The future is with us today.

This exchange between Condoleeza Rice and Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja took place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and concerned "rendition flights" of suspected terrorists. I won't editorialize except to say that Rice's attitude is extremely telling and can't help reminding me of Bush's comment that Iraq was the next President's problem.

Tuomioja: "We all agree on the need to fight terrorism but we should do so in a way that does not create more terrorism in the future."

Rice: "Let's deal with those who are trying to kill us now and leave the future for some other time."

Tuomioja: "The future is with us today."

More Evidence NDE's are Illusions of the Brain

Brain stimulation creates shadow person

For years we have been studying and discussing near death experiences. I started off as a believer only to find that I could no longer keep making excuses to temper the findings of neuroscience. One of the very common and repeated descriptions of the NDE involves a sensed presence which accompanies a person into the nether-realms. Generally this sensed presence is not seen and is assumed to be an angel or loved one. Often the experiencer will say that she could feel that her loved one was next to her, but could not see her. Michael Persinger did experiments with helmets emitting small electromagnetic fields and found that often people sensed presences. But this was not repeatable in everyone, and some people thought it may be due to the mere expectation of sensing the presence that made it happen. Now it appears we have a smoking gun on the sensed presence phenomenon. Of course, it involves the tempero-parietal area of the brain. Once again, the angels fail us.

Harris vs Medved

For many moons I have dreamed of a showdown between Medved and Harris, and now we have one. It starts at time 37:30 and is very good. Harris avoids the suspected belligerance and Medved lets him talk (most likely because Harris bashes liberals as well). Harris gets his points across and avoids being cut off by using the line "I just think this is the wrong question to be asking" when Medved tries to corner him with his side-tracking sophist bullshit. Excellent job Sam.

Proof of Global Warming

The scientific method at its best.

I Read Letter to a Christian Nation

Sam Harris' book is absolutely beautiful. I sat down at Barnes and noble with an iced coffee, read all 91 pages, and the cheap bastard that I am, decided to not pay the $16 for the hardback and wait for the paperback. Then I went and bought a bottle of zinfandel, a coffee table, a pair of scissors, 2 placemats, and a winged corkscrew.

The book is a bite sized morsel that puts the whole issue in perspective in one fell swoop. It leaves it's mark beautifully. Here is my amazon review:


This book will most certainly go down as a modern classic of it's ilk. In today's schizoid U.S. political climate where the latest ridiculous rendition of Christianity turns Jesus into some sort of affluent agressive war-god of the financially elite, secular progressives have a secret weapon to protect themselves from the attack of empty air-headed slogans and sound-bites- *good writing*. And Sam Harris is an extraordinary writer. His words are so lucid and well thought out that it reads like prose. Even as someone thoroughly familiar with Harris' other writing and thought, I found this beautiful little book to be full of gems and novel insights. It's a nice compact and unashamed little polemic that touches every major point with brutal clarity. Of course, nobody would expect Christians to read it and suddenly realize the folly of their ways, but this book is a perfect remedy to the meme of fundamentalism once that little crack of doubt opens and that seed of reason is planted. People will be converted by this thing, and people will be referred to and will resort to this book (if they are brave enough) for years to come. It is small enough to finish in less than 3 hours for an average reader.

This book is a molten wrecking ball of common sense and crisp logic. The arguments in it are irrefutable without resorting to some sort of blind grasping. I will enjoy it for years to come. Thank you Sam Harris.

"It is from the bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. And the bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."
- Thomas Paine

Sam Strikes Hard

Another blistering piece of obvious and concise rationality from Sam Harris.


The following article was just published by The Los Angeles Times. Feel free to pass it along.

Best, Sam

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals

Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.By Sam Harris

SAM HARRIS is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. His next book, Letter to a Christian Nation, will be published this week by Knopf. (www.samharris.org)September 18, 2006

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism. Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith. On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy. Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities. Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism. At its most extreme, liberal denial has found _expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode. Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities. I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals. Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are. Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal. Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise. We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies. Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game. While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't. The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
author@samharris.org






Jaysonn Kitzman for Hillary

The Atheist Tapes

I passively watched the three part series on the history of atheism as a form of pain relief while I finally got around to the agonizing task of filing mountains of forms and documents ( That I wouldn't understand even if I bothered to read them ) I've had laying around in boxes since moving into my new place. I am now 3/4 done, which is a relief.

The series was interesting, but not life changing. I noticed however, that the BBC had made a 6 part follow up series from the cutting room floor. They included the wholes of the interviews with prominent thinkers- Colin McGinn, Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Denys Turner, Dennet....

These interviews are priceless in a sense. You are sitting in a living room having a conversati0on with the pinnacle of human thought on manyb of these issues.

This page goes to the Dawkins interview and the rest are on the right hand column.

Horse Shit

Have you ever walked into a public John and wanted to wring the neck of the guy who filled the bowl up with 5 pounds of 50 caliber lumber and 3 rolls of paper without flushing? Check it out.

"That's Just Sad"

This is comical. It is simply amazing how successful these sheisters are in turning their own complete failure into a sense of pride. O'reilly as usual, sees that he has no valid argument and cuts his guest off mid-stream in order to avoid the crushing irrefutable logic of her obvious point.

Uh-Oh

These satellite-derived images show the minimum Arctic perennial sea ice measured in 1979, left, and 2003. The coverage declined by 9 percent per decade during that time. Two new studies found the rate of shrinking has accelerated.

Hmm... maybe we should await more evidence before taking action to reduce CO2. As long as I have stock in BP and Chevron, Im unconvinced.

How We View Faith

View of God can predict values, politics

HOW USA DEFINES FAITH

View of God can predict values, politics

Graphic: How Americans view God

Women more open to paranormal beliefs

Who will get into heaven?

Most called secular still believe in God or 'higher power'


By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

The United States calls itself one nation under God, but Americans don't all have the same image of the Almighty in mind. A new survey of religion in the USA finds four very different images of God — from a wrathful deity thundering at sinful humanity to a distant power uninvolved in mankind's affairs. Forget denominational brands or doctrines or even once-salient terms like "Religious Right." Even the oft-used "Evangelical" appears to be losing ground.

AMERICANS AND FAITH: How we view God

Believers just don't see themselves the way the media and politicians — or even their pastors — do, according to the national survey of 1,721 Americans, by far the most comprehensive national religion survey to date. Written and analyzed by sociologists from Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, in Waco, Texas, and conducted by Gallup, the survey asked 77 questions with nearly 400 answer choices that burrowed deeply into beliefs, practices and religious ties and turned up some surprising findings:

The Authoritarian God (31.4% of Americans overall, 43.3% in the South) is angry at humanity's sins and engaged in every creature's life and world affairs. He is ready to throw the thunderbolt of judgment down on "the unfaithful or ungodly," Bader says.

•The Benevolent God (23% overall, 28.7% in the Midwest) still sets absolute standards for mankind in the Bible. More than half (54.8%) want the government to advocate Christian values.

•The Critical God (16% overall, 21.3% in the East) has his judgmental eye on the world, but he's not going to intervene, either to punish or to comfort.

•The Distant God (24.4% overall, 30.3% in the West) is "no bearded old man in the sky raining down his opinions on us," Bader says. Followers of this God see a cosmic force that launched the world, then left it spinning on its own.

How We View Faith

View of God can predict values, politics

HOW USA DEFINES FAITH

View of God can predict values, politics

Graphic: How Americans view God

Women more open to paranormal beliefs

Who will get into heaven?

Most called secular still believe in God or 'higher power'


By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

The United States calls itself one nation under God, but Americans don't all have the same image of the Almighty in mind. A new survey of religion in the USA finds four very different images of God — from a wrathful deity thundering at sinful humanity to a distant power uninvolved in mankind's affairs. Forget denominational brands or doctrines or even once-salient terms like "Religious Right." Even the oft-used "Evangelical" appears to be losing ground.

AMERICANS AND FAITH: How we view God

Believers just don't see themselves the way the media and politicians — or even their pastors — do, according to the national survey of 1,721 Americans, by far the most comprehensive national religion survey to date. Written and analyzed by sociologists from Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, in Waco, Texas, and conducted by Gallup, the survey asked 77 questions with nearly 400 answer choices that burrowed deeply into beliefs, practices and religious ties and turned up some surprising findings:

The Authoritarian God (31.4% of Americans overall, 43.3% in the South) is angry at humanity's sins and engaged in every creature's life and world affairs. He is ready to throw the thunderbolt of judgment down on "the unfaithful or ungodly," Bader says.

•The Benevolent God (23% overall, 28.7% in the Midwest) still sets absolute standards for mankind in the Bible. More than half (54.8%) want the government to advocate Christian values.

•The Critical God (16% overall, 21.3% in the East) has his judgmental eye on the world, but he's not going to intervene, either to punish or to comfort.

•The Distant God (24.4% overall, 30.3% in the West) is "no bearded old man in the sky raining down his opinions on us," Bader says. Followers of this God see a cosmic force that launched the world, then left it spinning on its own.

Coming Soon

In a current Newsweek article Sam Harris was interviewed along with several other Atheists. He said that he has refused offers to translate his works into Arabic, among other languages, fearing for the lives of the translators. I suspect he fears for his own life as much as for the life of any translator. As Aaron's graph aptly demonstrates, followers of the life affirming God (and/or Allah) are a lethal bunch. Harris works at an undisclosed University and/or College.


Nonetheless, Harris is publishing a new book in response to criticism (death threats in some cases) he has received from those fearing for our lives. And again, reviews tell us, he pulls no punches. Good.


Apparently, atheism represents only 1% of the American population,and that is itself probably an overestimate. Harris' first book, The End of Faith, has sold less than 200,000 copies. The first publishers to whom he sent the book, Random House, wouldn't even touch it. I myself might best be described as a provisional atheist. God may exist, but I don't see any reason why an individualized deity is necessary to explain the universe.

So, I'll be among the first in line when the book is released. The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon.Com. Look for a new book from Richard Dawkins as well.

Early Praise for Letter to a Christian Nation:

It’s a shame that not everyone in this country will read Sam Harris’ marvelous little book. They won’t, but they should.

— Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University, author of The Cosmic Landscape

Sam Harris’s elegant little book is most refreshing and a wonderful source of ammunition for those who, like me, hold to no religious doctrine. Yet I have some sympathy also with those who might be worried by his uncompromising stance. Read it and form your own view, but do not ignore its message.

— Sir Roger Penrose, emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford, author of The Road to Reality.

Reading Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation was like sitting ring side, cheering the champion, yelling “Yes!” at every jab. For those of us who feel depressed by this country’s ever increasing unification of church and state, and the ever decreasing support for the sciences that deliver knowledge and reduce ignorance, this little book is a welcome hit of adrenalin.

— Marc Hauser, Professor of Psychology, Biology. and Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, author of Moral Minds

Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality. Now when the subject arises, as it inevitably does, I can simply say: Read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.

— Janna Levin, professor of astronomy and physics at Columbia University, author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Read this book and decide your stance for the future.

— Michael S. Gazzaniga, Director of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Ethical Brain

I can’t sign my name to this blurb. As a New York Times best selling author of books about business, my career will evaporate if I endorse a book that challenges the deeply held superstitions and bigotry of the masses. That’s exactly why you should (no, you must) read this angry and honest book right away. As long as science and rational thought are under attack by the misguided yet pious majority, our nation is in jeopardy. I’m scared. You should be too. Please buy two, one for you and one for a friend you care about.

–Unsigned, New York Times best selling author

Who Killed More

Thanks Steve, for the picture.

If we add the 2/3 of the earth slaughtered in the coming tribulation, assuming it happens within the next couple decades, we would be somewhere around 4,622,038,344.

Can I get a hallelujia?


My favorite nihilism bumper sticker:

BAN HUMAN NATURE

Favorite rapture sticker:

REJOICE! JESUS IS COMING BACK TO SLAUGHTER OUR FAMILIES
AND SAVE THE EMBRYOS!

Now seriously. I am dead tempted to have this made and put on my car. I need your opinions. Should I do it?

Small Town America...

...Or large town, what difference would it make. This piece was written right after 9-11. I remember telling senor K I'd show it to him. Pretty interesting, humerous...and pathetic. This was posted, of all places, in a Scottish newspaper. Wonder what the world thinks of us.

The view from Smalltown, USA

The novel Fight Club depicted an America brought to its knees by anti-capitalist terrorists. As the shock waves of last week's attack on New York reach the author's home town of Portland, Oregon, he reacts to his fiction becoming reality. By Chuck Palahniuk

THE problem is I don't have a television so I have to visit people. I listen to the radio. Plus, there's always the phone and e-mails. I had to call a lot of folks. The other problem is that this is Oregon, 2000 miles from the attack.

My friend Mike shrugs and says: 'So? If people want to live in New York they need to accept the risks.' Another friend, Dan, who clerks at the farmers' market, says: 'It serves us right. How long can we continue to consume the majority of the Earth's resources?' A farmer comes by, and Dan stops talking. There's a sign outside in the parking lot. Dan's rearranged the plastic letters to read: 'Pray for peace.'

A relative calls to say it's the Jews trying to make Palestine look bad. My sister calls to say it's the Bush political machine. 'Every time we're in a depression,' she goes, 'what gets us out? A war.'

The local mayor comes on the radio every 10 minutes to say no-one has attacked Portland, Oregon, yet.

At the park where I walk my dog, a 55-year-old Vietnam veteran tells a group of young men: 'It's war. Yeah, it's war all right. And we're going to go over there and kick some camel- jockey butt.'

All these young men, all registered for the draft, they try to change the subject. The sun is warm. Our dogs play. The veteran talks about all the women he's slept with. He tells us he's a plant expert and gets paid $60 an hour to tell people their gardens suck. He says the government has already dispatched the military to destroy targets. He says we'll all have to fight in this one, but it will be a glorious war. He says he sleeps with his four dogs and every morning he has to wipe a layer of shed-dog hair off his face.

After an hour he's the only one left talking, and it's all war, war, war. Everyone else has left.

On the radio the conservative presenter Rush Limbaugh says Americans need to forget their differences of race, income, sex, religion. 'We just need to be happy with what we have,' he says. We need to unite against our common enemy.
I ask my neighbour, Linda, if she's worried about going to war and she says: 'Women don't have to fight in wars.' She says: 'We don't have equal rights so why should we support this country?'

My friend Monica says: 'I want to go to mass, but isn't religion what got us in this mess in the first place?' My mom calls to say: 'Well, we could use that federal budget surplus right about now.'

There are a lot more American flags around, but not on the majority of houses.
On television, when I visit friends, we watch the World Trade Centre towers crumble again and again. My friend Anuj in New York says: 'It wasn't surreal. It was hyper-real.'

On the radio, a local gas station-owner makes a public apology for boosting his gasoline prices to $5 a gallon. My friend Ken in New York says the grocery store shelves are bare. He stood on his roof and watched the disaster, so close he could see the individual panes of glass.

On the television there's only older white men talking. Newscaster Dan Rather reads some really profound Abraham Lincoln quotes between the same few seconds of video, the towers falling, again and again. The same shots of people falling, jumping to their death. At Mike's house, Romona comes in the room and watches someone falling 70 storeys. 'I saw that one already,' she tells us. She's brought take-out Mexican food and we eat it, channel- surfing for new and different video shots, angles, slow- motions. Mostly it's the same old death shots we've seen 100 times before.

The local mayor comes on the radio to say no-one has attacked Portland, Oregon, yet.

My friend Jim sends me an e-mail full of Nostradamus quotes that seem to prove this is the third world war. Still, when I check a volume of his prophecies, each line of the quote has been gleaned from a different place and the whole assembled to have this wild new meaning.

A couple of days ago I made a victim's rights statement in court. This was part of the procedure for sentencing the man convicted of killing my father in 1999. The law allows the defending attorney to cross-examine me, but the convicted man dismissed his attorney so he could question me himself.

My father's killer -- a convicted child-molester and rapist, now a multiple murderer -- he and I talked back and forth for a half hour. Then I had lunch with a reporter. Then I sat with the coroner and looked at photographs of my father's dead body, burned beyond recognition. We discussed the angle of the bullet, the contents of my father's stomach, how long he lived with both lungs punctured. How he was shot in the legs to cripple him first. In the photos both his legs are burned off, and the torso and head rest on a scrap of plywood.

I call my sister to tell her how the bullet passed through dad's diaphragm and his lungs. It missed dad's heart and stopped against his shoulder blade. Over the phone, I can hear she’s eating something. I ask if she wants to go to the sentencing – the death penalty looks likely – and she says no. Her local kite festival is that same week.

At home my doctor tells me this isn’t a good time to come off
Zoloft, a prescription drug for stress and depression. He says: “If you don’t like the side-effects, would you try Paxil?”

I’ve been on Zoloft for two years. My doctor says people have been on Zoloft for 20 years with no ill effects.

My friend Mark says Zoloft has saved his marriage. He used to look at the world and get so angry and frustrated. His wife maintains the erectile dysfunction side- effect is worth the hassle. They’re both very happy now.

At dinner, Monica shows me her bottle of Klonopin, an anticonvulsant. “Yeah, it’s addictive,” she says, “but they still prescribe it.” You only take it when you’re actually anxious, but she takes one. She gives me one. We order some wine. Her friend Russ wants a Klonopin, and Monica gives him one.
“Percocet [narcotic painkillers] and Valium,” my friend Linda, a nurse, says. “It’s the high everybody wants now.” She describes the vague symptoms of fibromyalgia and says faking is the best way to get an ongoing prescription.
On television, the towers fall again and again. The same people cartwheel down through the air. The same voice yells, off-camera, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”
In one shot, firemen pick through the rubble near burning wreckage and smashed cars. Behind them a large red digital clock says the current temperature, and Mike says: “That sign’s all messed up. With all those fires, it has to be hotter than 86 degrees.”

Dave calls with the address for a new bestiality website.

Diana calls from San Francisco, where she’s stranded on her book tour. From the airport, she says: “At least Anne Frank never had to tour with her book.”
On television, Bart Simpson says about Generation X: “We need a Vietnam to thin out their ranks.” On another Simpsons rerun, Bart watches the Superbowl, saying: “Stadium snipers, where are you?” On the news, the same dark silhouette of a jetliner plows into the second tower. Again and again. The burning fuel billows out. The same plume of yellow smoke rises from the tip of Manhattan. It’s yellow on Mike’s television. Every 10 minutes we see what Dan Rather calls “the fourth explosion”.

Monica asks me where I was when the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986. I was at work, my first job as a newspaper reporter, on a suburban street, and a strange woman leaned out of her house and shouted the news to me.

Neither Monica nor I can remember where we were for the Columbine High School shootings. Or the federal courthouse bombing in Oklahoma. Or the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas. Never mind any killings in Europe or Asia. Mariah Carey’s hotel crack-up. The Bill Clinton blow-job. The OJ Simpson car chase. All those other school shootings. It’s all gone fuzzy.
We remember the jokes.

“What colour were the Challenger traveller Christa McAuliffe’s eyes?”
“Blue. One blew east, one blew west.”

The OJ Simpson/Butcher of Brentwood jokes.

On the internet, we watch the school security video of Columbine, the video that police dubbed with popular dance music so more people would watch it.
On the radio, Live’s song Lightning Crashes has been established as the rock anthem for the “Attack on America”. Monica says: “I hate that line ‘Her placenta falls to the floor,’ but at least it’s not Elton John.”

After the last attack on the World Trade Centre, in 1993, television producers filmed a low-budget movie here in Portland. It was called Terror In The Towers. They shot it in a warehouse near my friend Suzie’s house, and her family was awake most nights, hearing explosions and the screams of dying actors.
Suzie calls to say: “I just hope they don’t film the television movie next to my house this time.”

My friend Jonah e-mails me a map he made that shows every house in his neighbourhood where they grow oriental poppies in the front yard. He attaches a recipe that uses ginger, lemon juice, crushed ice and poppy seed pods to make an opiate smoothie. He asks, can he use my blender?
On television, the towers fall in slow motion. The same crowds of people stand around on the West Side Highway, observing. There’s the same jiggling, chaotic shot taken by some cameraman fleeing the cloud of dust. Watching this, David says: “This is worse than The Blair Witch Project.”

Then he asks: “They ever find that intern, Chandra Levy?”

Another friend, Cory, calls to ask if I’m going to the Dada Ball, a big-ticket costume rave. I say no. Cory says it’s OK. “The president told everyone not to stop their lives.” She asks if I have any Vicodins left. Behind her I can hear a really good dance mix of that Suzanne Vega child abuse song.

At the lumberyard, my friend Larry helps me load wood into my truck. After we’re done, he stands there, silent, leaning against my truck’s tailgate. He just looks at the ground. Finally, he straightens up and wishes me a good day. I tell him to take it easy. If he’s stoned or sad, I don’t know.

At Geoff’s house, on television, it’s the same shots of the Pentagon, the towers falling, the field in Pennsylvania. The same burned people are being lifted into ambulances, and Geoff asks if they’ve announced any celebrities who were killed on the hijacked jets.

On the radio, Rush Limbaugh says this is the time for a return to traditional values. He wonders out loud, again and again, why the people on the hijacked planes did nothing to save themselves.

At the pharmacy, the druggist says that Paxil has a cumulative effect. My fear and anger and confusion, frustration, all this anxiety – the druggist, she says I should feel better in about three weeks.

Anuj e-mails from New York that September 11 will be the line of demarcation for Generation X. This will be our opportunity to become heroes. He says everyone should light a candle to show solidarity. He says to forward his e-mail to all my other friends.

The local mayor comes on the radio to say no-one has attacked Portland, Oregon, yet. Then David e-mails me the address for a sex doll website. It’s where they make the really expensive ones that cost over $1000.
Chuck Palahniuk is the author of Fight Club (Vintage, £6.99), Survivor (Vintage, £6.99) and Choke (Jonathan Cape, £10)

Even Stevphen and Atheism

I have started a book called "doubt a history" Jennifer Hecht. Interesting so far. Somewhat tedious yet informative study of how free thinkers from ancient Greece to modern times made progress by doubting the beliefs of their cultures. Interestingly enough, atheism was punishable by death at times in ancient Greece. According to Hecht's questionnaire, I am an "agnostic" because I answered "not sure" to questions like -do you think there is an underlying conscious force in the universe-. Not sure. It's tough for me to answer such questions because unless I am really adamantly certain of something I have to say "I'm not sure". My thinking is that there may be an aloof conscious interconnectiveness that can be aware and give a shit about the universe or be aloof from it simultaneously. so far, the longer I live, the closer to staunch materialism I get. But I think that the leap from matter to consciousness is more profound and more mysterious than the leap from nothingness to somethingness. It's almost... too good to be true. Or another way of saying it, it may just be too weird to be random despite how seemingly obvious materialism seems. If I really really embraced materialism, I would not even care about these issues anymore.


The following are some gut bustingly funny skits

1
2

The following is a really interesting looking 3 part BBC documentary on the history of Atheism. Geez, its hard to find a reason to burn three hours on TV anymore.

part 1
part 2
part 3

Turning the Corner

This week the American media zeitgeist turned a crucial corner. I noticed a distinct change in tone amongst the news outlets, probably best characterized by this Keith Olbermann monologue. The majority public response to Bush's latest broken record speach was something like "Oh c'mon, we're so fucking tired of your bullshit". Now the ball is rolling.

Are you a part of it or not?

This will haunt us for a generation

Then the backlash 25 years from now maybe something akin to a secular revival... if we last that long.

Souls in genes

Researchers breed permanently “happy” mice

Aug. 24, 2006Courtesy McGill Universityand World Science staff

A new breed of permanently “cheerful” mouse is providing new hope for treatment of clinical depression, researchers say.
The sci­en­tists stud­ied a gene called TREK-1, which can af­fect the flow of a brain chem­i­cal called ser­o­to­nin. This in turn in­flu­ences mood, sleep and sex­u­al­i­ty. By breed­ing mice with­out TREK-1, the re­searchers sa­id they cre­at­ed a de­pres­sion-resistant strain.

The find­ings ap­pear in the re­search jour­nal Na­ture Neu­ro­science this week.“De­pres­sion is a dev­as­tat­ing ill­ness, which af­fects a­round 10 per­cent of peo­ple at some point in their life,” sa­id Guy Debon­nel of McGill U­ni­ver­si­ty in Mont­re­al, Can­a­da, prin­ci­pal au­thor of the pa­per. Cur­rent treat­ments fail for a third of pa­tients, he added.Sci­en­tists al­so be­lieve mice can suf­fer moods a­kin to hu­man de­pres­sion, ev­i­denced by with­drawn and pas­sive be­hav­ior in the ro­dents. Some of the same brain chem­i­cals have been linked to both hu­man and ro­dent “de­pres­sion.”Debon­nel’s team tested the new­ly bred mice us­ing “be­hav­ioral, e­lec­tro­phys­io­log­i­cal and bio­chem­i­cal meas­ures known to gauge ‘de­pres­sion’ in an­i­mal­s,” he sa­id. “The re­sults re­al­ly sur­prised us. [They] acted as if they had been treated with an­tide­pres­sants for at least three week­s.” The re­search rep­re­sents the first time de­pres­sion has been e­lim­i­nat­ed by ge­net­i­cal­ly mod­i­fy­ing an or­gan­ism, he added. “The dis­cov­er­y of a link be­tween TREK-1 and de­pres­sion could ul­ti­mate­ly lead to the de­vel­op­ment of a new gen­er­a­tion of an­ti­de­pres­sant drugs.”

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I remember back in the day when people thought that moods and attitudes were related directly to soul qualities. I remember the day when you could look at a bright and shining personality and remark about how extraordinarily keen and well adapted that person is, as if the factors relating to that perky well-adaptedness were 100% related to personal life choices, up-bringing, outlook, angelic vs. demon posession or any number of metaphysical explanations. And now we learn that if we tweak a few amino acids here and there in a chain of code, we can make everyone a bright and shining soul- or a monster for that matter. Is there any room left for a soul?

The peculiar thing about the debate this question raises is that, regardless what your answer is- soul or no soul, we can ultimately attribute our entire cognitive and feeling experience to physical elements which we arguably have no control over.

On a personal note, when I reached the age of thirty, and decided that after 15 years of devoting my every waking minute and thought to the question of spirituality, to the search for meaning, to meditation, purpose, the edification of the soul, to studying the mind and the brain and science and people and intentions, and the stark reality of human nature - only to have to come to the conclusion that my entire life had been a lie, a deception, an empty fleeing from the pain of the brutally obvious; My entire pursuit of God, of transcendence, a soul, an immortal essence that I could call "real" and "eternal" and "true" collapsed only to be forced kicking and screaming with gut-wrenching reluctance to admit that my 30 years of existence provided no evidence whatsoever of any hint of free-will on my part, but just a dreamy sleep-walk through a hall of smoke and mirrors choosing at best between one illusion and another.

It's fascinating that the mice are conscious and feeling creatures with analogous nerve structures and behaviors to people, despite such tiny brains. They are neurologically geared to be capable of feeling severe torment and pain- little units of consciousness coralled in a lab for study, with no god to deliver them into the land of Canaan. It makes you wonder whose cage we're in and for what reason if not none.