dove into the water, we had to submerge instantly and follow Ian, who would be at the head of our column. Andy would be at the rear of the column. First Mate John would be in the Magick and meet us all when we gathered at the end of the dive. One or two of the other crew members would be in a dinghy in case any of us required rescuing. When we reached the end of the dive, Ian would be holding a rope that we all had to grab on to, which would then be attached to the Magick for towing us all back to the Aquacat.

Soaking all of this in, I started having serious reservations about doing the dive. Remembering my bad experience with a strong current at Closemon Reef on the first day, I was leery of drifting away from the main group and not being able to get back to them.   Then again, I thought, I had come here for new experiences, and this would definitely be a new and exciting experience.

I was feeling a bit tense as I donned my gear in anticipation of the dive.   We all started to take up our positions so that we would be ready to jump into the water when the word was given. Some of the divers walked down to the two dive platforms while the rest of us would jump off the dive deck on either side of the boat, which was the only way possible to accommodate the most number of divers at once.

Then came the announcement for all divers to dive (I must confess, I don't remember the exact words) and in we went.   As I splashed into the water, I exhaled steadily so that my body would begin its descent. Once I got about 15 or 20 feet down, I looked around me to see where everyone else was heading and started following, continuing my descent.   I didn't really have to worry about which way to go, because the current just pushed me along. I ended up making my way close to the front of the group so that Ian the divemaster was in my sights. Otherwise, it was just a matter of letting the current take you along for the ride.

I didn't take my camera for this dive, because I was worried the seal might break during entry. In a normal dive, you enter the water and then a crewmember would hand your camera to you. Too bad, because this dive presented some great photo opportunities.

At one point during the dive, I was looking to my right for marine life and just taking in the scenery. Then I turned to my life, and nearly did a double-take. Several feet to my left was Nick, the Filipino kid, riding on a plastic horse. I almost shot my regulator out of my mouth from laughter. I was like "Where did he get that from?"   I found out after the dive that one of the crew had found the plastic horse and they would bring it on the drift dives to let divers take turns riding it.

Another interesting sight on the dive that would have made for a great picture was this huge brain coral about the size of an automobile. It had these gashes and cuts in just the right places to give it the appearance of a giant jack-o-lantern.

The dive proceeded smoothly to plan, and when we got to the end point, we surfaced, holding on to Ian's line for the tow back to the Aquacat. It was a really cool dive and I realized that my earlier nervousness about it was totally unfounded.

The drift dive for the Washing Machine on the 28th proceeded according to the same plan as Wax Cut Drift, with as many divers as possible making a simultaneous negative entry into the water, with the remainder following immediately afterwards.

I was really looking forward to this dive, which is one of the more famous dives in the Bahamas.   The site is located between Highborne Cay and Long Cay in the Exumas. For those of you who have never heard of it, the Washing Machine is what they call an area where, to quote from the Aquacat website, "the strong incoming tide of up to 6 mph takes scuba divers thru a narrow cut where water drops off a ledge and then makes a sharp bend to the left. This causes the water to swirl like the water in a washing machine." Divers who enter the Washing Machine can find themselves tossed and spun around. I really wanted to experience that!

As the current pulled us along, I kept anticipating that over the next drop would be the Washing Machine and I would feel the tossing and the spinning. And I waited and waited and waited. Nothing. I looked at Tara and Jeff and shrugged. Where was this Washing Machine. And then the dive was over. It wasn't without its excitement though. I had a collision with Martha that scared the bejesus out of her. When we were back on the boat, I apologized profusely to her, but she was very understanding.   It turned out that a lot of the divers on the dive didn't get the Washing Machine experience. In fact, I think Guy and Tony were the only ones who reported getting tossed around. All in all, it was a disappointing dive, though from what I understand, the experience can be inconsistent. It's one of those YMMV things.

To give you an idea of what the Washing Machine can be like, here's a video I found on Youtube for your viewing pleasure.

An Absurd Superstition

2011-12-02T22:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, after a dearth of posting, it's time to get my groove back.

I'm currently reading Ratification: The People Debate The Constitution, 1787-1788 by Pauline Maier. It is a very dense, well researched book about the process of debating and ratifying the Constitution that runs over 470 pages, excluding the end notes.

While it is a very worthwhile story in its own right, the book caught my attention several months ago while trolling for bargains at Borders before it closed its doors because I wanted to see if it offered any revealing insights into what degree, if any, overt Christian or Biblical beliefs played in the debate over the Constitution.

So far, I haven't seen any reference in Maier's book to any of the Founders crediting God in crafting the Supreme Law of the Land. On the other hand, I did find the following passage amusing. It's on page 102, where Maier writes about the ratifying convention in Pennsylvania.

"In its opening days, the convention rejected a suggestion by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a somewhat quixotic Philadelphian and one of the country's best trained physicians, that it appoint a minister to open its business with prayer. Several delegates objected: Considering the religious diversity of the state, they argued, any such appointment would offend some people. Moreover, neither the Pennsylvania legislature nor the convention that had drafted the state constitution had begun with prayer. When Rush suggested that was why the state had ever since been beset with divisions, [John] Smilie dismissed the doctor's theory as an 'absurd superstition.' That ended that."

If one took pseudo-historians like David Barton at their word, one would labor under the impression that every public undertaking in early America was suffused with prayers and overt religiosity. The bitch slap that Benjamin Rush received when he pushed to have the convention open with a prayer led by a minister shows that this was not necessarily the case.

And as I showed in this post, when the governor of South Carolina issued an overtly Christian Thanksgiving Day proclamation in 1844, he provoked the ire of the Jewish community of Charleston. This all took place decades, well over a century actually, before there were organizations like the ACLU and Americans United championing the separation of church and state.

The Belated Obligatory Five Year Anniversary Post

2011-11-30T21:48:00.000-05:00

The other day I realize that the five year anniversary of Exercise in Futility had passed about two months ago. My blogging activities have lagged so much of late that I didn't even take notice of the milestone at the time. Well, anyway, there it is. It's been a busy November for me, but I had to do at least one post for the month. See you all in December!

Just Like The Alamo, If All Of The Mexicans Were Homos Who Were Trying to Get Married

2011-10-22T21:32:00.000-04:00

While most of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates are a sorry lot, if I had to pick the most pathetic of the bunch, it would have to be former Senator Rick Santorum. Like a Ming loyalist general fighting on decades after the Manchus conquered China, he continues on with his quixotic campaign to keep gays from getting married or serving in the military.

In an interview with a Shane Vander Hart of Caffeinated Thoughts, Santorum was asked by Vander Hart what some of the hills are that he would die on.

"The battle we're engaged in right now is same sex marriage, ultimately that is the very foundation of our country, the family, what the family structure is going to look like," Santorum explained. "I'll die on that hill." (Underlined for emphasis)

While one could argue that Santorum's use of such dramatic language was due to the way Vander Hart framed the discussion, Santorum has a history of being a drama queen when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. This post was inspired by a letter I received in the mail a couple of years ago from the National Organization for Marriage, either written by or for Santorum and signed by him.

Santorum also seems overly concerned with people who like to have sex, and (shudders!) use contraception so that the act does not result in pregnancy!

"One of the things that I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It's not OK because it's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Santorum continued: "They're supposed to be within marriage. They are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal but also procreative, and that's the perfect way a sexual union should happen. When we take any part of that out, we diminish the act. If we take one part out, it's not for the purposes of procreation, it's not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women. So, why can't you take other parts of that out? And then all of the sudden it becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure, and that's certainly a part of it, and it's an important part, don't get me wrong. But there is a lot of things we do for pleasure and this is special and it needs to be seen as special."

Oh? And how are things "supposed to be" Ricky boy? Is he seriously saying that my wife and I, who have two children and do not intend to have anymore (I'm 42 and she's 48), should never have sex again for the rest of our lives? For us, sex is simply all about pleasure, and why should it be about anything else? And that is what makes it "special" for us.

Ricky, to borrow a line from the Robin Williams movie 'Good Morning Vietnam', "you're in more dire need of a blowjob than any white man in history."

h/t: Crooks and Liars.

A Quiet Voice on the Margins

2011-10-18T13:04:00.000-04:00

In today's edition of The New York Times, there is an op-ed by two evangelical Christians, Karl W. Giberson, a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens, an associate professor of history, titled "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason."

Giberson and Stephens rebuke the bulk of the crop of the Republican presidential candidates for being "a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism."

They make an important point that "evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced."

The two professors also rightly add that "Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll… recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society."

Theirs are voices that definitely need to be heard more by fellow evangelicals. But alas, Giberson and Stephens can't resist taking a backhanded swipe at atheists by declaring that "even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins."

I wish Christians would make up their minds about us. We're either a tiny, insignificant minority to be ignored, or we are a threat to the American way of life. Of course, the truth is, we're neither. We should not be ignored, nor are we trying to destroy the United States. We are for the most part patriotic Americans who simply believe that belief should not be elevated over nonbelief in public life.

The End of the World Is Near

2011-10-17T21:29:00.000-04:00

We atheist bloggers had a lot of fun last spring with the publicity surrounding Harold Camping's prediction that May 21, 2011 would be Judgment Day. As I wrote in several posts on my blog, I personally witnessed a number of people in New York City handing out pamphlets or holding up signs proclaiming the imminent doom of those of us who refused to repent.

Of course, Camping's dire prognostications did not come true that day. Mostly forgotten is that Camping also warned us that the actual end of the world would not occur until October 21, 2011, which is this Friday. The God of the Bible, cruel bastard that he is, couldn't hold out until Monday the 24th so that we could all have one last weekend of fun and decadence. I still have the pamphlet I found many months ago, which confidently declares that:

"On October 21, 2011, God will completely destroy this creation and all of the people who never experienced the salvation of Jesus Christ along with it. The awful payment for their sinful rebellion against God will be completed by the loss of everlasting life. On October 21, 2011, all of these poor people will cease to exist from that point forward."

Tellingly, I don't see any of the street corner doomsters in New York City warning us about the approaching end of the world. I wonder how many of them still hold out hope that the world will indeed end this Friday, even if they dare not express it because they have retained a small sliver of awareness that tells them "I don't want to look like a fool in public."

As for Camping's Family Radio website, all references to Judgment Day and the End of the World appear to have been scrubbed. On this page, there's even mention of a Special Promotion from October 17 through October 24.

That being said, Camping himself is apparently still sticking to his guns. According to this article,
"Camping recently said in a statement, 'We can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011.'"

Yeah, whatever. See you all on the 22nd.

Two Decades of Atheism

2011-10-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

A lot of atheists who were formerly religious can probably recall the moment when they came to that inescapable conclusion that "I guess I am an atheist." Likewise, it also holds true for many people who embrace a particular religious faith that they remember when they made the decision to give their hearst and souls to their beliefs.

Perhaps I am atypical in that I really don't remember the day I realized that I no longer believed in any divine being that watched over us and took a personal notice or interest in our lives. I don't know if it was due to a book or something else I may have read, or that I had been through a life changing experience. Whatever it was is lost in the mists of time. All I remember was that it was the final step in a journey that had seen me abandon Catholicism while still retaining belief in a personal god that I could communicate with, until I realized that there was nobody there and my religious beliefs had all along been just a way to provide myself with a sense of purpose and importance.

What I do remember is that I had become an atheist sometime in the year 1991. That means I have been an atheist for approximately 20 years, or nearly half of my 42 years spent thus far on this Earth, and almost my entire adult life. It has been long enough that I can look back on the past two decades with a long term perspective.

Intellectually, becoming an atheist was a very liberating experience for me. I was no longer under the rule of a watchful deity that expected me to go to church once a week, refrain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent or cared if I masturbated once in a while. I was no longer a slave to an overseer who existed only in my imagination, and I was overjoyed at the realization that I was in charge of my life. I did not have a crisis of morals either. Rejecting Christianity or my own personal religious beliefs that had succeeded it did not make me want to lie, cheat, steal or engage in other terrible things. Instead, giving up religion was like taking the training wheels off of a bicycle.

I would be mistaken though if I were to say that my life was all peaches and cream once I became an atheist. The early 90's were pretty good to me, but during the mid-90's I went through a rough period in my life. For a while, it seemed hard to believe that I would ever get out of the emotional ditch I had landed in. But throughout it all, I never quite lost a dogged optimism that I had the power to make my life better.

By the late 90's, my life improved markedly. I met and married the love of my life, I made a career move that would see me making a good salary, my wife and I purchased a house, and we had two beautiful, healthy children together. I achieved things that only a few years early seemed unattainable.

I did have a serious personal crisis for a few months about six years ago where I feared I would lose everything I cherished. Some people in my place, in a time of extreme personal distress, might have returned to the refuge of religion, and when the crisis inevitably passed, would have seen it as proof that it was all due to them crawling back on their hands and knees to God and seeking divine aid. I, on the other hand, did none of that. From the moment I became an atheist, never at any time where I felt any personal despair did I consider turning to religion for aid and solace. I realized that the only thing I had any control over was how I behaved and things would turn out either well or badly regardless of whether I prayed to a god or not. I passed through my great crisis, never wavering in my atheism, and I emerged wiser and stronger than before.

Looking at my life now, I have to say that I think I have it pretty good and consider myself to be rather fortunate. Of course, my life isn't perfect, and there are some things that I wish could be different or that there are some personal changes I could make. Then again, don't most people feel that way about themselves? Besides, while I may be 42, I still have many years left to look forward to and experiences to have. In the last few years, I have taken up scuba diving and have taken part in a shark feeding dive, and even crazier still, I did a tandem sky dive.

I'm sure there are some theists, Christians in particular, who would say to me "Tommy, sure you may think you have a good life now, but you are missing out on so much by not seeking a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and you are turning your back on the chance for eternal life."

But when you live the life of a satisfied atheist, that's the only thing left up their sleeve, isn't it? "You better believe or before you know it you'll be dead and then it will be too late!"

One of my favorite atheist bloggers, The Jolly Nihilist, in his most recent post, wrote:

"Even a staunch atheist such as me—one who, as an evidentialist, has tried to look at the evidence objectively and, in so doing, has had his non-belief repeatedly reaffirmed—is not immune to occasional frightful thoughts of being consigned to an eternity of agonizing punishment in hellfire."

Maybe it is because I have been an atheist for twice as long as Jolly, I never even consider the possibility that I will suffer for an eternity in the afterlife if I die without believing that the creator of a universe filled with billions of galaxies impregnated a virgin teenage girl in the Galilee a couple of thousand years ago. To be honest, I don't know if everything contained in this universe is the product of some divine intelligence. But if it is, then I have the feeling such a being won't be disappointed or upset that I did not believe in its existence or cringe in fear of it. Any being powerful and intelligent to create so much is surely secure enough with itself that it won't be troubled by such trivial things.

God's Got a Lot of Buffers

2011-10-01T22:11:00.001-04:00

Fans of the movie The Godfather Part II will no doubt recall the scene that inspired the title above.

One of the things about really devout Catholics is that they don't just pray to God. They are constantly calling on the Virgin Mary (also frequently referred to as Our Lady), or Saint This, That or The Other One to intercede with God on their behalf. There are a lot of saints in Catholicism. Heck, there's even a Patron Saint of Artillery.

One of my wife's cousins, who can hardly seem to write about anything on Facebook except religious nonsense (and who I suspect is not exactly playing with a full deck), is really into Padre Pio and promoted Pio as someone to whom directing intercessory prayers could really get some results.

So how does this intercessory prayer thing work? According to the New Advent web site, "The Catholic doctrine of intercession and invocation is set forth by the Council of Trent."

Here is what the Council had to say about intercessory prayer:

"the saints who reign together with Christ offer up their own prayers to God for men. It is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers, aid, and help for obtaining benefits from God, through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, Who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour.

Prayer is offered to a person in two ways: one as though to be granted by himself, another as to be obtained through him. In the first way we pray to God alone, because all our prayers ought to be directed to obtaining grace and glory which God alone gives, according to those words of the Psalm (lxxxiii, 12): 'The Lord will give grace and glory.' But in the second way we pray to the holy angels and to men not that God may learn our petition through them, but that by their prayers and merits our prayers may be efficacious."

So, God is more likely to answer the prayers of Timmy's family to cure his cancer if the family pleads to scores of saints, who in turn will give the almighty their hearty recommendation? That sounds exactly like some autocratic monarch who only answers the appeals of his subjects if some influential minister at court has the monarch's ear.

I also came across a lot of this intercessory prayer stuff while reading the Spiritual Diaries of Ignatius of Loyola, or Iggy for short. Take this entry from February 15, 1544:

"Next on preparing to leave for mass, as I began to pray, I could feel, and was shown, our Lady, also how great had been my fault the previous day: I felt moved within and wept, for I seemed to be putting Our Lady to shame in having her intercede for me so often, because of my many failing. So much so that Our Lady hid from me and I found no devotion in her or higher than her. A little later, when I sought to go higher, as I could not find Our Lady (maybe she was hiding out in the Lady's Room?) a mighty impulse to weep and sob gripped me (Oh fuck! There he goes again with the weeping!) and I seemed to see or feel that the Heavenly Father showed Himself propitious and kind - to the point of making clear to me that he would be pleased if Our Lady, whom I could not see, would intercede."

On February 18, it got even more convoluted:

"A little later I wondered where I should begin and it occurred to me that it might be with all the Saints, putting my cause in their hands, so that they might pray to Our Lady and Her Son to be intercessors on my half before the Blessed Trinity."

In other words, Iggy wanted the saints to convince the Virgin Mary and Jesus to plead his cause to the Trinity. Talk about sending it up the chain of command. But the part that gets me is that Jesus is supposed to be one third of the Trinity, so isn't that like asking Jesus to plead to himself? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see why some people would find Protestantism more appealing, because it cut out the middleman, in this case, the Catholic Church and its legions of saints hanging around that Versailles in the sky.

Way back when I was a believing Catholic more than two decades ago, I don't recall ever praying to saints or even the Virgin Mary. Though I knew about some of the different saints, I never really gave it much consideration. When I prayed, which was often, I prayed to God only. Maybe that's why my prayers were never answered!

The Repeal of DADT

2011-09-28T22:45:00.001-04:00

On September 20, 2011, the United States military officially ended its policy of Don't Ask Don't Tell, aka DADT. Secretary of Defense Leon Pannetta hailed the change, declaring "Thanks to this change, we move closer to achieving the goal that is at the foundation of American values -- equality and dignity for all.”

Needless to say, not everyone in the United States shared Pannetta's positive viewpoint.

The "Family" Research Council (yes, the quotes are deliberate on my part) decried the policy change, concluding that President Obama "is more interested in appeasing sexual revolutionaries than in fighting America's enemies." Yes, the same President Obama who ordered the raid on the compound in Pakistan that ended the life of Osama bin Laden and who has overseen a policy of increased drone strikes in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that has killed so many Taliban is really not interested in fighting America's enemies. Right.

Hopeless Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, in a recent Republican candidates debate that saw several audience members boo a gay soldier serving in Iraq, stated in response to the soldier's question that he would reinstate DADT if elected. Santorum affirmed his belief that "Any type of sexual activity has no place in the military."

I wonder if Ricky boy ever read Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down, which is about the raid carried out in Mogadishu, Somalia that saw two Black Hawk helicopters shot down and the US Army Rangers and members of Delta Force who found themselves surrounded and under fire for the better part of a day. Bowden describes what life was like for the servicemen stationed in Somalia prior to the raid.

"The worst thing about hangar life, of course, was the lack of women...There was plenty of porn around, of course, and many of the Rangers were humorously casual about masturbation. Most were discreet about it, but some had adopted a sort of crude defiance, standing up next to their cot to announce 'I'm going to the port-o-pot to fuckin' jack off!' Specialist John Collett, a SAW gunner with absolutely no shame about such matters...claimed to have gotten a 'harness jack,' that is, to have masturbated hanging from a parachute harness."

Given the Catholic Church's position on masturbation, and Ricky being a good Catholic boy and all, I'm sure he would be mortified to know that some of our elite soldiers engaged in a form of sexual activity in a combat area. Maybe the mission in Somalia went awry because God was punishing our soldiers for jacking off.

My favorite over-the-top wailing about the repeal of DADT comes from Washington state's resident Christian wingnut Ron Boehme, who I've mentioned before in this blog here and here.

Boehme rants:

"December 18, 2010 was a sad day for the cause of liberty. The United States Senate voted 65-31 to rescind the seventeen-year "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) policy in the American forces. On the heels of a 250-175 vote in the House of Representatives, largely along party lines, homosexuality is now "free" to openly flourish in the barracks or foxhole.

By this infamous vote, The United States government now openly condones and encourages homosexual behavior among our fighting men and women. The last bastion of discipline and moral order in the United States has been breached, not by an invading army, but by a destructive Lame Duck Congress."

He adds, with typical hyperbole, "This is a sad day for real liberty--which is freedom from sin." (Italics in the original).

The reason why I used the picture of Corporal Klinger from M*A*S*H at the top of this post is because when it comes to gays serving in the military, I think that is exactly what the homophobe opponents of DADT repeal picture when they claim that homosexuality will "flourish in the barracks." It seems beyond their realm of comprehension that a gay man can serve in the military without walking around with a boner and grabbing the asses of the manly heterosexual and devout Christian men in his barracks.

Boehme, Santorum and their ilk are full of shit because it was not what gay soldiers were doing in the barracks or in combat or other service that caused them to be discharged from the military but because of what they did or were thought to do in their private life.

And it is disingenous of Boehme to invoke "freedom from sin" in opposing the repeal of DADT, because the last time I checked, one of the tenets of Christianity is that everyone is a sinner. That includes every heterosexual man or woman serving in the military. Yes, for some reason, sexual orientation, not behavior, mind you, but orientation, is the one sin that should disqualify a person from serving in the United States armed forces, regardless of that person's talents or abilities.

While the supposedly Gawd fearin' people like Santorum and Boehme are all hot and bothered about the sin of gayness being inserted into the military, there is some actual sinning going on being perpetrated by heterosexuals in the military.

While searching the Department of Defense web site for the press release I linked to above about the repeal of DADT, I came across this interesting press release about addressing domestic violence in the military.

The restricted reporting option has been in place since 2006, and is intended to offer domestic violence victims a chance to seek help despite fears they might feel based on their situation, Robertson said.

“A lot of times, victims don’t want to come forward -- they’re afraid to come forward,” she added.

Often in such cases, Robertson said, abuse has escalated over time, and victims –- especially military spouses -- may fear loss of finances, housing and family security. Restricted reporting offers them a safe avenue to help, she added.

This article from the July/August 2005 issue of Mother Jones shines a spotlight on the military's domestic violence problem up to that time.

The article begins with the story of John Corcoran, who "arrived at his wife’s house and went after 30-year-old Michele with a gun, firing at her as she fled to a neighbor’s. (She was wounded but survived.) He shot and wounded another Fort Bragg soldier who was in the house and then shot and killed himself—all while his seven-month-old daughter lay in another room."

"He joins a band of brothers. Corcoran’s is the 10th fatality in a slew of domestic violence homicides involving Fort Bragg soldiers since 2002; in one six-week spree four Army wives were murdered by their husbands or ex-husbands. Including nonfatal incidents, there were 832 victims of domestic violence between 2002 and 2004 at Fort Bragg alone, according to Army figures."

Maybe Boehme doesn't consider domestic violence to be a sin, because the wife is supposed to submit to the husband, right? How does he feel about sexual assault then? From the CBS article in the foregoing link:

"Wendy’s experience is not unusual. Since 2002, the Miles Foundation, a private non-profit that tracks sexual assault within the armed forces, has received nearly 1,200 confidential reports of sexual assaults in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Those reports have increased as much as 30 percent a year.

Part of the problem for the increase, critics say, is the quality of today's recruit.

The military is increasingly issuing something called "moral waivers," so they can enlist military personnel with felony convictions for crimes like rape and sexual assault.

“We don’t enlist convicted rapists in the armed forces of the United States,” said Michael Dominguez, the principal under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. “If there’s a consensus 'that kid needs a second chance, I think he’s got it in him to be a solider,’ then they’ll let him into the armed forces.”

In fact, CBS News has learned that both the Army and Marine Corps did issue a number of "moral waivers" to enlistees with felony convictions for rape and sexual assault - something not acknowledged in a follow-up letter from Dominguez."

The Religious Right likes to bellow about the immorality of allowing gays to serve in the military, while being eerily quiet about the problems of domestic violence, sexual harrassment of female service members and the issuing of "moral waivers" to enlistees and recruits. It seems plainly apparent that for these Christian culture warriors, some sins are more equal than others.

Ignatius the Weeper

2011-09-25T23:38:00.000-04:00

For about six months now I have been reading many written works from the 16th century, including Praise of Folly by Erasmus, Utopia by Thomas More, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, and The Discourses by Machiavelli.

I have also made it a point to read explicitly religious works written during the period and at present I am reading the Penguin Classics edition of the Personal Writings of Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius founded The Society of Jesus, better known to us today as The Jesuits. The Jesuits played an important role in the Catholic Church's Counter-Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century.

But back to Ignatius himself. At present, I have only read about 84 pages in a book that is some 360 pages. Even so, from what I have read so far, Ignatius cried a lot. He cried more than Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner. He may have cried more than any other person in history. The tears of Ignatius could have filled buckets.

To get an idea of the frequency of Ignatius' weeping, one need only read his Spiritual Diary. To provide some context, the Spiritual Diary was written during a period when Ignatius was agonizing over whether or not The Society of Jesus should have a fixed income for its churches. The issue must have caused him a tremendous amount of grief and turmoil, because his eyes became a veritable Niagara Falls of tears. Let the crying begin:

February 5, 1544: "Great devotion before, during and after mass, with tears so abundant that my eyes ached."

Febrary 6: "Devotion, not without tears, before and during mass, and more inclined toward complete poverty."

February 7: "Very great devotion and tears before mass."

February 8: "After experiencing remarkable devotion and tears while I prayed, from preparing for mass and during mass very great devotion, also tears; only at times could I retain the power of speech."

February 10: "On reconsidering the choices, and on making the offering of complete poverty, I felt great devotion, not without tears." Apparently Ignatius didn't cry on February 9, because he makes no mention of it in his entry for that day. Or maybe he had just exhausted his supply of tears.

February 11: Lots of crying on this day, of which I quote only a portion: "Then receiving greater devotion and losing all desire to consider the question any longer, with tears and sobs I made, on my knees, the offering of complete poverty to the Father; and so many were the tears running down my face, and such the sobs that I could hardly get up, so great was the devotion and grace that I was receiving. Finally I did rise though even then the devotion and the sobs continued."

February 13: "Then I experienced very great devotion, and many most intense tears, not only during prayer but while I vested; I sobbed and as I could feel the Mother and Son to be interceding for me, I felt a complete security that the Eternal Father would restore me to my former state. Later, before, during and after mass, greatly increased devotion and a great abundance of tears."

February 14: "When I prepared to leave the room, not without tears and interior impulses. Then before, during and after mass, very copious tears, devotion, great sobs - so great that I often could not keep the power of speech for long before losing it again."

And on it goes, day after day after day. I can only imagine some of the people in the pews during his masses rolling their eyes and muttering "Oh for fuck's sake, there he goes again!"

There's a great line from the television series House, "Isn't it interesting that religious behavior is so close to being crazy we can't tell it apart?" Outside of the context of intense religious devotion, profuse crying on an almost daily basis would be considered crazy or bizarre by most people. So, why should intense religious devotion get a pass?

From the Reminisces, I offer this last excerpt:

"He used to have great devotion to the Most Holy Trinity, and so used to pray each day to the three persons separately. And as he was also praying to the Most Holy Trinity as such, a thought used to occur to him: how was he making four prayers to the Trinity? But this thought troubled him little or not at all, as something of little importance. And, one day, while praying the office of Our Lady on the steps of the above-mentioned monastery, his understanding began to be raised up, in that he was seeing the Most Holy Trinity in the form of three keys on a keyboard, and this with so many tears and so many sobs that he could not control himself. And on walking that morning in a procession which was leaving from there, at no point could he restrain his tears until the mealtime, nor after the meal could he stop talking, only about the Most Holty Trinity, and this with many comparisons, a great variety of them, as well as much relish and consolation, in such a way that the impression remained with him for the whole of his life, and he feels great devotion when praying to the Most Holy Trinity."

The Bahamas Trip - Day 4 - July 27, 2011 - An Atheist In Shark Infested Waters

2011-09-20T22:20:00.000-04:00

Wednesday started off on a rather frustrating note. We were diving at a site called Shroud Wall located off of Shroud Cay at the northern end of the Exumas Land and Sea Park. As usual, I buddied up with Craig.

After making our entry, we proceeded along the port side of the Aqua Cat to make for the mooring line. I was ahead of Craig, keeping a look out for the mooring line. The visibility at this site was very poor, so I ascended close to the surface so that I would have a better chance of spotting the mooring line. At one point, I looked behind me and saw Craig about 20 feet below and behind me. Moments later I could see the mooring line and headed towards it to guide my way down to the mooring block. When I reached the line, I looked behind and below me but did not see Craig, who was usually easy to spot with his yellow shirt.

As I began my descent, I looked down in the direction of where the mooring block was and in the cloudy water could make out several divers nearing the block, though I could not determine who they were. I thought one of them might be Craig and figured he would wait for me. But as I descended towards the block, there were no divers there.

"No problem," I thought to myself. "I'll just wait here for a couple of minutes and I'm sure he'll show up." So I waited. And waited. And waited, wondering what I should do next.

Since the reef wall was just a few feet further away, I thought maybe Craig had gone ahead to the wall. So I decided to make my way over to the reef wall and take a peek. When I got there, I could make out a couple of divers headed away from me along the wall. While I couldn't tell who they were, I knew Craig wouldn't have just gone off without me, so I decided to head back to the mooring block. But when I got there, there was still no sign of him. For a moment, I considered aborting the dive and surfacing to see if anything might have happened to him. I decided against it and thought I would head back to the wall and do some sightseeing.

Because I was alone, I didn't venture far along the wall. I tried to make a careful note of useful landmarks so that I could find my way back to the mooring block. Before I got there, to my surprise and relief I encountered Craig, along with another diver, Tagi. Tagi seemed to be making gestures towards me that I interpreted as "What the hell happened to you?" I didn't reply, but if I could talk, I would have said "You know how long I waited at the mooring block by myself!" I signalled to Craig and Tagi that I was returning to the boat. I was still puzzled at that point what had happened to Craig, but was glad that at least he was not alone.

They headed for the reef wall while I continued on to look for the mooring block. Seconds turned into minutes, and to my growing concern, I could not find it, hampered as I was by the poor visibility. Still, I took comfort in knowing that I could not be far away from it and decided to make a slow ascent to the surface. If I couldn't find the line, I figured I would break the water not far from the Aqua Cat. Then, to my relief, I saw the mooring line at about 30' and headed straight towards it.

After Craig came back on board, he explained to me that he must have missed both me and the mooring line and that he had ended up surfacing at one point before finally finding the line and meeting up with Tagi. With the water as cloudy as it was, I could completely understand.

Rather than participating in the next dive, I decided to take my kids on a beach excursion. We landed near a quiet lagoon and I decided that it was a perfect place for them to try out their snorkel gear. The sand sloped gently into the water, enabling them to sit and put their gear on and then slowly ease into it by leaning forward and sticking their masked faces into the water. Andrew had some trouble at first getting water into his mask and snorkel, but I helped him adjust and then the next thing I know, he was off swimming around on his own. My daughter Kellyanne, on the other hand, was scared to go in and thought she saw urchins, so she stayed at the edge for the most part. I told her not to worry and to take her time getting used to breathing with her snorkel in the water. She started to gain some confidence and swam along the shallow edge when it was time to return to the Aqua Cat.

The next site, further south in the Exumas, was Amberjack Reef. Andy, the dive master for this dive, told us that this was the site where they used to do their shark feeding dives. And sure enough, as I was putting on my dive gear, I spotted a reef shark break the water alongside the boat. I teamed up with Craig again and as before, the plan was to head for the mooring block and do some exploring.

When we began our ascent, I saw that there was plenty of life to observe right under the boat. There were several reef sharks as well as a few Nassau Groupers lurking around. The water, in contrast to the Shroud Wall, was very clear.

After Craig and I reached the mooring block, we started making our way through the grooves between the coral formations, heading generally away from the bow of the Aqua Cat. As usual, I took point and would bang my tank or make hand gestures if I saw something that I thought Craig would want to take a picture of with his camera. With each formation, I tried to make note of some landmark that would help distinguish it from the others. For instance, the coral patch where the mooring block was had a barrel sponge on top of it.

In our previous dives, there would come a point where I felt Craig and I would go no further and I would gradually lead us back to our starting point. After one dive, Craig proclaimed that I was "an awesome navigator!" With this dive, after making a few twists and turns, crossing over an area of mostly sand and then hitting another coral formation, I got that feeling again that we should begin to head back to the mooring line. I looked at my gauge, which read around 1700 psi.

Things seemed to be progressing rather smoothly. We passed one formation that moments earlier I had dubbed "The Cactus" because it reminded me a little of a cactus. Duh! We crossed the sandy field again and started hitting the higher coral patches cut by grooves. Then I saw a coral formation with a mooring line rising from it. Then I saw Tagi, who was by himself avidly taking pictures with his camera. What a relief, I thought.

That feeling soon dissipated as I looked at the mooring line and saw that it came to an end about 15 or 20 feet above us. Also, I did not see the barrel sponge on top of the coral formation that I had remembered earlier. Something was wrong. I gestured to Craig to indicate my confusion. I remembered that Andy told us during his dive briefing that there was an old mooring block at the site. I took my best guess as to which direction I thought the boat was and motioned for Craig to follow me.

I kept a nervous eye on my gauge, which was now nearing 1,000 psi. We continued on for a few minutes and when the gauge was below 1,000 psi, I started to become very concerned. I motioned to Craig that I was going to surface and take a look for the Aqua Cat. When I surfaced, I saw it quite a distance away from us and wondered if my air supply would be sufficient to make it back. I descended again and motioned to Craig the direction of the boat and then I started kicking my legs as hard as I could. When my gauge got down to about 750 psi, I surfaced again. While we were a bit closer to the Aqua Cat, we had been heading in a direction that would have put us well behind it.

Again, I motioned to Craig, who was a few feet below the surface. This time, I didn't descend but decided upon a surface swim so that I could maintain eye contact with the Aqua Cat. Slowly, inexorably, I got closer to the boat, but the going was made difficult by the current. I decided that our best bet was to head for the Magick and grab on to the yellow rope that tied it to the back of the Aqua Cat.

I knew Craig was still behind me, but after a point, survival mode took over me, and I was more focused on myself. My air supply was continuing to deplete rapidly as I struggled against the current. My air had dropped to about 500 psi when I could finally see the yellow rope in the water. I kicked furiously, grunting loudly with each kick as I inched my way towards the rope. It started to feel like, in spite of my exertions, that I was stationary. Then when it was just several feet from my grasp, I looked down and to my right and saw a Caribbean Reef Shark slowly heading in my direction. While the picture at the top of this post was from a different dive, the angle of approach was about the same, only I was at the surface and the shark was about maybe at a depth of ten to twelve feet.

I didn't panic from the sight of the shark, because it appeared rather indifferent to my presence, but I remembered thinking, "It would really suck if he attacked me now, when I'm so close to the safety of the rope." My real concern was my air supply, which was approaching the 400 psi point. With a final effort, I reached out with my hands and grabbed the rope, which had seemed to tantalizingly beyond my grasp.

It was at that point that I thought about Craig again. He was a few years older than me and I knew if I was struggling, then he must be too. "What do I do know?" I asked myself. Part of me wanted to let go of the rope and swim back to him to guide him to the rope. Then I considered my own situation, exhausted and low on air. One of things that is taught in the Rescue Diver course is that when considering whether to assist another diver, make sure that you don't end up needing to be rescued yourself. Again, my desire for self-preservation kicked in, and I decided to get back to the Aqua Cat, where I could direct the crew to where Craig was. So, like my first dive at Closemon Reef, hand over hand I pulled myself along the rope until I got to the ladder and climbed up to the dive platform. I gasped to the crew member, can't remember which one it was, that we had gone to the wrong mooring line. I looked back in the direction where Craig was and saw that two crew members were already in a dinghy and on there way to pick him up. I felt doubly relieved, for Craig and for myself.

When I ascended the steps to the dive deck, I was greeted by my son Andrew, who told me excitedly, "Dad, I was snorkelling with the sharks!" While I was off on the dive, Andrew had asked if he could go snorkelling and Stacey, the only female crewmember on the boat, went in with him. I was very proud as well as very surprised at what my son had done. Generally, he tends to be timid and afraid to try new things. But for some reason he took to snorkelling in a big way. Stacey told me that when a shark swam near him, Andrew even extended his arm out in the direction of the shark, only to retract it as the shark drew closer.

However, even the news of my son's snorkelling feat failed to lift my spirits for long. After greeting Craig upon his safe return to the boat, I went back to my dive station and sat down with my head in my hands. I felt upset with myself for putting another diver, in addition to myself, in danger due to my failure to navigate properly back to the mooring line. Perhaps my earlier successes had me feeling a little cocky and I had overestimated my abilities. I sat there sulking for a few minutes and then went up to the sun deck, where Craig and his wife Sherri had gone to grab some refreshments. I told him that I was sorry that I had gotten us lost and had put us in a potentially dangerous situation, but he brushed it off and told me not to worry about it.

Following the surface interval, the next dive was going to be at the same site. Craig asked me if I would go back in with him again, and I decided that it would be best if I did. We agreed this time that we would stay within site of the boat and in we went. We spent the dive exploring the coral formations underneath the Aqua Cat. As we swam beneath the stern of the boat, I looked up to the surface and saw that Andrew was snorkelling with Stacey again. Then we came upon Nick and Bailey, the two teenagers on the boat, along with Bailey's dad, standing on the sand and taking turns doing backflips in their scuba gear. I had never tried a backflip while scuba diving before and decided to give it a shot. It was both easy and fun and I repeated it several times. A short while earlier, I had experienced one of the worst dives of my life, and now I had learned from a couple of teenagers how to cut loose and have a good time underwater. It was exactly the kind of dive I needed to have.

The Bahamas Trip - Day 3 - July 26, 2011 - Underwater Photography

2011-09-17T22:49:00.001-04:00

Though I brought an underwater camera with me on this trip, I only took it with me on three dives. The pictures below are from the third dive. If memory serves, they were taken at a dive site called Fire Coral Reef. Below are among the better shots I managed to get of the marine life in the area.

First up is a Yellowtail Snapper. There were a lot of these guys swimming around.

Next up is a French Angelfish. These fish were a pain in the ass to photograph. Every time I would focus on it, it would turn into the coral facing away from me. Finally, after numerous attempts, this was the best side view I could get. French Angelfish are very beautiful, and this photograph hardly does it justice.

I was the only one in our group to spot this small Nurse Shark. It was swimming over a bed of coral a few feet away from me, so I had to swim really fast to get above it to get this shot.

The Bahamas contains a diverse population of angelfishes. This next one is a Queen Angelfish. It was much more cooperative than the French Angelfish.

And yet another species of angelfish, the Gray Angelfish.

Here is a pair of Spotfin Butterflyfish. My bad for not getting closer before I took the picture.

Next up is the dreaded Lionfish. This is an invasive species that is indigenous to the Pacific. When I dove in Belize in 2009, the only Lionfish I remember seeing was one caught by John, one of the crewmembers of the Sundancer II. However, in the Bahamas, there were a lot of them. You have to be careful with these guys, because they have poisonous spines. It was really annoying for me, because some of the dive sites had very narrow grooves between the corals, and in some cases, small coral caves, that I liked to venture into and explore. There were several occasions where I started to go into a narrow passage and then up ahead I would see a Lionfish just hovering there.

I'm not quite sure what this last one is. My copy of the National Audobon Society Field Guide to Tropical Marine Fishes does not show this specific fish. However, the guide does contain about a half dozen fish with the same shape but different colors. I am guessing this is some kind of Trunkfish or Cowfish.

Clearly, there's much room for improvement in my underwater photography skills, though it will probably have to wait until next summer when I go to the Caymans.

Back From Vacation

2011-09-05T23:16:00.000-04:00

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. Just back from visiting my wife's family in the Philippines and spending several nights in Taipei, Taiwan. Hope to have some posts and pictures up after I've finished with the Bahamas trip. And of course, I need to put in a few atheism related posts so that nobody thinks this site has morphed into a travel blog!

Bahamas Trip - Day 3 - July 26, 2011: Underwater Marriage Proposal

2011-08-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

Among the other passengers on the Aqua Cat were a young French-Canadian couple, Justin and Genevieve. On the dive deck, their area was too my right.

Justin caught the attention of my children during breakfast on Sunday morning, because he walked into the dining area wearing a Speedo swimming brief, which, as you can see from the example in the preceding link, doesn't leave much to the imagination. When my kids saw him, they couldn't stop laughing because they had never seen a man wear one before, and I finally had to tell them to get a grip on themselves.

At any rate, after one of the dives on Tuesday, I can't remember which one, after I had put all my gear in place for the next dive and taken a shower, I went back to my dive station and noticed Justin's dive slate on the bench by his dive station. I saw that it was written in French, and at the time it read "Je t'aime," which is French for "I love you." Aw, that's romantic, I thought. Then I glanced at the sentence written below it ending in a question mark. I said to myself, "I know I'm not exactly fluent in French, but that looks like a marriage proposal." And sure enough, when I went up to the sun deck, I had found out that Justin had indeed propose to Genevieve during the dive.

Mikey, the crew member who was also serving as the ship's videographer, filmed the proposal at Justin's request. Everyone got to see it when they played the video for us on Friday night, our last evening on the boat.

On Tuesday evening, rather than doing another night dive, we had a shore excursion to Norman's Cay Beach Club, and I celebrated Justin and Genevieve's engagement by buying them a round of drinks.

The Aqua Cat at dusk as photographed by me from the Magick.

My kids in the Magick.

The Magick at shore, with First Mate John a silhouette in the twilight.

Captain Mark with a cold one at Norman's Cay Beach Club after a hard day's work.

The captain and I pose for a photo.

Sherri and Nina enjoying their liquid refreshments. Sherri is from Texas. I accompanied her husband Craig during dives when she wanted to stay on the Aqua Cat and relax. Nina, the taller lady in the brown top, was part of our group that flew down from New York.

One of the local residents of Norman's Cay Beach Club.

The other resident of Norman's Cay Beach Club.

All in all, it was a nice little change of pace for us. The next day would see some interesting diving.

The Bahamas Trip - Day 2 - July 25, 2011: There Be Sharks Here

2011-08-14T14:58:00.000-04:00

The next day, I felt much better. No more headaches and no more queasiness.

We found out the night before that we were doing the shark feeding dive on Monday. I was surprised that it was scheduled so early in the trip, our second day of diving. I figured it would have been held on Thursday as a build up to a climax. Nevertheless, I was excited by the prospect of taking part in something that I had been wanting to do for quite some time.

The Aqua Cat conducts its shark feeding dives at a site called Split Coral Head off of Eleuthera. Before we did the shark feeding dive, we did a regular dive at the site. The Reef sharks were already there and I looked forward to trying out my new underwater camera to to snap some shots. For those who are interested, the camera I used was a Sealife DC1200.

The photograph I took above was my first one. Several Reef sharks were swimming around me as I began my descent, and I was able to get the shot above with a shark in the foreground and several of the divers in the background.

I was able to get this close up of a Reef shark, though owing to my novice underwater photography skills, I wasn't quite able to get the entire shark in the frame.

It was a good dive and the first one I ever did with sharks in close proximity to me. I wasn't sure how I would react to find myself in the water with them, but surprisingly I didn't feel the least bit of trepidation. It was more a sense of fascination and wonder at being able to observe them in their natural environment.   For those who are shark-phobes, these sharks seemed generally indifferent to our presence.

After the dive was over, we returned to the Aqua Cat for a surface interval and then attended Ian's dive briefing. We would form a semi-circle on the sand, about 60 feet below sea level, while the fish would be lowered down the mooring line to about 15 or 20 feet from the bottom.   A few minutes after the feeding had begun, the crew would in turns take us one at a time to have ourselves photographed and briefly videotaped, and then guided over to the other side.   Ian stressed that we should under no condition try to touch the sharks, even on the tail, as they could bend their bodies so that their heads could reach back and bite you. No argument with that here!

I replaced the memory card in my underwater camera, as I wanted to keep photographs separate from video. I ended up shooting several segments of video. The first one is at the beginning and lasts about two and a half minutes. It is followed by a longer sequence that is more than 8 minutes. Then there is another shorter segment of the aftermath.  Close to the feeding site was a small patch of coral and as I approached it, Ian pointed out to me one of the denizens of the coral, a spotted moray. At one point in the video you will here me make a sound, which was my reaction to seeing the moray, as I wasn't sure at first what Ian was trying to show me.

At some points, the video points downward at the sand for seemingly no particular reason. If memory serves, at various times I needed to clear the flooding in my mask, and at those points the camera would have been floating while tied to my wrist with a lanyard strap.   The camera was also sensitive to light, and I notice that sometimes when it pointed upwards towards the surface, everything took on a reddish hue. What can I say, I'm not a professional at this. But I think I did a decent job overall. Enjoy.

Of course, I couldn't help but try to get a little bit of myself in the video by briefly pointing the camera towards me and giving a little wave.

At the end of the video when I pointed the camera at Tara, who had ended up to my left, she gave me the underwater signal for "shark."

You may notice at several points in this video some of the divers looking like they are crawling on the sea floor. During the dive briefing, Ian explained how shark teeth are very loose and that at the end of the feeding, it would be possible to find some teeth on the sea floor underneath where they had been eating. I was able to find two of them.

Besides Reef sharks, there were also a lot of Yellowtail snapper and Nassau groupers in the area that I also captured on film. All in all, it was a good day of diving.

The Bahamas Trip - Day 1 - July 24, 2011: I Chum The Waters

2011-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Early Sunday morning, the Aqua Cat departed from Paradise Island to make for the Northern Exumas. My kids had awoken early, as I did, to the sound of the engines, and we watched out of our cabin window as the Aqua Cat made its way out of the harbor. Once it had gotten clear, the ship kicked it into high gear and after an hour or so, Paradise Island began to dwindle in the horizon. In the picture I took above, you can just make out the tall buildings of the Atlantis resort. The small boat trailing behind the Aqua Cat is the Magick, which the ship's First Mate John used to bring the passengers on land based excursions. It would also prove very valuable to me on two of my dives.

While the previous day had been dominated by my intense migraine, the first casualty of this day turned out to be my daughter, who began to suffer the effects of motion sickness.   After first feeling it, she fell asleep in the cabin and awoke a little later on feeling much better. But not long after waking up again, she began to feel the effects even worse than before. One of the crew members ended up taking her to the bridge to have a better view of the horizon, which was supposed to help her relax and not feel nauseous.

I decided to skip the first dive of the day, a site called Barracuda Shoals near Allens Cay, because I had not set up my gear the evening before owing to my headache. So, after watching my friends enter the water, I set about getting my gear ready so that I could participate in the next dive. I was looking forward to trying out my new Hot Shot travel fins by Aqua Lung. Since my last dive trip to Belize two years earlier, I scaled down my gear so that I could fit it all into my carry-on luggage. Besides the travel fins, I ditched my wet suit and replaced it with a lycra full body skin. I also brought a rash guard shirt and shorts. To top it off, I switched to a foldable snorkel which I was able to fit into the pocket of my BCD. I also had a new mask, as the one I had worn in Belize, while good, had developed cracks and needed to be replaced.

The next dive site was called Closemon Reef. I was going to join Tara, Jeff and some of the other divers and just follow them wherever I went. I was happy with the fins. They were easy to put on and did not require dive boots. I donned my new mask, lightly inflated my bcd, and made my giant stride into the warm waters.   After giving the ok sign to the crewman on the dive deck, I started to descend and followed the rest of the divers in our group. The first thing I noticed is that we were swimming against a rather strong current, stronger than any I ever encountered before. Still, with effort, I kept up with the group as we made our way towards the mooring line at the bow of the boat. Then, I noticed my vision was getting cloudy, and suddenly it struck me. In my excitement, I had forgotten to defog my mask! I swam alongside Tara and motioned to her that I was returning to the boat and she acknowledged the signal.

I made my way back to the dive deck on the port side and told the crewmember Andy what had happened. I handed him my mask and he kindly put in some defog for me. I swirled it around and rinse it out and then donned the mask again and began my second descent. Barely a few seconds had passed when I hit that current again. I came to the realization that it would be foolhardy of me to try to struggle against the current alone in order to catch up with the rest of the group and decided to abort the dive but remain in the water. I made my way to the yellow rope that tied the Magick to the Aqua Cat and held on to it, while remaining at roughly a depth of ten or fifteen feet.

And then I made my big mistake. The site was shallow, only about twenty to thirty feet, so I decided to descend to the bottom because I was getting bored holding on to the rope. But even with my knees planted on the sand, I was still getting pushed back by the relentless current, so I felt it prudent to surface before I was pushed too far away from the Aqua Cat. But even as I ascended, I had an incredibly difficult time trying to reach the Magick.  I kicked furiously and groaned with each kick as I reached out for the hull of the Magick for support. Of course, being constantly submerged in the water, the surface of the hull was incredibly slipper and I could not keep a grip on it. I surfaced and called out for help, thinking, "Oh great, just like my first dive in Belize, when I had to be rescued!" However, rather than waiting around to be rescued, I decided to take my fate into my own hands again and resumed swimming with all my might back to the Magick. Again, my hands made contact with the slipper surface of the hull, but I managed to push myself slowly forward until I was able to grab the yellow rope. I then pulled myself relentlessly toward the Aqua Cat, hand over hand, until I made it to the ladder a couple of minutes later.

Andy asked me what had happened and I answered him wearily as I handed him my fins and struggled up the ladder to the deck. I was absolutely wiped out. When Tara returned, I explained to her what happened. Like Belize, my first dive was a clusterfuck. It could only get better from here on.

Because of weather related concerns, Captain Mark decided to leave the Exumas and make for Eleuthera. The next dive was going to be at a site called Cobia Cage. On this dive, I was going to accompany one of the passengers, a man from Texas named Craig. His wife Sherri was with him on the trip but decided to take a pass on this dive after participating in the two previous dives that morning. Mikey, the crew member who would be the dive master for the dive, described the cage to us, but when we entered the water, what he told us did not begin to prepare me for the enormity of the structure.

A Cobia cage basically looks like some extraterrestrial space craft submerged in the water. I didn't take my underwater camera on this dive, so I did not get to take a picture of it, but the photo I found above shows you how massive and strange looking the structure is. Craig and I passed over it and then headed towards some nearby coral formations. I had a tank banger and would look around us or peer into the nooks and crannies of the corals and let out a bang when I saw something that Craig could photograph with his camera.

It felt good being on a dive where I didn't have to fight a current. But as the dive continued, I started to feel queasy, though it was still tolerable. As we headed back towards the Cobia cage, I motioned to Craig that I was returning to the boat, which was visible from the cage. Besides, there were a number of other divers circling around, so Craig wouldn't be alone. I gradually made my way to the hang bar and grabbed on to it and prepared to begin my safety stop. The nausea got noticeably worse, and then without warning, I puked into my regulator. I had done it once before when I was doing one of my open water dives in Fort Lauderdale in 2008. I remained calm, trusting that my regulator could handle it. And then I heaved again. And again. And again. I think I overloaded my regulator, as I sucked in some vomit when I started to inhale. I decided I had had enough and shot up to the surface, letting out one last upchuck in view of the crew member manning the dive deck (can't remember which one).

Undeterred, I participated in the next dive, at Knuckleheads Reef. While I still felt vaguely queasy, I did not get sick and I had my first good dive of the trip, though to my chagrin my mask was prone to flooding and I had to constantly clear it. I was also pleased to see that my daugher was no longer suffering from motion sickness and was her old self again. I dove with Craig again and managed the itinerary, finding him marine life to photograph. This dive site was tricky, because there were lots of cuts and and turns and it is easy to get lost if one goes too far. When my air supply got down to about 1700 PSI, I motioned to Craig that we would be making our way back. After retracing our path, I felt a sense of relief when I could make out the bubbles of a number of other divers up ahead. We made contact with the other divers and continued to explore the coral formations near the mooring line. At one point, just as I was ready to begin my ascent, I spotted a Southern Stingray up ahead, but it was headed in a direction away from us and soon passed out of view.

The night dive was being held at the same site. None of the group I went down with nor Craig and his wife were participating in this dive, so I just stuck with Ian the divemaster and three or four of the other passengers.

When I did the night dives in Belize, the bottom of the Sun Dancer II was lit up like a stadium, making visibility near the boat very good, as well as providing a sense of comfort because it was easy to spot even if one went some distance away. But with the Aqua Cat, there would be no such light, owing to the presence of sea wasps, which are attracted to the light and at night rise to about 10 feet below the surface. I wore my full body skin again, having eschewed it for my previous two dives, as I found that the water was plenty warm enough to dive wearing only a t-shirt and shorts.

The dive itself was largely uneventful and I couldn't wait for it to end. That urge became even stronger, as I found myself becoming increasingly nauseous again. I signaled to Ian and when he looked at me, I made the hand sign for "not well" and pointed at my abdomen. He must not have understood me, or if he did, he may have thought it was not terribly important, as he continued to go about poking about the coral and shining his light on it. I tried to suck it up and tag along hoping the dive would soon end. Then I felt myself nearing the point of no return. I signaled to Ian again and this time, to make it unambiguous, I gave the thumbs up sign, which means "surface." This time he understood, and as we made our ascent, I vomited several times again.

I was so glad when I finally made it back to the Aqua Cat. The dive deck was dark as I ascended the ladder, owing to the aforementioned sea wasps. It ended up being a good thing, because as I found myself looking skyward, I stopped and looked in utter amazement at the night sky. Never in my life had I seen so many stars. There were so many that I barely recognized familiar constellations. The real treat though was that for the first time in my life that I can recall, I saw the band of the Milky Way.

Later on, after the dive was over, I went up to the sun deck and they turned off the lights so that we could all admire the majesty of the night sky. I spotted a couple of meteor streaks, and in the distance, the lightning from a far off thunder storm flashed in a fantastic display.

Back From The Deep

2011-08-12T21:45:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it's been nearly two weeks since I returned from my scuba diving trip to the Bahamas. While returning to work from a vacation is hard enough, I had the added burden of moving to another law firm, which is one of the reasons why it took me this long to return to blogging.   The change of work place happened rather suddenly, with the partner I worked under at my previous firm telling me the week before my vacation that she was moving to another firm several blocks away and that some of the clients were following her, including the client for whom I the majority of my work. She told me that the new firm said she could bring a paralegal with her and asked if I would be interested.   It only made sense to do so, since a good chunk of my workload was leaving with her. Plus, the new firm said they would match my salary, so I decided to make the move.

Anyway, back to the vacation. It was on a liveaboard in the Bahamas called the Aqua Cat. Above is a picture of the Aqua Cat at dock as seen from a nearby outdoor bar called The Green Parrot. I had my two kids in tow so that my wife could have a week of peace and quiet to herself rather than having to stay home with them while I cavorted in the azure waters of the Bahamas.

The trip got off to a bit of a rocky start. We all met at the house of Martha, one of the people going on the trip, at 4:30 in the morning to catch our ride to Newark Airport, where our flight to Nassau was scheduled to depart at 7:30. I thought it might be cutting things a little too close, but figured we would make it in time. But when we finally got to the group checkin area at Continental Airlines terminal at 6:30, the lady behind the counter told us that the computer would not allow her to check us in and that we would not make the 7:30 flight. Sue, the wife of Larry, who used to own the dive shop where I took my lessons, pleaded with the lady to no avail and then demanded to speak with a supervisor.

A few minutes later, a supervisor, a more pleasant Latina, had us move to a different counter where Sue continued to plead our cause. Finally, when all hope seemed lost, the supervisor said she could take all but four of us. So Sue, Martha, Tara, Nina, Bruce, Ira and Jeff checked in their bags, received their boarding passes and proceeded to the departure gate. That left Larry, myself, and my two kids. After a few minutes, the supervisor returned and after spealing with Larry, told him that she would put us on standby for the next flight for Nassau scheduled to leave at 8:55. We checked in our bags, got our boarding passes, and then did the security screening shuffle and headed for the departure gate.   Fortunately for us, the agent at the gate told us that we would be able to board the plane.

Several hours later, we found ourselves in Nassau and the Aqua Cat arranged for us to be picked up. We were dropped off at the Green Parrot, where the rest of the gang was already relaxing.   The Aqua Cat doesn't let passengers board until 6 p.m., which meant that we had to wait another four or five hours. Normally, that wouldn't be so bad, but I developed a rip-roaring migraine that refused to go away. I tried napping it off to no avail, and finally around 5 p.m. I asked for permission to go to my cabin on the Aqua Cat so that I could sleep on the bed in my cabin. When I awoke a couple of hours later, everyone else had boarded and it would soon be time for dinner. I still hadn't completely shaken the headache, so Martha's son Greg, who came down on a different flight, gave me a couple of Tylenol PM.

After the dinner, prepared by the Aqua Cat's Chef Kirk, we were treated to the orientation lectures by the ship's captain Mark and the lead dive master Ian. I retired early that night, looking forward to waking up the next day feeling refreshed and ready to hit the waters.

Scuba Diving Hiatus

2011-07-23T01:04:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know, not that I've been blogging all the much lately anyhow. But now I have a legitimate excuse. In a few hours I will be jetting off for the Bahamas to spend a week on a live aboard diving at sites in the Exumas. Also planning to do a shark feeding dive, which has been on my bucket list for quite some time.

In addition, I recently purchased an underwater camera, so hopefully I will have some pictures and video from below sea level, unlike my Belize trip. So, take care for now and see you all at the next surface interval!

UPDATED - Pet Peeve of the Day: Jews For Jesus DON'T Promote Littering

2011-07-16T14:45:00.000-04:00

Since writing the post below, a couple of J4Js have commented here, including quite possible one of the members I saw handing out literature the other day at the subway station @ 34th and 6th around 5 PM. She and the first J4J commenter both insisted that they clean up any of their literature left on the ground by recipients who discard them.

Most, if not all of us, are prone to episodes of confirmation bias. In this instance, I, an atheist who also greatly detests littering, saw members of a particular religious group handing out literature in a public place and then seeing the same literature scattered all over the subway station steps and the sidewalk outside.   I guess for me it was a two-fer and I jumped on it based only on what I directly observed.

But, to quote Jerry Ohrbach's character at the end of the movie Dirty Dancing, "When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong."   I hereby apologize to the Jews For Jesus of NYC for accusing them of enabling littering and for referring to them as assholes. In instances such as this, it can be all too easy for a blogger to delete a post and flush it down the memory hole. Instead, I will leave the original post below intact as a reminder, to myself and others, that we should be mindful of making hasty accusations, especially in a public forum.

That being said, of course, as an atheist, I find it odd that a being that presumably can communicate directly with every human being simultaneously needs to rely on a few people to hand out pamphlets in a subway station in order to get its message across. However, I support their right to do so.

The original post follows:

It's not uncommon to see Jews For Jesus in New York City subway stations handing out flyers and pamphlets to passersby.   What really annoys me about them is that often just a few feet away from where they're standing are pamphlets they handed out that the recipient hastily discarded the moment they realized what had been given to them. The J4Js (for short) know that most of the literature they hand out ends up as litter and yet they don't seem to care. Great way to promote your religious beliefs, assholes! Of course, the recipients who litter are assholes too, but the J4Js are culpable knowing that most of what they hand out ends up on the sidewalks or subway platforms.

Adam and Steve To Get Married In New York - The Backlash Begins

2011-07-15T23:30:00.000-04:00

A town clerk here in my state of New York has recently resigned her position because, in her words, "There was no protection provided in the legislation of Town Clerks who are unable to sign these marriage licenses due to personal religious convictions, even though our US Constitution supports freedom of religion."

My response to that, well, don't let the door hit you on the way out, Ms. Fotusky.

Before same-sex marriage became legal in New York State, I wonder, did Ms. Fotusky ever wonder if any of the marriage licenses she signed for heterosexual marriages were for marriages that might have conflicted with her religious beliefs?

After all, some married couples have open marriages. Did Fotusky bother to ask the bride and groom if they intended to fornicate with other people? Perhaps one or both spouses entered into the marriage intending to engage in an adulterous affair behind the back of the other. Maybe one married the other simply for the other person's money. Given the prevalence of such behavior, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some of the people who had marriage licenses signed by Ms. Fotusky committed acts that went against her religion.

If these god fearin' town, city and county clerks are so worried about sinful behavior, why get all in a twist about same-sex couples, when quantitatively they have likely signed more marriage licenses for heterosexual marriages where immoral behavior will take place then all of the same-sex marriage licenses their offices will ever be asked to issue?

My Third Child

2011-07-12T22:09:00.000-04:00

That's what I call my mom nowadays.

Not long ago, I discovered I was part of something called the "sandwich generation." It refers to adults who are simultaneously raising children and finding themselves having to care for one or more parents.

I joined the club a little over five years ago, when my father died from complications resulting from a surgical procedure in the hospital. My mom had frequent bouts of anxiety and depression during the course of her life. My dad was the type who handled all of the finances, so when my mom found herself a widow, she was woefully unprepared for the job of managing her own money. Add those two factors together, and you have someone who is not consistently up to the task of managing her own affairs.

My uncle and I helped her out by setting up funds to provide her with an income stream to supplement her Social Security and pension checks, and we both had online access to her checking account so that we could monitor it.   So, from a financial perspective, my mom was in decent shape as long as she lived within her means.

For the first six months or so after my father's death, things were not so bad. While my mom was understandably still in grief over the death of her husband the better part of half a century, she otherwise was doing okay. That all took a sudden turn for the worse in December of 2006. I have already recounted the details here in an older post, but to make a long story short, my mom experienced a double-whammy, catching pneumonia and injuring herself in a fall.

For the next three months, visits to the hospital and then the nursing home where my mom underwent physical therapy were part of my daily routine. On weekdays, with my wife at work, this often meant having to bring my then 6 year old son and 4 year old daughter with me.   We also hosted my mom's dog Kiki, a Shi tzu-Maltese, until about June, when my mom had recovered from her injury. She even seemed in good enough shape that I felt comfortable leaving her on her own for two weeks while the wife, the kids and I went to visit my wife's family in the Philippines.

Sadly, Kiki died a few months later. Shortly afterwards, my mom bought a new dog, a seven month Pomeranian that was not potty trained.  About a month later, my mom ended up being hospitalized again, which meant that yours truly got saddled with a dog that found my basement an all-too convenient place to take a frequent shit. Finally, my wife and I got so disgusted, I took the dog to the Town of Oyster Bay animal shelter. I had hoped that would be the end of my mom's dog days, but alas, some months later, she got herself a little Chihuaha. Luckily, it took my mom little more than a week to realize she could not handle this new dog and it ended up being given away to someone. Again, I dared to hope that my mom had finally come to her senses and understood that as much as she desired the companionship a dog offered her, she was not up to the task of handling the responsibility of ownership.

As for my mom herself, I was beginning to notice signs of mental deterioration, most worryingly with regard to her medications. Every week, I would fill up one of those pill containers where you pop open the lid for each dose.  It also revealed to me the extent to which she was forgetting to take her medications.  When I would come by to fill the container at the end of the week, I would see that she would be missing several doses over the course of the week.   My uncle suggested getting a pill dispensing machine, so in August of 2008, I purchased one for my mom.   Every Saturday night, I would fill up the pill tray and stick it in the machine. Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, the machine would let out a beeping sound at the programmed time and deposit the medications into a pull out container. It cost a lot of money, roughly $800 if memory serves, but it was definitely worth the piece of mind.

Around that same time, my mom was having recurring bouts of depression and anxiety, and for weeks at a time she wouldn't be able to fall asleep at night, despite taking anti-anxiety medication and Ambien.   In addition to the loss of her husband that she continued to mourn, she was also saddened that two of her lifelong friends had ended their friendship with her. When brooding on it in my presence, she would chalk it up to them abandoning her, but I suspected there was more to it than that. I spoke to one of them in person when I stopped by her house to sound her out on the possibility of visiting my mom to try to cheer her up. She told me that my mom had been insensitive to her in a phone conversation they had. As for the other friend, I can only guess that my mom must have said something that inadvertently offended her as well. Sometimes my mom has a tin ear, and with her memory problems, I wouldn't past her that she said something to each of the two friends to upset them and then didn't remember the substance of the conversations, thus mentally insulating her from recognizing her culpability.

Fast forward to the summer of 2010. My mom had come out of her depression and was entering another active phase.   She would drive herself to her doctor appointments, beauty parlor appointments and other local errands, though she did get into a couple of minor traffic accidents.

Then one day in September at work, my phone rings and I see on the caller id that it's her number. I pick up the phone and greet her. "Guess what, Thomas?" she said to me with a slightly jubilant tone. I groaned inwardly and replied "Oh, please, no." She had gotten herself another dog. It was a Papillon.

Lacking originality with dog names, my mom called her Lola, the same name she had given to the Pomeranian. And like the first Lola, this one had the same problem with peeing and defecating indoors. And like the first Lola, soon after purchasing her, my mom ended up in the hospital for a few days, this time because she had problems swallowing something she ate and ended up becoming dehydrated after a couple of days of not being able to take her medication or hold down any food or drink. Once again, yours truly had to pay host to another Lola, Lola 2.0.   No matter how often she would be taken outside, she would crap somewhere in the house moments after coming back inside, even if she was observed doing her business outside. A couple of times, she even ran up the stairs to my son's room on the second floor and took a shit on his carpet.

It was such a relief when my mom was released from the hospital and was well enough to take her again. Don't get me wrong, Lola is a cute, friendly dog. But in addition to the lack of potty training, she can be very noisy when she wants attention. Not just barking. She makes this whiny sound that can be very irritating when you are trying to sleep.

In what was another sign of the change in my mom was her toleration of Lola going to the bathroom frequently on her living room carpet. It got to the point where the smell was almost unbearable sometimes when I entered her apartment. When I was a child, my mom had always been a clean freak and as recently as a few years ago such a state of affairs was unthinkable for her.

A further development was a tendency for my mom to lose her balance and fall from time to time, though luckily none of the injuries were that serious. At the beginning of this past June, she had told me about an incident at a department store where she felt pain in her legs and that she was going to fall, but held herslf up by holding onto a clothing rack. Some store employees aided her and called an ambulance, but she refused to go to the hospital and instead had herself wheeled to her car.   She had dropped off Lola at the dog groomer earlier and had to pick her up.

About a week later on a Saturday, it was my birthday. I had tried running in a 5K that morning at Muttontown Preserve, but the trail was muddly from the rain and after about a mile I had decided to just turn it into a nature walk. I had gotten home around 11:30 and was looking forward to spending the rest of the day with my wife and children. Then around noon the phone rang. It was my mom's neighbor at the senior housing development. My mom had fallen while walking her dog and had to be taken to the hospital. Shortly after I got there, they had diagnosed her with a dislocated left elbow. They did a procedure to pop it back in and discharged her. But her left arm was wrapped in bandages and in a sling.

I ended up missing the next four days of work. On Monday I tried to get an appointment to see her primary care physician but there were no openings. As for Lola, who had caused the accident by running away after the leash slipped from my mom's hand, I decided it was best at least for the short term to put her somewhere so I wouldn't have to deal with her, so I brought her to a dog hotel out in Deer Park. The next day I was on the way to work and called the doctor's office and was able to secure an appointment with her PCP later that afternoon, so I went into work for a couple of hours and left early. Earlier that morning I had stopped by my mom's to check on her, and she was babbling about hearing people speaking in her apartment. When I was helping her off the couch to go to the bathroom on the commode, she even told me to shut the door so that that wouldn't see her. I told her that there was no one else in the apartment.

The PCP gave us a referral for an orthopedist in the area and an appointment was made for the next day. When I brought my mom there, they took x-rays of the elbow and the doctor took one look at it and said "She needs surgery." Then informed us that his office doesn't do elbow surgeries and referred us to another orthopedist in Great Neck, which is on the North Short of Nassau County near the Queens border. I understand that orthopedics is a very specialized field, and it wouldn't surprise me if some orthopedists specialized only in the upper knuckle of the pinky finger.

So, day 4 (don't worry, we're getting close to the end!), and I have to bring my mom all the way to Great Neck. And when we get there, I find out that the PCP's office had not sent the authorization, so the orthopedist could not see my mom until it went through. After calling them on the phone twice, it finally came through nearly an hour after the time her appointment was scheduled. The ladies behind the desk told me they frequently had this issue with my mom's medical group. Anyway, after nearly an hour and a half wait, my mom finally gets seen. They take some x-rays and the orthopedist tells us my mom might not need surgery, particularly since she is right hand dominant. He tells us though that he would like her to have a CT scan.

Things finally seem to be returning to a state of normalcy.   Saturday night, the wife and I stayed up almost to 3 a.m. watching tv together. I turned into bed a few minutes after her, chiding myself for staying up so late, but figuring I would just have to sleep late Sunday morning. Then I drifted off to dreamland.   Alas, my stay there was cut short when I awoke to the phone ringing. I looked at the clock to see what time it was and it was only 5:30 a.m.   I grumbled, because I knew it was my mom calling about something.

I'm sorry to say I wasn't in the best of moods when I answered the phone. "What is is mom?" I asked. She started telling me about how a top she was wearing got tangled on her left arm. But that wasn't the real problem.   She also told me that her granddaughter Jamie was underneath her bed and wouldn't come out.   I could tell from my mom's voice that she was in a confused state.   Unfortunately, having barely two and a half hours of sleep in me, I was not exactly at my sharpest either.

Because my mom is hard of hearing, I had to practically shout back at her that I would be there in a few minutes. I hung up the phone and, to my disappointment, let loose a litany of angry and profane words at having my life disrupted again. I stormed into her apartment and found her sitting on the couch in her tv room naked save for the sleeve of a shirt on her left arm. After I got it off her, I either helped her to a standing position or she got herself up. She told me to put the shirt in her washing machine. As I walked to the washing machine outside the room, I heard her cry out and looked to see her fall backwards onto the carpet, hitting the back of her head on the leg of a plastic chair behind her. One of her implant teeth also came out, evidently being dislodged by the force of the impact.

I tried to help my mom up to get her back on the couch, but she was too heavy for me to move. I called 911, not only because I couldn't get her up unassisted (and who exactly was I supposed to call at 5:30 in the morning on a Sunday for help?) but also I wanted her to have medical attention to make sure she did not suffer a serious head injury. About ten minutes later, a police ambulance showed up, followed by two additional Nassau County police officers. It took all three of them to lift my mom up and then sit her on a chair that they then used to wheel her out to the living room where they had placed a stretcher.   She was then taken to Plainview Hospital.

Fortunately, it was determined that my mom did not suffer any injury from the fall. They discharged her around noon. Before that point, I hit my nadir for the day, and the recent past for that matter. At that point I just felt the crushing weight of all that had happened for the past eight days pushing down on me. I sat down on the floor in the emergency room with my back against the wall and my head in my hands.   One of the staff, a nurse I think, saw me and asked me if I was alright. She gave me the number for a hospital social worker to inquire about getting placement somewhere for my mom, for which I thanked her, though I ended up not calling the number.

Since then, things have gotten more tolerable. I arranged for a home companion to be with my mom on weekdays from 9 to 5. I have to take time off from work again for a follow up appointment with the orthopedist in Great Neck. Her dog is back with her, though I had to take it for a few days because the home companion was complaining that the dog was pooping on the rug and making the apartment stink, which caused a bit of a brouhaha between mom, the home companion, and me. Just what I needed.

As much as I complain about the burden of having to be a caregiver for my mom, I know that there are other adult children who are in much more difficult situations than I. Some have parents who are in far worse shape than my mom. Some caregivers are in poor health themselves.   I'm sure quite a few of them handle their situations with more grace and stoicism than I do. With my mom, as the story above describes, it has not been a daily strain for the last five years. Rather, there are periods, often lasting many months, of relative calm that is then disrupted by episodes that last anywhere from a few days to a few months.

In addition to being a member of the "sandwich generation," I also suffer from what I call The Curse of the Responsible Sibling.   Longtime readers of my blog might recall that I am the youngest of three siblings, but when it comes to caring for my mom, I might as well be an only child.   While my oldest brother Bobby calls my mom once in a while, he doesn't really do anything meaningful to help out. His excuse is that he does not have a drivers license (taken away for drunk driving) and a car.   Lately he has also been hobbled by a foot injury incurred at work, which at present gives him a plausible excuse for not being able to help. Then there is my brother John, who has barely been heard from in the past year. He never calls mom or myself to inquire how she is doing and if there is anything he can do to be of assistance. Therefore, the burden has fallen squarely on my shoulders. I have coworkers and acquaintances who are in similar situations. They have siblings as well, but those siblings seem to think nothing about washing their hands free of any responsibility of caring for their elderly parents and leaving it by default to the "Responsible Sibling."

What makes it even harder for me is that I am raising two school age children and I commute to a full time job in Manhattan. My two brothers are both divorced and each has three children that neither plays any role in raising. Like I wrote above, I might as well be an only child. So, all I can do is carry on and do the best I can, knowing that the best I can do might not be the best that could be done. With an elderly parent like my mom, the situation is not one of a very sick parent who requires lots of care. Rather, it is more like trying to manage a steady decline over time, hoping that a placement in a nursing home or assisted living facility can be put off for as long as possible.   And I know that one day, the burden will end.

Updated: A Not Quite Such A Clusterbleep!

2011-07-11T00:50:00.001-04:00

It turned out my initial reaction to the changes were largely unjustified. Plus, some of the changes to the blog are an improvement over the way it was before. The problem with the followers seems to have resolved itself. I'm still annoyed that I have to redo my sidebar links. I managed to reconstitute two of them. The template only seems to allow for one set of links, but I figured out a way create additional sets of links, but I won't be able to get to it tonight.

When I logged on earlier, I noticed I had a new follower for this blog. So, I clicked on Followers to see who it was, and then I got prompted to make a template change that (1) resulted in changing the appearance of this blog, and (2) wiping out the blogrolls in my sidebar and making it impossible to even see who my followers are, even though I added the thing it told me to add.

Is Blogger intentionally trying to dissuade people from using its services? It would be a shame if I had to end my blog over this.

Le Fin de Weiner

2011-07-03T22:01:00.004-04:00

I'm a couple of weeks late in commenting on this, partly due to factors in my life beyond my control, but wanted to throw my two cents worth in before the story completely vanished from the news cycle.

In my previous post on this scandal, I wrote that I wasn't sure if Weiner should resign and that it was between him and his constituents. However, I believe that in retrospect his resignation was the right thing to do.

When you look at the matter in perspective, Weiner's resignation was not that terrible a loss for liberal Democrats.   For starters, even if this scandal had never happened, it was highly likely that Weiner would have ran for mayor of New York City in 2013, and if he had won, he would have assumed that office in January of 2014. So as much as his supporters will miss him, Weiner only had, at most, a term and a half in the House left to him.

Second, due to population changes, New York State is slated to lose two seats in the House of Representatives, and Weiner's seat was on the cutting block. If Weiner had not resigned, his district and seat would have been erased even sooner than 2013.

What ultimately burns a lot of liberals about this affair is that it lent credibility to partisan smear merchants like Andrew Breitbart. But as someone who considers himself more or less a liberal, I can't help but put 100% of the blame on Anthony Weiner for all of this. No one forced him to behave the way he did. His real fault, in my eyes, is that he lied about sending the pictures, claiming that his account had been hacked. For over a week, Weiner's supporters publicly defended him because they believed he was telling the truth, only to have the rug pulled out from under them when he finally confessed the truth. That, and the revelations that there were even more pictures, eroded whatever good will toward him that had remained.

Maybe if Weiner had owned up to sending the pictures as soon as the scandal erupted, he might have salvaged some measure of credibility. Then again, Weiner had a reputation as an abrasive personality who rankled even some of his Democratic colleagues. I suspect not a few of them were glad to see him go.

A valid question that the Weiner scandal raises is to what degree should an elected official's (or even a candidate's) private conduct impact on that person's fitness for office? In Weiner's case, his behavior was seen as weird or creepy, especially given that he was only recently married. Did marriage bore him that quickly that sending pictures of his penis to women he never met seemed like a productive use of his time?   What was particularly embarrassing for Weiner, as Bill Maher pointed out on a recent episode of Real Time, was that the former congressman was the center of a sex scandal and he didn't even get laid.

I thought of another potential scenario that I want to throw out for consideration. Pretend a group of partisan activists looking to take down a firebrand politician from an opposing party smuggled a web cam into a hotel room where that politician was spending the night. Perhaps they're hoping to get footage of him cheating on his wife by having sex with a prostitute. But instead of hiring an escort, the politician is filmed unpacking a sex doll and then spends the next hour using it for sexual gratification.

There's no doubt that such footage, if made public, would be highly embarrassing. But is it really something that should destroy a politician's career? Granted, sex dolls aren't exactly in the mainstream. However, is anyone really harmed by what is little more than an act of glorifed masturbation? Or, to put it another way, should we hold politicians to a higher standard than we hold other people when it comes to sex? After all, if you found out the morning shift manager at your local Starbucks pleasured himself with a sex doll, are you going to demand that he be fired?

As for the sex doll scenario, the inspiration for it came from me remembering an episode of Nip/Tuck wherein series regular Kimber had a sex doll made in her likeness. Below is a scene from the episode in which Kimber solicits Sean and Christian to make some improvements to her doll's vagina.

I couldn't find the clip on YouTube, but later on in the episode, a drunk and emotionally distraught Sean has a graphic encounter with the Kimber doll. To date, I believe that Dylan Walsh's performance in that scene is one of the bravest ever filmed for a television program.

Adam and Steve to Get Married in New York

2011-06-24T23:48:00.000-04:00

Tonight, the New York State Senate passed the marriage equality bill. With that achieved, all that remains is for Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign the bill into law. This is a big victory for same-sex couples, because (1) marriage equality was achieved by a majority vote in the legislature, and (2) New York is one of the more populous states in the country with a larger gay population that can benefit from the law. A high school classmate of mine who is gay and has been in a longtime relationship with another man expressed on Facebook a short while ago how happy he was that the possibility of marriage for him and his partner had become real.

I believe 30 years from now, when marriage equality will likely have been achieved nationwide, a lot of people will probably wonder why some opponents of same-sex marriage were so hysterical over the prospect of two people of the same gender being able to tie the knot. Our civilization will not have been destroyed because Adam was able to marry Steve instead of Eve.

However, we also need to acknowledge that the picture will not be a completely rosy one. Gay marriage will inevitably lead to gay divorce. In some instances, child custody issues will arise, either because of adoption or because one of the partners in the marriage had a biological child from a previous heterosexual marriage or relationship. As with some heterosexual marriages, some same-sex marriages will be fraudulent. For example, gays who are American citizens will be able to bring in immigrant spouses so that the latter can obtain permanent residency and citizenship in the United States. It shouldn't come as a surprise that some of these marriages will be merely marriages of convenience to enable an immigrant to acquire American citizenship. That being said, these are no more reasons for barring same-sex marriage than they are for banning heterosexual marriage. It is simply a recognition that equality before the law is meant to provide equality of opportunity without guaranteeing perfect outcomes.

Failure to Launch

2011-06-10T22:30:00.001-04:00

"Momentum Builds In Iowa." That was the title of an e-mail I received this past May 20, 2011, from Newt Gingrich's campaign manager Rob Johnson.

Johnson went on to declare:

"One thing is clear: Americans are ready to put our country back on the right track. Newt visited seventeen cities across Iowa this week. At each and every stop people packed into overflowing halls to hear what we can do to put the right policies in place so we can get the right results for our country."

"We’re ready. We launched our campaign just over a week ago, and we are already seeing an outpouring of support. Volunteers have signed up in all 50 states. Next week Newt will campaign in both New Hampshire and South Carolina."

Fast forward three weeks later to today, June 10, 2011.

From Politico:

"[C]ampaign manager Rob Johnson, strategists Sam Dawson and Dave Carney, spokesman Rick Tyler and consultants Katon Dawson in South Carolina and Craig Schoenfeld in Iowa quit to protest what one called a “different vision” for the campaign."

“To be successful in Iowa, you need to be here, [and] taking a look at the way the schedule was, he’s not scheduled to be here in June at all, and he’s got very few appearances in July,” said Schoenfeld. “You want to make sure that you give yourself a chance to be successful.”

So, what went wrong?

"One official said the last straw came when Gingrich went ahead last week with a long-planned cruise in the Greek isles with his wife."

I couldn't help but get a chuckle about the "trip to the Greek Islands" thing. It's right up there with "santorum."

About a month or so ago, several Republican leaning people I interacted with, when discussing possible GOP candidates, mentioned Gingrich as a good candidate, with one of them even saying what a "bright" guy Gingrich is.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing that. What I see when I look at Newt Gingrich is a narcissistic, hypocritical and undisciplined man with pretensions of being an intellectual. I suspect that a lot of evangelical Christian voters are also not impressed with Gingrich and see him for the shallow opportunist that he is.

To the other person I had an exchange with, I replied that Gingrich was merely pretending to run for president just so that people would pay attention to him. Newt's presidential campaign will probably limp along for a few more weeks before he admits the inevitable and bows out. Over a decade ago, Long Island Republican Congressman Peter King called Newt "political roadkill." I don't see that anything has changed for Newt since then.

Can I Talk To Dead People on My Cell Phone?

2011-06-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

The other day I was looking at the events calendar in the Plainview-Old Bethpage Herald and saw an announcement that a local psychic medium named Robert E. Hansen would be conducting a session of his Love Never Dies program at the Plainview Jewish Center on Monday, June 13 for $35 per person.

My first thought, me being the skeptical guy that I am, was to wonder, "Has the Plainview Jewish Center conducted some kind of test to determine if this Robert Hansen can actually do what he claims to do, that is, to be able to communicate with the spirits of dead people?" After all, if you are hosting and charging admission for such an event, if the person is not the real deal, aren't you essentially facilitating an act of fraud on gullible people?

I'm not going to get into the subject of whether or not I believe that part of us survives the death of our physical body here. However, I find it interesting that nobody ever seems to be able to communicate directly with their own deceased relatives and friends, and yet somehow complete strangers can supposedly accomplish such a feat on our behalf because they have a special gift the rest of us lack.

How does that work anyway? Do the souls of the departed swarm around the privileged few who can hear them, whispering their names into the medium's ear, with only the first letter being clear? "I'm hearing 'Dave?' 'Dan?', or is that 'Donald?'" Or is it more like tuning into a radio station with constant static in the background, preventing the words from being heard clearly? On his website, Hansen compares it to "lying on the bottom of a 6' deep swimming pool and someone was trying to yell down to you."

Back to the testing part, one possible way of going about it would be if a number of people who were terminally ill (but still functional) were to bury boxes with a messages in secret locations, tell their family members that they buried something for them somewhere, but that they would have to visit a medium after they died to find out the where the boxes were buried. If the medium was legitimate, he would tell them the secret location of the box. If the medium could provide the location of the box, then it would be solid evidence that the dead can communicate with the living, and that the particular medium who provided the location was in fact the real deal.

It would probably not be easy to coordinate such an experiment with a sufficient number of terminally ill people to form a large enough group in a fixed geographical area so that the family members of the different deceased participants could consult the same mediums. If one medium succeeded in providing accurate locations for multiple boxes, while other mediums could not locate any, it could provide a benchmark for determining which mediums were true and which ones were bullshit artists.

Pet Peeve of the Day - June 6, 2011

2011-06-06T23:18:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's been over two years since I did one of these.

As a daily commuter on the Long Island Rail Road to and from work in Manhattan, I see a lot of things that annoy me.

One of my greatest sources of irritation are people who I have dubbed "Aisle Seat Assholes." If you ride the rails like I do, you might know the kind of people I am describing. They are the ones who as soon as they enter the train, plop themselves down onto the nearest aisle seat, even if the middle and/or window seat next to them is empty. But they are not just assholes for their choice of seat. It's what they do no next that really puts them in the asshole category.

Many of them, immediately after their posteriors have settled onto the seats, whip out their laptop computers, portable dvd players or other mobile devices and plug in their ear buds to drown out the world while people are still boarding the train. And then when you tap them on their shoulder or otherwise get their attention so you can get to the empty two seats to the right of them, they give you this look of annoyance like "How dare you bother me!"

What makes it worse is that if there are a dozen people trying to board the train through one door and the first person tries to get a seat in the first row which already is occupied by an Aisle Seat Asshole (hereinafter "ASA"), everyone has to wait while the ASA gets up, steps out into the aisle, lets the passenger by to occupy the middle or window seat, and then sit down again. Mutiply that four or five times, and sometimes you can find yourself being blocked from getting to a seat for a minute or more.

Maybe it's a quirk of my personality, but to me it seems to make more sense if the first people to enter a train car were to move to the middle of the car and occupy the window seat and the last people get the seats closer to the doors. That way, everyone would get a seat virtually immediately, even if it is not necessarily the exact seat they wanted to get.

I suppose it is too much to expect the bulk of the riders on the Long Island Rail Road to think that way.

What A Weiner!

2011-06-06T22:06:00.000-04:00

As anyone who has been following the story probably knows by now, Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has fessed up and admitted that he sent pictures of his bulging underpants and such to women who were not his wife. After initially denying sending the pictures, while strangely not denying they might be pictures of him, the liberal firebrand from Brooklyn has tarnished his credibility and possibly destroyed his career in politics.

Disappointingly, several commenters (see the excerpts below) in the Crooks & Liars article I linked to appear to be more upset with right-wing operative Andrew Breitbart, the man who released the photo and claimed to have others, than with Representative Weiner.

I believe these anonymous women (if you believe they are women) were paid handsomely for their involvement in this BREIBART set-up, otherwise ask yourself, why take it to Breibart and not the attorney General.

I believe Briebart deliberately, with malice and fore-thought, entrapped Weiner.

Breitbart is a dirt bag. Doesn't that fucktard have anything better to do with his time? I'm more embarrassed for him than Weiner.

Liberals can gripe about Breitbart all they want, but no matter how you cut and slice it, Weiner put himself in the situation he is in and the responsibility lies 100% with him.

To put things in perspective though, what Weiner did was hardly the worst thing a politician has ever done. Just about all of us have said and done things that would be tremendously embarrasing if it became a matter of public record. We're only human, and so are our elected officials. That being said, when you run for and get elected to public office, you should know that the public will hold you to a higher standard of behavior.

When you make yourself a lightning rod, as Representative Weiner did by being a brash, outspoken Democratic politician, you have to be aware that there is a well funded right wing apparatus dedicated to examining your life under a microscope and sifting through your activities with a fine toothed comb. President Clinton should have been a cautionary example in this regard. Knowing full well that conservatives were looking for anything they could find to take him down, Clinton foolishly fooled around with Monica Lewinsky, leading his impeachment. And like Weiner, Clinton initially denied what he had been accused of, only to have to come clean when damning evidence surfaced. Then again, maybe these guys just can't help themselves. Perhaps their egos delude them into thinking that they won't get caught, or if they do get caught, that they can somehow weasel their way out of it.

While Weiner is from New York, he is not my representative, as his district covers Brooklyn and Queens. I did have an exchange with him years ago during a meet the candidates event in Queens when he first ran for the office he holds today and I was sharing an apartment in Queens with my wife before we married. At the time, I was quite active in the immigration restrictionist movement (and I hope to one day write a post about how I came to be involved in the movement and why I ultimately left it) and I remember asking Weiner if he would support legislation to deny citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants. He snapped at me and made some remark about how did my parents get here or something to that effect.

I have since moved on with my life and gotten over that exchange. As my political views shifted from conservative to liberal over the years, I did admire Weiner's gutsiness and appreciated his vocal support for womens' reproductive rights. That being said, I am not going to reflexively defend him for engaging in behavior that I would condemn had it been done by a conservative politician.

As to whether he should resign, I think it depends on whether he did anything illegal. If not, then it is up to his constituents to decide come Election Day in 2012. After all, if Republican Senator David "Diaper" Vitter of Louisiana can be re-elected by the people of his state, then who am I to complain if the people of Brooklyn and Queens want to give Anthony another chance? Whether his wife will remains to be seen.

An Open Letter to Gideon

2011-05-22T11:36:00.000-04:00

Dude, why do you keep coming back here and leaving comments that I will never publish because you have been banned? Why the obsession on your part with my blog, which, you yourself have described as "a rather bland and ignominious blog"? What do you hope to accomplish? Is your time of so little value that you spend it by stalking a D-list atheist blogger who hardly anyone reads? You really should raise your ambitions higher and visit the popular atheist bloggers, because, to borrow from Willie Sutton, that's where the atheists are. Some of them are in my sidebar, including Atheist Revolution, Daylight Atheism and Pharyngula. So, go have at em'! Or keep wasting your time trying to post comments here that will never see the light of day because they amount to nothing more than the unhinged rantings of a raving lunatic.

Saturday Night Trance

2011-05-21T23:06:00.001-04:00

Kirsty Hawkshaw's "Just Be" as mixed by DJ Tiesto.

Judgment Day - The Aftermath

2011-05-21T22:44:00.000-04:00

Here's the quote of the day from Robert Fitzpatrick, the poor, deluded fool who blew $140,000 of his savings plastering the subway trains and buses of New York with his ads about May 21, 2011 being Judgment Day:

"I can't tell you what I feel right now," he said, surrounded by tourists. "I don't understand it. I don't know. I don't understand what happened.

"Obviously, I haven't understood it correctly because we're still here," he said.

Let me explain it to you Bob. You didn't understand it correctly because you turned off your critical thinking skills. A million people could have tried to dissuade you, implore you, to not buy into Harold Camping's bullshit and piss away your retirement savings. It would not have made a difference, because you were so dead set on believing what you wanted to believe.

Here is the plain, simple truth. The Bible tells us absolutely nothing about our future. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Zip. It doesn't tell us when the world will end or how. So, anyone who tells you that the world will end because of how he or she interprets the Bible is automatically wrong. Take it from me. It's financially sound advice. And the best part? It's free.

Update on the Alleged Rapture

2011-05-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

Well, it's a few minutes past 6 p.m., and as I expected, no earthquake here in New York. It did start raining about a half hour ago, but it's been raining off and on every day this past week.

Move along now. Nothing to see here.

May 21, 2011 - It's A Beautiful Day

2011-05-21T14:36:00.009-04:00

In honor of the Rapture that did not happen, here's "It's A Beautiful Day" by Sarah Brightman.

Apparently, there was supposed to be a rolling earthquake commencing in New Zealand at 6 pm local time. Well, it's been five hours and no such earthquakes were reported. There was that earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand on February 22, 2011 (I guess having the name Christchurch didn't magically protect them!), so maybe Harold Camping was off by about 3 months. Nor have "all the dead that have ever died" risen up from their graves.

I checked the Family Radio web site but thus far it gives no acknowledgment that Camping's long touted prediction has not come to pass.

Sadly, this whole affair has proven rather costly for some people.

This fellow Long Islander has been refusing to pay his bills, so convinced is he that he will be raptured. Unfortunately for him, not only will he not be raptured, neither will the collection agents for the phone and electric companies!

A former MTA employee spent $140,000 of his own money plastering MTA subways and buses with his ads proclaiming May 21 as Judgment Day. That's $140,000 less that he will have to see him through his retirement.

According to this article, Camping's Family Radio spent "millions of dollars on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the doomsday message. In 2009, the nonprofit reported in IRS filings that it received $18.3 million in donations, and had assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities."

Our old friend Marie Exley, "said the money helped the nonprofit save as many souls as possible. She said she and her husband, mother and brother planned to stay glued to the television Friday night in Bozeman, Montana for news of an earthquake in New Zealand."

I don't know how many "souls" were saved by these clowns, but a lot of fools were certainly parted from their money. It remains to be seen now what the fall out will be in the coming days when so may of the true believers realized they have been duped. Will they double down and insist that the prophecy is true but that Camping must have been off a little in his dates, or will some of them start to question their beliefs and develop some critical thinking skills?

Barack Obama Sends Armed Thugs to Murder Devout Middle-Aged Muslim Man in his Home in Pakistan

2011-05-01T23:54:00.003-04:00

Osama bin Laden willingly allowed himself to be killed by US Special Forces in order to enable Barack Obama's secret plan to impose sharia law on the United States. Well, that's probably what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are going to say tomorrow.

Updated: The Age of Discovery

2011-04-30T15:44:00.004-04:00

Those of use who are history buffs tend to have a particular interest in certain specific time periods or places. For example, especially here in the United States, there are Civil War buffs. Others are fascinated by Tudor England, the Italian Renaissance, World War Two, the Roman Empire, ancient Greece, and so forth.

While I enjoy reading about the history of just about any place and any time period, of late I have focused my attentions on an era that is both very broad and yet still can be put into a specific framework that ties the disparate events and locations into an interconnected whole. That era encompasses the entire 16th century, beginning with the voyages of exploration of the 4th quarter of the 15th century and ending in the early years of the 17th century. Thanks to the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, the written accounts of explorers, novels, plays, religious tracts, and philosophical works, among others, could be disseminated widely and rapidly. François Rabelais makes note of this in his popular book Pantagruel (1534) in this passage:

"Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek - without which it is a disgrace that any man should call himself a scholar - Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin: elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil. The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold it was not as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now." (Underlined and bolded for emphasis).

The 16th century period was a time not only of expanding physical frontiers, but of mental frontiers as well, with the former often stimulating the latter. It was an era that saw, from at least a European perspective, the discovery of two vast continents and the peoples who inhabited them, and the first circumnavigation of the globe. Though other continents and geographical regions remained to be found by European navigators, such as Australia, Antarctica, and the Polynesian Islands, the circumference of the Earth had at last become truly known.

As I wrote above, the discovery of hitherto unknown lands and peoples challenged previously held assumptions about the world held by European societies whose understanding of it was based on the Bible. How come the Bible did not account for the Americas and the people and creatures that lived there? One hint of this can be found in a report by Amerigo Vespucci:

“What should I tell of the multitude of wild animals, the abundance of pumas, of panthers, of wild cats, not like those of Spain, but of the antipodes; of so many wolves, red deer, monkeys, and felines, marmosets of many kinds, and many large snakes? We saw so many other animals that I believe so many species could not have entered Noah’s ark.” (Underlined for emphasis)

Though the voyages of discovery were initiated by Europeans, the process of discovery was itself a two way street. The natives of the Americas were discovered by the Europeans, but at the same time the Native Americans, as well as other indigenous peoples, discovered that they too were part of a world that was greater than they had realized.

For the most part, the written accounts we have are from the perspective of the European explorers. Many of my upcoming posts will based on my reading of these works. While they are of course of immense value to us, we also need to be mindful that what they tell us influenced by their own biases and misunderstandings. Fortunately, we are not entirely without written records of the people visited and impacted by the Europeans. From the Kongo Kingdom of Africa, for example, we have a letter by the King of Kongo complaining to the Portuguese king about the activities of Portuguese slave traders in his kingdom. In Japan, the introduction of firearms by two shipwrecked Portuguese men is remembered in a written account of a Japanese witness some sixty years after the event.

In another example of the opening of mental horizons, the 16th century was also the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Western Christendom would no longer be synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church, an event that would reverberate beyond the confines of Europe. It was also the time of the Moguls in India and the Ottoman Turks under Suleyman the Magnificent, to name but a few.

It must also be noted that while this period, which saw the birth of today’s global economy, was a period of great discovery, it was also a period of tremendous violence and destruction, especially for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I’m reminded of a line by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie Jurassic Park, “What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.” We are certainly still living with the scars of that period today.

What's the Difference Between Religious Filipinos and Crazy People?

2011-04-22T11:07:00.007-04:00

Yes, it's Good Friday, and that means it's the time of year in that most Catholic country of the Philippines when a few dozen of the deeply devout and deluded reenact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by literally having themselves nailed to a cross. However, they must be doing it wrong, because the picture above shows the nail being driven through the man's hand rather than by the wrist.

But interviews with some of the participants in this ghastly ritual suggests that there is more to it than mere religious devotion.

"I hope the Lord will grant my wish to make me win big in 'jueteng' this year," Alex Laranang, a 55-year-old food vendor who said he can't read or write, told Reuters before two 5-inch nails were driven into his hands on a scorching hot day.

Laranang, a father of five, said he had won 3 thousand pesos ($70) twice in the five years he had himself crucified on a cross.

Okay, so Mr. Laranang has had a 40% success rate in winning the lottery in the past five years. However, we do not have any statistics for the success rate of his non-crucified (is that even a word?) friends and neighbors who also may have won the lottery in the last five years. And three thousand Philippine pesos? Shit, I have 1,820 pesos in my filing cabinet left over from my last trip to the Philippines. I would have been happy to have given it to Mr. Laranang if it would have kept him from having himself nailed to a cross.

But maybe there's more to this crucifixion thing than winning the lottery. Health benefits, perhaps?

Roli Pantoja, a construction worker, said he felt much better after getting down from a wooden cross. This was his sixth crucifixion.

"I feel very fresh, like a new-born baby. I can't feel any pain," he said.

Damn! But if it feels so good, why only do it once a year? How about once a week? That way Mr. Pantoja can feel like a new-born baby all the time.

The Catholic Church in the Philippines officially condemns these crucifixion reenactments. After all, wasn't the whole point of the Crucifixion was that Jesus supposedly did it for us? I thought the message of Christianity was to take up the cross, not to be nailed to one.

Then again, the Catholic Church in the Philippines has more pressing issues, like opposing the Reproductive Health Bill.

A Catholic priest has set off a rumpus when he urged churchgoers during his homily to leave if they were supporters of the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill.

ABS-CBN in a report on its website quoted the priest as saying in a mix of Filipino and English: “If there is anyone in the Mass here who are pro-RH bill…please, go out. It’s useless.”

“What is this Mass for if you are pro-RH bill? What is going to Church for if you’re pro-RH bill?” Ilano was also quoted as saying.

I would be willing to pet my 1,820 pesos that at least some of the congregants who were in attendance at that mass were having adulterous affairs or engaged in other activities considered by the Church to be sinful. But the priest didn't say to his congregation, "If you are engaging in acts of adultery, thievery or corruption, please go out." No, instead he attacks those who support a piece of legislation which "promotes information on and access to both natural and modern family planning methods, which are medically safe and legally permissible."

Which leads me to my next question, why does an institution controlled by celibate men get to have so much say over matters involving the sex lives of other people?

Denialism and Shoddy Historical References

2011-04-21T19:37:00.004-04:00

The book I'm currently reading during my commute back and forth to work on the Long Island Rail Road is Denialism by Michael Specter. The subtitle of the book is "How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives."

One of the laudatory blurbs on the back cover of Denialism is from David Baltimore, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, who praises Specter for describing "the increasing public willingness to deny the hard-won facts of science in favor of myths and shoddy investigation."

Earlier today, while reading the chapter in Denialism about the anti-vaccination movement, which for the most part was pretty good, I winced when Specter writes the following:

"In 1421, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in sophistication, in learning, and particularly in scientific knowledge. It was the least ignorant society on earth. Then the newly completed Forbidden City was struck by a lightning bolt just as it opened, and the emperor reacted with horror. He interpreted the lightning as a sign from the gods that the people of the Middle Kingdom had become too dependent on technology - and were not paying enough attention to tradition or to the deities." (Bold emphasis mine).

Specter then references 1421: The Year China Discovered America by the crackpot Gavin Menzies and states that "the Chinese burned every library, dismantled their fleets, stopped exploring the globe, and essentially shut themselves off from the outside world." While Specter might have seen it as a convenient historical reference to bolster he point he was trying to make, if he were to dig a little bit deeper, he would have seen that most of the claims peddled by Menzies are a load of nonsense, as per the website 1421exposed.com. Talk about "shoddy investigation."

Specter baldly states that early 15th century China, as I highlighted above, "was the least ignorant society on earth." But what does he base this on? By virtue of its population, which included a large imperial bureaucracy drawn from men who passed civil service examinations, Ming China certainly did not suffer from a shortage of literate, educated people. Quantitatively though, I don't know how one can say that a Ming scholar or civil servant knew more about geography or the natural wold than a contemporary educated man in Europe or the Middle East.

While it is true that the Forbidden City was struck by a fire in 1421, the last of the great Ming Dynasty treasure fleets set out ten years later in 1431. The voyages came to an end not because of a palace fire, but for reasons that seemed entirely pragmatic to those who favored their termination.

For one thing, the treasure fleets were enormously expensive and offered little in return except for generating tribute missions from the kingdoms they visited. Second, and more important, the greatest threat to Ming China's security was a land based threat, the Mongols north of the Great Wall. In 1449, the Mongols even managed to capture a Ming emperor in battle. By way of comparison, 15th century Portugal, which had a more or less stable border with Spain on the Iberian Peninsula, and having no other alternatives for expansion, had the incentive and the means to devote its energies to exploration and overseas conquest.

The decline of the Chinese navy also had its roots in the conflict between the court eunuchs and the Confucian bureaucracy. Louise Levathes writes in When China Ruled the Seas, "Seafaring and overseas trade were the traditional domains of the eunuchs, and in striking down those enterprises the Confucians were eliminating a primary source of their rivals' power and income."

Levathes adds, "With the opening of the Grand Canal in 1415, there was no longer a need for oceangoing junks to carry southern grain supplies northward to feed the capital." Besides, while the Europeans wanted to sail to China and the Indies beause those places had things the Europeans badly wanted, Europe did not have anything that the Chinese wanted, or at the very least China evidently did not know enough about Europe to even consider whether it had anything to offer China.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that one of the factors that contributed to China falling behind may have been because it was one large state covering a territory that was greater in size than Western Europe and which was vastly more poweful than its immediate neighbors. If Chinese government policy shifted towards hostility to overseas trade and exploration, there was no alternative power base to turn to for patronage and support. Western Europe, on the other hand, consisted of numerous smaller kingdoms in competition with one another. So, in late 15th century Europe, a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus believes that he can reach China, Japan and the East Indies by sailing westward into the Atlantic. He can travel from one kingdom to another, pitching his idea to their respective monarchs, until at last Ferdinand and Isabela of Spain decide to support his venture. Then once it becomes apparent that vast, previously unknown lands have been found, just about every other European country with the means to build oceangoing ships wants to get in on the action.

Part of the problem in criticizing the Ming for turning inward in the 15th century is that it presupposes that the Ming should have had the foresight to see what is so clear to us today with the benefit of nearly 600 years of hindsight. Yes, they allowed their naval technology to decay at precisely the time when the seafaring kingdoms of Europe were beginning a series of voyages that would culminate in the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. But it would not be until the Opium War in 1839, a little over four hundred years after the last treasure fleet returned home, that the reality of their backwardness became apparent to the Chinese. You have to know you're in a race before you can realize that you've fallen behind.

But to circle back to the main point of this post, if Specter is going to rightly criticize people who base their beliefs on incorrect information or forgetting the past, then he shouldn't rely on the work of pseudo historians and lazy generalizations to make his point. It only serves to undermine his own credibility.

Miura Baien and The Disinterested Study of Nature

2011-04-16T16:16:00.005-04:00

One of the criteria I use to determine if religious claims are a product of human invention rather than a divine revelation is my human egocentrism test. What I mean by that is that the religion elevates humanity to a position of central importance in the affairs of the divine being credited with creating our universe.

For example, the Abrahamic God, having created a universe filled with billions of galaxies each filled with billions of planets and stars, takes an inordinate interest in the affairs of the species homo sapiens on the planet Earth. What we eat, what we drink, what clothes we wear, and who we have sex with, to list a few behaviors, are all supposedly done under the eye of a ceaselessly vigilant being who wants us to obey its rules and love it with all of our hearts.

From my perspective as an atheist, I view our species and the world we inhabit as part of a larger universe rather than being the reason for the universe. I don't rule out the possibility that our universe is the creation of some higher intelligence, but even if it is, all I can know about such a creator is that it is very powerful and very intelligent.

I was pleasantly surprised recently to see my view echoed in an unlikely place. Like a lot of college graduates, I still have some of the text books I purchased when I was in college. One of them was a book I had to purchase for a class on Chinese and Japanese history. The book, titled Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 1, contains excerpts of mostly original documents from Japanese history from ancient times up to the latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. For most of the past couple of decades, the book sat largely undisturbed on the shelf amidst my collection of history books.

A couple of weeks or so ago I found myself perusing it, and looking at the table of contents under a chapter titled 18th Century Rationalism, I saw something called "The Disinterested Study of Nature." Turning to the page, it turned out to be an excerpt of a letter written by a Japanese philosopher of the late Tokugawa era named Miura Baien. A fair chunk of the letter, or at least the portion of the letter printed in Sources, addresses the issue of human egocentrism with regard to the study of nature and the universe.

"Now the universe shelters all things in it, and man is just one of those things.... All beings exist together with us, and we are just one of them. Realization that Heaven (nature) is universal, while man is individual, must be the starting point for all discussion of humanity. This is what I call opening the window of the human sphere. The reason men have remained in the dark about the universe is that, remaining fixed in the human sphere, they have considered their own position to be of the highest dignity and their own intellect to be the most exalted. To view Heaven-and-earth in this way, or to study creation and its manifold objects with this attitude, is exactly the same as brewers of sake, su, moro, and amasake who consider rice only in terms of taste and flavor. In the comprehension of the universe, knowledge is most important. But as long as students approach creation without opening the windows of the human sphere, and persist in keeping a smug sense of their own importance and intelligence, their approach is certain to give rise to delusions, as a mote in the eye casts a shadow on what one sees.

Concern for the world and compassion for the masses is benevolent in motive, but the study of creation in human terms is not conducive to true knowledge. Those whom the world acclaims as leaders in thought and action take humanity and human motives as the basis of their thinking and speculation in order to set up standards for what is to be believed and done. But human minds are like human faces; their preferences differ from one another. Each considers what he has arrived at to be right, a revelation from Heaven or a deposit of truth from antiquity, and thinks those who do not accept his standards should be exterminated. It is my conviction, therefore, that there is no systematic truth or logic except that which enables man to comprehend the universe without setting up standards conceived in terms of humanity or human motives...."

I don't know if Miura Baien had ever read the Bible, though he likely did not.* Based on what he wrote above, if he did read the creation account of Genesis, he would object to it on account of it being expressed in terms of human needs, with the stars being created to provide us with light at night, and with God creating the fish and the animals so that man could exercise dominion over them. It would be like the flora in our intestines telling each other that humans only exist so that microbes could live in our digestive tracts.

*In 1637-38, there was an uprising of Christians in Shimabara that was brutally put down at the cost of some 37,000 Japanese Christians. Japan was closed off to the outside world except for the presence of a small Dutch presence near Nagasaki. Japanese Christians after that conducted their worship mostly in secret and proselytization by foreigners was no longer possible.

Tominaga Nakamoto, in his "Testament of An Old Man" (1738) wrote "In the world today there are three religions: Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto." None of the other excerpts of Japanese philosophers or historians in Sources during the 18th century period make reference to Christianity and focus primarily on Confucianism. It suggests that the ban on foreign contacts and the suppression of Christianity was such that most educated Japanese in the 18th century knew little or nothing about it, or if they did, that they lived in a climate where even discussion of Christianity could engender the risk of punishment.

Collecting More of the Wisdom of the Ancients

2011-04-12T20:51:00.003-04:00

Recently, the Borders bookstore in Westbury announced its closure and in its final weeks sold off its stock of books at discounts that rose as the supply of books shrank.

In the course of several trips there prior to its final closing, I purchased a number of Penguin Classics and other translated works of ancient historians and philosophers. As I wrote in a post I did on reading the works of Saint Augustine, when you read the writings of educated people from the past, it is a fascinating opportunity to see the world through their eyes. Often times, what you get is a combination of profound ignorance mixed with tremendous wisdom and keen insight, and the occasional surprise when you see that a person living some two millennia ago knew of something that you did not expect them to.

For example, one of the books I purchased was a Penguin Classics collection of some of the writings of Cicero, a Roman orator and statesman, called On The Good Life. One of the selections is from Discussions At Tusculum, which is written in the format of a dialogue between two persons, though one of the speakers, presumably meant to represent Cicero himself, tends to monopolize the discussion. At one point, the Cicero character talks about the experience of physical pain and of people who willingly embrace pain even to the point of death.

In one of his examples, Cicero describes the Indian practice of sati, "And Indian women too, when the husband of one of them dies, compete with one another to decide which of their number he loved the best (because each man usually has more than one wife). Whereupon the woman who is proclaimed the winner, escorted by her relations, joyfully joins her husband on the funeral pyre, and the loser goes sadly away."

Since the Discussions At Tusculum were written sometime in 44BCE, Cicero's description of sati is evidence that the tradition of Hindu widows joining their deceased husbands on the funeral pyre dates back at least to the 1st century BCE, if not longer. Given the tremendous distance that separates Italy and India, it is also indicative of how trade networks connected disparate places and served not only as conduits for the exchange of goods, but for information about far away places and peoples where the trade goods originated.

Another ancient classic I am currently in the middle of readings is The Modern Classic Library's edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. More a collection of random jottings of whatever came into the second century Roman emperor's mind than a coherent work, the Meditations is a mixed bag of wisdom, melancholy, and occasional morbidity, such as when Marcus writes "The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag. Look at it clearly. If you can."

Nevertheless, there are quite a few nuggets of practical wisdom and observations that resonate just as well today as they did when Marcus wrote them. When it comes to the topic of confronting injustice and oppression in the world, it is not uncommon for someone to quote Edmund Burke's famous line "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The emperor Marcus Aurelius was ahead of Burke by some 1,600 years when he wrote a simpler version of the same thing, "And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing."

Since I'm not quite finished reading the Meditations, I can't say yet what my favorite passage is, but among the ones I have underlined*, the following is probably a leading candidate:

"Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human - however imperfectly - and fully embrace the pursuit that you have embarked upon."

*Yes, I have not yet made the leap to buying a Kindle, Nook or other kind of e-reader. Eventually I will probably get around to it, but I still like to hold a physical book in my hand and underline or circle passages that interest me. Since many of the books I read are history books containing maps and pictures, I don't know how well they fare in e-book format. If anyone knows, please feel free to share in the comments section. Lastly, one thing you can't do with an e-book that you can do with a physical book is to get it signed by the author.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

2011-03-26T23:06:00.003-04:00

I recently finished reading the Penguin Classics edition of The Later Roman Empire, which covers the third quarter of the 4th century as written by Ammianus Marcellinus, who was alive during the period of time he describes.

While Ammianus focuses mostly on the military and political affairs of the time, he digresses on matters such as the origin of pearls, eclipses and comets, most of which have been omitted from the Penguin Classics translation, there is one passage included that caught my attention.

The central character of Ammianus' history is the last pagan emperor, known as Julian the Apostate. Ammianus describes how one night Julian "thought he saw a blazing light like a falling star, which clove its way through part of the air and vanished."

But the unintentionally funny part is when Ammianus goes on to write "In fact this fiery object was what the Greeks call a shooting star, which never falls or touches the earth. Anyone who thinks that bodies can fall from the sky must be set down as an ignoramus or a fool."

In fairness to Ammianus, he does offer some rather interesting and perceptive insights, such as when he notes that "according to the unanimous opinion of scholars, the circumference of the whole earth, which seems to us so immense, is no more than a tiny point in comparison with the vastness of the universe." Not long ago, my son brought home from school a work sheet about Christopher Columbus that repeated the canard that in the time of Columbus people still believed that the world was flat. Educated people have known for millennia that the Earth is round and this passage from a 4th century Roman historian is testament to this fact.

In another passage, Ammianus offers a nugget of wisdom that is very close to a line from the Buddhist Dhammapadda which tells us that "the greatest of victories is the victory over oneself." Ammianus writes "the truest glory is won when a man in power totally subdues his cruel and savage and angry impulses and erects in the citadel of his soul a splendid memorial of his victory over himself."

But my favorite passage from the book is from a section where Ammianus discusses the numbers of people wrongly imprisoned and executed during the reign of Valens on false or trumped up charges that reminded me of the climate of terror described in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

"How much might have been put right in those dark days if Valens had been taught by wisdom the lesson of the philosophers that sovereign power is nothing if it does not care for the welfare of others, and that it is the task of a good ruler to keep his power in check, to resist the passions of unbridled desire and implacable rage, and to realize that, as the dictator Caesar use to say, the recollections of past cruelty is a wretched provision for old age. If a ruler is going to pass judgment on the life and existence of a man, who is part of the world and makes up the number of living beings, he ought to reflect long and earnestly, and not be carried away by passion to commit an act that cannot be undone."

For anyone interested in the history of the Roman Empire, I highly recommend reading The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived during a critical time when the frontiers of the Empire were coming under increasing pressure from barbarian tribes in Europe and from the Sassanid Persians in the Middle East.

Why Pray?

2011-03-13T21:37:00.002-04:00

"If people pray for rain and it rains, how is that? I would say: Nothing in particular. Just as when people do not pray for rain, it also rains. When people try to save the sun or moon from being swallowed up [in eclipse], or when they pray for rain in a drought, or when they decide an important affair only after divination - this is not because they think in this way they will get what they seek, but only to add a touch of ritual to it. Hence the gentleman takes it as a matter of ritual, whereas the common man thinks it is supernatural. He who takes it as a matter of ritual will suffer no harm; he who thinks it is supernatural will suffer harm...."

from the Confucian philosopher Hsün Tzu.

Vjack at Atheist Revolution has a post up titled Japan Doesn't Need Your Prayers, wherein he writes "If you are praying for the Japanese people, please recognize that you are doing this only to comfort or distract yourself. It is for you, not for them. It does not do them any good."

I agree with Vjack that if a person prays to God to help the people of Japan with the expectation that God's divine power will prevent any of the nuclear reactors from having a meltdown or causing trapped survivors to be magically kept alive until they can be rescued, then that person is deluded and is not helping in any way. A post I wrote earlier this evening, May God Protect Those Who Haven't Already Been Hurt Or Killed, was inspired by a comment I saw from someone on a Facebook post who falls into this category.

That being said, I don't think prayer and doing meaningful things to help are mutually exclusive. I'm sure there are plenty of believers in a personal god, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim, who will engage in prayer and then write out a check to a disaster relief organization or, if they are able to, volunteer in some meaningful way such as picking up or delivering supplies to be sent to the disaster zone to aid the relief effort.

For a religious believer, the act of prayer can serve as a ritual that can help to focus the believer's mind on a matter of personal concern, such as helping those who have been affected by a terrible calamity, and empower that person to take action. If the act of prayer really does have such an effect on a religious believer, then I certainly won't begrudge the believer's decision to do so, even if I don't personally think it is necessary.

May God Protect Those Who Haven't Already Been Hurt or Killed

2011-03-13T20:43:00.005-04:00

While reading a post on Facebook yesterday about the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, the following comments from someone named Eduardo caught my eye:

"May God protect all the people effected by this tragic event. In God we trust."

If Eduardo was expecting God to actually protect people from being injured or killed, I would have to say that Eduardo's trust is greatly misplaced.

Considering that the death toll alone is projected to top 10,000 people, what do people like Eduardo actually expect God to do now? It reminds me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when the narcissistic and fraudulent wizard Gilderoy Lockhart declares that if only he had arrived sooner he could have helped a Hogwarts student who got petrified because he knew just the right counter curse.

Well, the Gilderoy Lockhart in the sky didn't protect the people of Japan from the tsunami. And all the work being done now to aid the people of Japan is being carried out by mere mortal human beings, the way it has always been done in the past.

Huckabee Hits The Trifecta

2011-03-08T00:33:00.004-05:00

Lately, former Arkansas governor and aspiring Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee can't seem to stop shooting himself in the foot.

At a roundtable lunch with reporters last month, Huckabee criticized the Obama Administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA"). In his remarks, the Huckster referred to ballot initiatives in numerous states that affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Fine, but as I pointed out in this post in response to an appeal I received from former Senator Rick Santorum:

"In 1996, I thought the idea of same-sex marriage was taking things too far, as much as I considered myself pro-gay rights at the time. But you know what, Ricky? People change their minds over time on some issues. Sometimes it takes decades. Other times it is just a matter of a few years. It's what Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion calls the changing moral zeitgeist. So, you can keep looking back on the passage of DOMA with fond nostalgia all you want, but it is not 1996 anymore."

While my comments were directed at DOMA itself, the same thing applies to the ballot initiatives referred to by Huckabee.

But where Huckabee really goes off the rails when he said "There is a quantified impact of broken families," Huckabee said. "[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year...that's the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties."

As a happily married man myself, I am constantly baffled when same-sex marriage opponents claim that the health of my heterosexual marriage hangs in the balance. Really? How? I thought the "dad deficit" was a product of straight men impregnating women and not taking responsibility for the children they fathered. It never occurred to me that gays were to blame for this.

Then on a radio appearance last week, Huckabee fired another round at his foot when he claimed that President Barack Obama grew up in Kenya. When it was pointed out that Obama did not grow up in Kenya and only visited the country when in he was in his twenties, Huckabee tried to backtrack by claiming he meant Indonesia. But he only ended up demonstrating the degree to which he was willing to engage in dishonesty, because the references Huckabee made in the interview cited Kenyan history.

Being an ordained pastor, and therefore, presumably a fine, upstanding Christian, Huckabee could have taken the high road and said, "In my remarks about Barack Obama the other day, I failed to live up to the standards of truth and honesty that Christians aspire to. Instead, I subordinated my convictions to the need to make cheap political points, and for that I apologize and ask you all for your forgiveness." Atheist that I am, I would have been mightily impressed if Huckabee had said something like that. But alas, the former Arkansas governor blamed the "liberal media" and showed that he was nothing more than a Republican Party hack.

Reeling from his self inflicted wounds, Huckabee still managed to fire another round, when during an appearance on conservative film critic Michael Medved's radio show, he responded to Medved's potshot at actress (and Long Island girl!) Natalie Portman for her acceptance speech at the Academy Awards for winning the Best Actress award. You see, the pregnant but as of yet unmarried actress thanked her fiancé for "having given me my most important role of my life." Shame! Shame! An unmarried pregnant woman appearing in public acknowledging the fact that she is pregnant but unmarried, though engaged to be married.

To be fair to Huckabee, I think Michael Medved was the bigger douchebag in the exchange with his "[Millepied] didn't give her a wedding ring" line. But Huckabee was way off base in suggesting that Portman was glamorizing out of wedlock pregnancy. While Huckabee cited the problems of poor, mostly minority women who have children out of wedlock, which is a problem, I seriously doubt African-American and Latina teenage girls decide pregnancy is a good idea because they saw Natalie Portman's acceptance speech.

God Is Pro-Choice

2011-02-26T21:41:00.006-05:00

Well, that's the conclusion I draw considering that yesterday in New York City the rain was absolutely pouring around 1 P.M., and yet today, for the rally I attended in support of Planned Parenthood in downtown Manhattan, the weather was about as nice as one could hope for in February. Because you know if it had rained during the rally like we experienced yesterday, some Bible Thumpers would be saying "You see, God's showing you how much he disapproves of what you're doing."

The rally itself was in response to the recent vote by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to strip federal funding to Planned Parenthood for the terrible sin of providing abortions in addition to the majority of their work, which is health care and birth control. I myself utilized Planned Parenthood's services during a time of crisis in my life, so I know first hand the valuable work that they perform. It's not often that I feel motivated to get off my duff to stand up for a cause, but the actions by the Republicans not only in Congress, but increasingly in state legislatures across the country, have made me realize that when it comes to defending what I believe is a woman's fundamental reproductive rights, I can't just be a passive supporter.

Below are some pictures I took at the rally this afternoon. The first one, which is partly obscured, is of a sign carried by one attendee that reads "Keep Your Boehner Away From My Planned Parenthood," referring to the Speaker of the House John Boehner, who is apparently more concerned with making a woman's uterus a public domain rather than focusing on job growth. A couple of other amusing signs follow.

Of course, the rally featured more than just some catchy signs. There was also some important politicians and celebrity figures. Below is New York Senator Charles Schumer.

Next up, the fiery Anthony Weiner, who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens in the House of Representatives. I believe Weiner's district is the one that Schumer formerly represented in the House before Schumer was elected to the Senate.

In the celebrity department, we have actress Kathleen Turner, her voice huskier than ever. I kept hoping she would say "Pussywillows, Dotty." Apologies for the grainy shot. She was far from me and I had the lens on near maximum zoom.

Another amusing sign. It's the one in the middle that reads "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries."

Another well known personality, at least in the blogging community, is the feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. Again, apologies for the grainy picture.

Last in batch, I couldn't leave out my own representative in the New York State Assembly, Charles Lavine. It's starting to become something of a running gag with us that we keep crossing paths with one another. Last autumn, we met at an open house at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury. Then on Election Day I was eating lunch at my local Cosi when he stopped in to eat with a couple of other people. He recognized me from the Islamic Center and we spoke briefly. So, as I was leaving the rally shortly after he spoke, I passed by him and when we made eye contact I greeted him again and was like "Hey, remember me?"

There were numerous other elected officials and feminist activists who spoke to the crowd, but I decided to focus only on the ones that I knew. Sadly, to me at least, all of the elected officials at the rally were Democrats. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate their support on reproductive rights, and since 2004 I have voted mostly for Democratic candidates either on the Democratic line or if they appear on other party lines, such as the Working Families Party. But it was not all that long ago that you could still find a few Republican politicians in New York who supported abortion rights. Regrettably, the Republican Party is increasingly solidifying itself as a party that opposes abortion rights even here in New York. For me as a voter, I find it difficult to pull the lever for a candidate that opposes abortion rights, but sometimes it puts me in the position of having to vote for a pro-choice candidate who is lackluster or who I do not otherwise care for. I would like to see the pendulum shift in the other direction so that opposition to abortion does not become a litmus test for Republican candidates for elected office.

And that leads me to another observation I want to make. Reproductive rights in this country are under a sustained and increasing assault by the anti-choice movement, and what I have noticed is that supporters of abortion rights are constantly on the defensive. What I would like to see from those of us who support abortion rights, access to contraception, and comprehensive sex education, is a counteroffensive to force our opponents to spend their money and resources responding to us rather than forcing us to always play defense. I would be eager to hook up with anyone in the New York area who would be interested in bouncing ideas off of each other and coming up with strategies to make this happen.

Change In The Arab World

2011-02-25T21:33:00.004-05:00

I had been intending recently to do a post about Pakistan, but the news lately has been dominated by the revolts taking place in many of the Arab countries. I will get to Pakistan very soon, though.

I do have to say that the wave of uprisings, particularly in the North African countries, is one of the most exciting events in the news since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The world is changing before our eyes and all we can really do is watch it happen and hope for the best.

Inevitably, what is happening in places like Egypt and Tunisia has been compared to the uprisings against the Communist countries of Eastern Europe more than two decades ago. One of the differences between what is happening today versus Eastern Europe is that the governments overthrown in 1989 were all more or less client states of the Soviet Union. Sure, Mubarak's government in Egypt could be described as a client state of the United States to some degree, but one cannot say the same thing with regard to Moammar Gaddafi's Libya.

With Gaddafi in particular, his regime is is certainly the one thus far that has shown the willingness to shed the most blood to defend itself. If the Arab revolts are to be compared to Eastern Europe in 1989, then Gaddafi is turning out to be the Arab Nicolae Ceasescu. Whether Gaddafi will end up sharing the same fate as the Romanian dictator remains to be seen, though he certainly seems to be heading in that direction.

Sarah Palin's Trademark Blues

2011-02-08T22:07:00.004-05:00

It's not often that I write about a topic related to the field in which I work, which is trademark law. So, I couldn't help but be amused when I read this story on Crooks and Liars regarding Half-Term Sarah's difficulties in registering her name SARAH PALIN as a service mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (hereinafter "USPTO").

Palin's application was filed with the USPTO on November 5, 2010 and was assigned serial number 85170226. If you're curious enough, you can look up the application yourself on the USPTO'S TESS database. Just click on the link and type in SARAH PALIN in the search term field and click on Submit Query. Then click on the first hit, SARAH PALIN (the search will turn up a second application for the mark SARAH PALIN'S GOING ROGUE ROUGE which was filed by another person, but more on that later). You can then view all of the documents available to the public for the application by clicking on the blue button labeled TDR.

The application was examined rather quickly, in less than a month, probably because the filing attorney filed using the TEAS Plus form. The Office Action (which is what a USPTO Examining Attorney issues to a trademark applicant informing the applicant of the Examining Attorney's objections to the application) sets forth two objections to the application.

The first objection is just a mere technicality, but it indicates that the attorney who filed the application does not know a heck of a lot about trademarks. You see, when a trademark application is filed that contains the name of a living individual, you need to provide the signed consent of that person if that person is not the one who is signing the application. This objection can be easily overcome by having Sarah Palin sign a simple form that states that she consents to the application. In fact, the TDR record indicates that the law firm representing Palin has already been in communication with the Examining Attorney regarding the requirements for overcoming this objection.

The second objection is more serious. But first some background information. Most domestic trademark applicants will commonly file the application based on one of two filing bases. A Section 1(a) application is an application wherein the applicant is using the mark in commerce in the United States a the time of the filing of the application. The applicant has to submit a specimen evidencing use of the mark and provide the date when the mark was first used. The second common filing basis is the Section 1(b) application, in which the mark is not in use at the time of the filing of the application, but the applicant intends to make use of the mark at a later date. An application filed under 1(b) cannot pass on to registration until a Statement of Use is filed with the specimen and first use date.

Furthermore, when an applicant submits a trademark application with the USPTO, the applicant is declaring, under penalty of perjury, that he or she believes that all of the information provided in the application is, to the best of the applicant's knowledge, true. Palin's application alleges that she used her name in connection with the services "Information about political elections; Providing a website featuring information about political issues" in Class 35 at least as early as January 1, 1996. However the specimens provided in support of her use claim is a page from the Fox News website from January 11, 2010 announcing that Palin was joining Fox as a political contributor (which of course as we all know is the real reason why she resigned her position as governor of Alaska. She gets paid much more money to spout bullshit about things she doesn't really know compared to governing one of the least populated states in the country) and postings from her Facbook page.

The problem for Palin's application is that being mentioned by Fox News on its web site is not evidence that she herself is providing information about elections and having a Facebook page does not constitute providing a website featuring information about political issues. Again, this strongly supports my belief that the attorney retained by Palin to file her application is not familiar with trademark law. Even more egregious is the first use date, January 1, 1996. While just about anyone who had a computer in 1996 had online access, it was not common for most people to have their own websites. For example, the well-known wingnut personality Michelle Malkin did not register her domain name until February 9, 1999, according to a Whois search of michellemalkin.com. I seriously doubt that Sarah Palin, who was unknown outside of Alaska at the time, had a website where she provided information about political issues as a private citizen. In early 1996, Palin was serving on the Wasilla City Council. I suppose it is possible the Wasilla City Council had its own website in 1996, though any information or remarks provided by Palin on the site would have been in her capacity as an elected official.

While Sarah Palin today has a website, sarah-palin.com, a Whois search indicates that this domain was created on August 29, 2008. There is also a domain name sarahpalin.com that was created on April 26, 2004, though the webpage is blank. A Whois search of foxnews.com indicates that the Fox News domain was created on June 21, 1995. I'm hazarding a guess that Palin's attorney (or Palin herself) believed that since Fox News was around since 1996, Palin could somehow piggyback on that. Or alternatively, as I wrote in the paragraph above, maybe she thought that anything she provided on a local government website back when she served on the Wasilla City Council counted as use of SARAH PALIN. Either way, an attorney knowledgeable about trademark law would have done a better job in providing a valid specimen and first use date.

It should not be too hard for Palin to submit a valid specimen, though I wonder if the Examining Attorney will also take her to task for the January 1, 1996 first use date, which I am quite certain is erroneous and possibly dishonest. The deadline for Palin to respond to all of the objections raised by the Examining Attorney is May 29, 2011, so she has a little over three months left to straighten this out. I wonder, by the way, if this story gets picked up by the conservative blogosphere if any of Palin's wingnut fans will call or send the Examining Attorney angry messages to stop picking on poor Sarah by bothering her with such pesky rules.

And to get back to what I alluded to earlier, an Alaskan individual named James Weeks has filed an application to register SARAH PALIN'S GOING ROGUE ROUGE for adhesive labels and printed novelty wine labels. Just like Sarah Palin herself, Weeks has to provide Palin's consent to register Sarah Palin's name as a trademark. However, I doubt that Weeks is going to get his former governor to consent to his application.

One other thing. Bristol Palin also has an application pending to register her name, filed by the same attorney who is handling her mother's application. Just like with her mom's application, Bristol's application has been rejected because Bristol did not sign the application, so she also has to submit her written consent. Also, like her mom, Bristol is facing an objection to the specimen submitted in support of her 1(a) application, which as the Examining Attorney has pointed out, is just a white sheet with her name typed on it.

I suggest that the next time the Palins want to file more trademark applications that they hire an experienced IP attorney.

Long Island and the Fact of Global Warming

2011-02-06T18:29:00.002-05:00

With all of the snow we've been getting here on Long Island since late December, as well as the big snow storm that barrelled across the United States last week, the last thing on anyone's mind is global warming, except maybe as a punchline. But the big picture gets lost when people focus on the weather while ignoring the long-term climatic data.

When the subject of global warming and climate change does get coverage, it is often dominated by the receding and thinning of Arctic sea ice and how it will affect the polar bears. Out of curiosity, I decided to find out if my native Long Island is experiencing warming.

The source of my data is the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. I was able to obtain for free temperature records collected at the NOAA's climate monitoring station in Mineola*. It was rather time consuming though, because I could only obtain one month at a time. I also damn near used up all the black ink in my toner cartridge! What I decided to do was to focus on two months as a representative sample, July and November. And to make sure I collected data for a sufficient span of time, I felt a good year to start was the year of my birth, 1969.

The data appears on what is, even up to the present day, a form with the information written in by hand. It contains the high and low temperature for each day of the month. What I did was to analyze the data in two ways. In one spreadsheet I put in columns for the first, 15th and last day for both July and November and then entered the highest temperature for those days from 1969 up to 2010. In a second spreadsheet, I created columns with temperature ranges, with columns for July for 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90-99 and 100+ degrees, and columns for November for 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, and 70-79 degrees. For each year I counted the number of days in which the highest temperature fell**. For instance, in July of 1969, there were 15 days in which the highest temperature was between 70 and 79 degrees.

After I plugged in the numbers, I created bar graphs to see if trends in temperature change could be discerned. Unfortunately, I don't know how to insert bar graph charts into a blog post, so I can't include them in this post. However, I can describe what they show. And what they do clearly show is that for both July and November, there is a noticeable increase in temperature in the last two decades.

For July, the frequency of days with the temperature highs between 60 to 69 degrees and 70 to 79 degrees shows a decrease. The number of days with temperature highs between 80 to 89 degrees increases only slightly, but this is because the number of days in which the high temperature falls between 90-99 and 100 and over is higher. According to the temperature records for Mineola, there were no days in July that reached 100 degrees between 1969 and 1987. The first year to reach 100 degrees is 1988. While the temperature does not consistently reach 100 or more on a year to year basis, in 2002 and 2010 the number of days in July in which the temperature reached 100 or more degrees was five.

I selected November because I wanted to see if an autumn month would show a similar trend, and I can report that it does. As with July, there is a decline in the number of days with temperatures in the lower temperature ranges, in this case between 30 to 39 degrees and 40 to 49 degrees. Likewise, there is an increase in the number of days in which the high temperature falls between 50 to 59 degrees and 60 to 69 degrees. The one range where November breaks the trend is in the number of days in which the temperature reached 70 or more degrees. The record occurred in 1975, when the temperature exceeded 70 or more degrees on 7 days. The number of 70+ days is slightly higher in the first two decades than the latter two. However, 70 degree days for November were infrequent for the entire 41 year span of temperature data I collected.

Using the temperature data for July and November, the evidence shows that in the last two decades temperatures on Long Island (or at least Mineola in Nassau County!) have increased. Readers of this post who might be of a right wing or libertarian bent, before you engage in a Tourette's outburst, please note that this post does not address whether human activity is causing this warming or whether there is anything we should be doing on a policy level to address the rise in temperature. I am merely reporting the findings from the data I have analyzed. You can look at the data yourself to confirm my findings.

Climate change on Long Island being a fact, the next issue to consider is what impact it might have on those of us who live here. One thing that springs to mind is the potential to affect the Long Island wine industry. The East End of Long Island, particularly on the North Fork, has a microclimate that has been compared to Bordeaux in France. It is possible that a continued rise in temperature could adversely impact the industry. I don't know to what extent, if any, that Long Island's winegrowers have noticed any change in their growing seasons or an increase in pests that favor warmer weather. I intend to contact the Long Island Wine Council to see if they have any information on this and will report what they say in a future post.

A greater potential threat to all Long Islanders are the effects of a rise in sea levels to our underground drinking supply. Long Island gets its drinking water from underground aquifers. This web page from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation contains a brief, useful description of our aquifers. A rise in sea level from the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica in combination with a decrease in our water table could increase salt water intrusion into our aquifers. This paper provides a good overview of the impact of rising temperatures and sea level on the Long Island Sound, estuaries and coast lines and the marine life that inhabit them.

In conclusion, the last two decades have seen a trend in rising temperatures for Long Island that could have potentially adverse consequences for those of use who live here if that trend continues in the coming decades.

* The data was either incomplete or missing for Mineola for November of 1982, 1984, 1988 and 1996. To the extent that it was available, I substituted data collected at the Wantagh station. Wantagh, for those of you not familiar with Long Island, is on the south shore of Nassau County, whereas Mineola is more towards the center of Nassau County.

** For November of 1977, there was no temperature data for the 8th and the 9th. For July of 1982, there was no temperature date for the 21st. For November of 1982, there was no temperature data for the 22nd and 23rd. For July of 1986, there was no temperature data for the 31st. For November of 1988, there is no temperature data for the 21st and 22nd.

Dear Erick Erickson, Please Forgive Me For Existing

2011-01-16T11:22:00.004-05:00

Erick "Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a Goat Fucking Child Molester" Erickson of Redstate.com had this to say in response to the Tucson shooting spree that seriously wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, among others, and killed six people, including a Federal judge:

"Through it all though, well meaning people on both sides of the ideological and partisan divide are not talking about the one thing that should be talked about — a saving faith in Jesus Christ."

I guess Rep. Giffords, who is Jewish, should count herself twice lucky. Not only was she not killed, she still has time to be "saved." I am sure that she will no doubt be grateful for Erickson's concern.

"In all the discussions we’re having, let’s not forget that bad things have happened throughout history, but we are seeing more and more a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ and we are seeing the most extreme rhetoric from those who reject the only real truth while embracing every other historic fad and nonsense as variations of truth."

Yeah, he's right. Militant Muslims reject Christ (though if I am not mistaken, they do recognize Jesus as a prophet of God) and they are increasingly resorting to extreme rhetoric and violence. Oh, wait:

"For a taste of what I’m talking about, look at Timothy McVeigh. Raised a Catholic, McVeigh self-admitted that there was a god of some sorts, but that he was agnostic, had no belief in hell, and had drifted far from anything having to do with Jesus Christ."

So much for that militant Muslim thingy.

"The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe."

For me, it's not so much cringeworthy as eyerolling.

"But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis."

Like Dark Matter and Dark Energy? How about solar radio bursts? The magnetic field?

"It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell."

Oh. Boy, was I way off. So, not only are angels, demons, God, Satan, Heaven and Hell real, they are "very" real. So, when bonobos engage in promiscuity, they're just behaving like the animals that they are. But when members of homo sapiens engage in promiscuity, it is because they are possessed by demons and/or are tempted by Satan (sorry, couldn't find the English version!). Acts of altruism by chimpanzees are again just animal behavior, but altruism by humans is special, as long as the person doing the altruistic act has a deep, abiding faith in Jesus Christ. Thus, Agnostic Adam, who volunteers at a food bank a few hours a week, gets killed in a car accident after spending a night with and getting a blow job from Steve, is going straight to the ovens because that blow job and Adam's agnosticism made the Creator of the Universe very upset.

"The back and forth and accusations and lies surrounding Jared Loughner should be a constant reminder to us that there is more at play in our world than what we see. And, frankly, at times like this I am more and more mindful of the great chasm in this world between the saved and damned."

Of course, Erick Erickson has that smug assurance that he is among the elite few who are "saved." However, the great chasm I see in the world is between the haves and the have-nots. The chasm between people who live in safe neighborhoods and those who live in places where the simple act of going to the market or to a well two hours away on foot is to risk being raped or murdered. The chasm between people who have access to basic health care and those who do not. The chasm between people who have shelter and those who do not.

There are good people in the world, both secular and religious, who devote their lives to trying to bridge these chasms. For example, some of my wife's family members, who are devout Catholics, will go back home to the Philippines once a year on medical missions to provide medical care to the poor. Is it my place to tell them "Great work on those medical missions, but you can jettison that Catholic crap, you know"?

"Political rhetoric did not make Jared Loughner do what he did. His embrace of evil led him down a road down which we should be in constant prayer no others dare travel."

Hold on there fella'! While I am not one to jump on the "blame Sarah Palin's target map" bandwagon with regard to this incident, the simple fact is that we won't know for sure what led Loughner to go on his shooting rampage at the supermarket unless and until he tells us. What does seem clear is that Loughner did not exactly have a firm grip on what we call reality. In the coming weeks and months, we may get a clearer picture of what drove him to commit murder. But what certainly did not cause him to do what he did was Satan whispering in his ear "Go on Jared, pull the trigger."

To circle back to Erickson's earlier about "a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ," if he is referring to those of us in America who are atheists, agnostics or members of other religious faiths, what does he base this on? How many vocal atheists have committed murder, rape or theft in this country and are there statistics that show an increase in such violence? Unless Erickson can produce this, I have to assume he just pulled that statement out of his ass. What is a fact though is that Erick Erickson did threaten to shoot U.S. census workers if they came to his house*. Then again, it's okay if Erick does it, because he's like "saved."

* My original version of this post was worded incorrectly in that I had wrote that Erickson threatened "to shoot U.S. census workers who came to his house."

Taking Stock - The Financial Front

2011-01-15T21:36:00.002-05:00

If there's one thing theists and nontheists have in common, it's the need to make a living and save enough for retirement.

I'm presently 41 and my wife is 47. We have two children aged 9 and 7. We are at an age where we can measure how far we have come towards reaching our financial goals and how far we still have to go.

While the news over the past year has been dominated by stories about the dismal state of the American economy and the high unemployment rate, I have been fortunate that my family's financial situation significantly improved by the end of 2010.

One development that greatly benefited us was the decline in mortgage rates. Going into the summer, my wife and I had about 11 and a half years left on our 20 year mortgage with a 6.88% rate. We took advantage of the lower rates to refinance to a 10 year mortgage at 4.125%. Thus, in one fell swoop we reduced the balance on our mortgage from about $205,000 to about $180,000. While our monthly payments were only reduced by a little less than eight dollars, we reduced the amount of time left to pay off the mortgage by a year and four months. It was, as the old saying goes, a "no brainer." At the time of the writing of this post, we have nine years and seven months left to go on our mortgage, though I anticipate paying it off a year early.

On the retirement savings front, my decision to boost my 401(k) contribution to 20% of my salary was well-timed to benefit from the gains posted by the major stock indexes. My 401(k) balance increased by roughly $25,000 from the previous year and crossed the psychologically important milestone of $100,000. The gains might have been greater if I had a more aggressive portfolio. But I have no complaints.

The combined balance of all of the retirement funds held by my wife and I increased by nearly $50,000 to approximately a quarter of a million dollars. While I suppose that is not bad for a couple of forty somethings, it is still far short of what we will need to fund our retirement.

To get an idea of how we are doing, I tried out a retirement calculator on the CNN Money web site. Based on the information I provided, if my wife and I continue to earn our current salaries and continue to contribute to our retirements savings as we have been doing, we are on track to amass over a million dollars. Of course, this assumes that the markets don't collapse in the next decade or so.

However, as important as it is to save for retirement, I strongly believe we must also not forget the here and the now. The job situation in this country is still cloudy, and in spite of signs of improvement in our economy in recent months, things can still take a turn for the worse. Furthermore, I don't want to wait until I am 65 before I retire. I want to be able to enjoy life while I am still relatively young and fit. In order to do that, one must also amass a nonretirement savings portfolio.

The financial experts will say that everyone should have a rainy day fund to cover anywhere from 6 to 12 months worth of expenses. I decided to take it even further and make it a goal of having at least $100,000 in nonretirement savings. There was a period of time a few years ago where I had actually achieved this goal, but for a variety of reasons, I ultimately was not able to hold the line. At one point in 2009, our nonretirement savings had declined to about $70,000.

Since late 2009, I have managed to sock away enough to claw our way back to $90,000. The last time I had amassed $100,000, stocks comprised a large portion of the porfolio. On the one hand, when they went up, it made it a lot easier to attain my goal. But the downside was that when the stocks went down, so did the balance. This time my nonretirement portfolio is much more conservative, so that while the gains are small, they are also irreversible in the absence of a need to tap the savings.

There are a number of reasons why it might become necessary to tap our nonretirement savings in the near future. Both my wife and I drive older model cars. While we have not had a lot of repair issues with them, I know that this will not last forever and eventually we will have to buy new vehicles. Our house is also going to require remodeling and repair work, including a problem we have with sagging floors. The money for this will have to come from somewhere. For now, I am deferring on much of this in order to build our savings.

The other dark cloud looming on the horizon is college expenses for my children, which will come rolling in conveniently as the mortgage is winding down. I have to confess that I have not set aside any money in any college savings vehicles, focusing instead on building a general nonretirement savings portfolio. One reason I have not done so is that I am reluctant to have a large portion of my nonretirement savings invested in funds that can only be withdrawn for educational purposes.

In summary, we have made a lot of progress and I suppose for our age, my wife and I are in decent shape, but we still have a long way to go to get to that promised land of financial security.

Desperate Times, Desperate Beliefs

2011-01-06T21:07:00.004-05:00

A prophet had appeared among the Paiutes of Nevada. He preached a new religion. It was a religion that offered hope for the Indian race - hope not dependent on promises of the white men. He held forth a vision of paradise in which all Indians would at last be free of the white burden and reside in a blissful land, a land without white people, a land inhabited by all the generations of Indians that had gone before...and it could be simply attained by practicing the tenets of his faith and dancing a prescribed "Ghost Dance."1

The closing years of the 19th and into the early 20th century witnessed the last stand of many indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa and Asia against the invasion of their lands and the destruction of their cultures and way of life by Europeans and Americans. Just as many individual people in the depths of crisis turn to religion to offer them hope and salvation, movements arose in these indigenous societies that were embraced by many as a means of destroying the foreign invaders and ushering in a time of paradise. Tragically, for all of them, the promises offered by these indigenous spiritual movements led to death and disaster.

Many of my fellow Americans are probably familiar with the Ghost Dance movement that spread among the Great Plains Indians in 1890. From Robert Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West, "All over Pine Ridge Reservation, and on others as well, the people abandoned their cabins and pitched their tipis in the cottonwood groves. Hypnotically, in slow shuffling cadence, they danced around sacred prayer trees. As the intensity and the excitement mounted, some fell to the ground, to die and go to heaven and there talk with the Indian Messiah and see the beautiful new world foretold. They came back to describe their experiences and to urge others to dance with a passion that would reveal to them, too, a vision of the promised land."

As the movement grew, some of its proponents began to preach confrontation and sought to bolster the courage of the Ghost Dancers by telling them that the white man's bullets could not harm them if they wore their "Ghost Shirts."

A decade later on the other side of the world, a similar movement arose in China. Ever since its defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War in 1842, the Qing Dynasty that had ruled China since 1644 suffered humiliating defeats and the carving up of its territory into spheres of influence at the hands of foreign, mostly European, powers. In this climate of increasing foreign encroachment, Chinese nationalist fervor increased, leading in some cases to extreme xenophobia.

The Boxers United in Righteousness, as they called themselves, began to emerge as a force in northwest Shandong during 1898. They drew their name and the martial rites they practiced from a variety of secret-society and self-defense units that had spread in southern Shandong during the previous years, mainly in response to the provocations of Western missionaries and their Chinese converts. Some Boxers believed they were invulnerable to swords and bullets in combat, and they drew on an eclectic pantheon of spirits and protectors from folk religion, popular novels, and street plays. Although they lacked a unified leadership, Boxers recruited local farmers and other workers made desperate by the distastrous floods that had been followed by droughts in Shandong; they began to call for the ending of the special privileges enjoyed by Chinese Christian converts and to attack both converts and Christian missionaries.2

In the summer of 1905, in German East Africa, now Tanzania, African villagers who labored in work gangs to pick cotton for export to Europe, began to listen to a spirit medium named Kinjikitle Ngwale, who called on them to unite and drive out the Germans.

The news spread like a fever. All they needed was maji ('water' in Swahili), with some castor oil and millet seeds. This was a 'war medicine' strong enough to turn German bullets into water. The leaders of each clan flocked to Ngarambe to obtain the magic water and the magic seeds... By the summer of 1905 the movement had spread more than a hundred miles west and south. But none of these men had modern rifles, only cap guns, spears and arrows.3

So here we have three completely different cultures in three different parts of the world where indigenous spiritual movements arose in a climate of anger and despair in the face of foreign encroachment. While they had their own unique characteristics, they shared many similiarities. They all promised a world cleansed of the hated foreigners. And they promised their followers that the foreigners bullets could not kill them.

The outcome of the Ghost Dancers is well known to many Americans. At a place called Wounded Knee, on December 29, 1890, the US Seventh Cavalry attempted to disarm the Native Americans encamped there. Utley describes the encounter:

As the search progressed, powerful tensions arose on both sides. A medicine man pranced about inciting men to fight; their Ghost Shirts would protect them, he said. Nervous troopers fingered their carbine triggers. One seized a deaf man and grasped his rifle. It went off. The chanting priest threw a handful of dirt into the air. A knot of Indians dropped their blankets and leveled Winchester repeaters at a rank of soldiers. Both sides fired at once, and the fight that neither side intended or expected burst on them.

When the shooting finally stopped, some 150 Native Americans lay dead or dying. In a spasm of brief violence, the Ghost Dance movement came to an end. Wounded Knee came to symbolize the end of armed resistance to the United States by the Native Americans, just as 1890 is cited as the year that the American frontier in the West vanished.

Ten years later, the Boxers in China had increased their attacks against Chinese Christian converts and foreigners, climaxing with the siege of the foreign diplomatic compounds in Beijing. This event is depicted in the Charlton Heston film 55 Days In Peking. The seige was broken on August 14, 1900 by a multinational expeditionary force of 20,000 soldiers. The Qing Dynasty, which had thrown in its lot with the Boxers after initially wavering, capitulated and signed a peace treaty known as the Boxer Protocol.

From Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China:

In this protocol, the Qing agreed to erect monuments to the memory of the more than two hundred Western dead, to ban all examinations for five years in cities where antiforeign atrocities had taken place, to forbid all imports of arms into China for two years, to allow permanent foreign guards and emplacements of defensive weapons to protect the legation quarter in perpetuity...and to execute the leading Boxer supporters including the Shanxi governor Yuxian.* They also agreed to pay an indemnity for damages to foreign life and property of 450 million taels (around £67 million or $333 million at the then current exchange rates), a staggering sum at a time when the entire annual Qing income was estimated at around 250 million taels. The Chinese were to pay the indemnity in gold, on an ascending scale, with 4 percent interest charges, until the debt was amortized on December 31, 1940.

But by far the worst outcome in terms of human life lost was the Maji Maji revolt in German East Africa in 1905-1906. There, the rebels experienced initial success, as the German military presence in the country was small and the German colonial government was slow to take the rebellion seriously.

The turning point came on August 30, 1905, when the maji attacked the German garrison at Mahenge. Thomas Pakenham quotes a mission worker who witnessed the battle in The Scramble For Africa:

Since they came to make an end of all of us, we had to defend ourselves and take part in the firing, which opened on the attackers at about 1,000 metres. Two machine guns, Europeans, and soldiers, rained death and destruction among the ranks of the advancing enemy. Although we saw the ranks thin, the survivors maintained order for about a quarter of an hour, marching closer amidst a hail of bullets. But then the ranks broke, and the men took cover behind numerous small rocks.... Then suddenly the cry broke out; 'New enemy on the Gambira [eastern] side!' Everybody looked in that direction, and there thick clouds of smoke were rising from our three schools and a second column of at least 1,200 men were advancing towards us... As soon as they [appeared] within range they were met by deafening fire. The first attackers were only three paces from the firing line when they sank to the ground... When no more enemy could be seen, the station commander climbed down from the top of the boma tower... and distributed champagne.

Then the Germans went on the offensive, incorporating forced famine into their strategy. According to Pakenham, historians of the revolt estimate that 250,000 to 300,000 Africans died as a result of the famine, some ten times more than had taken up arms in revolt. Maize and cotton fields in depopulated regions reverted to forest.

Pakenham also notes that African natives who did not join the revolt were skeptical of the claims that the maji water would protect them from the German bullets. He mentions one tribal chief who said he would drink the maji if some of the rebels survived a firing squad. "They did not survive."

As noted in the title of this post, in desperate times, people will believe desperate things. They will listen to the exhortations of priests or shamans to embrace beliefs in things that they should know are untrue, such as magic water or shirts making someone invincible to bullets. When religious beliefs come up against the laws of physics, the latter will win every time. Paying heed to this is not only smart, it could save your life.

1 The Indian Frontier of the American West: 1846-1890 by Robert Utley.

2 The Search For Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence.

3. The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham

* Yuxian promised the missionaries in Shanxi province that he would protect them from the Boxers and then proceeded to have all of forty-four of them, men, women, and children, murdered when they arrived.

The Judgment Day Virus

2011-01-06T20:26:00.003-05:00

I swear, this crap is really starting to annoy me.

As I was about to head into Penn Station this evening to catch my train home, I pass by this lady, an African-American woman in her late forties or early fifties, handing out pamphlets. Out of curiosity, I stopped, took one, and glanced at it briefly to confirm my suspicions.

Yes, it was one of those pamphlets proclaiming that Judgment Day will take place on May 21, 2011, barely more than four months from now.

I thrust it back towards her and as she took it back from me, she asked me, "What's the matter?"

"That's not true!" I shot back, pointing at the pamphlet.

She insists that it is and declares "It says so in the Bible!"

"Yeah, so?" I reply.

"Because the Bible is the word of God," she says.

"How do you know?" I ask.

I don't recall her exact words, but it was along the lines of "Because the Bible says so."

I respond that it's just circular reasoning. Then she drops the bomb on me.

"Who made you?"

"Uh, my parents."

"Who made your parents?"

"My grandparents."

"Well, who made them?"

"I don't see what that has to do with your pamphlet."

And so it went like that for a few more seconds, but I had to go because I had a train to catch. In retrospect, I should have asked her "If Judgment Day doesn't happen on May 21, do you promise to come back here holding a big sign that reads 'I was wrong!'"

Charles Darwin and The Perimeter of Ignorance

2011-01-03T20:41:00.002-05:00

Neil deGrasse Tyson uses the phrase "The Perimeter of Ignorance" to describe when people "appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance."

Recently, I finally finished reading The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. As most people know, Darwin served as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle during its journey of some five years, most of which was spent in South America and the South Pacific.

It was while he was in northern Chile that Darwin writes of an encounter with people who set the bar really low for invoking their own perimeter of ignorance:

"My geological examination of the country generally created a good deal of surprise amongst the Chilenos: it was long before they could be convinced that I was not hunting for mines. This was sometimes troublesome: I found the most ready way of explaining my employment, was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanos? - why some springs were hot and others cold? - why there were mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata? These bare questions at once satisfied and silenced the greater number; some, however (like a few in England who are a century behindhand), thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious; and that it was quite sufficient that God had thus made the mountains."

Of course, religious belief in and of itself need not act as a barrier to exploration and scientific inquiry. The numbers of religious believers who have participated in such endeavors should leave no doubt about that.

That being said, for a subset of religious believers, it would probably be accurate to say that scientific inquiries really are "useless." After all, if you believe that a collection of texts such as the Bible or the Quran contain God's commandments and that one's primary concern in life is abiding by those commandments, then there really is no point in sending probes to Mars or Saturn's moon Titan, or studying the Earth's ocean floors, to name a few. Anything that doesn't comport with one's literal interpretation of a religious text will either be twisted to fit one's Young Earth Creationist timeline or explained away as a misinterpretation of the data.

It Better Not Ruin My Summer Vacation Plans

2011-01-03T20:06:00.002-05:00

Four months ago, I wrote a post about a tract I found at the Hicksville Train Station proclaiming that Judgment Day will arrive on May 21, 2011, with the end of the world to follow six months later on October 21, 2011.

Sadly, it seems quite a few people are taking this nonsense seriously. A few of them are profiled in this Associated Press article. One of them is Marie Exley, 32, a veteran of the war in Iraq.

Exley "is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve."

If Exley wants to believe that the world will end this year, then fine. But it's quite another thing when she and her band of traveling fools waste gasoline spreading their deluded message across the country. We need to reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels, and these religious nuts are only making the problem worse. Then again, I suppose I can't expect them to care since they think the world will end in October anyway.

But for people like Exley, such misguided beliefs sadly have real life consequences.

"...Exley...said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family." And for what, so that she can engage in Rapture Porn?

To any such people who read this, let me make this as clear as I can. I will even use all capital letters.

"THE BIBLE TELLS US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT OUR FUTURE! NADA! ZILCH! GO LIVE YOUR LIVES LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE AND STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE RAPTURE BECAUSE IT IS NEVER, EVER GOING TO HAPPEN!"

Happy 2011!

Atheist Misconceptions About Christianity: Christianity Sunk My Roman Battleship

2010-12-26T19:00:00.002-05:00

While those of us who are atheists are inclined to be skeptical of religious claims, I submit that it is also important, for the sake of intellectual honesty, to shine that same light of skepticism on arguments and statements put forth by atheists about religion that themselves are ignorant and wrong.

Over the years, one of the claims I have seen repeatedly parroted by fellow atheists about Christianity is that it caused the Roman Empire to fall and was thus responsible for the Dark Ages. But is this really true?

On the surface it would seem so. The Roman Empire achieved the height of its power and territorial extent under pagan emperors during the better part of the 2nd century CE, when Christians formed a largely insignificant minority. Flash forward to the 4th century, and the increase in the numbers of Christians and the increasingly official status of Christianity as the state religion seems to go hand in hand with the decline of the empire. Important events that mark this decline are the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which the Emperor Valens was killed in battle against the Goths, and the sack of Rome in 410 by the Goths. 66 years later, the Empire came to an end in the West, and as the popular story goes, Western Europe remained mired in ignorance, superstition and backwardness for centuries thereafter.

One popular site among atheists that espouses this view is Jesus Never Existed, which declares that “The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia.” The picture painted by the site is one of a Western Europe in which Christianity turned the populace into a collection of ignorant retards, a sort of Idiocracy for the Middle Ages. Take a closer look though, and we see that this is not the case at all.

Jesus Never Existed undermines its own case by admitting that “[t]he empire had almost collapsed during the 3rd century because of military rebellions” during what is called by historians “The Crisis of the Third Century.” From the Wikpedia entry: “By late 274, the Roman Empire was reunited into a single entity, and the frontier troops were back in place. More than a century passed before Rome again lost military ascendancy over its external enemies. However, dozens of formerly thriving cities, especially in the Western Empire, had been ruined, their populations dispersed, and with the breakdown of the economic system, could not be rebuilt.” In other words, the Empire had suffered a near breakdown that had nothing to do with Christianity.

But if one wants to insist that the end of the Western Roman Empire is the fault of Christianity, then that same person has to explain why the Eastern Roman Empire also did not collapse in the 5th century. The Eastern half of the Empire had a larger Christian population than the Western half and for a longer period of time. While paganism had declined greatly in the West by the early 5th century, its influence must have still been strong enough that Augustine felt compelled to write The City of God in part as a rebuke to pagan claims that the sack of Rome in 410 was a punishment for abandoning the pagan gods.

The Eastern Empire did have two important things in its favor. It had a larger population than the Western Empire and it was also wealthier. During the 4th century, rough population estimates have some 22 million people in the Western Empire and about 34 million in the Eastern Empire. The East also had a greater number of cities with large populations.

The Eastern Empire experienced greater military pressure than the Western Empire during the late Empire period without collapsing, even though the catastrophic defeat at Adrianople in 378 took place in the Eastern Empire and the Gothic invaders for a time formed a state within a state in Eastern territory. In the mid-fifth century, Attila the Hun repeatedly ravaged the Balkans, and at one point camped outside of Constantinople itself, before turning his attention to the West. Furthermore, the Eastern Empire had to face a threat that the West did not, for it shared its frontiers with the Persian Sassanid Empire, which was the only other superpower in the region. The Eastern Empire and the Sassanids sparred frequently throughout the 6th century, culminating into a decades long war that raged from the late 6th into the early decades of the 7th century.

Therefore, at least from a military standpoint, it is absurd to blame the rise of Christianity for the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, unless one wants to seriously argue that the emperor Valens would have defeated the Goths at Adrianople in 378 if he were a pagan. However, numerous pagan Roman emperors had been defeated and/or killed in battle against barbarian invaders and Persian armies prior to Adrianople. Valens lost at Adrianople because of bad decisions that had nothing to do with his or his army’s religious beliefs.

If one wants to blame Christianity for the collapse of the Western Empire, then shouldn’t equal credit be given to Christianity for the success of the Eastern Emperor Justinian’s campaigns to recover significant portions of the former Western Empire? Likewise, do we blame Christianity for the defeats suffered by the Eastern Empire at the hands of the invading Arab Muslim armies a century later?

The spread of Christianity did not cause the Roman Empire to “fall”, contrary to the notion held by many critics of the religion. Rather, the growth of the religion can be seen as a symptom of the empire’s decline as the empire’s inhabitants sought spiritual refuge in a world that had, to them, turned upside down in the wake of civil wars, barbarian invasions and a breakdown of the social order.

Temporary Hiatus

2010-11-02T18:41:00.003-04:00

Now that Blogrolling.com has ceased to function, the blog links in my side bar have disappeared. I am gradually restoring and revising my blog rolls and hope to be back in action very soon.

Intolerance In Indonesia

2010-09-14T23:07:00.001-04:00

Having blogged about and expressing my support for the proposed Cordoba House near the former World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan, I read with interest the developing story of a similar situation taking place in Indonesia. Only this time, the roles of majority and minority religions have changed.

From this BBC article:

For the last few weeks, a group of Christians have been holding their Sunday prayer services on an empty plot of land - resulting in violent clashes between them and the majority Muslims.

The Christians say the land belongs to them, and they were given permission by the local government to pray here.

Violence has already broken out over this matter.

Rev. Luspida Simandjuntak, and a church elder, Hasian Lumbantoruan Sihombing, were attacked as they, along with HKBP worshippers, were on their way to a Sunday service at the church’s construction site at Ciketing village. Building plans a were halted following protests from residents and hardline groups.

As with the Cordoba House project, also known as Park51, there have been calls for the Christians to move to another location in the hopes of putting a stop to further Muslim attacks.

In response, "[t]he church’s spokesman, Judianto Simandjuntak, said the congregation would continue holding their services at the current location in Ciketing."

“We will remain in Ciketing because we have the constitutional right to perform religious services.”

The already tense situation has the potential to get uglier. The BBC reporter who wrote the article linked to above interviewed "Khairul Fuad, a long-time resident,... a devout Muslim [but of course, right?], and a family man."

The article quotes him as saying, "The land belong to us, and the majority of the people who live around it are Muslims. There was a rumour that to get that land, those Christians didn't tell the people they wanted to build a place of worship." Switch Muslims and Christians and what does that remind you of?

More menacing are the words of Murhali Barda, described as the local leader of the hardline Islamic Defenders' Front.

"There is no problem with praying. But when they are there with a mission to build a place of worship, it is unacceptable," he told me as he showed me around Bekasi's oldest mosque.

"If we start calling for Holy War, it doesn't matter if we live or die," he said, smiling. "If there is violence that results from this, then the Christians only have themselves to blame."

It wouldn't surprise me if this story is starting to make the rounds of the wingnut echo chamber here in the United States. I can almost here them declaring "You see, we're supposed to bend over for a mosque at Ground Zero and the Muslims are attacking Christians for wanting to have a church in a Muslim country!"

If so, I would say they have it backwards. One of the points I raised in my post on the Cordoba House is that letting it be built near the World Trade Center can give us the moral standing to forcefully condemn the lack of reciprocity in Muslim majority countries. Allowing the intolerant to prevail in our own country emboldens the intolerant elsewhere. It also plays into something I have observed among religious believers, which is the zero-sum mentality they have with regard to other religions. Allow members of Religion B to openly worship, and somehow it is seen as a loss by members of Religion A.

Furthermore, for those here in the United States who might try to use the situation in Indonesia as justification for opposing the Cordoba House, they would do well to notice that there are Indonesians of all faiths, including Muslims, who condemn the behavior of the militant Muslims.

From the same BBC article:

The problems in Bekasi have caught the attention of the entire nation.

In Jakarta, Indonesians of different faiths joined forces, raising their voices in unison in support of a more secular Indonesia.

The constitution guarantees the rights of citizens to practise their religion freely.

The protesters say they want their government to take action and uphold the principles of this country.

Nevertheless, the Indonesian government could probably use a little more prodding to give it some backbone in cracking down on the militants. There is always the temptation to give in to the militants in the hope that it will appease them, but as the shopworn argument goes, appeasing them will only embolden them further. Here is the link to the Indonesian Embassy in the United States. Tell them, politely, of course, that the principle of religious freedom should be upheld.

I Desecrated The Book of Mormon

2010-09-12T10:47:00.002-04:00

With all the hoopla recently over some kook pastor in Florida with a congregation not much bigger than an overcrowded kindergarten classroom in New York City who threatened to burn a pile of Qurans on September 11, I had forgotten that I had desecrated another religion's holy book.

I recall writing in another post that I have been noticing that the Book of Mormon has been appearing with increasing frequency in hotel and motel rooms across America and throughout the world alongside the Gideon Bibles. I took a copy of the Book of Mormon from a hotel I stayed at in Hong Kong several years ago, which I still haven't gotten around to reading yet.

Last month, my family and I spent four nights at the Marriott on the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls. When we got settled in our room, I noticed the Book of Mormon sitting on top of the night table between our beds. I promptly tossed it into the trash bin, where over the next few days it got buried underneath juice boxes, wrappers and other assorted flotsam and jetsam before the pail was emptied by the cleaning staff. It's probably in a landfill somewhere by now, slowly decaying from the elements and whatever icky stuff from the trash piled above it might be oozing and leaking down onto it.

Warning: The Practice of Islam Is Hazardous To Your Health

2010-09-10T23:09:00.004-04:00

While perusing the English language daily The Jakarta Post, I came across this article about the large numbers of vehicular accidents in Indonesia during the Idul Fitri holiday.

National Police deputy chief for operations Insp. Gen. Soenarko said Thursday there had been 743 traffic accidents from Sept. 3 to Sept. 8 nationwide, killing 144 people and wounding 579 others. Most of the victims were holidaymakers riding motorcycles, Soenarko added.

During the Idul Fitri exodus last year there were 1,646 traffic accidents across the country, claiming 702 lives and injuring 2,556 others.

But that is not the only Muslim holiday that has proven consistently fatal to adherents of the Islamic faith. Another is the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of the faith, which all able-bodied Muslims are expected to undertake at least once in their lives. Recent years have witnessed a number of mass casualty events at Islam's holiest site.

In 2004: The stampede, during a peak event of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, lasted about a half-hour, Saudi officials said. There were 244 dead and hundreds of other worshippers injured, some critically, Hajj Minister Iyad Madani said.

In 2006: Thousands of Muslim pilgrims rushing to complete a symbolic stoning ritual during the hajj tripped over luggage Thursday, causing a crush in which up to 400 people were killed despite Saudi attempts to prevent stampedes that have plagued the annual event.

Saudi officials estimated that 400 people were killed. More than 1,000 people were injured, said Dr. Abbasi with the Saudi Red Crescent.

[That] year's hajj was also marred by the collapse of a Mecca hotel on January 5, where 76 pilgrims were killed. The reason for the hotel collapse remains unknown. The latest disaster is expected to prompt the Saudis to enforce stricter controls, in order to do a better job of ensuring the safety of the millions of the faithful who arrive for the Hajj each year.

Call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing that a particular religion is true when the mere practice of that religion proves to be so deadly to its followers.

Who Are You Calling A Parasite, Rabbi Lapin?

2010-09-05T23:22:00.004-04:00

By way of Crooks and Liars, I watched the clip below from a recent episode of Glenn Beck's television program.

What a way to smear an entire segment of the American people, rabbi. Simply by virtue of going to church or synagogue once a week, tens of millions of other Americans are better people than I or any other atheist American?

But if you want to talk about parasites on a society, Rabbi Lapin would perhaps do better to focus on a growing segment of the population of Israel, Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This article from The Jewish Daily Forward gives a good summary of the demographic dilemma faced by Israel.

Under a rule enacted at the time of Israel’s founding, draft-age men are excused from serving if they are engaged in full-time Torah study at a recognized academy through age 40. The rule has the dual effect of removing yeshiva students from both the military and the work force. The more Haredim, experience shows, the fewer potential soldiers, and the fewer taxpayers.

When the exemption was first approved in 1948, it involved barely 400 men. Four decades later, in 1992, the Torah-study exemption was granted to 5% of that year’s conscription-age cohort of 18-year-olds. This year, 2007, the proportion reached 11%. In 2019, the exempted yeshiva students are projected to top 23% of the cohort, which is the proportion of Haredi students among this year’s first graders — the most straightforward predictor.

Nonreligious exemptions have declined in recent years, but Torah exemptions have soared. The main reason is fertility: The Haredi community averages 7.6 children per woman, roughly triple the rate for the population as a whole, according to the Israel government’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

But even peace will not solve the problem of Haredi men removed from the work force by their prolonged yeshiva studies. At present, just 30% of Haredi men participate in the work force. Almost half the Haredi population lives below the official poverty line. As the Haredi share of the population grows, pressure will mount on the tax rolls, the welfare system and inter-communal tolerance and civility.

A prime example of this lack of tolerance and civility happened this past June as per this article from the BBC:

Police said 120,000 Ashkenazi Jews rallied in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv.

They turned out to support parents who refused to let their girls share classrooms with Jewish pupils of Sephardic or Middle Eastern descent.

The Ashkenazi parents, who are of European descent, want segregated classrooms because they say Sephardi families are not religious enough.

"There is a set of rules [in the ultra-Orthodox community]. We don't want televisions in the home, there are rules of modesty, we are against the internet," Mr Litzman was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

"I don't want my daughter to be educated with a girl who has a TV at home."

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a mental disorder.

World To End on October 21, 2011

2010-09-04T21:38:00.004-04:00

Well, that's what it says in this tract put out by the eBible Fellowship that I found taped to one of the support pillars underneath the elevated tracks at the Hicksville train station this past Wednesday. How can we be sure that the world will come to an end on October 21, 2011? Because it says so in the Bible! And the author of the tract declares that "The Bible is the Word of God! Everything the Bible declares has the full authority of God Himself."

For openers, I guess this puts a damper on Barack Obama's chances of being re-elected in 2012.

But before the world ends on October 21, 2011, the pamphlet declares that we will first experience Judgment Day on May 21, 2011. This might be what that taxi driver was referring to on that February morning in 2009 when my family and I were being driven to JFK Airport for our vacation in Puerto Rico.

And what will happen on Judgment Day? It will set in motion a five-month period in which a "period of horrible torment will begin for all of the inhabitants of the earth." Gee, I thought the period of torment would start this coming November if the Republicans capture majorities in both houses of Congress.

On May 21, 2011, "God will raise up all of the dead that have ever died from their graves." No mention about people who were cremated or eaten by alligators or sharks. "Earthquakes will ravage the whole world as the earth will no longer conceal its dead." Wow, talk about bringing out your dead!

"People who died as saved individuals will experience the resurrection of their bodies and immediately leave this world to be forever with the Lord." If God abides in a non-physical environment, then why would a resurrection of physical bodies be necessary?

"Those who die unsaved will be raised up as well, but only to have their lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be everywhere." Again, what if I am cremated and my ashes scattered before May 21, 2011?

I have to say, I just love that whoever is putting out this tract is so absolutely confident as to cite specific dates in the near future when these apocalyptic events will supposedly occur. I would love to see what these people will have to say when they wake up on October 22, 2011 and the world will still be here.

The pamphlet contains other amusing and interesting information. Most Young Earth Creationists cite a roughly 6,000 year old Earth. However, the folks at the eBible Fellowship set the Creation in 11,013 B.C., with the demise of the Earth predicted "13,023 years from creation."

And how can we know this to be true? Because "[t]he genealogies of the book of Genesis... can be shown to be a precise calendar of the history of mankind in this world. The Bible 's calendar of history is completely accurate and trustworthy." After all, "[s]ince this Bible calendar is given by God in His Word, it can be trusted wholeheartedly." Gotta love that circular reasoning.

What always cracks me up about these End Times people is their belief that our little speck of a planet in one galaxy in a universe filled with billions of galaxies is some kind of central battlefield in a cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. The human origins of their belief systems is betrayed by the geocentric bias inherent in their theology. A being that creates a universe filled, as previously mentioned, with billions of galaxies that themselves contain untold billions of planets orbiting their own stars operates according to an Earth based calendar system measured in Earth days, Earth months, and Earth years. And of course, nothing preoccupies this immensely powerful and intelligent being more than the mundane affairs of the human inhabitants of this one planet during a tiny sliver of time on a timescale of billions of years.

Anyway, mark your calendar for my blog post on May 22, 2011 when I write about the Judgment Day that never happened.