“What the American public doesn’t know is what makes them the American Public.”
– Zalinksy (Dan Aykroyd) in Tommy Boy

“Ha-ha-ha!  You said ‘nuclear.’  It’s ‘nucular,’ dummy.  The ‘s’ is silent.” – Peter Griffin in Family Guy

“The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.”

Those are the words of Thomas Jefferson.  He knew a thing or two about what makes this country work, and he repeated one of those things over and over and over.  He says it again here:

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.”

And again here:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

If Jefferson were alive today, I think he would quickly come to one unavoidable conclusion:  We have a problem.  A big problem.

The word “elite” is thrown around a lot these days.  It is used sneeringly, with disdain.  A significant portion of the American population uses the word “elite” to indicate that a person or group is pompous, arrogant, overeducated, and most importantly, wrong.  It is a derogatory term meant to disparage its target.

Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines “elite”: “The choice part; cream; the best of a class.”

Here is Sarah Palin talking with Brian Williams on NBC News and giving her definition of “elite”:  “Oh, I guess just people who think they’re better than anyone else.”

According to Merriam-Webster, “elite” describes someone who excels, someone who is the best at what they do.  According to Sarah Palin, “elite” describes … what?  People who disagree with her?  People who criticize her?  From the sound of it, Palin wants you to think that the elite – the people who have worked hard to excel in their field – think they’re better than you.  In other words, people who are smarter than you should not be trusted because you have all you need to know as long as you … I don’t know, watch Fox News and read your bible?  Actually, it doesn’t matter what Palin’s definition means – what matters is that it resonates with her target audience, with her base.  Who are they?  Well, they’re people who like the sound of Sarah Palin’s definition of “elite.”  It rings true to them – He’s really good at something?  Really smart?  Then he thinks he’s better than me!

Never mind that her definition has absolutely nothing to do with the word’s actual meaning.  Her definition – which she is far from alone in applying to the word – transforms “elite” into a label for people who are … well, knowledgeable; people who tend to point out inconsistencies of logic; people who are prone to be articulate and well-spoken.  Palin herself is none of those things.  Neither are most of the people who make up her base.  Those who are those things are considered suspect by Palin and her many admirers.  They are not to be trusted.  Their knowledge and abilities are really nothing more than arrogance.  They are rejected, mocked and smeared.  And keep in mind that Sarah Palin was the Republican vice presidential candidate in the election of 2008.  Keep in mind that she fills auditoriums when she speaks.  Keep in mind that Palin’s book Going Rogue sold 300,000 copies it’s first day.  None of those things would be true if Sarah Palin were alone in the opinions she holds.

George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, said, “Well, the jury is still out on evolution, you know.”  He also said, “The bird flu virus could evolve to a form that can be spread easily from human to human.”

In a 2007 debate of Republican presidential candidates, the following question was asked:  “Do you believe in evolution?”  Three candidates – Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee and Representative Tom Tancredo – said they did not.  Those three men were not elected to their offices in a vacuum.  They have a lot of like-minded supporters.

According to a Gallup Poll, fully one third of all Americans believe that every word of the bible is literally true and accurate.  That means they believe, among other things, that animals may talk, that a bush can burn without being consumed by the flames, that the sun can be stopped in the sky during its rotation of the earth, that eight people repopulated the entire planet after a global flood, that it’s sometimes okay for a man to have sex with and impregnate his own daughters, that a woman can get pregnant and have a child while still remaining a virgin, and that people sometimes come back from the dead and live and function as they did before dying.  This requires them to reject science whenever it contradicts these beliefs.  It also requires them to reject anyone who does not share these beliefs.  Don’t believe me?  Watch this political campaign advertisement.

That campaign ad pointed out that Bradley Byrne does not hold the beliefs listed above, but does accept the scientific theory of evolution and does not think that every word of the bible is literally true and accurate – and it pointed all of that out in an effort to discredit him.

America’s founding fathers repeatedly made clear their conviction that America was a secular nation that neither endorses nor enforces any religion, but allows all religions, or no religion.  The evidence of this is abundant.  There’s George Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, in which he wrote, “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”  There’s the Treaty of Tripoli, endorsed by Washington and ratified by John Adams, which states without ambiguity, “The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion.”  There’s the Constitution of the United States, in which the only time religion of any kind is mentioned is to prohibit it from government.  There is more, too, plenty more.

And then there’s this.

Despite the abundant evidence that they are flat wrong, a hefty segment of the American population shares Sarah Palin’s opinion in the video linked above that America is “a Christian nation” that merely “tolerates” other faiths out of the goodness of its heart and views these other faiths as inferior.  These people will passionately argue that America was founded on Christian principles by Christian people so Christians can live here in a nation of Jesus-loving Christianity, that the United States is the nation that Jesus built.  I was recently in an argument about this with just such a Christian, and when I pointed out that nowhere does the Constitution mention god or Jesus Christ, he said, “Yes it does!  The Constitution is dated this way:  ‘In the Year of Our Lord!’  And our lord is Jesus Christ, the son of god!”

Are you beginning to see why “elite” has become such a dirty word in America?  It has replaced the once popularly maligned word “intellectual” – because, one might presume, it is shorter and easier to spell.  Intellectuals are usually the early targets of any dictatorship as it comes into power (it seems dictators don’t like the “elite” any more than Sarah Palin and her fans).  Why kill them?  Noam Chomsky answers that question:  “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”

Those damned pesky elite intellectuals – always asking questions, and worse yet, often answering them!  They’re so troublesome and annoying to corrupt leaders who don’t like it when their actions are criticized or their motives questioned.

In an interview with Cincinnati Magazine, musician, writer, poet, actor, talk show host and punk rock legend Henry Rollins put it well:

How can you argue with someone who applauds when Sarah Palin says we need a real commander-in-chief, not some scholar?  Oh, I see, we don’t like intellectuals.  We don’t want a smart guy as president because he won’t start a war with Iran.  We like the dumb guy better, who couldn’t pronounce any leader’s name and couldn’t find a country on a map; who struggled with the English language like a guy trying to hold on to a live eel.  Yeah, that’s, you know, the coarsening of the intellect.  Who feared smart people?  Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Putin … interesting.  And Palin.  And her flock. “I like Sarah because she’s like me and she’s a good person.”  Well, what about her policies?  “Oh, I don’t know about them, but she’s a good person and that’s why she should be president.”

Of course, here in America, we can’t go around killing intellectuals the way Hitler, Mao and Stalin did … can we?  No, not really.  It wouldn’t look good.  It would be all over the news, Oprah would disapprove, and the media might even make a “reality” TV show about it.

Of course, just because we can’t kill them doesn’t mean we can’t assassinate them in the arena of public opinion.  Listen to right-wing radio talk show host Michael Savage on any day of the week and you will hear him venomously refer to President Obama as, “That university professor!”  As if it’s an epithet on a par with calling him the N-word.  Listen to any of the right-wing radio talkers and you will see how contemptuous they are of well-educated people who’ve devoted their lives to a particular field.  Former Saturday Night Live cast member Dennis Miller, once one of America’s wittiest, most intelligent and acerbic comedians, whose material was peppered with a wide variety of intellectually challenging references that ran the gamut of art, science, pop culture, and history, now hosts a right-wing radio talk show on which he says, multiple times every day, “I’m not much for no fancy book-learnin’.”

But if you think this rejection of intelligence, knowledge and excellence happens only on the right, you’re mistaken.  This past week, movie actor and vocal leftist John Cusack (whom I follow on Twitter) posted this message (I am reproducing it here exactly as he wrote it):

hope we can believe in– ban the ivy league! i kid but not really… lets see what happens when the” best and brightest” dont rule–

Let me repeat that last part again: “Let’s see what happens when the ‘best and brightest’ don’t rule.”  Yes, let’s shove the best and brightest aside and go down the ladder a ways to find our leaders.  Maybe this country would be better off if we put it in the hands of people with no historical frame of reference, people who don’t reach decisions through critical thought and reasoning but rather according to their religious beliefs and ancient religious texts written thousands of years ago by ignorant, superstitious men.  How would that be, huh?  Can you imagine a time when that’s the kind of thinking we use to choose our leaders?

Oh, wait … we’re already there.  Are you scared yet?

In 2008, Susan Jacoby was interviewed by Truthout.org.  Jacoby was a reporter for the Washington Post and the program director of the Center for Inquiry in New York City.  She is now the author of several books, including The Age of American Unreason.  She discussed the common attitude toward knowledge, intelligence and excellence in America and gave the following example of this phenomenon on the left side of the aisle:

At the end of the primaries, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain endorsed a gas tax holiday for Americans this summer. Every economist, both liberal and conservative, said this would do nothing to help matters.  And when Hillary Clinton was asked by the late Tim Russert, “Can you produce one economist to support the gas tax holiday?” she said, “Oh that’s elite thinking.”

Now to say that economists have nothing intelligent to say about whether a gas tax will give people economic relief is like saying that you don’t ask musicians about music; you don’t ask scientists about science.  It’s not just an attack on a political idea; it’s an attack on knowledge itself. … Of course, she doesn’t believe it for a minute. It shows that a lot of politicians think they have to play to ignorance and label anything that goes against received opinion as elitism.

We live in a country in which many brilliant, well-educated people feel they have to play dumb in order to get elected.  They feel the need to pander to the most ignorant among us to get votes, to throw their own knowledge and intelligence out the window and say things they don’t really mean or believe in order to get votes.  And do you know why they do it?  Because it works.

In the same interview, Jacoby gives another example of the frightening way knowledge has been rejected and ignorance embraced:

I’ll give you an example of how stupid this country has become.  I’m one of the village atheists on Faith, a panel sponsored by the Washington Post and Newsweek.  In a recent post I wrote that when I was 7 years old, I was taken by my mom to visit a friend who had been stricken by polio and was in an iron lung. Polio has basically been eradicated, but I grew up when polio was still a real threat to children, before the Salk vaccine.  This childhood friend had been playing and running only three weeks before, and now he was in an iron lung. And I asked my mom, “Why would God let something like that happen?”  And to her credit, instead of giving me some moronic answer, my mother said, “I don’t know.”

After posting this on Faith, I received an e-mail saying, “All childhood memories are unreliable.  We construct narratives to justify what we now think.”

Of course it would be stupid if I’d said I became an atheist at the age of 7.  But I hadn’t said that, only that I remembered this childhood experience as making me begin to question what I’d been taught.  The whole tone of the e-mail was that nobody’s memory about anything could possibly be accurate – no fact could possibly be true.

… One of the points I make in my book is that unreason pervades our culture. It’s not just a matter of right-wing religious fundamentalism. There are all kinds of unreason and suspicion of evidence on both the Right and the Left.

We often hear about the vast promise of technology to educate and enlighten us, to put oceans of information at our very fingertips.  But how can all that information be useful … if we have no frame of reference to apply to it?  Susan Jacoby again:

In my talks to people, I often mention a statistic from the National Constitution Center that almost half of Americans can’t name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. A student stood up at a university in California and said, “That doesn’t matter because you can just look it up on the Internet.” But if you don’t know what the First Amendment is in the first place, you don’t know what question to ask the Web.  Garbage in, garbage out. The Web’s only as good as our ability to ask questions of it. The ability to access information means nothing if you don’t have an educated framework of knowledge to fit it into.

But aren’t we at least smart enough to know that we don’t know a lot?  How could we possibly get ourselves into this situation?  Susan Jacoby says:

A fundamentalist is one who believes in a literal interpretation of sacred books, and a third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.  That’s about 10 times more than any other developed country in the world.  It’s entirely possible to be a religious believer and to accept science, but not if you’re a literal religious believer.  You can’t believe that the world was literally created in six days, and be open to modern knowledge.

There’s also something else:  We’ve always had more faith in technology than other countries. One of our problems with computers is that we believe in technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems.  Not knowing is a non-technological problem.  The idea that the Web is an answer to knowing nothing is wrong, but it’s something that Americans – with our history of believing in technology as the solution to everything – are particularly susceptible to.

Why is it that such a large percentage of the Americans read every word of the bible literally?  Jacoby again.

That’s in my previous book, Freethinkers.  One reason, oddly enough, is our absolute separation of church and state.  In secular Europe – as it’s often called sneeringly by people like Justice Antonin Scalia – religious belief and belief in political systems were united.  So if you opposed the government, you also had to oppose religion.  That wasn’t true in America because we had separation of church and state.  Many forms of religious belief survived in America, because you could believe anything you wanted and still not be opposed to your government.

The freedom of religion in America gives us more freedom, it’s true – but it also gives us more religion, and that freedom provides no balance whatsoever.  People are free to believe whatever idiotic nonsense happens to appeal to them – and they do.  But shouldn’t education provide a balance for this?  Sure, our educational system is a bit problematic these days, but it’s still the best in the world, because America is number one – right?  Jacoby says:

… Americans are unwilling to look at how really bad our educational system is because we’ve all been propagandized with the idea that we’re number one.  That may have been true after World War II, but not anymore.  The idea that we’re number one and special and better than everybody else is a very powerful factor in American life, and it prevents us from examining certain respects in which we’re not number one.

Is Jacoby exaggerating?  Is the educational system really that bad?  After all, America is number one … right?  Well, let’s see.  According to the December 12, 2004 issue of the New York Times, the United States ranks 49th in the world in literacy, 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy and American workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that businesses in the U.S. spend $30 billion a year on remedial training.  According to the January 7, 2005 issue of The Week, 20% of all Americans think the sun orbits the earth, and 17% believe the earth orbits the sun once every day.  On page 78 of Jeremy Rifkin’s book The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, he notes that the International Adult Literacy Survey found “that Americans with less than nine years of education ’score worse than virtually all of the other countries.’”

If you don’t believe any of this and think I’m exaggerated or my information is incorrect, please watch this video, which is a few years old, but still quite relevant.  And be afraid.  Be very afraid.

From the time that I was a boy, I watched my father retreat from the world because the world refused to conform to his opinions and beliefs.  When he was in the sixth grade, his teacher wanted him to give an oral book report in front of the class.  He didn’t want to.  The teacher insisted.  So Dad threw a tantrum, walked away from school halfway through the sixth grade with his signature I’ll show them attitude and never looked back.  He went through life with that same attitude, and the older he got, the angrier he got, because he found that his attitude was not well received.  When I was a child, he used to come home from work angry every day – everyone else was stupid, everyone was out to get him, everyone else was to blame for all of his problems.  After having back surgery, he applied for disability and got it.  He wasn’t disabled – he did plenty of hard work around the house – but he no longer had to face a world of people who knew more than he, who thought more clearly than he, who refused to tell him he was right about everything when he was right about virtually nothing, and who refused to tolerate his tantrums when this fact became clear.  He continued to retreat from the world until he almost never left the house, even to go to church (he was quite religious and was fond of wildly misquoting the bible he never read).  The excuse he invented was, “I don’t like being around crowds.  It’s my nerves.”  My mother played along.  The little house in which they lived became his entire world, and in that world, he knew everything, he was always right, and everyone else was crazy and ignorant and full of crap on every conceivable topic.  And if you didn’t believe him, just ask Mom.  She would nod and smile and say, “That’s what Dad has always said.”  As if always saying it makes it right.

If you had a discussion with him about anything and you happened to disagree with him, you didn’t simply hold a differing opinion – you were saying that he was wrong.  Opinions weren’t just opinions to him because in any conversation, someone had to be right and someone had to be wrong – and he had to be right.  As a result, he walked away from every conversation by angrily snarling his favorite words:  “I know what I know!”

Dad used to pronounce the word “realty” as “reality.”  This drove me crazy.  Finally, I pointed out to him that he was mispronouncing the word.  “Realty refers to the sale of real estate,” I said.  “Reality is a different word and has an entirely different meaning.”

“But I’ve always pronounced it ‘reality,’” he said.  My family was big on the idea that repeating something a lot made it true.

“I know you have, but it’s always been wrong.”

“Well, I prefer to say it my way,” he said.

“Then no one will know what you’re talking about, Dad.”

“That’s their problem.”

I wanted to say, No, Dad, that’s your problem, but I said nothing, and if you’d known my dad, you would know why.

Life in America is starting to bear a terrifying resemblance to life with my parents.  I’m 47 years old, have been married to my wife for 20 years, and yet it seems that, with increasing frequency, when I engage others in conversation on topical subjects, I feel like a little boy again trying to have a conversation with my father.  This is due, I think, to a combination of phenomena that have created a perfect storm of willful ignorance in America.

Fully one third of the population believes in the infallible accuracy of a book that claims it’s okay to abuse or even kill your children, that seas part so people can walk across them, that women are unclean during their menstrual cycle and everything they touch during that time must be burned, that virgins have babies and people rise from the dead.  These people in turn reject any scientific information – sometimes even evidence that is right in front of them – that contradicts this book.  And let’s face it, folks – if you believe all that not only without a speck of evidence to support it but in the face of hard, cold proof to the contrary, then there is no limit on what you will believe.

We live in an era that is bloated with information.  Once upon a time, there were only three, four, maybe five television channels available to most people.  Now there are hundreds.  News channels now have 24 hours to fill every day, which has made everything “news” – the latest celebutard drug overdose, political sex scandals, missing puppies and updates on American Idol contestants are now given the attention and significance once reserved for national policy decisions, wars and natural disasters.  “Reality” TV has invaded every area of television – the major networks, MTV, cooking channels, it’s everywhere – presenting as “reality” the very worst elements of humanity.  Selfish, arrogant, angry, deceptive, promiscuous, ignorant, small-minded people get their own TV shows today and are held up as celebrities, and people tune in to follow their exploits.  They’re soon popping up on shows other than their own – talk shows, panel shows, “news” shows, and in magazines where they pose for glossy, glamorous photo shoots.  They become the topic of watercooler coversations in workplaces around the country.  These people – the stars of “reality” TV shows who have, as a result, become TV stars, celebrities, and the subject of stories that pass for “news” these days – have rapidly become cultural touchstones for us.

On top of that, our culture has become dominated by things like Twitter, Facebook and cell phone texting, all of which have positive aspects.  But a significant portion of our population has come to believe that it’s very important that everyone know exactly what we’re doing at every moment and that we share every little thought that pops into our heads.  It has given us a sense of self-importance we did not have before, the feeling that the minutiae of our lives is somehow special and of great interest to others.  Hey, if those unpleasant, obnoxious, proudly stupid people on The Jersey Shore can have their own TV show, then I can be a celebrity, too, right?  We have become celebrities in our own minds, filled with a false sense of our own importance.

Add to all of the above another factor, one that perhaps does the most damage.  Just as wealthy, pampered celebrities tend to surround themselves with “yes men” who tell those celebrities only what they want to hear, it is now possible for us to structure our own personal lives to confirm only those things we believe about ourselves and our world.  You’re a Christian conservative who believes that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles to be ruled by Christians?  Then watch Fox News and CBN and listen to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham and go online and read Newsmax and WorldNetDaily (both of which have a long history of outright lies).  You believe that the scientific theory of evolution is a lie and the world was created in six days by a silent, invisible god?  Well, there are plenty of well-funded organizations that agree with you and are working hard to spread the word that your belief has scientific support and is being unfairly rejected by the American educational system in favor of its wicked, godless teachings.  In no time at all, you will be absolutely convinced that you are right about everything!  You don’t even have to listen to anything that disagrees with you!  After all, you have TV shows and reporters and news websites and celebrities and shiny organizations to back up everything you believe.  Suddenly, all those who disagree with you become the “elite” – people who think they’re better than you, people who think they know more than you.  What more do you need to know other than the fact that you’re right!

Now, ignorance and stupidity are not only allowed, they are actively encouraged and nurtured!

During the eight years that George W. Bush was president, I nearly pulled my hair out every time I heard him speak.  Whenever he opened his mouth and words came out, he butchered the language, said appallingly ignorant things, and made it very clear that he just wasn’t thinking clearly, as if all the wrong synapses were firing at all the wrong times (“Is our children learning?” … “You need to put food on your family.” … “The jury is still out on evolution.”) Whenever I openly complained about this, it seemed there was always someone who spoke up and said some variation of the following:  “Leave him alone!  At least he’s not one of those people who says everything exactly right all the time, like he’s better than everybody else, like knows more than everybody else!  He talks like a normal person!  He talks like me!”

Every time they said that, what I heard them saying inside my head was, I like him because he’s dumb like me! I heard my father saying, I know what I know! I heard him saying, That’s their problem.

No.  It’s our problem.  It’s the entire country’s problem.  And it’s a problem that is rapidly getting worse, metastasizing like a cancer.  Thomas Jefferson was right – the functional operation of this country as it was conceived by the founders is absolutely dependent on an informed electorate, on reasoning and informed intelligence.  All of that is disintegrating right before our very eyes.

Don’t wait for the educational system to fix this.  Don’t wait for the government to correct it.  It will only get worse unless we start doing something about it ourselves, individually, one at a time.  Educate yourself and stay informed.  Think – and think critically.  Turn off the television and radio and stop listening to the many talking heads who want to do your thinking for you.  Go to the library or a book store, do some reading.  Seek out information and opinions that challenge you and will keep you from saying, I know what I know.  Examine each issue thoughtfully, using reason as your guide, not devotion to a religious belief or allegiance to a political party or the popular opinions of our time.  Keep in mind that the majority opinion is seldom the right one – that the majority once wanted black people and women to remain second class citizens without voices or rights.  Arm yourself with the facts, then speak up when you hear those facts being trampled or twisted.  Don’t remain silent in the face of willful ignorance and disinformation.  Point it out, correct it, and then denounce it.  If we don’t do that with frequency and conviction, we will find ourselves traveling backward in time with terrifying speed, and we will land in a place ruled by ignorance, superstition and anger.  We’re halfway there right now.  In that place, there will be no freedom, no individuality, no thinking.  There will only be the constant repetition of the words, I know what I know … even if what is known is nothing at all.

There was one of those horrifying moments in the news – the report of eight children mercilessly slaughtered by off-duty policemen in Rio, also known as the Candelária massacre. It brought a horrifying knowledge to a sanguine world that, despite all vacuous homilies about children being ‘divinely’ protected, it is an unsafe and insane world even for infants and toddlers.

‘Street children’  is

a term used to refer to children who live on the streets of a city. They are basically deprived of family care and protection. Most children on the streets are between the ages of about 5 and 17 years old, and their population between different cities is varied.

Street children live in abandoned buildings, cardboard boxes, parks or on the street itself. A great deal has been written defining street children, but the primary difficulty is that there are no precise categories, but rather a continuum, ranging from children who spend some time in the streets and sleep in a house with ill-prepared adults, to those who live entirely in the streets and have no adult supervision or care.

A widely accepted set of definitions, commonly attributed to UNICEF, divides street children into two main categories:

1. Children on the street are those engaged in some kind of economic activity ranging from begging to vending. Most go home at the end of the day and contribute their earnings to their family. They may be attending school and retain a sense of belonging to a family. Because of the economic fragility of the family, these children may eventually opt for a permanent life on the streets.
2. Children of the street actually live on the street (or outside of a normal family environment). Family ties may exist but are tenuous and are maintained only casually or occasionally.

Street children exist in many major cities, especially in developing countries, and may be subject to abuse, neglect, exploitation, or even, in extreme cases, murder by "cleanup squads" hired by local businesses or police.^[2]

In Latin America, a common cause is abandonment by poor families unable to feed all their children. In Africa, an increasingly common cause is AIDS.

Let’s take a gander at some stats, shall we?

• India 11 million
• Egypt 1,5 million
• Pakistan 1,5 million
• U.S. 750,000 – 1 million
• Kenya 250,000 – 300,000
• Philippines 250,000
• Congo 250,000
• Morocco 30,000
• Brazil 25,000
• Germany 20,000
• Honduras 20 000
• Jamaica 6,500
• Uruguay 3000
• Switzerland 1,000

The top 8 offenders are in bold. And, surprise! The top offenders are also the most highly religious countries.

One can easily ascribe these numbers to superstitious bullshit. India is often touted as the most religious country in the world. Egypt and Pakistan? Guess what those numbers are? The US comes in at a staggering 3/4 of a million to a million stray ‘sewer rats’.

I lay these crimes of overpopulation at the stair of superstition – I hammer this thesis to the door – I rant and rage at the bullheaded stupidity of ensoulment, for it is from this unprovable, ridiculous romanticism that is laying the bed of millions of vagrant children in blood and shit and tears.

Religion has done a piss poor job of controlling our loins, because it is fostered in the weltering weird fear of the sex drive, and it takes away the tools of education, the implements of prevention, the logic of critical thought, and replaces it with hierarchal horseshit and infanticidal delusions.

Religion. It’s gotta go.

Till the next post, then.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’ –Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll.

I may have mentioned this before, but I’ll bring it up again:

I am both pro-life and pro-choice. Not necessarily in that order.

I admit freely and without qualms, that I am a speciesist. In that vein alone, I am bigoted. I am a bigot towards my own species. It is not that I consider lesser species to be our slaves, toys, or any other ridiculous thing. I simply value human beings above other animals. As such, I do lend value to human embryos, zygotes, blastocysts, or other variations of how a child comes to be.

Hold it right there.

This isn’t meant to be an insinuation, an inference, an implication, that any of these stages have attained the value of personhood, especially contrasted with person of the mother. The woman gets a choice. Simple enough?

My point here, is that through all these years of blogging, I’ve seen numerous EPIC FAIL arguments because of the intense polarization of the dispute. And as polarizing arguments go, both sides go too far. Ours as well as theirs. I’ll cite a few:

A. The growing child in the womb is a parasite.
This fails spectacularly, because actually, parasites don’t detach from the host, grow up, and end up taking care of the host in the host’s golden years.
B. Anybody who is pro-life is a practitioner of ‘sperm magic’
Again, fails. Sperm is only one component, so this is the logical fallacy of composition, not to mention a strawman. I find this particularly obnoxious, so do avoid this stupidity.
C. Accusations of ‘ensoulment’. I don’t need supernatural tendencies to value a child, or the beginnings of a child.

I’m sure numerous others will be brought up, and I’ll deal with those on a case-by-case basis. Here’s the point that grinds my gears:

It’s not a ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ situation. To clarify, the two sides of the issue go to ridiculous extremes. The pro-lifers holler that an embryo has full personhood value, the pro-choicers holler that it has zero. (This is also the fallacy of the false dichotomy.) As it is in real life, the actual answer lies somewhere in-between. As does my point. It’s natural, a part of the human condition, that we go to extremes. You, me, everybody, in some order, in some way, we all go overboard. And on polarizing issues, well, the extreme is almost cliché.

I can pretty much get an all around agreement that the majority of readers here love children. Why do we? Because of all the near-magical possibilities, the potentialities that can reach into the future. Most cultures are based on potentialities anyways, that foresight, looking to the future. And there are fewer more powerful symbols of that than children.

And while being pro-choice as well, I can haul out an extreme (but extremely possible) example: if say a woman who was two days away from giving birth went nutso, and decided that she was carrying the Antichrist, and wanted it cut out of her, there’s no way I could stand by and mumble that I was ‘pro-choice’, because obviously this lady’s brain has landed somewhere south of Pluto and obviously she isn’t fit to make a decision of that import.

And let’s face it: abortion is a no-win situation. Nobody’s in favor of it ‘just because’ – there’s long-term ramifications that have to be examined on a case-to-case basis. Tubular pregnancies, incestual rape (or any rape for that matter), drug addiction – it’s a necessary evil. Not a cause for celebration for anyone. The biggest concern is poverty – because being poor means a lack of education, lack of security, lack of everything that would be optimal for a child’s upbringing. Concerns such as birth control, religious folderol, and varied other variables put forth by the far right in their efforts to control the common woman.

So a wee bit o’ advice: the next time you (figuratively) inhale to bellow at some nimbulb who’s blattering on about abortion, take a bit of a breath, and think first. It’s natural to take the other side of the argument and go to extremes (I’ve done it too, guilty!) – but we promote ourselves as the rational ones, and it behooves us to walk the talk as such.

And that, dear readers, is my nickel’s worth. Spend it freely, or sock it away for a rainy day.

Till the next post, then.

So often are we embroiled in contextual as well as metaphorical battle with the minions of religious darkness, that we sometimes neglect to notice that the world is advancing. True enough, it is halting, it is sporadic, but the days of torches and pitchforks at the door seems to become more a thing of the past, and those of us that aren’t supernaturally dysfunctional needn’t develop cricks in our necks by glancing over our shoulders constantly. 

I stumbled upon this little gem recently, and found it cool.

This is a panel from a graphic novel from Marvel, a part of the Dark Reign story arc. More specifically, the gentleman in white is one Fantomex, and the other fellow (without the mask) is Noh-Varr. The synopsis can be found at this link, as this is just an example of what I am speaking to.

Now for a personal anecdote. I’ve been unemployed since February of 2009, and just recently, I was contacted by the US 2010 Census for work. I took the test (and scored pretty high too), and called them every couple of weeks to see what was up. Finally, I fielded a barrage of calls from them after months of silence, and this last Friday (April 16th), I was sworn in. As the group I was in was walked through the folder full of governmental documents, we came to the swearing-in document. Upon reading it, the code words “So help me God” caught my eye. The Asian gentleman who was giving us the run down was reading it off to us prior to the swearing-in. Oh crap, I thought silently, here we go. I raised my hand. “Yes?” “I’m an atheist.” The older fellow responded, “So?”, but his (much) younger assistant popped up with, “I can give him the alternative oath.” So as the rest of the group (9 people) were swearing and affirming to uphold the constitution “so help me god”, I was off to the side, using almost the same oath verbatim, sans the nod to on high. The only response outside of this was one elderly retired woman snorting derisively, but everyone else took it in stride. Once done, we were trained on how to fingerprint people (as we will be spending an entire day fingerprinting other enumerators), and there was no drama, no confrontations during or after the procedure. In fact, I had most of my co-workers alternately laughing or in stitches, and I let the snort go.

So, let’s try this gedankenexperiment – please share your positive experiences with other readers. Some time or another when you weren’t excoriated for your lack of religious dysfunction.

It might do you a bit of good – or me – or someone else. Masticate on it, and get back to me.

Till the next post, then.

There are strange, small pools of thought that emerge sporadically from the landscape of any culture. Oddities that come bobbing to the surface like so many bits of driftwood on the beach of obscurity, that do not enrage the heart but cause a furrowing of the brow and a stroking of the chin by the fingers.

One of these oddities was one John Humphrey Noyes.

Noyes was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, and was not even 21 before he started voicing his first "heretical" ideas. While studying at Dartmouth College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale Theological College he used his skills at theological argument. He combined this with his skill in religious science, and the common sense he had gained as a farmer, to “make the application of a revolutionary religious doctrine to everyday life, an application that produced a social revolution.”

Where have we heard that one before?

It was in his second year at Yale that he made his first theological discovery. He was trying to determine the date of the second coming of Christ, and determined it had already occurred. His conclusion was that Christ’s second coming had taken place in 70 A.D., and that “mankind was now living in a new age.” With this in mind he became increasingly concerned with salvation from sin and with perfection. He began to argue with his colleagues that unless man was truly free of sin, then Christianity was a lie, and that only those who were perfect and free of sin were true Christians. This internal religious crisis brought about a religious conversion within Noyes. From there he began to proclaim that he “did not sin.” The idea of Perfectionism—that it was possible to be free of sin in this lifetime—caused his friends to think him unbalanced, and he began to be called a heretic by his own professors. From the moment of his conversion Noyes maintained that, because he had surrendered his will to God, everything he chose to do was perfect because his choices “came from a perfect heart”. His theory centered around the idea that the fact that man had an independent will was because of God, and that this independent will came from God, therefore rendering it divine. The only way to control mankind’s will was with spiritual direction. And Noyes proclaimed “it was impossible for the Church to compel man to obey the law of God, and to send him to eternal damnation for his failure to do so.” Noyes claimed “his new relationship to God canceled out his obligation to obey traditional moral standards or the normal laws of society.” As a result Noyes started acting on impulses from his intuition rather than giving thought to the actions or consequences. On February 20, 1834, he declared himself perfect and free from sin. This declaration caused an outrage at his college, and his newly-earned license to preach was revoked.

This obsession with ‘perfection’ has laid many low, and may eventually be the downfall of the human race.

Upon his expulsion from Yale and the revocation of his ministerial license, he returned to Putney, Vermont, where he continued to preach, declaring, "I took away their license to sin and they go on sinning; they have taken away my license to preach but I shall go on preaching". At this time his Putney community began to take shape. It started in 1836 as the Putney Bible School and became a formal communal organization in 1844, practicing complex marriage, male continence and striving for Perfection.

Like so many people before him, upon being cast out by his peers, he went out and founded his own community:

Community structure

Even though the community reached a maximum population of about 300, it had a complex bureaucracy of 27 standing committees and 48 administrative sections.

The Oneida Community was a self-supporting enterprise. Its primary industries were the growing and canning of fruits and vegetables, the production of silk thread, and the manufacture of animal traps. They were the primary supplier of animal traps to the Hudson’s Bay Company. The manufacturing of silverware, the sole remaining industry, began in 1877, relatively late in the life of the Community, and still thrives.Secondary industries included the manufacture of leather travel bags, the weaving of palm frond hats, the construction of rustic garden furniture, and tourism.

All Community members were expected to work, each according to his or her abilities. Women tended to do much of the domestic duties. Although more skilled jobs tended to remain with one person (the financial manager, for example, held his post throughout the life of the Community), Community members rotated through the more menial jobs, working in the house, the fields, or the various industries. As the Community thrived, it began to hire outsiders to work in these positions as well. They were a major employer in the area, with approximately 200 employees by 1870.

Interesting, but little more than a raised eyebrow.

Gender roles

As a goal subsidiary to achieving religious and social revivalism, Noyes believed that one of the major purposes of the Community was to regenerate relations between men and women, which he believed to be deteriorating in the larger society. In theory, males and females had equality and equal voice in the governance of the community.

However, scholars disagree about whether gender roles at Oneida were, on the whole, feminist or conservative. On the one hand, women were relieved of the special duties of childcare by a community nursery, which provided care for infants and children so that both parents could work. Females adopted a style of dress, believed to have been copied from the Iroquois, consisting of a short skirt over trousers (bloomers). This allowed them much greater freedom of movement than contemporary women’s styles.

On the other hand, Marlyn Klee-Hartzell has shown that women were disproportionately assigned to tasks—like nursery duty, housekeeping, and laundry—that were traditionally considered women’s work. Some women may have been required to wear bloomers against their will by Noyes, who believed that allowing women to wear dresses would make them materialistic.

Hmmm…some sexual equality, but a disparity between theory and practice is to be expected. Now here’s where it gets interesting –

Complex marriage

In theory, every male was married to every female. Status at Oneida was based on people’s spirituality. Community members were not to have an exclusive sexual or romantic relationship with each other, but were to keep in constant circulation. To help prevent a "special love" from forming, each Community member had his or her own bedroom. This extended even to couples who came to the Community already married. A married couple entering the Community was not required or even encouraged to legally dissolve their union, but rather to extend the borders of it to the rest of the Community in complex marriage. The average female Community member had three sexual encounters, or "interviews", a week.

I would imagine that if they’d gotten farther than one generation, the diversity may have well broken down into the third and fourth generations, contingent on the restrictions of community.

Postmenopausal women were encouraged to introduce teenage males to sex, providing both with legitimate partners that rarely resulted in pregnancies. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships which would form and would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hopes that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the non-devout.

Interesting, and this sort of practice would have discouraged the raging ageism we see today.  Here’s where I get a tad irked:

Noyes believed that sex had not only biological, but social and spiritual purposes as well. To Communitarians, it was yet another path to perfection. Generally, it was believed that older people were spiritually superior to younger people, and men were spiritually superior to women. Noyes and his inner circle were at the top of this hierarchy in the Community. In order to improve oneself, one was only supposed to have sexual relations with those spiritually superior. This was called "ascending fellowship." Once a Community member had reached a certain level (usually determined by Noyes and his inner circle), they were then to turn around and practice "descending fellowship" with those Communitarians trying to work their way up.

The idea of ‘perfection’ seems to always include some hierarchal concept of superiority – and I myself have met many older men and women who were anything but ‘superior’ in any way.

I found this intriguing:

Mutual criticism

Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting. The goal was to eliminate bad character traits. Various contemporary sources contend that Noyes himself was the subject of criticism, although less often and of probably less severe criticism than the rest of the community. Although this could sometimes be a harsh process, the majority of community members appreciated this criticism because it allowed them to try to better themselves.

I think a great many folks in this day and age should embrace criticism (as long as it’s constructive and not constrictive), but we tend to lead with our emotions and confuse our opinions with ourselves.

Here’s where it gets a little scary…

Stirpiculture

A program of eugenics, then known as stirpiculture, was introduced in 1869. It was a selective breeding program designed to create even more perfect children. Communitarians who wished to be parents would go before a committee to be matched based on their spiritual and moral qualities. 53 women and 38 men participated in this program, which necessitated the construction of a new wing of the Oneida Community Mansion House. The experiment yielded 58 children, nine of whom were fathered by Noyes.

Once children were weaned from breast milk (usually at around the age of one) they were raised communally in the Children’s Wing, or South Wing. Their parents were allowed to visit, but if those in charge of the Children’s Wing suspected a parent and child were bonding too closely to one another, the Community would enforce a period of separation.

This is truly illustrative of how a slippery slope argument actually does work. First, the environment is too controlled and structured. Second, interfering with a parent-child bond violates some serious ethical imperatives. Third, perfection of any sort is a plateau: you cannot by definition become more perfect – A. it’s an impossibility, and B. there’s utterly no yardstick for this falsehood.

Of course, since this community was too close-knit and too internally diverse in so many ways, it started to come apart at the seams (and you folks will love one of the factors):

The community lasted until John Humphrey Noyes attempted to pass the leadership of the Community to his son, Theodore Noyes. This move was unsuccessful because Theodore was an atheist and lacked his father’s talent for leadership. The move also divided the Community, as Communitarian John Towner attempted to wrest control for himself.

Them durned atheists! And of course the eventual confusion about sex:

Within the commune, there was a debate about when children should be initiated into sexual rituals, and by whom. There was also much debate about its practices as a whole. The founding members of the Community were aging or deceased, and many of the younger Communitarians desired to enter into exclusive, traditional marriages.

Noyes had a penchant for the youngsters:

The capstone to all these pressures was the harassment campaign of Professor Mears, of Hamilton College. John Humphrey Noyes was tipped off by trusted adviser Myron Kinsley that a warrant for his arrest on charges of statutory rape was imminent. Noyes fled the Oneida Community Mansion House and the country in the middle of a June night in 1879, never to return to the United States. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to his followers from Niagara Falls, Ontario, advising that the practice of complex marriage be abandoned.

And the polygamy/polyandry/universal marriage thing came apart at the seams (a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one):

Complex Marriage was abandoned in 1879 following external pressures and the community soon broke apart with some of the members reorganizing as a joint-stock company. Marital partners normalized their status with the partners they were cohabiting with at the time of the re-organization. Over 70 Community members entered into a traditional marriage in the following year.

On a final note:

The joint-stock corporation still exists as of 2008 and is a major producer of cutlery under the brand name "Oneida Limited". In September 2004 Oneida Limited announced that it would cease all manufacturing operations in the beginning of 2005, ending a 124 year tradition. The company would continue as a marketer for products manufactured overseas. The company has been selling off its manufacturing facilities. Most recently, the distribution center in Sherrill, New York was closed. Administrative offices remain in the Oneida area.

Hence the ‘spooning’ joke in the title.

Thus endeth the history lesson. While Noyes had some interesting (and eclectic) ideas about communal organization, gender roles, etc., it is readily obvious that he would have failed regardless of whether religion was involved or not. However, it’s safe to say that religion usually ends up helping these oddballs screw the pooch even sooner.

Till the next post, then.

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. – Dawkins

Today is that day the Christians hail as fundamental to their belief system, the resurrection of the larger-than-life mythical being we know as Jesus. In real life, we usually realize that when a story is chock full of ‘miracles’, it’s more likely than not what is termed a ‘fish story’ (to those of us who aren’t wide-eyed and gullible, that is). Until recently, we as a culture have been told ‘hands off’ when it comes to religious topics of any sort (unless they tend to be absolutely bugfuck crazy – then it’s okay to mock) – but recent events as well as archeological discoveries have been the gale wind to knock down houses built on foundations of sand.

The first item on the agenda: the empty tomb. Somehow this has become one of those hoary old chestnuts we’re fed as children, inundated by cheery Xmas songs and the inculcated idea that the bible has any shred of veracity whatsoever. Yet, as we’ve seen over the past few centuries (as the religious tend to argue and war over petty items), nobody can seem to agree on where the damn thing is. The most basic point is best: this location would have been inundated by pilgrims from the get-go, especially if the mass conversion of many thousands in the Middle East was true. In fact, the standard measuring point in any form of historical veracity is the same as it is in the retail motto: location, location, location. Yet somehow this is overlooked in any discussion of the topic among the Christians.

Item two: the missing body. I think Richard Carrier puts it best:

In Acts’ history of the Church, from the moment the Church first goes public, right in Jerusalem, nowhere do either the Romans or the Jews ever show any knowledge of a missing body, nor do they ever take any action to investigate what would only be to them a crime of tomb robbery and desecration of the dead (both severe death penalty offenses), or worse. The Gospel of Matthew even claims the Jewish authorities accused the Christians of such crimes before Pilate himself (Matthew 27:62-66, 28:4, 28:11-15). Although that is certainly fiction (as I have argued elsewhere, external and internal evidence confirms Matthew’s story is a poetic and apologetic fabrication), it reflects what could not fail to have happened–if any body had gone missing.[17]

Since Christians were supposedly capitalizing on this fact, they would be the first suspects–or at least the second ones if (as the Gospels claim) Joseph of Arimathea was the last person known to have had custody of the body (Mark 15:43-46, Matthew 27:57-60, Luke 23:51-56, John 19:38-42). In that case he would be the first man hauled in for questioning. Yet he vanishes completely from this earliest history of the Church, as if no one knew anything about him, or he didn’t exist at all. Though Christians would be suspects in a capital crime of grave robbery, and Acts records case after case of them being interrogated at trial before Jews and Romans on other offenses, never once in this history of the Church are they suspected of or questioned about grave robbery. It’s as if there was no missing body to investigate, no empty tomb known to the authorities. Which means the Christians can’t have been pointing to one. If they had, they would have been questioned about it (and possibly convicted for it, innocent or not). Yet Acts shows there were no disputes at all regarding what happened to the body, not even false accusations of theft, or even questions or expressions of amazement.

Thus, either Acts deliberately suppresses the truth about what happened to the body and what was really being argued, said, and done about it (which entails the truth must have been severely embarrassing to Christians), or there was no missing body and no one was claiming there was. In alignment with the latter conclusion are the facts already surveyed above, which suggest the original Christians were preaching that Jesus rose in an entirely new body, not the old one left in the grave, and the fact that Acts fails to mention any debate or discussion about any tomb being empty or any body being missing (e.g. it never occurs as an argument or a defense in any of the trials or debates it records).[18] Such an incident was evidently entirely missing from the history of the original Church.

The Romans would have had an even more urgent worry than body snatching: the Christians were supposedly preaching that Jesus (even if with supernatural aid) had escaped his execution, was seen rallying his followers, and then disappeared. Pilate and the Sanhedrin would not likely believe any of this resurrection or ascension nonsense (and there is no evidence they did), but if the tomb was empty, and Christ’s followers were reporting that he had continued preaching to them and was still at large, Pilate would be compelled to haul every Christian in and interrogate every possible witness in a massive manhunt for what could only be in his mind an escaped convict (guilty of treason against Rome for claiming to be God and King, as all the Gospels allege: e.g. Mark 15:26; Matthew 27:37; Luke 23:38; John 19:19-22). And the Sanhedrin would feel the equally compelling need to finish what they had evidently failed to accomplish the first time (finding and killing Jesus). Yet none of this happens. No one asks where Jesus is hiding or who aided him. No one is at all concerned that there may be an escaped convict, pretender to the throne, thwarter of Roman law and judgment, dire threat to Jewish authority, alive and well somewhere, and still giving orders to his followers. Why would no one care that the Christians were claiming they took him in, hid him from the authorities, and fed him after his escape from justice (according to Acts 1), unless in fact they weren’t claiming any such thing?

The best explanation of this strange omission is that the body was still in its grave, since then all the Christians’ claims could be legally ignored. That’s why those claims are dismissed as mere madness (Acts 26:24), involving no possible criminal charge of any kind under Roman law (e.g. Acts 18:12-17, 23:26-35). Otherwise, the crime of either robbing graves or aiding and abetting an escaped felon and royal pretender would certainly have been obvious grounds for an inquest or trial. Yet neither occurs. Thus, if Acts records any truth about the history of the first Church, its narrative all but entails there was no empty tomb, the body of Jesus was not missing, and that the earliest Christians, including Paul, were instead preaching a resurrection by transfer to a new body, residing in heaven (at least after the Pentecost), a fact known only by private revelations and interpretations of scripture.

Item three: the evidence of absence, or an argument from silence. We know of Julius Caesar quite well, for instance. There are statues and coins a-plenty. He wrote quite a few items – memoirs, some poetry. His enemies spoke/wrote of him, as did his extensive family. Yet the Christians make the claim that Jesus was indeed a historical figure, more so than any other. Yet there is a dearth of evidence surrounding this mystery figure. Of forty historians of that time period, not a word. Not from Philo Judaeus, nor Seneca the Elder or the Younger, not from Velleius Paterculus nor Livy. For someone who allegedly attracted droves of followers (so many that some were trampled underfoot), this is a suspicious silence. Josephus mentions him (among numerous other Jesii), but contemporary sources fall silent. Note that Flauvius was born seven years post ex facto, and brief mentions of rumors heard do not an account make. There is indeed, not one written account from an external source who looked in the face of our mystery man – no one who wrote about that day on Golgotha, or sat and ate a meal with him. Not a whisper. It’s well-established fact  that the Synoptics were written well past the given date by a century or more of the alleged event.

And there you have it. Three simple items that would not only make the less gullible amongst us pause, but those of us who have a sharpened sense of critical analysis laugh out loud. But it is difficult, when the meme has had centuries to take deep root, and the resistance squashed by those who claim to practice ‘turn the other cheek’ but in reality cannot internalize the concept.

Welcome to the 21st century, where finally these anachronistic superstitions will be laid to rest in a shallow, unmarked grave.

Till the next post, then.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace – Imagine, John Lennon

I recently watched this movie, and I have to say: I absolutely loved it.

Because, let’s admit it – as an atheist, I cannot abide dishonesty. It was the initial attraction it had for me after all. The uncompromising pedantry, the brutal clinical analysis of details, the utter logic of it. And religious people? They lie. Perhaps in small ways, even more so in large ways. The mental gymnastics of rationalizing their worldview, the  semantic dishonesty, the dance of belief so fragile that a light wind can shatter it and the denial afterwards.

So the plotline was a refreshing concept: a parallel world where nobody understands the concept of lying. Wow. What I wouldn’t give to live there, I tells ya. You’d know where you stood immediately with anyone you’d meet. Conversations where people never ever used ‘weasel words’. If you were going to score, you’d know it. Ask a question, and there’s no dancing about, just a straight answer.

And one of the more beautiful aspects of the flick, is that there was no such thing as religion. Not one jot nor tittle.

So one day, as shown in the trailer, Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) lies and gets more money from the bank than he has. He begins to experiment with this newfound ‘power’, much to our collective amusement.

And the big hit at the Judeo-Christian religion, is when his mother is lying in bed, scared of death, not wanting to go into cold nothingness, and Mark makes up a huge fib about what is obviously termed heaven here, and is overheard by the doctor and nurses. The ‘word’ spreads like wildfire, and people begin camping on his doorstep. So Mark writes the ‘nine commandments’ on the back of two pizza boxes, and addresses the crowd by telling them about the ‘man in the sky’. Much hilarity ensues.

I rather liked the subplot, where Mark is trying to woo Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), who isn’t interested in him at all, and…well, watch the movie. Some critics didn’t like the idea of a dumpy little guy getting a hottie, but it does happen, and screw those shallow pricks anyways.

And some of the religious kooks weren’t too hot about it, anyways:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film the three and a half stars out of four saying "in its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, [it] is a remarkably radical comedy" while Empire gave the film 1 star out of 5 saying the "ramshackle plot detours into a hideously ill-conceived religious satire". The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops rated The Invention of Lying as "O – morally offensive"^] However, Xan Brooks of The Guardian was more favourable, giving the film four out of five stars, although he was critical of some aspects: "It is slick and it is funny. But it is also too obviously schematic, while that romantic subplot can feel awfully synthetic at times."

But hey, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined the race.

Anyways, till the next post.

Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. – Isaac Newton

So, here’s the question: how many of you, in your travails amid the blogosphere, have had this canard trotted out? They’ll trot out a famous name: “Hey look, this brilliant genius way back when believed in gawd, and he was RILLY RILLY smart!”

Not only is this an argument from authority, it obviously only uses selected highlights to lure in the believer. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in faeries in his senile dementia, John Nash Jr. had schizophrenia, Bobby Fisher not only got involved with an apocalyptic church but he’s also a raving anti-Semite, Anatoly Fomenko is by all accounts a brilliant mathematician but also a crazed historical revisionist….but I think you’ve caught the gist of it. Or as an old co-worker of mine once said, “Just because you’re smart, doesn’t mean you’re not stupid.”

Isaac Newton is indeed one of these. A brilliant physicist, one of those ‘somebodies’ the religious trot out to prove a point. However, by today’s standards, old Isaac was…well, for want of a better word, a bit of a fruitcake:

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), the noted English scientist and mathematician, wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies.

These occult works explored chronology, alchemy, and Biblical interpretation (especially of the Apocalypse).

Alchemy?

Newton’s scientific work may have been of lesser personal importance to him, as he placed emphasis on rediscovering the occult wisdom of the ancients. In this sense, some have commented that the common reference a "Newtonian Worldview" as being purely mechanistic is somewhat inaccurate. After purchasing and studying Newton’s alchemical works in 1942, economist John Maynard Keynes, for example, opined that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians."

Obviously not the magician in the same sense as Houdini.

In the pre-Modern Era of Newton’s lifetime, the educated embraced a world view different from that of later centuries. Distinctions between science, superstition, and pseudoscience were still being formulated, and a devoutly Christian Biblical perspective permeated Western culture.

Like I said, selected highlights. Skipping to the ‘selected highlights’ (hehehehe):

Of the material sold during the 1936 Sotheby’s auction, several documents indicate an interest by Newton in the procurement or development of The Philosopher’s Stone. Most notably are documents entitled, "Artephius his secret Book", followed by "The Epistle of Iohn Pontanus, wherein he beareth witness of ye book of Artephius", these are themselves a collection of excerpts from another work entitled, "Nicholas Flammel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures which he caused to be painted upon an Arch in St Innocents Church-yard in Paris. Together with The secret Booke of Artephius, And the Epistle of Iohn Pontanus: Containing both the Theoricke and the Practicke of the Philosophers Stone". This work may also have been referenced by Newton in its Latin version found within Lazarus Zetzner’s, "Theatrum Chemicum", a volume often associated with the Turba Philosophorum and other early European alchemical manuscripts. Nicolas Flamel, (one subject of the aforementioned work) was a notable, though mysterious figure, often associated with the discovery of The Philosopher’s Stone, Hieroglyphical Figures, early forms of tarot, and occultism. Artephius, and his "secret book", were also subjects of interest to 17th Century alchemists.

Somehow, Dawkins’ refrain of not being so open-minded one’s brains spill out springs to mind. His library on alchemy sounds like an incredible waste of time.

Newton studied and wrote extensively upon the Temple of Solomon, dedicating an entire chapter of "The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms" to his observations regarding the temple. Newton’s primary source for information was the description of the structure given within 1 Kings of the Hebrew Bible, which he translated himself from the original Hebrew.

The temple of Solomon? You mean that edifice that is thoroughly lacking in any archeological evidence whatsoever?

Oh, and talk about delusional:

Newton considered himself to be one of a select group of individuals who were specially chosen by God for the task of understanding Biblical scripture. He was a strong believer in prophetic interpretation of the Bible, and like many of his contemporaries in Protestant England, he developed a strong affinity and deep admiration for the teachings and works of Joseph Mede. Though he never wrote a cohesive body of work on Prophecy, Newton’s belief led him to write several treatises on the subject, including an unpublished guide for prophetic interpretation entitled, "Rules for interpreting the words & language in Scripture". In this manuscript he details the necessary requirements for what he considered to be the proper interpretation of the Bible.

Mild messianic complex, anybody?

In addition, Newton would spend much of his life seeking and revealing what could be considered a Bible Code.

(Points to head, rotating index finger, whistling.)

He placed a great deal of emphasis upon the interpretation of the Book of Revelation, writing generously upon this book and authoring several manuscripts detailing his interpretations.

Perhaps the most crazed book of that diatribe of shepherd tales.

Unlike a prophet in the true sense of the word, Newton relied upon existing Scripture to prophesy for him, believing his interpretations would set the record straight in the face of what he considered to be "so little understood".

And yet, so few believers know that this even exists. So much for being ‘chosen’.

In 1754, twenty-seven years after his death, Isaac Newton’s treatise, "An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture" would be published, and though it does not argue any prophetic meaning, it does exemplify what Newton considered to be just one popular misunderstanding of Scripture.

But today, in the 21st century, our understanding is exemplary: the bible is crap, scripture is nonsense.

Although Newton’s approach to these studies could not be considered a ’scientific’ approach, he did write as if his findings were the result of evidentially-based research.

Of course he did: don’t they all? Isn’t that the whole point of presuppositionalism?

And dig this – he thought Atlantis was real:

Found within "The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms", are several passages that directly mention the mythical land of Atlantis. The first such passage is part of his Short Chronical which indicates his belief that Homer’s Ulysses left the island of Ogygia in 896 BC. In Greek Mythology, Ogygia was home to Calypso, the daughter of Atlas (after whom Atlantis was named). Some scholars have suggested that Ogygia and Atlantis are locationally connected, or possibly the same island. From his writings it appears Newton may have shared this belief. Newton also lists Cadis or Cales as possible candidates for Ogygia, though does not cite his reasons for believing so. Within the same material Newton mentions that according to ancient sources, Atlantis had been as big as all Europe, Africa and Asia, but was sunk into the Sea.

Is there an emoticon for ‘tasered into disbelief’?

Enough. I believe my point has been made. In summation, Newton was a phenomenal physicist, and we still employ many Newtonian principles to this day. But his religious (and yes, occult) beliefs would serve to get him laughed at in many venues in our century as well as the last. He is, in short, the last person on earth anyone should use as an argument from authority in relation to their belief system.

And to top this minor post off, here’s a link to an essay by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, titled the Perimeter Of Ignorance, which is far more eloquent than I could ever hope to be.

Till the next post, then.