Scientists who study life on Earth have something in common with scientists who study the climate of Earth. Besides being scientists, that is.

Practically all life scientists accept that life on Earth initially evolved from non-living materials billions of years ago, and has continued to evolve via natural selection – as initially proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject evolution.

Practically all climate scientists accept that the Earth’s atmospheric temperature is rising and that human-generated carbon dioxide is a primary cause of that rise – as initially proposed by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess in 1957, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject anthropogenic global warming.

Both life and climate scientists deal with “arguments”, usually endlessly-iterated catchphrases, that are inaccessible to logic. As Richard Dawkins relates in The God Delusion, a person once heard Dawkins out and then told him, ‘Your argument is compelling, but I don’t believe it.’

Both life and climate scientists deal with ad hominem attacks that seek to discredit their work by assassinating their characters. As if the alleged indiscretions of golfer Tiger Woods somehow erase the scores Woods posted in winning, to date, 14 major championships. (That earthquake was the flamboyant, and less than discrete, golf legend Walter Hagen rolling over in his grave, laughing hysterically over the Woods furore.)

Both life and climate scientists face these challenges, in part, because, as Jeff Masters (yes, Mom, him again) so eloquently puts it in the latest entry to his “Manufactured Doubt” blog series, they “are honest, incredibly hard-working … servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news (emphasis added)”.

Bad news to the religions, especially Christian religions, because the findings of the life scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our spiritual well-being.

Bad news to the fossil fuel industries, because the findings of the climate scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our material well-being.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries have fought back. By proclamation of dogma (of, literally, the “Good News” in the case of Christianity) or manufacturing of doubt. And, most importantly, by means of emotional appeals. A cross moves more hearts than a dissertation. A Hummer is a whole lot sexier, and easier to grasp, than a long catalogue of facts. And it may even cost less.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries pay people, often handsomely, who are trained in the techniques of manipulating feelings. Precisely what the scientist is trained to abhor. It is obviously money well spent … for half of We the People are supporting the hypothesis that an ounce of emo is worth a pound – nay, a ton – of data.

And therefore – because the very people who profit most from your agreement to this statement say so – neither evolution nor global warming exist.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din -
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show,
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
“God keep you, stranger”, I exclaimed. “You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too.”
He raised his eyes, and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn,
Replied – his manner with disdain was spiced:
“What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I’m Christ.”

Ambrose Bierce (writing as “Gassalasca Jape S.J.“) penned this near-perfect indictment of Christian incomprehension sometime around the turn of the 20th century; it was included in his 1911 Devil’s Dictionary under the heading CHRISTIAN. Every time I read it, I think back to when I first began to question what people were telling me about this Jesus person.

I was nine. Third grade, in the American public school system. More importantly, the “confirmation year” for our church, at the end of which each of us kids received our first Bibles. Ours was the last year that the confirmation class graduates received unannotated copies of the King James Version. I spent the next fifteen years trying to figure out who the hell the prophet Esaias was. But I digress.

I suppose most of my classmates took their gifts home, planted them on a bookshelf somewhere and promptly forgot about them. Me, I couldn’t wait to get mine. I read anything I could get my hands on anyway, mainly ’cause reading helped me forget that I was beneath useless at “gym” and “recess” (I was the odd one out every time the ball sides were chosen, and I stopped noticing that this was happening when there was an even number of kids in the pool). I especially wished to read all about this wonderful, kindly, Sunday school “Prince of Peace”.

I read some, and was perplexed. More, and grew dismayed. Still more, and I became positively alarmed. I wasn’t getting no Prince of Peace out of the pages of that KJV New Testament. What I was seeing was a razor-tongued SOB who was violent (Mark 11: 15-17), vindictive (Mark 11: 12-14, 20-21), petty (Mark 6: 4-5), and bigoted (Mark 7: 25-27; for “children”, read “Judeans” – in case you missed the memo, Jesus was a Judean). His own people were terrified of him (Mark 9: 32), and no wonder, for he was a master of the put-down (Mark 8: 17-18). No public school in today’s America would let this self-esteem killer anywhere near the children.

I can understand Jesus yelling at dense bureaucrats, and especially at demons. Sometimes you just have to speak in the language that your audience has a chance of understanding. But, your own people? And what did that poor leper do …?

Then a leper comes up to him, pleads with him, falls down on his knees, and says to him, “If you want to, you can make me clean.”

Although Jesus was indignant, [in first-century CE Judaism, the leper was about the filthiest sin-fouled skunk this side of a Samaritan or a Roman - for a righteous Judean literally untouchable] he stretched out his hand, touched him, and says to him, “Okay – you’re clean!” And right away the leprosy disappeared, and he was made clean.

And Jesus snapped at him, and dismissed him curtly with the warning, “See that you don’t tell anyone anything, but go, have a priest examine your skin.” – Mark 1: 40-44 (Scholar’s Version)

Prince of Peace? Hell. This Jesus of Nazareth character sounds more like your boss. Except dirtier (Mark 7: 1-5) and without the stock options. Not that those stock options have been doing your boss any good lately.

In taxonomy, the branch of science that takes on the task of putting names on living things, the name of a species is based on a physical object, the “type specimen”. In the case of a dispute over whether organism X belongs to species A or not, the judge and jury in the case is the type specimen of species A. Oftentimes, a scientist who is putting names on organisms and does not know, or has misunderstood, the type specimen of species A, will put species name A on organisms that actually belong to species B or C. Only later, when those specimens of B or C are reexamined together with A’s type, is the mistake discovered, and corrected. This happens, a lot. Crede expertum.

Bierce’s point, and mine, is that religions bearing the name “Christianity” have been named in the absence of the type specimen – Jesus of Nazareth, who had the misfortune to die before the institutions that bear his title, “the Christ”, had a chance to become established. Should it indeed come to pass that the type, Jesus, return to the third rock from Sol and make himself available for examination, we think that it will prove necessary to assign another name to “Christian” churches, on the basis of nonconformity of the name “Christian” with the type. We would expect, in this assessment, the vehement assent of Jesus himself.

And, just as the choicest rebukes in Mark’s gospel were reserved for the people in Jesus’s own retinue who weren’t “getting it”, so, I think, a returned Jesus would speak most sharply to those modern-day people who are the most conspicuously certain that they are following him.

NOTE: The quotations in this post are drawn exclusively from Mark’s gospel for several reasons.

1. Most scholars think that Mark is the earliest gospel, the first drafts of which were penned a mere twenty years or so after Jesus’s death (ca. 50-60 CE).

2. The gospels of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, grafting other materials onto Mark’s narrative structure and, in the process, providing semi-independent corroboration for nearly all of Mark. The only major story in Mark that is missing from Matthew and Luke is that of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:25-27). Neither “Matthew” nor “Luke” wished to remind their readers that Jesus was a mainstream, partisan Jew – “Matthew”, because his community had split from Judaism, “Luke” because he wished to “sell” the Christian movement to Gentiles.

3. Nearly all of the words of “Jesus” in the gospel of John are likely, instead, to be those of “John” – who was trying to unify his proto-Christian community under his leadership in the face of severe persecutions from both mainstream Judaism and Rome, some 70 years or so after Jesus’s death.

I therefore have assumed that, of the four canonical gospels, Mark comes closest to offering a picture of the “real Jesus”. Though it probably still isn’t very close.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Once upon a time, in the dark years BT (Before Twitter), there lived in the Heartland of America a college football gridiron coach by the name of Woody Hayes. A coach who was famous for his victories, and also for his hates.

* Michigan. (This was when there still was a Michigan.)

* Sideline photographers.

* The forward pass. Of which he is said to have said, “Only three things can happen, and two of them are bad.”

This is how Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has come to think about blogging “in his own person”. Most of the things that can happen are bad.

The post can sound whiny. Which may accurately reflect my personality, but I’d rather not front-and-center that, if you don’t mind.

Or, it can sound as if I have “the answers”. As if. A person who, these days, needs Quilly to remind him which name he’s supposed to be signing to the checks is not someone who should be suggesting Solutions to the world’s Problems.

But I heard something this morning that’s been tugging at what’s left of my mind all day, and I’d count it a favor if you’d let me talk through it with you.

The “thing” was a lecture (a sermon, really) on the theme of “The Decline and Fall of Christian America”. Yes, Newsweek had a cover story on this topic three months ago. Yes, I don’t normally pay any attention to Newsweek. The main point of both the magazine article and the sermon was “lots fewer Americans call themselves Christians these days, and what are we going to do about it?”

To which my first reaction was “Um … celebrate?” After all, We the People have allowed ourselves to be ruled, for the past eight years, by certain persons who have identified themselves as “Christians”, and what have we got to show for it?

* Vietnam in the desert? Make that two Vietnams in two deserts? (And it looks like Osama bin Laden, like Ho Chi Minh, will die, a hero, of old age.)

* A hole in the map where Michigan used to be?

* And another one being sawed out for California?

The news, seems to me, is not that there are fewer people going to church, but that there’s anybody going to church. If, as our speaker suggested, Christianity and atheism are competing for Our attention, maybe the atheists should be given a shot at running things on the grounds that they could hardly do any worse.

The problem with atheists, however, is that they tend to be individualists. Especially the intellectual atheists of the sort that Richard Dawkins (for example) champions. The sort that Dawkins himself has likened to “herding cats”; for whom the most congenial organization, after “None”, would be Conan Doyle’s Diogenes Club, where no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other. Not exactly what you need when you’re trying to rally the troops to fight internal and external battles.

Effective religious organizations are wonderfully good at rallying the troops, of providing a sense of belonging for their members. For good or ill, depending upon whether you belong to Desmond Tutu’s group or Jim Jones’s.

So why aren’t the mainstream churches doing any of this rallying? It’s not like nobody’s looking to belong to a group where some incarnation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in charge, if the increasing numbers of mostly young people who identify themselves as “spiritual” are any indication.

Trouble is, those increasing numbers of young people are listening to hip-hop, and are likely to consider Nearer My God To Thee a little lame. Not to mention sermons without either special effects or a point that makes sense (unless you’ve spent six years in that church’s Bible study classes).

In return, the parishioners who have spent the six years in those Bible study classes are saying “We put a lot of time and effort into making this church what it is. We like it this way, it’s staying this way. We’re not listening to any Eminewhosis. You want to be with us, you’ll sing Nearer My God To Thee with us, and like it.”

Which might possibly have been a better sell if the generation insisting on “church as it is” hadn’t been the one that blew the country’s budget with amoral business practices and avaricious, and ultimately failed, wars, and blotted Michigan off the map. That young people aren’t willing to follow such a lead should come as exactly no surprise to today’s graybeards and bluehairs, who came to their majority chanting the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty“. What goes around comes around.

So, in this Amoeba’s opinion, the mainstream churches (including many of the evangelical ones that sprang up in the heyday of the Christian Wrong Right) will dwindle, while new ones (that may or may not be “Christian”) will spring up to take their place. Full of people who wish to be spiritual.

It’s not like this sort of thing hasn’t happened before. Did you know that, in the dark ages BT, even longer ago than Woody Hayes, Nearer My God To Thee was considered radical church music, on the order of today’s hip-hop? It was radical music (based on tunes from popular music of the era) for the radical breakaway (from the Church of England) church of John and Charles Wesley – today’s staid old “mainstream” Methodists.

What goes around, comes around.

(Forgive me for suggesting this … but if God, however you imagine her, is as all-seeing, all-knowing, all-encompassing as We proclaim, isn’t it just a teeny bit presumptuous, arrogant even, for us to say where She will be putting us after we die? Whom are we really worshiping …?)

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Of all the thoughts and images that have sprung, in my mind, from the assassination of Dr. George Tiller last Sunday (31 May 2009), one leapt to the fore immediately, and has stayed there ever since.

The man was killed in a church.

Say anything you like about the religions that built the churches, or mosques, or temples – their avarice, their bigotry, their hypocrisy. I’m even likely to agree with most of it. But if there is any one thing that the houses of worship themselves have come to represent, it is this.

Sanctuary.

Hell, most of them are called “sanctuaries”, in whole or in part.

In Europe during most of the Common Era, Christian churches have been known as places of sanctuary, where persons in strife go for protection against their circumstances or their adversaries.

The principal is pretty universal. In pre-Christian Hawai‘i, a person who broke a kapu or otherwise offended the gods or their agents on Earth had the option of retreat to a pu‘uhonua (sanctuary, usually part of a heiau, or temple). Getting there was more than half the fun (to reach Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau, the refugee had to swim a fair distance across a shark-infested bay), but when (if) the offender arrived, the attendant priest (kahuna) would absolve the refugee from wrongdoing and release him [sic] back into the community, where he would be immune from harm. At least until the next time he offended.

To be sure, the principle of sanctuary has been both abused and violated throughout history. We the People of these Untied States, for example, are used to being told that, for certain Iraqi mosques, “sanctuary” is spelled A – R – M – O – R – Y, which is why those mosques are now one with Ozymandias’s lone and level sands.

Nevertheless, I think we relinquish the notion of sacred sanctuary at our peril. Which is why the death of George Tiller, a man whom I did not know, on whose attention I had no claim despite his position of prominence in our culture wars, continues to bother me.

For whatever it may be worth, a piece of music sprung into my head as a result of my reflections on George Tiller’s murder and the violation of sanctuary that the killer, and whatever sponsors he may have had, committed. Below, a link to a sound file of that piece of music (.mp3). The sound is not quite what I’d like, and I can’t add the lyrics; I’m at the mercy of my rather inexpensive music-writing software. Maybe one day you’ll get to hear it with live instruments/voices:

Sanctuary
Words: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, alt.
Music: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, setting IHL*

(* Latin [in hic loco], “in this place”. Pig Latin: drunken and crazy.)

Inscription: In memory of Dr. George Tiller, and of all those who have sought the sanctuary of a house of worship in vain.

Lyrics: (slightly altered from the original)

Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary,
Pure and holy, tried and true,
With thanksgiving, I’ll be a living
Sanctuary for you.

It is you, Lord, who came to save
The heart and soul of each one of us,
It is you, Lord, who knows our weakness,
Who gives the strength we hold in trust.

Lead me, Lord, from all temptation,
Purify me from within.
Fill my heart with your holy spirit,
Take away all my sin.

[Repeat v. 1]

For any who are interested in such things. The music is scored for oboe, English horn, and four-part choir. The oboe and English horn parts can be played by any number of instruments of similar sound quality, including flutes, recorders, or harmon-muted trumpets/cornets. I tried adding rhythm (guitar, keyboards) but didn’t care for the results, at least not yet.

Copyright as for this blog. Contact me or Quilly if you’re interested in the sheet music or whatever. Especially if you plan to make a million bucks off this thing. As if.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Back in February 2006, in only my second month as an addict a member of the blogosphere, I wrote something that I called, with great hubris and naïveté, “My Last Ever Post on Abortion”.

Its main point remains, in my mind, valid. Which is why I thought I’d never be writing on this subject again:

If we truly had concern for each other as people, we would recognize that abortion is a tool, available if it is needed. We would educate ourselves, long before the occasion arises, of what the tool is and what it represents. We would educate ourselves as to the costs and responsibilities associated with childbirth and child rearing, and realize that the cheapest and easiest way to manage those costs and responsibilities is to keep yourself, whatever gender you are, off the couch and out of the bedroom until you have the maturity, the social network, and (above all) the funds, to support them. Or are sure of your tools and strategies for avoiding fertilization. In other words, proper and thorough sex education.

I have caught some heat for this viewpoint, most often from women who tell me, “if we had to wait until men were ready to have children, there would be no children.” A moment’s reflection on the current human population crisis, and my response options to this critique shrink to one. “This is bad how?“

From commercial and religious interests, silence. Beneath their notice, I suppose:

But no. Sex sells. We have to have the right to live dangerously, or how would we ever get that SUV marketed? And we always have demagogues who are prepared to convince you, for their profit, that you can do whatever you want. Or to argue, for their profit, that their God is the sole repository of ethics in the world, and anyone who disagrees is automatically Satan, and oughta be dead.

Like George Tiller. Who, in case you didn’t know, was [sic] a physician who specialized in women’s health services. Including late-term abortions. Who survived several challenges to his perfectly-legal operations (abort, retry, fail …).

And who was murdered this morning (31 May 2009). While he was serving as an usher at a church service, for Christ’s sake!

Heinous as the murder was, it takes second place to the comments published by one of Tiller’s opponents in Kansas, which all but confess to ordering the hit.

I’ve come to see that the main point of my “last ever post on abortion” is flawed. Fatally flawed. It requires reason, a disinterested (to the degree that that is possible within the human condition) evaluation of the relevant information leading to a conclusion that is, in the light of that evidence, the best answer for all parties.

We the People do not want to suppress our emotions. We want, we demand, the right to feel, to act and respond according to our passions. That those passions can be manipulated, Adolph, does not occur to us. We will slam dunk over your puny little head, and chest-bump in celebration afterward. We will blockade your abortion clinic, and celebrate the resulting additions to the welfare rolls – or the suicide roster. If that humiliates you, tough shit. And if you try to do anything about it, we will take you out.

Perhaps you don’t care for this picture. So what will you do about it?

MURDER, n. What happens to human embryos that are subjected to abortion – and, what happens to those that are carried to term and born into this world unwanted and without adequate provision for their support. Most civilized societies profess to prefer quick, relatively painless means of dispatch to slow ones with torture. But then, this is America. See GUANTANAMO, ABU GHRAIB.

Thanks, Cooper, for the heads-up. I think.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

We are convinced that the difference between our [present misery] and the happiness we seek lies in a stranger’s pocket. – Doug Pascover’s The Prattler.

I heard the story I’m about to tell many moons ago, from the pulpit of a church in Friday Harbor, in Washington State, USA. The story could have originated in any one of a hundred communities along the rivers and streams of the American Pacific Northwest, down which the logging companies raft their logs to (for example) the great sawmills on the shores of Puget Sound.

The good citizens of this particular community, so the tale begins, had taken to collecting the logs that had broken free from the rafts and washed up along their shoreline, and using them as sources of fuel and lumber.

branded log

Now, a Judeo-Christian theologian of a disputatious turn of mind would likely turn to Leviticus 19:9-10, and start lecturing on the applicability of its provisions to the situation of branded logs washing up on the shoreline of a needy town downstream of its “fields”.

But the preacher that blew into town one fine day didn’t do that. For whatever reason, he bypassed verses 9-10 and went straight to v. 11. “Do not steal.” Upon which subject he preached, his first Sunday behind the pulpit. To loudly-voiced approval by the townsfolk.

So loudly was he acclaimed that he was certain his message had gotten through, and the logging company would soon be getting back its escapees. To his chagrin, he discovered that branded logs were still vanishing from the town’s shores and winding up in stoves and treehouses.

A month later, therefore, he strode to the pulpit and, more powerfully than before, preached “Do not steal.” The acclaim was deafening. The preacher’s fame, already considerable, skyrocketed. His mastery of the Word of God won him a seat at every table in the town, a voice at every debate.

And the logs kept disappearing.

The preacher was amazed. “What part of do not don’t these people understand?” He resolved that he would try once more, and this time, he would make sure that the good citizens got his message.

The fateful Sunday arrived, and he declaimed, with all the homilectical skill and emotional force at his command, “Do not steal other people’s logs.”

The next morning, the preacher was riding one of those logs downstream, wearing nothing but a coat of tar and feathers.

He eventually settled down and raised a large family. His children migrated far and wide.

But they gained their greatest fame in California. Where they preached how state budgets could not be balanced unless each citizen shared the burden of increased taxes and trimmed services, unless all citizens stopped taking anything they could grab from the stream of state spending and “returned the branded logs”.

And they suffered their father’s fate.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As I wrote yesterday, the fat version of Michelangelo’s David has been getting a bit of internet attention lately.

What’s been lost in the shuffle, perhaps, is that the (public service) ad campaign that launched the career of “fat David” actually featured two historical figures.

The other one?

Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe himself.

I was thinking about Lincoln today. Particularly, about Lincoln’s role in the formation and growth of the Republican Party – which, in the 1850s, was a fusion between big business interests and fundamentalist Christians. (Yes, that should sound familiar.) Either one of which could have told the other, at any time, to do things my way or hit the road, Jack.

Lincoln, especially in Illinois, was the organization man. He was the one who put things together, smoothed over differences and difficulties, kept the party focused on what would allow it to grow and become competitive in what then passed for national elections. On more than one occasion, he put his own ambitions for public office aside in order to advance the party.

To be sure, Lincoln’s task was made easier by the one issue which the otherwise-mismatched elements of the party could champion without reserve: the abolition of slavery. Since slavery offended both the morals of the Christians and the avarice of the capitalists. But Lincoln played this card to near-perfection, using it to secure alliances within the party and to prevent those alliances from fracturing under the stresses of events. The Republicans held together, and, in 1860, won an election that changed the face of the United States, and arguably the world.

Fast-forward to 2009. The Republicans are beset by a narrow faction that is hell-bent on creating an American “Land of the Pure”, and its leader tells any who fail its white-glove test, Arlen, to begone, and take your filthy fellows with you. It may wind up being a small party, but, by God, it will know what its principles are, and every shelf in the freezer on which each one is kept.

It’s enough to cause any national icon to slouch in his armchair, gorge himself on tortilla chips, cheez whiz, and beer, and stare vacantly into space.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In this season of rebirth and renewal …

Well, except for those of you in the southern hemisphere, where spring was six months ago …

Or those of you in the tropics, where “spring” is whenever the rainy season shows up, could be November for all I know …

Where was I? Oh. Yeah. In this season of rebirth and renewal (for some of you, anyway), a mind is likely to turn to thoughts of love. Maybe even partnership of the “I do” persuasion. Which is fine. Assuming that the object of your affections is agreeable.

Along with the laws of your government. And here in these Untied States, the governments of We the People have plenty to say about whether the object of your affections can legally be agreeable. Especially if that object has (ahem) the same haircut that you do.

If you’ve been following the news about efforts to legalize nontraditional marriage arrangements (gay marriage, plural marriage, etc. etc.), you know that this is a neverending squabble that gives the evolution-creation “debate” a run for its money. And each side claims that it is the moral one. One argues that granting nontraditional marriages is immoral, because Scripture bans them. The other argues that not granting nontraditional marriages is immoral, because the consequences of banning them (promiscuity and other risky behaviors) are worse.

I promised Doug Pascover that I would write on this topic in a way that illustrates Amoeba’s Rule:

If an argument goes on forever, it’s because the participants are arguing over the wrong thing.

So, wise guy blob, if the argument’s not really over the morals of marriage, what is it about? I think it’s … wait for it …

Money.

Specifically, the money that comes from tax and other benefits granted to married couples.

And why do these benefits exist? Because, in the world in which they were created, marriage was a contract between two people, one male, one female, one of whom (usually the woman) would leave the ranks of money-makers in order to raise children. Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is an expensive proposition – and that’s after just the first visit to the obstetrician’s office. Think about this a minute. You have two young people, both of whom are at the beginning of their working lives, and hence are making dirt masquerading as wages. Then you give them a full-time job baby and take away one of the wages. Who ordained this arrangement, and what were they thinking?

For these people, significant marriage benefits make sense. Hell, it’s the least a society with any sense of society can do. Everyone else? Nice try, Max. Point your accountant somewhere else for your tax breaks.

So, as far as this Amoeba is concerned, the franchise of marriage should be available to anyone who wishes it. It does serve a critical social function, to promote fidelity among the partners. This, too, has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with (yes, again) money.

Specifically, money spent on health care, or else. For a pathogenic virus, bacterium, or fungus, sex is the Golden Gate Bridge to new opportunities. Aldous Huxley’s world of free and meaningless sex has zero chance of coming to pass, for the germs would soon wipe it out. If you don’t believe me, I recommend a trip to AIDS-ravaged Africa. Cutting that bridge might be seen by some as “social engineering” or “legislating morality”, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than dealing with pandemics of incurable diseases. Which is how come so many of the Laws of Moses prescribe death as the punishment for unsafe sex. Better two than the whole tribe.

I might therefore accept a modest marriage benefit for childless partnerships, to recognize their contribution to public health. But any significant money goes to partnerships where there are children, and a demonstrated sacrifice of wages that is directly linked to the care of the children.

To me, a system of open marriage availability but restriction of (most) marriage benefits to partnerships with children (as they were originally intended to be) addresses the real issues underlying the debate in as fair and reasonable a manner as I can imagine.

And, I reckon, a sun king just might be able to enact it.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Good Friday, that is. Not that business yesterday. We’ll talk about getting old another time, with your permission. Compared with talking about someone who got dead, “old” doesn’t even appear on the radar.

So what’s is good about it? I mean, the day isn’t even a holiday any more. (Actually, it still is a state holiday in Hawai‘i. You can tell by looking at the rush hour traffic in Honolulu. Which is stopped dead. Just like it is on a workday.) Hell, more people are taking time off today to remember a baseball player than to mourn the anniversary of the death of The Biggest Name In Faith®.

I have a memory (perhaps you do too) of asking the question (I was, like, eight years old), “What’s so good about Good Friday? Isn’t that when Jesus died? This is good?” Or maybe it was the Sunday school teacher who asked the question. Sunday school teachers are pretty good at asking questions like that. And at giving out the set answer.

“Well, Juwan, it’s because Jesus died for our sins, so they can’t hurt us anymore.”

“OK, Teach, whatever you say.” [Kid's translation: Huh?!?]

“And then he rose again after three days, and we have a party!“

“Now you’re talkin! Can we die too, so we can come back to cake and ice cream? Will it be chocolate cake?”

These days, the Good Friday lesson plan has to come with a warning label. When you teach the Crucifixion and Resurrection, tell your children that they are not to try this at home.

I suppose it has to be done, but how pathetic is it to try to teach the average middle-class eight-year-old kid about “how Jesus died for our sins”? Especially since, in all probability, the real Jesus of Nazareth had no intention of dying, for his sins or anyone else’s. Bottom line is, the Romans caught him, and snuffed him, and his followers ever since have been desperate for an explanation for how this disastrous failure of their leader and his movement could possibly be “good”.

But let’s stick with the kid. How is “Jesus dying for our sins” going to be meaningful when the kid hardly knows what sin is? When the closest thing to guilt the kid might ever have experienced is over having to tell the teacher that “the dog ate my homework”, and then having to tell the parental units that the teacher wasn’t buying it, and that’s how come he got that F. Which the parents will then sue the school board over. Leading the kid to think, of course, that he never did anything wrong in the first place.

Maybe that kid will never have to face his family with the words “I yelled at the boss for no reason and got fired; I don’t have a job anymore, I don’t know what we’re eating next week”. Or “I just blew the rent money gambling online; the landlord will probably throw us out on Friday.” Fully expecting to go hungry, to go houseless, and for his loved ones to walk away after slashing him to ribbons with his own fingernails and leaving the pieces on the street. And it’s all his fault. Death, in every way but one – the one that would be a blessed relief, and consequently will not be granted.

What is granted instead is his friend offering employment to keep his family in money and, for him, a chance to rebuild both his confidence and his reputation; his landlord pulling his cable instead of serving an eviction notice; his spouse taking a job instead of a hike.

In so many words, a resurrection. Or, as Americans often prefer to express it: a second chance. Or third, or fourth, or seventy-seventh.

This is what makes Good Friday “good”. Even if the real Jesus didn’t intend for things to happen quite like that.

But, when else have We allowed the truth to get in the way of a good story?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Or, maybe, in your household, you wait to dye the Easter eggs until Saturday afternoon …

Ever since I started to question the supernatural origin of baskets containing chocolate bunnies, I have had a problem with Easter.

Not so much with the holiday. Hey, I’m not that dumb. This is free chocolate we’re talking about.

No, it’s the word “Easter” itself that gave me fits.

I mean, easter than what?

Was it supposed to refer to Jerusalem, which is more east than, say, Cairo, but isn’t as east as Tokyo? And if that’s the answer, what about somebody celebrating the holiday in New Delhi? Would that person celebrate “Wester”? Would somebody in Sydney celebrate “Northwester”?

As any one who grew up in New England, USA remembers, we periodically would be granted a holiday called a “Northeaster“. But that was usually “celebrated” with snow shovels, not chocolate bunnies. Though occasionally there would be mugs of hot chocolate waiting for us after we shoveled out the driveway. Assuming the storm hadn’t taken out the electricity.

And if a nor’easter happened during Easter, there wouldn’t be a lot of holiday spirit going around. More like weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. And maybe some weary spirits raiding the spirits locker at the end of the day. It didn’t seem like my investigations were on the right track.

Then I discovered that Easter wasn’t a direction, it was a religion. Specifically, a Germanic pagan religion. Now I’m even more confused. The biggest event on the Christian calendar, and the Christians can’t even come up with their own name for it? I suppose things worked out that way because the obvious first choice – Christmas – was already taken. Evidence that, though the early Christian evangelists may have been passionate believers, they were a few tests short of a passing grade in business acumen.

Easter is, of course, the celebration by Christians of how the judicially-murdered Jesus of Nazareth returned to life, after “three days” (actually, somewhat less than two, from around 3 PM IDT Friday to an unspecified hour on Saturday evening). To be sure, he presented himself a couple of times to disciples and promptly vanished, never to be seen again despite two thousand year’s worth of predictions of his imminent return.

But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the promise of new life that the “risen Jesus” represents. A promise also represented by fresh flowers and green leaves and Easter eggs.

An empty promise if you happen to have been one of the embryos in those eggs you just boiled up for the Easter baskets.

On the other hand … I suspect that the fine new clothes that, in the Western ecclesiastical traditions, are usually trotted out for Easter, were originally intended to disguise the fact that the devout of northern European churches were living skeletons, saved from death by starvation or nutrient-deficiency diseases by the appearance of those flowers, leaves, and eggs.

To such people, the resurrections of springtime must have been, in the most fundamental way, the beginning of a new year. And, indeed, in early European societies, the new year was deemed to start at the commencement of spring growth. A convention observed for millennia by many happy families.

Until some astronomers got together and decreed that the year should begin, not at the time of life’s rebirth, but at the time of its greatest apparent peril, when the length of day is at its shortest and the harshest of the winter weather still lies ahead. The shift of New Year’s Day from the spring equinox to the winter solstice must rank as one of the earliest instances of a human population choosing to follow the dictates of an “expert” rather than those of common sense.

Perhaps it’s time to shift New Year’s Day back to the spring equinox. And play practical jokes on unsuspecting “January fools“.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Today, a bright young thing danced up to me (she hardly ever walks) and asked me for money.

“What for?”

“I’m going to starve for food.”

And time stood still.

Starve? Starve? Thirty hours is hardly enough time to get any serious hunger pangs going, never mind learn how to deal with them, to experience how they eventually go away as your body adjusts to the reality of feeding primarily on itself.

Oh, great. Now I’m hearing voices in my head. What do you want?

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart. Enjoy life all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. (Ecclesiastes 9: 7-10, NRSV)

She got her money.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Blog buddy Doug Pascover, who for some time now has been compiling an updated version of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, also produces a weekly series of satirical essays under the heading The Prattler, likewise in emulation of Bierce. The current edition deplores the disappointment of liberal ideologues with the first 60 days of the Yeswecan Administration – just as conservative ideologues were disappointed with the 2922 millennia days of the Bushie Administration:

Liberals will always be disappointed by government, just as conservatives will always be. This is not only because the presidency has a way of drawing its inhabitants toward the center. It is also because, while reality has a way of withering the wise like raisins in the sun, the idealist the world stomps for wine.

Your Amoeba read this line, with its alliterative references to the fruit of the vine, and these words popped into his head ectoplasm:

For such worthy disappointees as these, the grapes will always be sour.

And then …

Y’know, I hadn’t heard, or thought of, Aesop’s fables in, like, forever. Which I thought odd, in a world that threatens to do a major (and probably grossly imperfect) sorting out of the grasshoppers from the ants, pronto.

So I thought I’d better dig in the archives a little, see what’s what with Aesop. I went online, and, to my relief, there is my childhood friend the fox, spotting the grapes, leaping at them time and again without success, the fruit being just out of reach, and finally giving up and stalking off with the words “The grapes are …”

Unripe? GREEN?!?

Whaddaya mean, “green”? What happened to the good ol’ nursery-rhyme staple sour, huh?!? This changes everything! You give up on sour grapes, but green ones? Now, that ol’ fox could come back with a ladder …

This is as good a time as any to explain something. If it isn’t … well, remember Blogosphere Rule 1? The blogger is always right? And Rule 2: if the blogger is wrong, see Rule 1? OK. See Rule 1.

Where was … right, I was explaining something.

If you’ve been around this blog for any length of time, you’ll have (no doubt) noticed that I provide a lot of links to Wikipedia. I do this because Wikipedia is free and not-for-profit, and therefore linking to it likely will give the reader some relevant information on the point in question without dropping her down a spam hole.

I know that some people call the site Wikipedierror. Mostly people from for-profit information sites of the Encyclopedia LowerSlobboviana class, who are at least as pissed off at Wikipedia as the newspapers are at craigslist. Wikipedia is not a perfect source of information. But, no secondary source of information is perfect. If you look something up, and you see something that seems incredible, it’s essential to verify it.

Which I did. There, just as Wikipedia said, is the reference, in the earliest available Greek texts of Aesop’s fables, to “unripe” grapes. Complete with its possible implication of heterosexual pedophilia. Hey. I thought this story was about a fox. Not a wolf!

Revisionist interpretations of grapes are everywhere these days. It wasn’t too long ago that the story broke about the passage in the Koran that promises the martyr, not virginal women, but fresh white grapes as his reward in Paradise. Astronomers monitoring the universe with radio gear have written about a constant low-grade hum on their instruments, which they’ve tentatively identified as being noise left over from the Big Bang. An alternative explanation now presents itself: the hum is the collective sighs of relief of female departed souls, and the collective groans of disappointment of male ones.

This being Paradise we’re talking about, “sour grapes” from the gentlemen is probably disallowed.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

The pastor of the church we attend in Honolulu probably lost some people today.

The first part of her sermon spoke of how the Decalogue represents rules by which a community may live, and, one hopes, thrive. No problem here. Any social system, even anarchy, is going to be governed by a series of rules – the members need to learn and remember which actions will keep the community working, which ones will destroy it. From what we know (or, at least, what this Amoeba knows) of social systems in the millennium before the Common Era, the Decalogue’s rules looks pretty good, not least because of their implicit restrictions on the principle of retaliation (e.g. “No killing allowed”; elsewhere, (only) an eye for an eye), thus minimizing the risk that a community will wipe itself out seeking “justice” for its members, Mr. Corleone.

The second part, however, spoke of conscientious objectors to the Iraq war, specifically Hawai‘i’s Ehren Watada, and how God’s rules (“No killing allowed”), to which they are adhering to their cost, trump any rules that The Evil Military Authorities attempt to impose.

War black. Peace white. Welcome to 1969. Hell. Welcome to 1863.

The hawks have just left the building. And the Amoebae are thinking that Pastor has missed the point of her own sermon.

That point? That an effective set of social rules (and the principles on which it is based) serves its community under all circumstances. Including both war and peace.

Neither war nor peace is an absolute. Each is a circumstance with which, from time to time, the community must deal; Qohelet famously wrote of a “time for war” and a “time for peace”. The key issue is never “War or else” or “Peace or else”. It is, instead: “In the present circumstances, how can we best ensure the survival and growth of our community?”

Indeed, if its people are sufficiently committed to the community’s principles and rules, they will be willing to sacrifice for that community, rather than risk the possibility of that community failing. And sometimes, Clint, that means shootin’. An idea that We the People didn’t have much of a problem with back in 2002 and 2003, when we actually had a chance to do something that would make a difference about the wars that have since bankrupted us, financially and morally.

Sacrificial commitment is the message of several Biblical passages, the Gideon story, to name one.

It is also the story of the Mexican War (1846-48).

If the aphorism (attributed variously to Napoleon, Voltaire, and Tradition) that “God is on the side of the heaviest batallions” were correct, you would be reading this blog in Spanish. American forces were attacking a much larger body of Mexican troops on their own soil – a circumstance that should have produced higher casualties and lower morale for the American side, and an eventual Mexican victory. However, the Americans were volunteers bound together by a common set of principles, while the Mexicans were mostly conscripts who had little in common with the hacienda owners and mercenaries who commanded them. The Americans were soon dictating terms in Mexico City.

Note, please, that there was nothing particularly noble about the principles that the victorious Americans espoused. For one thing, American settlers first gained a foothold in Texas through outright lying to Mexican authorities about their intentions to learn Spanish and convert to Catholicism. (If you have the stomach for it, I recommend a comparison between the American principle of Manifest Destiny and the [Nazi] German ideal of Lebensraum). For another, Mexico had abolished slavery in 1810 (a decree reinforced in 1813 and 1829). One of the first acts of Americans in territory taken from Mexico, Texas especially, was to relegalize slavery and establish slave-labor plantations.

What, then, is the true significance of an Ehren Watada? What else than this: the community no longer agrees on its core principles and rules.

Which means that We the People may be in the condition of the Mexicans of 1846. Or of the Jerusalem of ca. 598 BCE. When Jeremiah the prophet spoke out and said:

You have a choice. End the greed that divides you, pay the true wages of peace, bring back a community that all can support, and live. Or continue as you are, and die.

As it happened, the multimillionaires and their sycophants, Rush nobles of Judah, in their mansions of cedar staffed by slaves and “guest workers” in rags, chose not to heed Jeremiah, chose not to heal the rifts that divided them from their people, and their people from each other. They even had men of the cloth to whistle in the dark for them.

And Jerusalem, and Judah with it, fell to Nebuchadnezzar.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an opportunity to sing a verse of a Negro spiritual in the church that Quilly and I attend. I got through it without damaging anybody’s ears, I think. But one of the lines I was given to sing bothered me then, and still bugs me now. It claims something for God that doesn’t seem to fit with the stories we tell about God and God’s conflicts with The Dark Side. Perhaps this tale will tell you what my problem is …

==========================

The scene is the Inferno. All around the Prince of Darkness, ice swoops in howling gale-driven pellets; lava plumes punch their way through the drifted snow in fountains of fire and steam and noise. Wind-tossed souls groan under the endlessly-repeated encounters with frozen rock and molten. But none of this can be heard over the blare of Hell’s sound system, which is playing – of all things – gospel music …

When the hosts of Hell assail, and my strength begins to fail,
Thou who never lost a battle, stand by …

“SCREWTAPE!!!”

“Yes, sir?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, don’t call me Sir! Who the Heaven do you think I am? Paul McCartney?? Speaking of noise, find me the miserable demon who authorized that … that … PTAH! on our loudspeakers. I want that creature here. NOW!”

“My lord?”

“What?”

“It is here.”

“What’s here?”

“The creature you’re seeking. It’s here.”

“Where? I see only you and me.”

“Precisely.”

“You… ?!?”

“I did no such thing. You did.”

“Did NOT!”

“Did. Satanic Majesty’s Request 2475JW856, dated …”

“Gimme that!”

“Paper copies in triplicate are filed in 17 separate secret stations scattered throughout the nine levels. And that doesn’t count the 23 supercomputer nodes on which the .pdfs are stored, sealed with seven seals each. If you tried to find and destroy all these copies, s… my lord, all Hell would break loose.”

“Think you’re a pretty funny hobgoblin, don’t you, Screwtape? And just why would I put out an order like this?”

“Because, according to Appendix iiB of the cited SMR, you were impressed by how the Americans used what they persisted in calling ‘music’ at places like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and thought that our clients would accrue similar benefits from the experience.”

“Well, I repent myself of that op…”

“Yrch!! My lord! Language!!“

“Save the PC gambit for the rooks, Screwtape. I tell you I repent myself of that opinion. REPENT REPENT REPENT REPENT!! Turn that garbage off! It’s driving me crazy!!“

“Well …”

“‘… we are in Hell.’ I’ve heard that one for an eternity too. Perhaps you haven’t heard this one. As efficient managers, Screwtape, you and I should not have to subject ourselves to the instruments that we apply to our worthy customers in order to ensure ourselves of their efficacy. Or am I to infer that your efficiency has become compromised, and I am to seek another for your posi … Ah, that’s so much better. There’s something utterly restful in the random screaming of the damned. Nothing to make me think of that lying, cheating, misleading, micromanaging son of a …“

“My lord?”

“‘Never lost a battle’, he says. What does he think this is?”

“The pits?”

“It’s my victory, you scumbag! I wrested this domain from his oh-so-omnipotent hands! I created this world and filled it, and made it possible for smart-mouthed little demons to scurry around in it setting up loudspeakers and supercomputer networks and piles of forms in triplicate that I have to plow through to sort out your petty schemes. As if I don’t give you enough work to do topside. I did all this. I! So long as I am here, his claim on the world is without form and void!“

“Yes, my lord. Speaking of supercomputers …”

“What about them?”

“You have heard of virtual reality?”

“I told you I have to plow through your bloody forms! Including the ones detailing all 4,582 of your recruitment strategies that utilize some form of IT. But if this is a beg for more hardware and bandwidth, the answer is NO. Not until we get that shipment of CEO souls we’ve been promised from the big corporations. Their lives as they know them are over, but they keep denying us their labor, when we are in crying need of it. I just don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us.”

“And what is it that you don’t understand, oh mighty Screwtape?”

“How we know that we’re not just a level on his Wii?”

“Because … because … no. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t …!?!“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Awhile ago, I wrote about the sad tale of the professor and the student. The professor who taught evolutionary biology, and the professor’s student who became governor of Louisiana and signed an anti-evolution teaching bill into law. A law that, I read, passed with hardly a discouraging word from We the People of Louisiana’s elected representatives.

(Vox Dei, vox populi, I suppose. Or is it supposed to be the other way ’round?)

Because, as I and many others have written, and the scientists themselves have begun to realize, the debate between “creation” and “evolution” is data-proof. It has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with persuasion. The one who shouts loudest has the floor. Or the one with the heaviest ordnance.

Well, the lab mice are finally getting around to putting corks in their popguns.

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), a gathering of professional researchers and educators in the field of “organismal biology” (basically, Life on Earth, what it eats, and how it catches and digests it), has announced that it will not be doing Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 2011 after all. You simply can’t do comparative biology without a working theory of evolution, and the SICB, not surprisingly, doesn’t wish to lend support to anyone who would declare their modus operandi null and void by legislative, or evangelical, fiat. So, the SICB has dropped its plans to hold its annual meeting in Katrina City, and will now go to Salt Lake City instead – where the Masters of the Temple have obligingly written a missive that announces, in effect, “we’ll say anything you like about evolution if it means you’ll come here and let us take your money.”

Which, in these times, is no small thing. Or shouldn’t be.

Other scientific societies are rumored to be considering similar actions against Louisiana. Which, on the economic face of it, should not really be a big deal, since the total membership of a society like the SICB wouldn’t make for a profitable half hour at your local neighborhood Wal-Mart. In all probability, Bobby Jihad Jindal & Co. are counting on this fact to help them weather whatever storms the scientists may brew up.

But the SICB’s stance is getting press far above its stature in the world, coming as it is on the heels of the Darwin anniversary. Similar gumption on the part of the whole of the scientific community in America (which does have some numbers going for it) might just generate enough firepower to combat the forces of ignorance, and put We the People back on a profitable track.

There is a bright side to the Louisiana story. After all, the state has a Legislature that, in this instance at least, passed a controversial piece of legislation through with hardly a hiccup or filibuster.

Maybe the whole lot of them should get put on planes, trains and automobiles, and go to California to work on their state budget.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.