It’s been awhile since there have been any news stories concerning culinary iconography. Seems though that there aren’t any suckers ready to spend money for these holy spuds. Could it be because people are wising up? Nah, people revere these sort of things a lot less when the economy is crappy.

Crosses in potatoes appear to online sellers

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Move over, Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese. Step aside, Fish Stick Jesus. Online bidders may now buy two potatoes containing likenesses of crosses in their centers. One was found by an Iowa family and the other by a police detective in Ohio.

Jim Gross of Marion, Iowa, says his wife was peeling their potato on New Year’s Eve when she found the cross shape. The spud is on sale for eBay, with bids starting at $2.

Dennis Bort of Brunswick, Ohio, says he found the cross shape in his potato on Christmas Day.

Bort listed his spud for $1,000. He hasn’t found any bidders yet.

In the past, collectors have paid big bucks for items deemed to have been blessed by the appearance of a religious symbol, including $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich with the likeness of the Virgin Mary.

Just wondering what you all think about this.

Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize

Just nine days after ordering 30,000 more U.S. troops into battle in Afghanistan, Obama delivered a Nobel acceptance speech that he saw as a treatise on war’s use and prevention. He crafted much of the address himself and the scholarly remarks — at about 4,000 words — were nearly twice as long as his inaugural address.

In them, Obama refused to renounce war for his nation or under his leadership, saying defiantly that “I face the world as it is” and that he is obliged to protect and defend the United States.

“A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms,” Obama said. “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history.”

The president laid out the circumstances where war is justified — in self-defense, to come to the aid of an invaded nation and on humanitarian grounds, such as when civilians are slaughtered by their own government or a civil war threatens to engulf an entire region.

“The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it,” he said.

His winning the peace prize while at the same time ordering more troops to Afghanistan has riled anti-war activists:

The president’s motorcade arrived at Oslo’s high-rise government complex for Obama’s meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as a few dozen anti-war protesters gathered behind wire fences nearby. Dressed in black hoods and waving banners, the demonstrators banged drums and chanted anti-war slogans. “The Afghan people are paying the price,” some shouted.

Greenpeace and anti-war activists planned larger demonstrations later that were expected to draw several thousand people. Protesters have plastered posters around the city, featuring an Obama campaign poster altered with skepticism to say, “Change?”

The debate at home over his Afghanistan decision also followed the president here. He told reporters that that the July 2011 date he set for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to begin will not slip — but that the pace of the full drawdown will be gradual and conditions-based.

I don’t like to see more of our young men go to war. But at the same time we must not sit back and let terrorists build their forces and plot and plan to murder mass numbers of innocent people either. War is sometimes necessary for peace.

An article on atheists at Christmastime? Things are really beginning to change for us. People are finally starting to recognize that we atheists exist!

This story from Minneapolis was posted at Yahoo News via the Associated Press:

Atheists at Christmas: Eat, drink and be wary

MINNEAPOLIS – Angie O’Neill recently moved into a new apartment complex for seniors and she’s trying to make new friends. But Christmas is a tough time of year for an atheist.

“All the planned activities at this time of year revolve around the church,” said O’Neill, a retiree and an atheist for decades.

O’Neill sought an escape this week, joining a group of her fellow nonbelievers for a weekly “Atheist Happy Hour” at a suburban Mexican restaurant. The group, Atheists for Human Rights, is active year-round but takes it up a notch this time of year with a Winter Solstice party, a charity drive and good attendance for the weekly gathering at Ol’ Mexico.

For one thing, it’s a chance to share coping techniques during this most religious time of year. They range from the simple, like warning about certain stores that blare religious Christmas songs, to tougher tasks like how to avoid certain topics with certain family members. These atheists describe adjusting some customs to make them their own, like Nancy Ruhland, a pharmacist who sends out Christmas cards to friends and loved ones — but makes sure to find ones without a Christian message or subtext.

Even as they chafe at the omnipresence of Christmas, many of the atheists here are quick to stress their belief in the pagan roots of a yearly celebration near the winter solstice. Before Christianity and other organized religions, many cultures would mark the point where days started getting longer again with a “festival of light” that included parties, gift exchanges, even placing trees in homes. Some of those rituals were religious, but usually in a polytheistic way.

“What we’re celebrating this year is the promise of the sun returning. That’s S-U-N, not S-O-N,” said Bill Weir, a retired marketing executive from Plymouth.

“Then the Christians stole it,” added Marie Alena Castle of Minneapolis, the 82-year-old founder of Atheists for Human Rights and an atheist activist for two decades.

While I have not been a fan of joining any support groups for atheists, or atheist “churches” or any of that kind of stuff, on the other hand it is a good sign that atheists are coming together instead of keeping to themselves and silently enduring these holidays that have been hijacked by Christian Mythology.

It is not often that I write of other writers, better writers than I – and it saddens me when I read of the degree of mental pain and self-torture that these geniuses were subjected to. Nijinsky had schizophrenia, Tolstoy had a small but impressive litany of issues, Van Gogh and Newton suffered from bi-polarization, Dickens suffered from clinical depression. It seems that great creativity springs from great pain, which is indicative of how badly the world is wrought.

As I was sprouting from muddled middle-schooler to troubled teen, I chanced across the writings of Philip K. Dick, and was completely tumbled by his strange visions and his eclectic command of the language. Many of you (as avid bibliophiles) are no doubt aware, Mr. Dick was the author of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, which became a major movie title Blade Runner. He was also the mind that created the concept of Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. A personal favorite of mine was the Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, and the novel Valis was my first (albeit brief) encounter with the concept of exegesis. 

For the most part, the art is usually a reflection of the artist, but as a rule, the artist is not the art, but the art is a facet of the creator. However, Valis was actually somewhat autobiographical in nature (in which he named himself Horselover Fat, "Horselover" echoes the Greek etymology of the name Philip, while in German, Dick’s surname means "fat". )

It is a little known fact that PKD actually had some serious mental health issues:

On February 20, 1974, Dick was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive delivery of extra analgesic, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a pendant with a symbol that he called the "vesicle pisces". This name seems to have been based on his confusion of two related symbols, the ichthys (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in profile) that early Christians used as a secret symbol, and the vesica piscis. After the delivery woman’s departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions. Although they may have been initially attributable to the medication, after weeks of visions he considered this explanation implausible. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane," Dick told Charles Platt.

In 1974, even admitting the onset of visions was a stigma – most likely that exists to this day. Again, religion provides an umbrella for the disturbed to hide under.

Throughout February and March 1974, he experienced a series of visions, which he referred to as "two-three-seventy four" (2-3-74), shorthand for February-March 1974. He described the initial visions as laser beams and geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and of ancient Rome. As the visions increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live a double life, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century A.D. Despite his history of drug use and elevated stroke risk, Dick began seeking other rationalist and religious explanations for these experiences. He referred to the "transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and, most often, "VALIS". Dick wrote about the experiences in the semi-autobiographical novels VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.

None of the explanations seem overly rational.

At one point Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. He believed that an episode in his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was a detailed retelling of a story from the Biblical Book of Acts, which he had never read.

One has but to read the novel to see how delusional that is. Or, just read the synopsis.

In time, Dick became paranoid, imagining plots against him by the KGB and FBI. At one point, he alleged they were responsible for a burglary of his house, from which documents were stolen. He later came to suspect that he might have committed the burglary against himself, and then forgotten he had done so. Dick himself speculated as to whether he may have suffered from schizophrenia.

Strangely, there’s no motive listed for why two high-powered Intel groups would be interested in him.

Many of his works showed several powerful themes running through them:

Dick’s stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is "real" and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion constructed by powerful external entities (such as in Ubik), vast political conspiracies, or simply from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality," writes science fiction author Charles Platt. "Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person’s dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."

Alternate universes and simulacra were common plot devices, with fictional worlds inhabited by common, working people, rather than galactic elites. "There are no heroes in Dick’s books," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people." Dick made no secret that much of his ideas and work were heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, the Swiss founder of the theory of the human psyche he called "Analytical Psychology" (to distinguish it from Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis). Jung was a self-taught expert on the unconscious and mythological foundations of conscious experience and was open to the reality underlying mystical experiences. The Jungian constructs and models that most concerned Dick seem to be the archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/ hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory. Many of Dick’s protagonists overtly analyze reality and their perceptions in Jungian terms (see Lies Inc.), while other times, the themes are so obviously in reference to Jung their usage needs no explanation. Dick’s self-named "Exegesis" also contained many notes on Jung in relation to theology and mysticism.

Mental illness was a constant interest of Dick’s, and themes of mental illness permeate his work. The character Jack Bohlen in the 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip is an "ex-schizophrenic". The novel Clans of the Alphane Moon centers on an entire society made up of descendants of lunatic asylum inmates. In 1965 he wrote the essay titled Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes.

Drug use was also a theme in many of Dick’s works, such as A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Dick was a drug user for much of his life. According to a 1975 interview in Rolling Stone,^[31] Dick wrote all of his books published before 1970 while on amphetamines. "A Scanner Darkly (1977) was the first complete novel I had written without speed," said Dick in the interview. He also experimented briefly with psychedelics, but wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which Rolling Stone dubs "the classic LSD novel of all time," before he had ever tried them. Despite his heavy amphetamine use, however, Dick later said that doctors had told him that the amphetamines never actually affected him, that his liver had processed them before they reached his brain.

A sad troubled genius was Horselover Fat – he spun wild tales that ran rampant with weird conspiracies, and challenged the concepts of reality. It was unfortunate that these were bizarre echoes of his personality, a pastiche of a fragmented person, struggling, ever struggling, and that the baroque meritocracy of his vision resulted in some of the best science fiction ever put to pen.

I do not have it in me to mock his pain, or his inability to cope. It poses the question, however: if he had been privy to the advanced psychological treatment we have access to today, would he have then still penned the works he had, or been reduced to a drooling patient in a psych ward?

It is food for thought, it is.

Till the next post, then.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

The consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man; the knowledge of God is the self-knowledge of man. Man’s notion of himself is his notion of God, just as his notion of God is his notion of himself – the two are identical. What is God to man, that is man’s own spirit, man’s own soul; what is man’s spirit, soul, and heart – that is his God. God is the manifestation of man’s inner nature, his expressed self; religion is the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the avowal of his innermost thoughts, the open confession of the secrets of his love. – Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity

The ontological argument is one of those strangenesses of religion – it is indeed an item that illustrates the essential difference between believer and non-believer. The believer cheers! The non-believer says, you gotta be kidding.

In summary:

The argument examines the concept of God, and states that if we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist. The argument is often criticized as committing a bare assertion fallacy, as it offers no supportive premise other than qualities inherent to the unproven statement. This is also called a circular argument, because the premise relies on the conclusion, which in turn relies on the premise.

It is no wonder that the human animal thinks in circles. The world rotates: the sun goes down, the moon comes up, this reverses, and goes again. There are four distinct seasons, readily apparent (except for perhaps Manipoor, which has five), that come and go in intervals. Circles are ubiquitous – they’re everywhere.

This would also go to explain why we’re such a dizzy species.

Anselm’s ‘argument’ is as follows:

1. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

2. God may exist in the understanding.

3. To exist in reality and in the understanding is greater than to exist in the understanding alone.

4. Therefore, God exists in reality.

As ridiculous as that sounds, Descartes (of course!) comes up with some real head-splitting sophistry:

1. Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing.
2. I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Interestingly enough, some have employed Hume to dismantle this:

In David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the character Cleanthes argues that no being could ever be proven to exist through an a priori demonstration:

[T]here is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.

Though this criticism is directed against a cosmological argument similar to that defended by Samuel Clarke in his first Boyle Lectures, the point applies to ontological arguments as well.

I’m going to employ Hume in a little bit, in a different way (hence the title of this essay), but first, let’s expound on the problem of evil:

Classical theism states that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Ontological arguments, both old and revised, have also assumed this explicitly or implicitly. Many philosophers are skeptical about the underlying assumption, as described by Leibniz, "that this idea of the all-great or all-perfect being is possible and implies no contradiction."

For example, moral perfection is thought to imply being both perfectly merciful and perfectly just. But these two properties seem to contradict each other. To be perfectly just is always to give every person exactly what he deserves. But to be perfectly merciful is to give at least a person less punishment than he deserves. If so, then a being cannot be perfectly just and perfectly merciful.

To resolve and dissolve this, I’m going to employ Hume’s Is/Ought problem. Using the guillotine, we can pare this down accordingly.

We ought to live in a perfect world – but it isn’t. We ought to be perfect in some way (though this can digress into multiple subjective observations) – that is to say, we shouldn’t become ill, catch viruses, ever go hungry or homeless or jobless. Nothing’s perfect. Then again, perfection is a hollow fantasy, entirely contingent on the individual’s perception.

Perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness.

We ought to be complete and flawless, but we are (subjectively speaking) most certainly the opposite. And given that we live in a world where there are counterpoints, Yin to a Yang, hot to cold, solid to fluid, we assume that there has to be a polar opposite of our existence – in other words, a perfect being that has none of the flaws and foibles we manifest (and likely doesn’t drool in its sleep). But the other problem arises: perfection is static. It would have to be. Interaction with the imperfect would introduce flaws into the hypothetical flawlessness. Nothing escapes creeping entropy, after all. Even a hypothetical flawlessness would eventually be worn down to a sliver – and then the hypothetical flawlessness would be flawed, as that item or person would be much less than itself and ergo, not perfect.

And, as I am a non-reductive materialist, understanding (See Anselm’s #2) is entirely contingent on the physicality of the brain, and when that brain is gone, poof! so is the understanding. Not that imagining something makes it real (would that it were – Angelina Jolie materializing in my apartment dishabille would certainly make a believer outta me!), but humans tend to reify these illusions.

So hopefully, much of this (or I’d settle for some of it) has been useful to the gentle reader, and perhaps it can be used to mystify and stupefy any religious folks (usually pretty easy to do) who use this supercilious piece of fluff as a talking point.

Till the next post, then.

That quarter of the year is upon us now: when Fall’s chill threatens Winter’s white cold, and the snow and darkness remind us of our mortality.

As we are the creatures who are self-aware, and from that springs our awareness that each of us will end some day, we as a species draw strange maps of nowhere, calling upon vague shadows to hear our supplications, and some among us will lay claim to that most ephemeral of claims, the mantle of immortality.

In some ways, it is to be expected. We see our loved ones pass – we watch also the passage of strangers and acquaintances alike. It is a foible, this superstition that we tell our neural pathways, this insistence that we should rise, become some other, wisps of energy to be reunited by other wisps, to whisper to those that have gone before, and say hello, I’ve missed you sorely, and that the pain of passage is assuaged, we are all together now, as it should be.

It is also only human, to hope for a redress of the grievances visited upon us by others in this short-lived life, and to imagine there are reckonings amid the shadows and dark places.

Such are the banes of consciousness. The human animal perceives that there’s a beginning to its life, and after some years, an end. But also observes that many things in nature run in cycles, and deludes itself that there’s some cyclic undercurrent as to the state of consciousness, and sees also the inherent unfairness of having learned so very many things, and the knowledge ending upon death. (Of course this can be passed on to others of the pack, but still, it seems unjust.)

So it is the onset of winter that our (some of us blatantly, others subliminally) thoughts may turn to ending. We see the four season in ourselves, microcosmically: spring as birth, summer as youth, fall as middle age, winter as dotage.

As the animal who perceives, we spin tales, we construct elaborate rituals and dances, some of us dancing widdershins upon the heath and jump the bonfire and telling old rumors like true stories, others among us hide within stone walls and sackcloth and print voluminous tomes that recount badly remembered cautionary tales from another age, and yet others unfold and create metaphorical origami that is pleasant to the ear and the mind’s eye but anachronistic and of little use in reality.

And to forestall the inevitable end, we build cathedrals and monuments and graveyards and mausoleums to the beloved dead, and useless monks intone futile hymns to the unproven afterlife, in hopes of shoring up some form of invisible capital like karmic interest, and preparing a road where none lay.

Life is precious, and its passing sadness. But denying death and claiming life everlasting has led to naught but madness.

While there is no soul, life is good, there is no hole in us that cannot be filled by ourselves. We are all stardust dancing in this cloak of flesh, and the loss of the supernatural is a boon to the heart, and we dance, awkwardly or with grace, to the end, smiling, for life has been good for it has been there, and the inevitable quiet is to be embraced and not feared, for a human end should be soft and calm and good, to be painless it is hoped, and a life fully lived need not be shot through with regrets.

I hope your Halloween was a happy one, and may all your tricks be kind ones, and all your treats be pleasant both before and after.

Till the next post, then.

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