Martyrs in the Military

We've been hearing, it seems, quite a bit in the media about self-proclaimed Christian martyr Gordon Klingenschmitt, but through Ed Brayton we learn about a real martyr in the military, an unnamed atheist who attempted to hold meetings with fellow freethinkers, only to have the meeting disrupted by a rabid fundamentalist major, who seemed to be suffering from the illusion that his job in the military was to spread his brand of Christianity--much like the (imaginary) John Birch Society police officer in MAD magazine, who thought that the job of the police was to fight Communism.

I hope--not that I have any confidence--that the American military will take swift action to discipline this major, and I hope the result will be that this clown receives a dishonorable discharge. There are problems enough with the military, without it becoming the stomping ground for radical Christian loons like the major--or like Gordon Klingenschmitt.

A Word about Marriage

When I was growing up, marriage was a hot topic. Specifically, people were concerned about who should be allowed to marry whom, and how certain kinds of marriages could be stopped. The same lame arguments I heard then about why people of one "race" should not be allowed to marry people of another have been trotted out again today, this time as a justification for discrimination against people whose chosen partner is of the wrong gender, rather than the wrong "race".

I was in high school when the Supreme Court decided the case of Loving v. Virginia by striking down laws forbidding people of different "races" to marry. Right now it seems incredible to me that such laws were still on the books in the twentieth century, actually in my lifetime, but so it was. I can vividly recall one conversation in particular on the subject, when my family was visiting with another family, and we children--this was years before Loving v. Virginia--were playing in the same room where our mothers were talking. Both our families were strong supporters of the civil rights struggle then going on. So I felt a bit surprised when their mother said to my mother that interracial marriages were all very well in theory, but she wouldn't want her children to ruin their prospects by marrying the wrong kind of person. Marrying a person of another race, she felt, would keep them from advancing in their jobs, from being able to live in the best neighborhoods, and from getting their kids into the right schools. She didn't want that for her kids. My mother was noncommittal. She said that she was sure that the kids would take that into account if the situation ever came up, and that they would act in a manner that they felt would best assure their own future happiness.

While this topic was hypothetical for us, it was a very real issue for Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who were actually convicted for the crime of marrying across "racial" lines. In honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in their favor, Mildred Loving prepared the following statement (PDF here):

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn't to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn't get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn't allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn't that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the "crime" of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed.

The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: ""Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn't have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," a "basic civil right."

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God's plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation's fears and prejudices have given way, and today's young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Amen.

Jerry Falwell Burns in Hell

Ding dong, the witch is dead--yes, the man who promoted AIDS as a instrument of social transformation has gone to his own place, where the fires never die and the vultures gnaw his liver eternally. Uneducated but arrogant, a liar, libeler, and defender of terrorists, his ignominious career at last comes to an end. And high time, too.

Faith-Based Logic

The United States is an overwhelmingly faith-based nation--a March 2007 Newsweek poll showed that 91 percent of the country believes in God.

ABC News: Atheists in a Town of Believers

Is anybody else bothered by an obvious difficulty with this statement? The conclusion (the US is an overwhelmingly faith-based nation) does not follow from the premise (91% of the country believe in god). Something is missing here. It reminds me of a time when I saw a guy on TV claim that 95 percent of the people of the United States wanted prayer in school. How did he get this figure? I wondered. When I looked up his source--he had cited a recent poll--I found his 95% figure--but it was not in connection with prayer in school. (As a matter of fact that topic was not addressed in the poll.) It was the number of Americans who claimed to believe in god.

This is a trick that has always irritated me. If you can't prove something, cite something different and move on. Quickly. J. A. T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolworth's, was fond of this sort of hit-and-run argument, which is the basis of his oddball book Redating the New Testament. My health sciences teacher in junior high--a coach who majored in public speaking--used to use it when teaching the required anti-drug propaganda. It always bugged me, and left me wondering what was being covered up.

So here, the question strikes me--what is a faith-based nation, anyway? It would be the opposite of an evidence-based nation, I guess, but that doesn't get us very far. For the most part Americans seem to rely on a mixture of faith and evidence to make daily decisions. We trust that our food providers aren't going to poison us with tainted tuna, for example--but we have the FDA and usually some kind of food inspectors to back it up. We have faith that our employees aren't robbing us blind--but we audit the books nonetheless. We are, as a people, credulous while priding ourselves on our skepticism.

Now when I look around on the internet I find that "faith-based" is apparently being used as a weak synonym for "religious." This is lame, and apparently politically motivated. It also displays a Christian bias. In Christianity belief without evidence--faith--is exalted. Remember the story in the fourth gospel about the unbelieving disciple Thomas? This was the fellow who refused to believe that Jesus had in fact been raised from the dead until he felt the body of the reanimated corpse for himself. Thomas required evidence, you see. The author of the gospel, however, has Jesus condemn Thomas for this. Faith without evidence is superior to evidence-based faith--at least in Christianity. This is one reason why people speak of the Christian Faith.

But, on the other side of the same token, it is incorrect to speak of the Jewish faith, or the Buddhist faith, and so on. When anybody refers to world faiths, they are--whether they know it or not--restricting themselves in essence to the sects of Christianity and Islam (and the latter, as far as I can tell, appears to be little more than a heretical offshoot of the former anyway).

So if faith here is being (mis)used as a weak synonym for religion, then apparently "faith-based" means simply "religious." But if that's what the author meant, why not just say it? I suppose the fact that 91% of the people claim to believe in a god proves that they are religious, though that leaves out the possibility of philosophical belief. But why gibber when you don't have to?

In this case I suspect that it has to do with the fundamental dishonesty of the article in question, where the issue is not "faith"--dragged in arbitrarily--but bigotry. A small community of god-believing bigots tried to drive out an atheistic family rather than practice the virtue of tolerance, but you'd never gather that from this piece. The truth is, in most instances Americans are hostile to faith. Faith-based medicine or faith-based accounting gets its practitioners jailed, and rightly so.

"Dinosaur Girl" Sounds Off

High school senior Reed Braden (Unorthodox Atheism) gives us a glimpse into the scientific knowledge of a high school girl whom he refers to as “Dinosaur Girl”:

Are we ignoring the third law of thermodynamics? [she asks rhetorically.] Any scientist with the slightest bit of intelligence will tell you that every single molecule, atom, and electron moves from a state of order to entropy (which is defined by Merriam-Webster's dictionary as "the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity," in case you weren't aware). Evolution directly contradicts this inherrent law of the universe. But I guess you're probably smarter than Albert Einsten, who am I kidding...

I know you've heard the rock stratification argument, but it just makes sense. Why isn't the earth in neatly arranged layers? Why are dinosaur fossils next to fossils from other periods... Speaking of fossils, why haven't they found a complete fossil of a prehistoric human. And Lucy doesn't count -- she was a hoax, after all.

Where are you getting your dates from. I know you would probably cite C-14 dating, but are we really sure that's accurate? After all, a California redwood was dated to be 4.6 million years old. I know they live a long time... but that old? Still not convinced? A monarch butterfly was dated to be 1200 years old. What's their lifespan again? Seems this technique may need reexamining.

Now this girl confuses the second law of thermodynamics (which she gets wrong) with the third; she erroneously thinks that it somehow contradicts “evolution”; she is under the impression that fossils from different periods appear mixed together; she suffers from the illusion that Australopithecus afarensis is a hoax, and then she babbles crazily about radiocarbon dating.

Okay, so what’s the punchline, you’re probably wondering. The girl’s got a lot to learn, but a decent introductory science class should clear up most of her confusion. Or so one would think. That’s what high school’s for, right? Replacing ignorance with knowledge? Turning kids on to the wonders of the natural world? Equipping them with the tools that will enable them to evaluate problems that will confront them as citizens in an increasingly complicated world?

The thing is, this girl is a senior. She is about to graduate. In my book, anybody this pig-ignorant shouldn’t be receiving a high school diploma. But it gets worse. This girl is apparently a salutatorian in her school. She is right at the top of the graduates there. (I wonder what the kids who didn’t make the honor roll are like.) A school turning out products like this has clearly failed across the board, and a diploma from this institution is worth somewhat less than piece of toilet paper.

Now “Dinosaur Girl” goes on to remark rather fatuously that she enjoys “learning material I disagree with. You have to know the other side in order to effectively combat it.” I would be interested to know what “other side” she has learned, since she plainly knows nothing about physics, biology, or ancient history. All she is doing here is parroting creationist talking points, and she can’t even get them right.

Now what “Dinosaur Girl” needs to realize—and this is a tough one—is that people are lying to her. These are people she presumably trusts and believes in, but they aren’t doing her any favors. They are filling her mind with garbage. She needs to do her own research. She should ask the person who told her that Lucy was a hoax what evidence there is to support this notion? What do actual scientists say about it? How does the second (or third) law of thermodynamics “contradict” evolution? If “every single molecule, atom, and electron moves from a state of order to entropy” how is it possible for a crystal to grow? Or for an embryo to grow into a human being? Each of these involves a local decrease in entropy. Since these things do happen, does that mean the second law of thermodynamics is full of holes? Or what? How does radiocarbon dating work? How has it been tested? What other ways are there of dating objects from human history and prehistory? What is dendrochronology? Why is the bristlecone pine significant in calibrating the radiocarbon date? As she herself observed, “I could go on and on and on ... but I won't.”

Now of course, this being from a random internet site, it could well be a hoax. Frankly, I hope it is. I’d like to think that Reed Braden made up “Dinosaur Girl,” or that maybe somebody hoaxed him with a bogus letter. But I’m very much afraid that somewhere in America there is a high school senior this ignorant about science who is graduating near the top of her class. It’s a frightening thought, and a sad commentary on the failure of the American school system.

Understanding As Noise (by G--rge G-ld-r)

[I received a very interesting piece taking issue with my objections to the concept of belief without understanding. It seems that I am not au courant with information theory as it is presently practiced. So today’s guest Rational Ranter is Dr. G--rge G-ld-r, technoguru of universal bandwidth and the “P. T. Barnum of modern information theory.”]

Your sophis and tries amount to nothing more than an argumentum ad consequentiam informed by anti-epistemic materialist cant. Cautionary fables from the Mah Jong aside, information is archetypical and precedes its decryption. Just as the automobile, a phenomenon decried by the most eminent biologists of the nineteenth century, demonstrates empirically that the cart precedes the horse, so belief precedes understanding. An archetypical formation may be addressed by superpositional prestidigitation. Consequently misunderstanding may be avoided only by a process of noetic myopia focused exclusively on the information in question.

In this sense the medieval Bogomils were entirely correct in asserting that the meaning of scripture is only evident to the eye of faith. Attempts to decrypt information without the key of noesis simply introduce noise into the mix. The mathematical theory of misinformation shows that corruption and gibberish both increase exponentially, diagonally in a simple oblique direction. This makes all the difference.

Just as the medieval warm period establishes the preconditions for the feudal state, so the little ice age that follows creates the foundation for capitalism. In each case belief in the system precedes its implementation. Even the reductionist absurdities of Karl Marx’s diacritical materialism precede its implementation in the gas chambers of Nuremburg and the Gulag. Tides and times may come and go, but the substrate of ideas in a text remains eternal. Faith, or something like it, is the key to true interactive realization of a text. This is in no way a matter of Biblical literalism, but if the shoe fits—so be it.

[The rest of the piece involves a proposal for investment in a structure spanning the East River in New York, a project beyond my financial means at this time. sbh]

Bobby "Boris" Pickett: A One Hit Wonder Passes On

I have a collection of 45s dating back to my childhood. (45s are small vinyl disks that can be decoded to play music with the appropriate mechanical device, known as a phonograph or record-player. They were the MP3s of my generation.) One of these is a thing put out by Garpax records, with a black-and-white picture-sleeve showing a monster against a background of tombstones. I don't know where or when I picked it up.

The song was something called "Monster Mash" sung by Bobby Pickett backed by the Crypt-kickers. Mr. Pickett sang, in a stunning Boris Karloff imitation, a strange piece about a mad scientist and his dancing monster. I'm sure you must have heard it; it resurfaces every Halloween like a bad penny taped to a cork in a bloodwort stew.

It's actually kind of a survivor in a way; this sort of macabre humor was once common. Spike Jones, at the end of his career, when he was trying desperately to compete with the likes of Stan Freberg and Mort Sahl, put out an entire album devoted to this sort of thing. Katie Lee was edgier, with songs like "When I Was a Little Girl" and "Group Therapy." And of course Tom Lehrer was way ahead of the curve with "A Hunting Song" and "Irish Ballad." Eventually even the Cultural Wasteland succumbed, in a somewhat sanitized way, with TV shows like The Addams Family and The Munsters. (Who can forget the exchange between Wednesday Addams and an Avon Lady?

Wednesday: Nobody uses anything like that except Uncle Fester. He uses a preservative.
Avon Lady: A preservative? Oh, to keep young?
Wednesday: No, just to keep.

Or maybe, who can remember it?)

"The Monster Mash" went right to the top of the charts, as I recall--though if I looked it up I'd probably find out that it was only #11 on the Billboard chart, or something. Still, I'm doing this from memory, and I may as well tell it my way.

It was 1962 and "The Monster Mash" went straight to the top of the charts only a couple of weeks after it was released. It was impossible to escape that Halloween. I'm thinking this was that strange Halloween, not long after the Columbus Day Storm, when trees were still lying across parts of houses, and debris was everywhere. My buddy and I felt we were too old to go out begging for candy, but we still got into costume (as a television and a wall socket, I think) to shepherd our younger brothers and sister and friends about.

It would be a decade before I heard of Bobby "Boris" Pickett again, and this time we were on the road in search of America, or maybe just a good time. As we crossed the country that summer of 1973 every station in every town seemed to be playing it. Why, I wondered. It's just because of the success of the horror film guy (now I can't remember his name--Portland's equivalent of SCTV's Count Floyd anyway), one of my fellow-travelers suggested. But that wouldn't explain why it's playing out here in Iowa, I replied. Nobody knew, and apparently nobody cared. But me. And I didn't care that much.

From all accounts Pickett took his one hit wonder status with a certain grace and style. He used to announce his performances by saying that he was going to do a medley of his hit--fair enough, I guess, though that line must have gray whiskers by now. And one hit is more than most performers get, though fewer than most musician's ambitions. And what a hit it was, sure to resurface every Halloween for years to come.

Bobby "Boris" Pickett passed away last Wednesday. A moment of silence, please.

(Once again, I am doing this without benefit of my notes, records, or library, so some of the titles above may well be wrong. Not to mention dates, persons, sequence of events, and the like. Ah, well.)

The ineffable concept of mindscum

I don't know who Shawn Holster is--apparently an artist of some kind--but he has the mindscum thing down in a way I can only envy. I would quote from this blog entry on reconnecting with his inner dickhead, except that his sidebar requests that I do that only with prior permission, which I don't have. Please note, to those who have known me awhile, this isn't like the time I described Dustin Diamond as a comic genius. I am serious. This guy is an original, and I say this as an art-despising rope-eating dirt-hugging anti-capitalist Republican money-grubber.

Also let me say many thanks to Dave Away from Home for turning me on to Shawn Holster's Monkey Eggs in his Blog troll v.4.0. The other blogs he mentions there (including mine, by the by) are also worth checking out, but Monkey Eggs' stream-of-unconsciousness rants are something else.

(WARNING: strong language, vile content, disturbing images.)

Tambo and Rush: The New Minstrel Show

I am out of sorts today. Who knows why? Things continue to deteriorate here in my ex-house, I can't get hold of people, and the electric company--who has been paid in full--continues to leave pointless messages in my voice mail. And to top it all off, I am greeted when I wake up by something called "Barack the Magic Negro."

Okay, let me be clear about this. I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. I have only listened to him when forced to by my fellow human beings, who for some reason think this guy is--what? Funny? Clever? Something, anyway. I remember once when I was stuck on jury duty and my fellow potential-jurors had the Rush on the big TV screen in the front of the room. He was babbling about something which he described as voodoo economics--Bush Sr.'s term for Reagan's version of Friedmanism--and then said the only funny thing I've ever heard from him. Of course, he said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), now I'll probably get in trouble for that for defaming one of the world's great religions. He waited for a laugh. None came, at least not from his audience. I laughed, or rather chuckled, earning a nasty glance from one of the Rush-heads present. Oh well.

Over the years he's only come to my attention otherwise when he's doing something horrific. Like cruelly making fun of Michael J. Fox for being ill. That kind of junior high crap may go over well with his audience--I don't know. They probably laugh at Beavis and Butthead too. But puerility sinks to scurrility with his latest offering. This is, believe it or not, a burlesque of "Puff the Magic Dragon" with some clown doing a bad imitation of Al Sharpton apparently criticizing Obama for not being black enough. It's a nasty flashback to the days of Rastus, Tambo, and Bones, when watching a white man in blackface do a farcical imitation of a crippled ex-slave was considered the height of humor, right up there with setting fire to a stray dog. I like to think we've progressed a little since then.

Nothing is Real

Decades ago now talented songwriter John Lennon was murdered by a born-again Christian missionary. Did we hear in the news about the murderer's religion? About his missionary work in Lebanon? How he once belonged to a group that prayed for the death of John Lennon? Of course not. That would have been politically incorrect. Instead we were given a fairy-story about this guy being a demented fan--something asserted without any evidence--a bizarre twist on the blame-the-victim theme. It seems it was Lennon's own music that drove this guy to take his life.

Okay, right. This is beneath contempt, and posthumously justifies Lennon's crack about them being the simple-minded chroniclers of our times. Still, there is actually an interesting story here, though it has very little to do with Lennon, and much to do with the vagaries of the religion-addled mind. Let's start by going back, back, back....

In the first century (we may suppose, direct evidence being missing) people started writing what were later termed "gospels", short accounts that told of the message, as the writer saw it, of Jesus of Nazareth. The oldest extant gospel appears to be the one entitled Mark. The author liked to harp on certain themes--the notion that Jesus claimed secretly to be the king (which is what the term christ means), for example. One of these notions was that Jesus' closest followers didn't understand this. His followers, according to Mark, failed him on every level. One of them turned him over to the authorities, another one "cut him dead," (as Mary Magdalene puts it in Jesus Christ Superstar), and still others fail to recognize or report on the significance of his tomb being empty. A miserable performance all round.

Now historically this tells us that the author of Mark was acutely aware he was presenting a notion at odds with the teachings of Jesus' closest followers. A new teaching, as it were. For our purposes, however, the key point is that collectively the impression given by the gospel writers is that his key followers just weren't all that bright.

This notion has informed a great deal of scholarship (and faux scholarship) since. On the one hand it fits with the notion that Jesus was a god or an emissary of a god--it's not unreasonable that his merely human followers might not understand him clearly. On the other hand, for those seeking to create a better Jesus--to free him of having said some of the things that are (in that person's mind anyway) clearly unworthy of him--it works too. Who was responsible for screwing his message up? Those idiot followers, of course.

Yes, those idiot followers have a lot to answer for.

Now skipping quickly over some nineteen centuries from the first to the twentieth we come to the next step in the narrative. In the 1960s a fellow named Hugh Schonfield wrote a couple of books that became best-sellers and stirred up a lot of debate. If memory serves they were called The Passover Plot and Those Incredible Christians. As I recall Schonfield argued, on the basis of a painfully naive reading of the gospel texts, that Jesus planned for his own resurrection, but the plot failed. His followers spirited the body away, but the attempt to revive him failed, thanks to a spear in the side from one of the guards. The missing body, along with wishful thinking, inspired the story of the resurrection anyway--or something like that. I haven't reread the books myself for decades, and maybe I've confused it with others of its ilk. The thing is, as Schonfield correctly pointed out, the gospel narratives have been shaped by decades of church history that must be taken into account in examining the events of the time.

What John Lennon got out of this, when he read Schonfield, is that Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. He remarked as much to a journalist.

He also remarked in the course of discussion that Christianity would shrink in the future and ultimately vanish. Indeed, he said, it's already happening--the Beatles are more popular than Jesus now.

Nobody seems to have had a problem with this remark until the Beatles publicly stated their opposition to racial segregation, refusing to tour the Union of South Africa. This was still a hot topic in the south of the US, which was then segregated, and a few southern radio stations seized on this Jesus remark as an excuse to attack the Beatles. The manufactured outrage spread. The DJs organized book and record-burnings in their honor. In the end even the press got hold of the wrong end of the stick and started beating the bushes with it, as Neil Innes put it. The Ku Klux Klan joined the fray with various empty threats. Obscure fundamentalist ministers seeking their fifteen minutes of fame hopped on the bandwagon to issue vapid statements to the press. Then Lennon apologized, after a fashion, and the whole thing blew over.

Except among crazed fundies. What they got out of the whole thing is that John Lennon was an evil person who hated Christianity.

A historical footnote here. Lennon's religious views may be described as complex--or confused, depending on where you stand. A theist, he believed that the universe was eternal and uncreated, and that it was impossible to know anything about the past through archaeology, palaeontology, and the like. Evolution was impossible; things are now as they always have been. People who study the past just dig things out of the ground and make up stories about how life used to be. He had equal contempt for creationists, and as far as I can see, an equal lack of understanding. According to one story, he hired an investigator to check out European monasteries and other cultural backwaters for the spear that pierced Jesus' side, apparently believing it had some sort of mystic powers.

Not an orthodox Christian, exactly, but not outside the pale either. He liked to think of himself as belonging to a tradition of enlightenment shared by Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and Gnostic Christianity.

He was a musician, for god's sake. You wouldn't expect him to be well-informed on these sorts of subjects. You'd ask him maybe about say Aeolian cadences or the like--though, come to think of it, he wasn't well-informed there either. But you see what I mean.

But the fundies could hardly be expected to understand these fine distinctions. For them, or a small subset of them, actually, John Lennon was Evil Incarnate, maybe even the Antichrist. His songs, seen through the lens of hate, seemed to support this. "Christ you know it ain't easy | you know how hard it can be | the way things are going | they're gonna crucify me." "God is a concept by which we measure our pain ... I don't believe..." "Imagine there's no heaven ... no hell below us ... and no religion too." Some of them prayed for the death of John Lennon.

It was one of these guys who decided to do more than pray. He decided to carry out god's will. He studied his prey carefully, and kept himself psyched up by reading pieces about him that cast him in a negative light. And in December 1980 he struck, silencing the voice that had entertained millions.

So who bears the responsibility of having launched an assassin John Lennon's way? Who was it who made sure that it would be Lennon who was the target, rather than say George Harrison (a non-Christian), or Mick "Sympathy for the Devil" Jagger? Was it the Christian cell that prayed for Lennon's death? Of course not. They were merely exercising their god-given right to believe whatever hateful and addle-pated thing they liked, regardless of consequences. What about those disc jockeys who started it all? Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and all that jazz. No, they can't be held responsible for anything, far from it. What about Hugh Schonfield, or the author of Mark? Let's not get crazy here. No, let's just call the murderer a deranged fan and be done with it.

Except that in my book it is a short step from burning the works to burning the man himself. People who misrepresent what somebody says, who needlessly stir up hate against him--and for ratings, at that--, who organize public burnings, who fan the flames of hysteria--people like this can't morally wash their hands of the results when some nutjob takes them up on their words. But that's just my opinion. I'm sure they never lost any sleep over the matter.

Posts I Have Enjoyed

Pharyngula -- A Godless Ramble Against the Ditherings of Theologians (27 October 2006)
Dispatches from the Culture Wars -- Worldnutdaily Flogs Dead Sternberg Horse (16 February 2007)
Questionable Authority -- The Limits of Tolerance (3 March 2007)
Effect Measure -- On the Alleged Nonexistence of Atheists (4 March 2007)
Dave Away From Home -- Joining the Blogstorm (8 April 2007)
Religion Clause -- Missouri House Approves Proposed Prayer Amendment (11 April 2007)
Questionable Authority -- An Open Letter to My Senators and Representatives (14 April 2007)

Holy Saturday

When we die
Do we haunt the sky?
Do we lurk in the murk of the seas?
And what then?
Are we born again
Just to sit asking questions like these?

Spinal Tap

If your leaders tell you the Kingdom is in the sky, then the birds of the air will get there before you. If it's in the sea, then the fish will get there first. But the Kingdom is inside you.

Jesus of Nazareth

Among the strangely-named holidays of the season--Fat Tuesday, Palm Sunday, Bleeding Wednesday, Screaming Thursday and the like--comes a kind of pause. Holy Saturday falls between the excitement of Good Friday and the mystery of Easter Sunday, and is the one point in the narrative where we can say with assurance that Jesus is dead. What was he doing on this day? Was he shaking down hell for all the patriarchs and virtuous pagans and whoever else would believe in him, as the story has it? Or was he lying quietly in his tomb? Or did he meet the more common fate of the crucified--his body dumped nameless with others who shared his shameful execution?

We have one, and only one, early gospel account that claims to be by an eyewitness. This fragment turned up maybe a hundred years ago, from a medieval manuscript containing an excerpt from a lost gospel, The Gospel of Peter. (Peter is also supposedly responsible for the earliest reference to the harrowing of hell in a letter that made it into the New Testament itself, after years of struggle.) And what does Peter say happened? Well, it seems that the Judean authorities posted guards at the tomb, and while they watched a voice shouted from above and a bright light appeared from the sky, while two men calmly walked into the tomb, the rock blocking the entrance rolling away by itself. The guards promptly woke up their centurion and the elders, who were keeping watch nearby, according to the text. (Peter shows he has a keen sense of the absurd here.) While all of them are watching, an interesting procession comes forth from the tomb--the two men who had come down from the sky, another man, and a cross. The first two men were now so tall that their heads just brushed the sky itself, while the third man is even taller--his head is higher than the sky. A voice overhead asks, "Have you spoken with those who are asleep?" The cross takes it upon itself to answer this question in the affirmative. At this point the witnesses debate among themselves whether to tell Pilate or not, and decide that they should. While still another guy comes down from the sky and into the tomb, the guards, centurion, and elders all go and call upon Pilate. Pilate takes the news rather well, all things considered. "Well, it was your idea to execute the guy, not mine," he observes to the elders, and then orders everybody to say nothing to anybody about the whole affair.

Which, of course, brings up the obvious question, how did Peter know about it. Was he a direct witness to the supernatural goings-on? Well, not really. "But we, the Lord's twelve disciples, cried and felt sad. Each of us, feeling bad about what had happened, went home." We may suppose, I imagine, that one of the witnesses told Peter about the strange events in spite of Pilate's order. (I don't suppose it was at all likely that Pilate would be Peter's source.) But Peter doesn't tell us, at least not in the extant text of the fragment.

Of course modern scholars don't believe that Peter wrote this gospel any more than they believe that he wrote the two letters or the "preaching" put out in his name. (And if I'm any judge of style we're looking at three or four different authors here at least. Still Peter must have been a busy man, what with opposing Simon Magus and being the cornerstone of the church and all, and maybe he just hired scribes to write his gospel and letters and preaching and so on...) But this is the only available account that claims to have been written by somebody who was there, and that gives a picture of where the information may have come from. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is the closest thing we have of an account of the resurrection. It certainly gives the impression that there were some pretty strange goings-on that Saturday night in Jerusalem.

What about the other gospels? Thomas never tells us anything about the resurrection as such; Mark ends with the discovery that Jesus' tomb is empty. For the rest--John, Matthew, that strange piece from an unknown gospel tacked onto the end of Mark, and so on--they skip the resurrection altogether and get straight on to the various appearances of the Lord, whose animated corpse has returned zombie-like from the dead. "Handle me and see," it said, "that I am not a bodiless demon." At least one of the disciples took it up on the deal and checked to see that the corpse itself was in fact present, and that this wasn't some bizarre dream. Even the wounds were still fresh. It's a grisly picture, and I personally have never felt comfortable reading about the situation until the reanimated body finally flies off into the sky. The Holy Ghost may be a bit spooky, what with the snake-handling and talking in tongues and all--but it's downright friendly compared to zombie-Jesus.

But all's quiet on Holy Saturday. We probably needed a break. I know I did.

Understanding is a Virtue Hard to Come By

When I was a child I had a 45 player in a red case my father built for me. The record-player died at some point, and my father gave me an FM receiver to replace it. Now in those days FM was unheard of, a sort of cultural wasteland inhabited by religious fanatics, right-wing politicians, and aficionados of obscure music. My station--the one I listened to--played "classical" music. Symphonies, operas, and sometimes jazz. My favorite program was a request show that ran every weeknight from midnight to six in the morning and was called something like "Music out of the Night." "It's midnight here in the City of Roses and lights are going out one by one as a busy populace lays aside the cares of the day and welcomes the stillness of the night." Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, Tchaikovsky's Seventh Symphony, electronica from the Columbia-Princeton synthesizer project, Bach played as written on the instruments the music was actually composed for. Amazing stuff. All kinds of music.

While KPFM was wall-to-wall music most of the time, Sunday was the exception. In the morning came some sort of horrible religious program, or rather several of them in a row, and at ten at night it went off the air for routine maintenance, something I was very familiar with as my father did the same thing for another station. That's when I started tuning across the dial looking for whatever was on.

There were only two FM stations on those bleak Sunday nights, and both were religious. I ended up listening to all sorts of crazy people. One of them was Billy Graham, whose program sent me into hysterical laughter, especially his ritualistic ending, "May the Lord bless you--real good." The fake folksiness of that fatuity fascinated me, as did Garner Ted Armstrong's determined denial of the real world. But mostly I listened to evangelists more obscure and less coherent than these characters.

One night that sticks in my mind--a Sunday night I assume, though at this point anything is possible, memory being what it is--I was listening to this one character on the radio. I don't remember his name, or the name of his show, or his denomination, or much of anything else about him of that sort. He had a kind of Prairie Home Companion feel about him that I enjoyed, often telling stories of this strange backwoods place he'd grown up in, I think in the mountains of Kentucky. Whatever the name of the town was it appeared to have been inhabited entirely by quaint colorful icons of Americana, all of whom read the Bible and played checkers at the local store. Or something like that.

Anyway, it seems that they used to have Bible discussions around the checkerboard, in which particular passages would be thrown out for general comment. There was one fellow there, an old pastor, who sat in the shadows listening, but never contributing. Everybody else was voluble in his opinion, expressing himself at great length and supporting his claims with other passages from scripture, and no doubt those quaint country metaphors we've come to expect from backwoodsy places. On one occasion the discussion became quite heated. Opinions were flying back and forth like barn swallows on a cold October morning. Finally one guy turned to the old pastor and asked him, "Sir, how do you understand this passage?" The old pastor slowly drew himself up to his full height and then said, "Son, I don't understand the Bible. I believe it."

That was it. That was the punchline of this particular story. We should be like the old pastor, believing the Bible without understanding it. In striving to understand something, it seems, we inevitably twist and bend the text to our own preconceptions. Only by avoiding the pitfall of understanding scripture could we embrace its truth and really believe it.

Now this guy may have been making some profound theological point, or expounding a bold paradox, or whatever. I don't know. What I got out of it was more like These radio evangelists have all got a screw or two loose. And some more than others.

Belief without understanding. Yes, "The more people know about what is happening," observed Chinese sage Lao Tse, "the harder it is to control them." Of course it figures that Lao Tse felt the government's job was to keep the people in the dark and feed them bullshit. Ruling class propaganda. Wouldn't the pastor's job be so much simpler if only people didn't question him about all this old gibberish written, as the Reverend Me used to say, by a bunch of babbling barbarians two or three thousand years ago. Believe the bible, stay in school, respect your teachers, even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss, and when. Remember that two wrongs don't make a right, but three do. What I tell you three times is true.

Okay, I may be veering a bit here, but the question jumps out at me--how in hell can you believe something you don't understand? First comes understanding, and only then can you know whether something is believable or not. Right?

Or maybe not. When you're trying to believe the impossible, maybe understanding does get in the way of belief. Like the White Queen says, it takes practice. If you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, then who knows what you can manage to believe after lunch. It's the perfect training for a nation of dupes; though maybe not so great for a nation of informed citizens in a democracy.

Stupid Angel Tricks

Some years ago I found a mouse had gnawed holes in some of our paper sacks. The hole bore a striking resemblance to an image of a mouse. "Look," I said, showing it to my nephew Brandon, "I think the mice are trying to communicate with us."

"What is it supposed to be?" asked Brandon. "A rabbit's head?"

"No, turn it over, the other way. See, doesn't that look like a mouse?"

"It's crude, and the proportions are wrong."

"Yeah, okay, but the impressive thing is that it made the attempt at all. You know, when a donkey flies, you don't criticize it for not staying up that long, like the guy said."

"My point is," said Brandon, "it's a mouse. What's it got to say? 'Hey, I'm a mouse--look at me! I'm living in your house. I'm eating your stuff.' It's trivia. Not important."

Well, maybe. At any rate, my mouse-gnawed self-portrait beats the hell out of that blobby white thing Custos Fidei is trying to pass off as an angel. You have to see this to believe it. I wonder how he can tell that it's not a ghost? a UFO? Bigfoot? Or maybe an attempt by the mice at St. Peter's Basilica to communicate--at least it looks rather like a legless mouse with oversize ears to me.

Dubious Documents: The Case of the Bible of the Revolution

One of my many unfinished projects is something I have tentatively titled Dubious Documents. The chain of links between the creation and reception of a text is fraught with peril, and errors in transmission, translation, and interpretation can render a document toxic. The idea was to examine a number of documents that aren't what they're cracked up to be, and to see what exactly went wrong in each case. One of the texts I was considering is the (so-called) Bible of the Revolution, the 1782 Bible printed by Robert Aitken.

Now I don't have my files available at the moment, thanks to the fact that I have no office. I have no access to my notes. My books are in storage. More and more I'm being forced to rely on the often dubious resources of the internet to find the grist for my daily mill. In this case, however, I really lucked out. Somehow or other I stumbled onto an account of the "Bible of the Revolution" by Chris Rodda, the author of Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History.

What Chris Rodda has done is extremely neat, and I hope more authors in the future follow up on this approach. She put her footnotes on line. I can't emphasize this enough--she has given us her sources, and not just simple citations, but actual images of pages or documents so that the readers can examine her evidence directly for themselves. This practice alone, if followed by others, would eliminate much bogus scholarship--cargo-cult scholarship I called it once in connection with those who support the so-called Byzantine Majority Text of the New Testament.

So in this case I want to emphasize that whatever research I may have done in the past on this subject, for this piece I acknowledge that I am simply taking Chris Rodda's research as the basis for my account. (Not of course that she's in any way responsible for my take on the issues involved.)

Okay, so what's the story on the Bible of the Revolution? What is the shadow that hangs over it? This version comes from William Federer's America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations (courtesy of Chris Rodda):

Robert Aitken (1734-1802), on January 21, 1781, as publisher of The Pennsylvania Magazine, petitioned Congress for permission to print Bibles, since there was a shortage of Bibles in America due to the Revolutionary War interrupting trade with England. The Continental Congress, September 10, 1782, in response to the shortage of Bibles, approved and recommended to the people that The Holy Bible be printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia. This first American Bible was to be "a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools".

The story has been around for awhile. It got a boost in 1930 when two guys had one of these rare bibles dismembered and the pages individually bound along with an account of this story and facsimiles of related documents. Chris Rodda cites one account (W. P. Strickland, History of the American Bible Society from its Organization to the Present Time) from 1849:

In 1781, when, from the existence of the war, an English Bible could not be imported, and no opinion could be formed how long the obstruction might continue, the subject of printing the Bible was again presented to Congress, and it was, on motion, referred to a committee of three.

The committee, after giving the subject a careful investigation, recommended to Congress an edition printed by Robert Aitken, of Philadelphia; whereupon it was "Resolved, That the United States, in Congress assembled, highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interests of religion; and being satisfied of the care and accuracy of the execution of the work, recommend this edition to the inhabitants of the United States."

What is particularly interesting is that this account gives the text of a key document in the story, the actual resolution by Congress. The document is a bit puzzling, however, in that Congress merely approves Aitken's undertaking, and recommends his volume. What practical effect this might have is unclear. Also the document as printed doesn't have that line in it about it being a neat edition for use in schools given in the later account.

Now fortunately--and this isn't always the case with historical documents, far from it--the original archives still survive. So in this case we can check the text of this version against the original, and when we do, we find that the text of this document has been unaccountably garbled in transmission. The resolution actually read:

Whereupon, Resolved, That the United States in Congress assembled, highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied of the care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorise him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.

The first thing that jumps out--and this is a low end version of what is called redaction criticism--is that the Strickland version omits two key passages--the first giving a secular reason for Congress's action ("an instance of the progress of arts in this country"), and the second giving a practical consequence of the resolution (Aitken is authorized to publish the recommendation of Congress based on the care and accuracy taken in the work). The editing of the text appears to have been done to give the impression that Congress was more intimately involved with the project than it was--to make it look, in fact, as though Congress was sponsoring Aitken's bible. The surrounding text shows that is exactly what Strickland wants us to understand, and his conclusion is especially striking:

Who, in view of this fact, will call in question the assertion that this is a Bible nation? Who will charge the government with indifference to religion, when the first Congress of the States assumed all the rights and performed all the duties of a Bible Society long before such an institution had an existence in the world!

The changes, in other words, help make the document support Strickland's position. Whether he is the perpetrator of this new version of the Congressional resolution, or merely a victim of some other editor, is immaterial. The key point is that the text was altered, and that the alteration was made in the interest of religious politics.

Which, in turn, casts some doubt on the rest of the story. Fortunately, we don't have to leave it there. The documents exist, and Chris Rodda's research gives us the rest of the story. Remember that phrase about the Aitken Bible being a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures intended for schools? That wasn't in the resolution. Where did it come from? It came from a record of Congress, says one source, which is technically true. It came, in fact, from a memorial of Robert Aitken of the city of Philadelphia, printer, to the Congress of the United States. He started by noting

that in every well regulated government in Christendom the Sacred Books of the Old and New Testament, commonly called the Holy Bible, are printed and published under the Authority of the Sovereign Powers in order to prevent the fatal confusion that should arise, and the {alarming} injuries the Christian Faith might {suffer} from spurious and erroneous Editions of Divine Revelation.

(The words in {brackets} are difficult to read.) Aitken, in other words, was thinking of the United States as functioning somewhat in the manner of England, which had an officially established church, and in which publishing the authorized version of the bible was a prerogative of the Crown. After a hard-to-read sentence suggesting that Congress should share his views, he goes on

Under this persuasion your Memorialist begs leave to inform your Honours that he {hath} begun and made considerable progress in a neat Edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools. [And] being cautious of {suffering} his copy of the Bible to {be set forth} without the Sanction of Congress Humbly prays that your Honors would take this important Matter into serious consideration & would be [illegible] to a [illegible] one Member or Members of your Honorable [illegible] to inspect his work to that the same may be published under the authority of Congress. And memorialist prays that he may be Commissioned or otherwise appointed & authorized to print and vend Editions of the Sacred Scriptures, in such manner and form as may best suit the wants and demands of the good people of these States, provided the same being in all things perfectly consonant to the Scriptures as heretofore Established and received amongst us.

So it looks as if Robert Aitken, printer, had visions of being the authorized bible publisher for the new nation, "appointed ... to print and vend Editions of the Sacred Scriptures"; the possibility of getting the contract for supplying school bibles must have seemed especially attractive. He seems to have been traditional enough not to want anything to do with an edition that was not "perfectly consonant to the Scriptures as heretofore Established". I find this proviso interesting. Did he imagine that Congress might come up with its own version of the Holy Scriptures? It seems to speak of a certain lack of confidence in the soundness of their religion, anyway.

So, how did Congress respond to these requests? Did it recommend that Aitken's bible be used in schools? Well, no. Did it commission Robert Aitken, printer, to print and vend editions of the Holy Scriptures? Again, no. Did it have the work published under its authority? Once again, no. What Congress did was have the chaplains check the book for accuracy, and allow Aitken to publish a statement that Congress found it to be carefully and accurately done. And that's all Congress did. They pointedly did not authorize its use in schools, for example. In the end Congress did not even buy copies for distribution to the troops, as Aitken hoped. The edition lost money, and its poor sales are the reason it is so rare today.

So, what is the meaning of all this? Well, I don't know. Documents become corrupt for a variety of reasons. This example at least shows how religious politics can distort the text of one document, cloud the origins of another, and at least imply an authority for a third that it never possessed. In point of fact the "Bible of the Revolution" is simply a failed speculation on the part of an obscure printer in the late eighteenth century.

SF Classics I Have Read

Five Public Opinions and The Lippard Blog both have a list of the fifty most significant SF and fantasy books of the past fifty years. The idea is to reproduce the list with the titles you yourself have actually read in bold. Okay, here goes:

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I know I've started both The Sword of Shannara and Neuromancer, but I don't remember finishing either. I was pleased to see some of my personal favorites here: Stand on Zanzibar, The Man in the High Castle, The Stars My Destination. There are others that surprise me in the other direction--why on earth is Starship Troopers included and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress omitted? My personal list would have included Silverberg's To Open the Sky, Sheckley's Mindswap, and maybe Pohl & Kornbluth's Gladiator at Law.

Addendum:
A few specific comments:

Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien): Overrated, but still amazing. I don't know how many times I've reread it, or for that matter how many different ways I've read it; the thing that amazes me about it is the illusion of depth. If the characters (say) pass over an ancient battlefield, it doesn't just lie there--you can research it and find out who took part in that battle, what it was about, and what happened to the participants. You don't have to, of course, but it's one of the things that made the book fascinating. On the other hand, Tolkien is a mediocre writer and a truly dreadful poet. He is at his worst in bits (like the Tom Bombadil sequence) when his poetic impulses come to the fore, especially with allegedly comic poetry. Somebody should shut Samwise up for good.

The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov): "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." The Mule. The second Foundation at the opposite end of the galaxy. This series had a profound grip on me at one time, and the events still have a mythic quality in my mind--a mythic quality, alas, not justified by the actual work. For me it came as a series, by the way, and I didn't read it in sequence. I read the first and third volumes before I had the second. What impressed me is that the hero of the sequence is not a person, or even an institution, but an idea. The Seldon plan. These words still resonate with me. Anyway. The trouble is that Asimov was still learning his craft when he wrote these stories, and some of them are far superior to others. When you add in the later volumes the change in skill level feels actually painful.

Dune (Frank Herbert): This was never one of my favorites, but virtually everybody else I knew was really excited by it. It's been far too long since I've read it for me to make any serious comment on it.

Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein): I deliberately didn't read this book for a number of years, mostly because so many people I knew were enthusiastic about it. No, it wasn't the number of people--it was the kind of people I knew who liked it. They didn't inspire me with confidence in their literary tastes. Guys who insisted that we could live on what grew naturally in our back yards and who thought that the finding of Noah's Ark (as if it had actually been found) somehow disproved Darwin. Also I grew apart from Heinlein after a while--I liked The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and some of the Future History series, but as he delved further and further into Crazy Capitalist Fantasies I quit reading him. Well, not altogether, but that's another story. When I finally did read Stranger in a Strange Land, I was actually rather pleasantly surprised. It still wouldn't be on my list of fifty SF books, but it's not a bad little story. I've always pictured Jim Backus as Jubal Harshaw and Goldie Hawn as Jill.

The Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin): I have a very positive sense of this book--wasn't this a series?--but it's actually been so long that nothing is coming to mind about it. If my collection wasn't packed up somewhere I'd take a quick look at it and refresh my memory a bit; I know what the cover looks like anyway. I enjoy Le Guin's work anyway--it's irritating that this won't come back to mind.

Neuromancer (William Gibson): I never finished it, and I wasn't impressed by what I read of it.

Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke): Now Clarke actually can write, and his ability, I think, makes Childhood's End look better than it is. If I were going to pick one of his early works, it would be The City and the Stars (rewritten from his first novel Against the Fall of Night).

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick): Brilliant.

The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley): Okay, I really didn't care for this one--maybe I was over-sold on it or something. I read it I think at about the same time as Clan of the Cave Bear and for about the same reason, and I didn't care for either of them. On the other hand, I knew a number of people whose taste in literature is reasonably sound who liked it. Go figure.

Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury): Bradbury at his worst. Bradbury really is not a novelist at all; he is a great short-story writer. For reasons that have never been obvious to me, one of Bradbury's repeated themes was his notion of a conspiracy of clinical rationalists banding together to stamp out fantasy. Here he goes that one better, and has them stamping out all books of any kind. A much better choice would have been The Martian Chronicles.

The Book of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe): Not only have I never read this one, I've never even heard of it.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.): I remember this as outstanding, but you know, I haven't read it in a long time. I probably should look at it again.

The Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov): A favorite of mine, but I like a lot of Asimov probably beyond its desert. I liked another one of his detective-like stories better; it was called something like The Currents of Space.

Children of the Atom (Wilmar Shiras): This one I was surprised to see here; it's been awhile since I read it, but the last time I did I was rather disappointed. There is some interesting speculation here about future developments of the human species, and the idea of a multi-bodied being is interesting, but the story line is really not compelling.

Cities in Flight (James Blish): I remember enjoying this when it came out, though

The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett): I haven't read it.

Dangerous Visions (edited by Harlan Ellison): Pretentious crap.

Deathbird Stories (Harlan Ellison): I haven't read it.

The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester): This, I think, is usually regarded as Bester's masterpiece, but I personally like The Stars My Destination better.

Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delany): I've never read it, mainly because I don't like Delany. Or if I have, I seem to have forgotten it.

Dragonflight (Anne McCaffrey):

Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card): I've never read it.

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (Stephen R. Donaldson): I don't think I've read this; the title is familiar however.

The Forever War (Joe Haldeman): I've never read it.

Gateway (Frederik Pohl): I enjoyed this when it came out, but I thought it was over-hyped. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't come to it with such high expectations. I've never felt the desire to reread it, however, and as I recall there was a sequel? I haven't read it, if there was.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (J.K. Rowling): Rowling is competent and a genuine story-teller, and the Harry Potter series deserves its success. So do a lot of children's books that have been neglected, however. And if Rowling makes the list, why doesn't C. S. Lewis? Still, that's nit-picking, I guess.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams): The original BBC series was amazing, ***

I Am Legend (Richard Matheson): I either haven't read this or don't remember it; I've read a lot of Matheson and probably something of his should be on this list.

Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice): I haven't read it.

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin):

Little, Big (John Crowley): I haven't read this one.

Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny):

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick):

Mission of Gravity (Hal Clement):

More Than Human (Theodore Sturgeon):

The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith

On the Beach, Nevil Shute

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

Ringworld (Larry Niven):

Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson): I never read this.

Stand on Zanzibar (John Brunner):

The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester): This is one of my favorite books period. Gully Foyle's convoluted revenge on Vorga, the ship that abandoned him in space, is ultimately breathtaking. Or something like that. The Scientific People. Synesthesia. The Burning Man. Quant suff.

Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein): I can think of any number of Heinlein titles I might have included in a list like this, and this one wouldn't be one of them. In Starship Troopers, as in Glory Road, Heinlein is practically reduced to self-parody.

Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

The Sword of Shannara (Terry Brooks): I never finished this one, and don't even have much of an impression of it.

Timescape (Gregory Benford): Never read it.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Philip Jose Farmer):

Something to Remember

[NOTE: The following was written in 1991 and is reprinted here for no good reason.]

It seems that the age of great historical discoveries is not over. One Joe B. Cassel of Lindale Texas has discovered some words of Abraham Lincoln's that are unknown to scholars, historians, and Lincoln biographers. He found them in a drawer he had not looked in for ages.

He submitted them for examination to Ann Landers, the advice columnist, who apparently pronounced them authentic, as she published them in her column. They appear there as follows:

Something to Remember

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help little men up by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Abraham Lincoln

It is odd that these words sound nothing like Lincoln, but hey--you can't argue with facts. Lincoln's name was on the thing, wasn't it? And it was found in a drawer, and at that a drawer that hadn't been looked in for years. What more proof could you want? Probably Lincoln left them there himself on a visit to Lindale Texas. It's even stranger that a certain Reverend William Boetcker apparently copyrighted this piece in 1916, but surely so eminent an authority as Ann Landers could not be mistaken. Nobody whose words reach millions every day would be so irresponsible as to rush into print without checking its authenticity very carefully.

Maybe it doesn't really matter who wrote the words; it might be argued that they are so wise and wonderful that they stand on their own. By a curious coincidence, I myself discovered some similar words in a drawer the other day, mixed in among my odd socks. This is a drawer I have not looked in for a very long time; in fact I never look in it if I can avoid it. The words seem to have been written by George Washington, the father of our country. Although it's a little hard to tell whether the first name is Geo. or Cleo, I think we will all agree that whoever wrote them, they are wise and wonderful.

Something to Remember

You cannot promote the truth by spreading a lie.
You cannot lengthen the grass by mowing the lawn.
You cannot raise revenues by cutting taxes.
You cannot hit the broad side of a barn with a SCUD missile.
You cannot find something out by being taken in.
You cannot collect social security until you have turned 65.
You cannot make a bad check good by signing another man's name to it.
You cannot win a land war in Asia without overwhelming air superiority.
You cannot get a driver's license without three pieces of ID, at least one of which has your picture on it.
You cannot get something really stupid published, unless you attribute it to somebody really famous.

George (or maybe Cleo) Washington

Jesus and his Family Found?

For once, KKKatholic bigot Bill Donohue is right. Or partly right. There is no good reason whatever to believe that anybody has found the burial place of Jesus and his family, no matter what a new documentary claims. I just finished watching a Paula Zahn piece about all this, a piece I found interesting because of the lack of any real information. She brought in a panel to discuss the matter consisting of a paleontologist, a commentator on faith and public affairs, and a--well, whatever Bill Donohue is exactly. No archaeologist, no historian, no expert of any kind, although at least the paleontologist was involved in making the documentary in question.

I guess this is par for the course for Paula Zahn, who recently aired a discussion about atheism in which no atheist appeared. (Thanks to Five Public Opinions for covering this.) CNN could have brought in any number of qualified people to discuss the matter, and they might have informed the public of just what this is all about. To bring in three interested laymen to discuss this seems absurd.

The fact is we have way too little to go on to ever make such a case. Even if we accept that a Jesus son of Joseph was entombed in this place, and that there is a Mariamne there who is unrelated to this Jesus by blood, it proves nothing about the Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Sorry, but that's how it is. Jesus and Joseph were common names. There is no reason to suppose that this Jesus and this Mariamne were married. There is no good reason to believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were anything but teacher and disciple, and the references in the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary should be read in the light of various claims that Peter, or John, or Thomas, or Mary was Jesus' favorite disciple.

Surging Towards Redundancy

[A belated contribution to the late and lamented Word.]

Our president--Mr. Stay-the-Course--is talking about a surge in Iraq. The media, the pundits, whatever, have picked up that word and run with it. Surge. What, if anything, do they mean by surge?

It’s a word I’ve had troubles with before. A century or so ago, when I was in grade school, I remember having to use “surge” in a sentence. I recalled the climax of Henry Kuttner's "What You Need"--when the anti-hero, wearing the smooth-soled shoes given him by the proprietor of a mysterious shop, can't keep his footing in a crowd on a slippery platform, and falls in front of a moving train. Remembering the scene I wrote, "There was a surge towards the edge of the platform." My teacher didn't accept that as a legitimate use of the word. I took my case to a higher authority--my mother--but she ruled that while my sentence was perfectly correct, I had not demonstrated in it that I actually understood the use of the word. Our definition had used the word swelling, or something like that, and from my sentence it could have been supposed that I thought that the platform was swollen at one edge.

Webster’s defines surge as a "violent rolling, sweeping, or swelling motion," among other things. My own feeling is that President Stay-the-Course and the media celebrities trailing in his wake have failed to demonstrate, at least as badly as I did, that they know the meaning of the word. What we are talking about is the gradual introduction of twenty thousand, or forty thousand, or whatever the real number is—not that we’ll ever be told—to Baghdad, to assist in trying to establish order there. Not a surge. More like a seep, or an ooze, a trickle, or maybe a creep. The thesaurus comes up with bleed as a possible synonym, grimly appropriate, but not in the sense I had in mind.

Language change is eternal, or at least so the linguists seem to think, but I feel that a kind of creeping obfuscation has grown up over our language that obscures and defiles the sharp distinctions that should exist. While the infer/imply debate seems to be a lost cause, to the impoverishment of the English language, surely we can still resist new misuses of words, particularly when important distinctions are lost. Parody and burlesque, for example. What Liam Lynch does is parody. What Weird Al does is burlesque. There is a difference, and calling burlesques parodies, and parodies also parodies, makes the language less precise. Likewise, calling a ripple a surge seems to me to blunt the instrument we communicate with, and perhaps we even think with, if Dr. Watson and his followers are right.

Which brings me to the three Rs—Reduction, Redundancy, and Redaction. All three of these words are under attack by creeping obfuscation. Redaction has been confounded with Censorship, Redundancy with Joblessness, and Reduction with Expansion.

Okay, reduction. How on earth could anybody confuse reduction and expansion? Are not increase and reduce opposites? Well, let’s take a look at the position of the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate on this word. The APPCDC is a little-known outfit. The United States belongs to it, as well as Australia, South Korea, India, Japan, and China. According to one writer it is one of George Bush’s unsung triumphs. The APPCDC is promising to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by half by the end of the century. And this without slowing the economy down or requiring any painful sacrifices by the people of the world. Sound impossible? Well, actually, it is, at least by the methods pursued by the APPCDC. The thing is, the APPCDC has its own private definition of reduce. We usually think of reduction as meaning decreasing the amount of something. The APPCDC has its own notion. For it, reduce means increase at a lower rate of speed. A scene from The Motor Chums in Strange Waters may perhaps illustrate the point:

“Slow down,” shrieked Ben Hangdog wildly, as the car increased its pace down the narrow country lane. “We’re going to crash!”

“Oh that’s impossible,” chuckled short Ned Eliot, “as the piano tuner said of the twelve-inch pianist. Not with Tom Wilshire driving.”

“In any case,” Harry Fletcher observed precisely, “Tom is in fact slowing down.”

“How can that be?” inquired Ben Hangdog wildly. “The speedometer just rounded sixty.”

“As you just observed,” replied Harry, “It took Tom no less than thirty-eight seconds to go from forty miles per hour to sixty.”

“So what?” screeched Ben. “We’re almost up to sixty-five! The gear box will never stand it!”

“But it took him almost twelve seconds. At the present rate we will only be at seventy-five when thirty-eight seconds have elapsed. The car is thus slowing down.”

“You’re crazy,” muttered Ben nervously, reaching for the door handle.

“No, it’s the simplest of simple math,” said Tom Wilshire confidently.

Made Redundant is now a synonym for being without a job, Redundancy refers to joblessness, and the word is a synonym for superfluous, even useless. This blunts the meaning. A certain amount of redundancy is necessary in a system, to make it robust. Redundancy refers to multiplication, not to necessity. We have perfectly good words for the concept of lacking necessity—superfluous, for one, and unnecessary, for another. Gratuitous. Uncalled for. Unneeded. Unwanted. The language itself uses redundancy as a device to counter noise, with such points of grammar as agreement of subject and verb, or of adjective and noun. The fact that the same information is delivered in more than one way is an example of redundancy—but the redundancy is nonetheless necessary grammatically. Huge systems (like the electrical grid that supplies the power we use to write and read this very entry) are designed with a certain amount of necessary redundancy in order to ensure that the failure of a part doesn’t mean the failure of the whole.

Now the other day when I was watching TV, or at least I had it on in the background, I heard a bit of dialog. The prosecution offered the defense a copy of an avadavat. “The name of the witness has been redacted,” protests the defense attorney. Redacted! I believe the term she was looking for was removed, or perhaps obliterated. The technical term is censored. Redacting a document does not mean censoring it—though censorship may well be one object of a redaction. Redacting a document is editing it—creating a new edition, perhaps to add material, perhaps to abridge it, perhaps to combine it with another account of the same events. Redaction criticism examines such an edited document, focusing on the differences between it and its source. This new and perverse use of the word to mean censor seems to me a kind of political correctness—censor is a bad word, so we just say redact. Never mind the damage done by this abuse of language.

Galileo Galilei RIP

Ye men of Galilei, why stand ye gazing up into the heavens? So an opponent of Galileo is said to have preached--the reference is to Acts 1:11--in opposition to his astronomical discoveries. Galileo's tiny telescope was not even as good as the binoculars my father used when I was six or so to show me the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, but with it he turned the world upside down, as Martin Luther put it. Mountains on the moon, spots on the sun, the phases of Venus--these things may seem commonplace now, but they were revolutionary at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They weren't in the Bible, or Aristotle, or any other authority from antiquity, and they suggested ideas that challenged the common sense notion of the world that then prevailed.

That the solid earth we stand on might be hurling at some inconceivable speed through space is counter-intuitive, to say the least. But if we accept it--and the idea was by no means new when Galileo started peering through his primitive telescope--might not the other bodies we see be worlds as well? The moon, Venus, Jupiter? Could they be inhabited? And why hadn't the authorities, either religious or secular, said anything about all this? And if God wasn't up there sitting above the sphere of the fixed stars, keeping everything in motion, turning the cosmic mechanism with a gigantic crank--well, then, where was he?

In the end Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton, and those that followed them would crack the tiny medieval cosmos open like an egg, revealing the splendor of the universe we know today. More than that, as time and distance commingle, we get to look back in time, and see the universe as it was. It's been one hell of a trip from the tube Galileo looked through to the massive arrays of mirrors here on earth and the Hubble out in space, but he was there at the beginning, and he helped to start it all.

As 15 February 2007 is Galileo's 443rd birthday, a look at how he fares in the news might be interesting. Eminent climatologist and Nobel laureate Frank Beckmann compares himself to Galileo in connection with the "controversy" over global warming. (I assume from his magisterial tone on the subject that he must be an eminent climatologist and Nobel laureate in addition to holding a day job at WJR.) "No, I consider myself and fellow doubters to be more like Columbus (and Galileo), going against the grain of conventional thought. Columbus was ridiculed by his contemporaries who, by ‘consensus,’ had determined that the world was flat, much as Galileo did with his earth/sun argument. It’s the alarmists who represent the Catholic Church of your example."

This is not inspiring. Columbus, by the by, was "ridiculed by his contemporaries" for believing that the world was about twelve thousand miles in circumference, instead of the twenty-five thousand or so they had determined it was. The issue was the size, not the shape, of the earth. And Columbus's experimental proof of the concept--his reaching the Indies by crossing the Atlantic--in fact failed, when it was determined that Columbus had not in fact reached the Indies at all. Does everybody sleep through history, or what?

Elsewhere, we find Jack Cashill describing one Dr. Richard Sternberg as "the Galileo of the Smithsonian scandal". "What did happen to Dr. Sternberg is shocking even by Washington standards. The damage done to his career is real, irreversible and symptomatic of the lengths the science establishment will go to suppress challenges to the most vulnerable of its paradigms, namely Darwinism and its derivatives."

Again, not exactly inspiring. "The most vulnerable of its paradigms"? I don't have the facts on this, but as far as I can gather from the report, it looks as though Dr. Sternberg as editor of a scientific publication bypassed the ordinary review process to publish a substandard paper by a buddy of his. As I don't see that much of anything was actually done about this shocking breach of ethics on his part, I likewise don't see how this makes him a "Galileo". Perhaps somebody can enlighten me.

I don't know how Galileo became the patron saint of the anti-science crowd, but it seems somehow not wholly inappropriate. From the hindsight of history we watch Galileo take the first steps towards something resembling science--but they are baby steps. He reached wrong conclusions about comets, and tides, and the elliptical orbits of planets, and defended them doggedly in the face of what appears today--in hindsight anyway--considerable evidence. His understanding of science was primitive--much like the understanding of those who cite him today. Of course he had the excuse of having grown up in a dense jungle of medieval superstition, christian theocracy, and fossilized natural history. What, I wonder, is Beckmann's, or Cahill's excuse?

(17 February 2007: The Lippard Blog provides a link to a piece expounding the Sternberg Affair.)

Ku Klux Katholicism

Score two for Bill Donohue and the pack of bigots who support him and his Katholic Inquisition. I hear on the news that the two bloggers he falsely accused of intolerance (without a shred of evidence by the way--see Catholic Bigots at Work) have now resigned. Well, why not? If Turner Broadcasting can pay for cleansing Boston of imaginary aliens, I suppose John Edwards can pay for ridding his campaign of imaginary bigots. Of course I would have second thoughts about voting for Edwards now, after the way he bungled this whole business, except that I wouldn't be voting for him in any case, what with being a Republican and all.

And the world continues to turn. I can't help but feel that these Ku Klux Katholics need to get out in the real world a bit more. There's real anti-Catholic bias out there, without making things up.