Official Confession!

Haggard confesses.

"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality and I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all of my adult life."

(words of holiness in red)

I know what is most despicable- the fact that he lied straight faced in front of his wife and to his congregation. Imagine what his kids must be going through. Oh god, time to recruit the former cult member deprogrammers. We need about...oh... 30 million of them.

Updated information that is very interesting:

More on Haggard's battle against "Control"
Yesterday, Radio France's Rachel Maddow interviewed Jeff Sharlett, the author of "Soldiers of Christ," the definitive article on Ted Haggard published in Harpers last Spring.

From the interview, we learn the following facts about Pastor Ted's battle against a shadowy group of demon-possessed evil doers that he calls "Control."

Pastor Ted staked out homosexual bars and sex shops in an effort to recruit the establishment's patrons into a Christianist lifestyle.
He laid siege to homosexual bars and federal buildings by praying in front of them and rebuking the demons within them.

One Haggard follower would take a garden sprayer filled with blessed water and spray it onto sinful intersections.

Pastor Ted says that Satan sent a witch to stab him.
His parishioners say Haggard resurrected a dead person.

Interview link

Nabbed!!!!

"Our investigation and Pastor Haggard's public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct," the New Life Church's Overseer Board said in a statement.

Well, looks like he's fried. For the board to come out and not even try to downplay it one bit means they know he did it. They know it was more than a mere massage. On top of that, Haggard is lying and they know that too. Soon we will see the rehearsed confessional, replete with the tears of forced emotion, and a broken voiced pleading for forgiveness from Christ on high. Should be great theater. And the media will no doubt play the succession of those pastors whose footsteps he has traced- Swaggart and Bakker being the most well known.

God, with all these scandals the Republicans may lose their asses on Tuesday. Lets hope. Let the Iraq investigations begin. I can't wait for the day when the talk radio shitheads are made fun of the way they deserve, and the reptile-brained emotocons are marginalized and squeezed between the pages of history like a wilted flower. Our votes should be an apology to the world on behalf of Americans beginning to sober up after a riotous night of insane post-9/11 fear based hysteria.

As Bill Maher intoned (in different words than mine)- Bushes campaign to protect us from terrorism by incessently defending the virtues of a failed military campaign despite all evidence to the contrary is like saying that he keeps smearing our faces with shit while trying to sell us fly repellent. The republicans are the party of fly repellent.

Doesn't Jive Both Ways

“Hi Mike, this is Art,” one call began. “Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply.”

Now, something doesn't make sense here. Haggard claims he bought some but then decided never to use it. So if that's the case, why would he request MORE???

In defense of Haggard, one could also rebut the claims of the escort by asking why Haggard would call and ask for more over the phone when the escort claims that the only meth he used was in front of him during their liasons.

For me, the quantity of a $200 supply and the word "more" are damning to Haggard and suggest strongly that he is lying. If the backwoods hicks around here can afford meth, then a $200 supply must be a pretty good load of the stuff (I've absolutely no idea how much it costs, all I know is that people working at McDonalds can afford it). Haggard is almost assuredly lying, just based on what's available to the public to hear.

In defense of the escort's story, it could be that Haggard just meant that he wanted more meth to be available for their next encounter. According to the escort, the meth was not a standard part of his service, but something Haggard requested, so by asking if they could get some more Haggard was probably just requesting that a fat line was available for the next butt dart session.

Hmm, in the video of him in the car, it even looked like his wife didn't believe him. He's got a good poker face, but his face turned red, he closed his eyes and winced. I could read it. He's lying his ass off and he's goin' down!

Pastor Haggard's Dripping Hypocrisy

If you send me a thousand dollars, I won't tell your wife!

Hahahaha!!!!

Ok, so maybe I really don't feel that sorry for the bastard.

Breaking News

Another one bites the dust. Ted Haggard, possibility the highest of the highest up Christians in America has resigned after allegations that he paid a male prostitute to have sex with him regularly for 3 years.

In a way I feel elated. That the lying bastards get caught. But there is also an overpowering sadness. I feel sorry for the man living such a profound lie. I even feel sorry for the thousands of duped parishoners living their lie.

Haggart speaks to president Bush on the phone every monday morning. Wonder what they discuss...bible prophecy? Does Haggard influence foreign policy based on bible prophecy?

Here's a pissed off Richard Dawkins, watching a sermon by Haggard in his state of the art mega-church. I can read Richard's mind here- "All this hard work I've done all my life, all this data we've collected and dissected, this insurmountable testament to the beauty of the workings of nature.. all trumped by this clown spouting his nonsense to people who don't know enough to even question." As Dawkins gets older, he must realize even moreso than I have that a worldview based on sober educated reason is always merely an aristocrats high parlor game, nothing more. No more significant than an interactive game of Sodoku or the annual Linares Chess tournement. No more influential on the masses than Tiddley Winks.

It is a wonder of wonders that so many of these preachers are gay. If they just wanted heterosexual sex because they felt unfulfilled it would be different. How could anyone read Leviticus and come away feeling safe for being gay..let alone the nations highest ranking Christian leader?

If this isn't curtains for these guys and their integrity what is? But I've said this before. Unfortunately, there is no amount of evidence or persuasion that would change these people's outlooks. But maybe it will keep some of their asses out of the polls on Tuesday.

Addendum: "Jones also said Haggard snorted methamphetamine before their sexual encounters to heighten his experience."

"Jones said he has voice mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash, though he declined to make any of it available to the AP."

"There's some stuff on there (the voice mails) that's pretty damning," he said.

And imagine the devilish little person who came up with this title for their coverage:

Evangelical leader quits amid sex probe

Excellent Article

There was a balanced article in the Washington Post about Sam Harris which is worth a read. It talks a bit about his background, and points out the negative reactions of religious moderates.

I am perpetually saddened by the arguments of moderates which invariably fall under the following lines of unreason:

Moderate's Steps to Create Meaning out of Nonsense

1.) Claim that the holy book in question was inspired by the creator of the universe, but tainted by human flaws. This way we can throw out all those tiny little irrelevencies such as- how the religion started, why people believed in the God in the first place, what drove the people to ethinically cleanse their neighbors, the reason behind their customs and rituals, the origin of their sense of what is moral and right. Just minor stuff, of course. Throw it all away, and keep a few psalms and the sermon on the mount. The rest was tainted by culture.

2.) Claim something like this- "Religion doesn't make people bigots," says Reza Aslan, author of "No God but God," a history of Islam. "People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology." In other words, only bigots actually believe their holy books. Good people use their pre-established sense of morality to discern that the bulk of their holy books are grossly immoral.

3.) Realize that, because there are patches of enlightened insight in every holy book, they therefore must have been inspired by the creator of the universe, and should rightfully be classified as "holy" books and given respect accordingly. Especially if their jackets are made of leather, the page edges are painted gold, and the translation is antiquated and totally divorced from references to the modern world.

4.) The big bamboozle, the big fraud, the big trump card of unreason. Say this: "he has taken these "Old Books" at their literal word, instead of studying the way that the faithful actually engage the scriptures". What a crock of FUCKING insanity!!! I could just as easily say that we should parse Mein Kampf and decide that we should never belittle the tome again because of it's many prosaic lines emphasising loyalty, courage and honor. Taken as a whole, it's a nightmare. But parts of Mein Kampf were clearly inspired by God Almighty so it's a big holy book. Especially if we were to to bind it in leather, paint the edges gold and put Hitler's more innocuous phrases in red.

Sam Harris used this glorious retort to this pathetic line of babbling grasping stone age madness in a recent debate in New York (described in article):

"If the Koran were exactly the same," he said, toward the end of the night, "and there were just one line added to it, and the line said, 'If you see a red-haired woman on your lawn at sunset, kill her,' I can tell you what kind of world we'd live in. We'd live in a world where red-haired women would be killed often. We'd live in a world where people like yourself" -- and here Harris gestures to his opponent, Oliver McTernan -- "would say, 'That's not the true Islam.' Twenty women in Baghdad would have their heads cut off and someone would come forward and say, 'This has nothing to do with Islam. Some of them were strawberry blond. Some of them were strangled."

Flags of Our Fathers

Flags of Our Fathers

See it in the theater.

My favorite director, Clint Eastwood does it again. Nobody directs more psychologically honest films.

This was better than Saving Private Ryan on all levels in my opinion- war realism, message, gravitas.

No wonder Republicans are railing about it. Once again, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

This might be the best new rules I've ever seen.

Indeed, how many times can people be wrong for how long before they are completely banned from having anyone care about their opinions?

Bad Reasons to Be Good

Do We Really Need Bad Reasons To Be Good?
Bad reasons to be good
By Sam Harris October 22, 2006

THE MIDTERM elections are fast approaching, and their outcome could well be determined by the “moral values” of conservative Christians. While this possibility is regularly bemoaned by liberals, the link between religion and morality in our public life is almost never questioned. One of the most common justifications one hears for religious faith, from all points on the political spectrum, is that it provides a necessary framework for moral behavior. Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. The political version of this morality claim is that our country was founded on “Judeo-Christian principles,” the implication being that without these principles we would have no way to write just laws.

It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature’s brain and its experience of the world.

Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called “moral” questions—such as gay marriage—where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.

Consider the suffering of the millions of unfortunate people who happen to live in sub-Saharan Africa. The wars in this part of the world are interminable. AIDS is epidemic there, killing around 3 million people each year. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how bad your luck is if you are born today in a country like Sudan. The question is, how does religion affect this problem?

Many pious Christians go to countries like Sudan to help alleviate human suffering, and such behavior is regularly put forward as a defense of Christianity. But in this case, religion gives people bad reasons for acting morally, where good reasons are actually available. We don’t have to believe that a deity wrote one of our books, or that Jesus was born of a virgin, to be moved to help people in need. In those same desperate places, one finds secular volunteers working with organizations like Doctors Without Borders and helping people for secular reasons. Helping people purely out of concern for their happiness and suffering seems rather more noble than helping them because you think the Creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it.

But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to be much less good than they might otherwise be.

We have to realize that we decide what is good in our religious doctrines. We read the Golden Rule, for instance, and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: If a man discovers that his bride is not a virgin on their wedding night, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22: 13-21). If we are civilized, we will reject this as utter lunacy. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions, keeping the real issue of human happiness in view. The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.

As we consider how to run our own society and how to help people in need, the choice before us is simple: Either we can have a 21st-century conversation about morality and human happiness—availing ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last 2,000 years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to an Iron Age conversation as it is preserved in our holy books.

Wherever the issue of “moral values” surfaces in our national conversation in the coming weeks, ask yourself which approach to morality is operating. Are we talking about how to best alleviate human suffering? Or are we talking about the whims of an invisible God?

Sam Harris is the author of Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. He can be reached through his website, samharris.org.

The God of Coincidence

At times like these I am forced to doubt my provisional atheism and concede that there must be a God -- with a sense of humor.

This coincidental group of images from "Yahoo's Most Popular" is too good to pass up. For the married men viewing these images, please note the wrecked home at the top left.

Aaron, how can you explain this through sheer chance?

Impossible. Give up your atheistic ways.

Today's Moment of Zen

Steve jovanovich: Are you planning on sleeping?
Aaron James: no
Aaron James: r u?
Steve jovanovich: That picture of you as a child is quite awful.
Steve jovanovich: You looked fat then, and you're certainly fat now.
Steve jovanovich: (And getting fatter.)
Steve jovanovich: Aaron, are you ever planning on doing anything productive with your life, or are you simply going to attack random people for no defensible reason except out of spite for life?
Steve jovanovich: Why, exactly, are you so mean?

Dawkins on Colbert

<--Richard Dawkins sitting in a pew at Pastor Ted Haggard's church listening to a sermon he later called similar to a Nuremburg rally (actual rally pictured below).

I know Richard.... I feel the same way. It's like being on a different planet sometimes.

Anyways, the other day I was in the shower or something and I was wondering what Dawkins would do if he were on the Colbert report. I thought maybe he would be dry and the humor would fly right past him.

Surprise surprise. He did appear on Colbert, and he had a nice suit, done up hair, and bleached white teeth. He even looked sort of hip in a crusty scholarly way. Looks like he's not beyond appearances to promote his excellent book "The God Delusion", which I am almost done with and will write a review on soon.

Experiments in Musical Intelligence

While I know this blog isn't abuzz with readers (yet), if anyone should have happened to have read my post below "Counterpoint", I just found the web page where EMI's musical compositions can be listened to.

It is:

http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm

EMI's efforts are impressive. The pieces are essentially built on the scaffolding of the composers' original compositions. While they lack the "soul" (the drama and creativity of human compositions) they are nonetheless interesting.

Functioning of the Constitution

A federal judge has just ordered that Cheney's "visiting logs" be released (which would reveal his doubtlessly embarrassing contacts with various lobbyists, and this just before the elections).

However, one thing Republicans are good at (as with all good lawyers) is framing an argument, no matter how absurd, in their favor.

Cheney's attorneys say: “This case is about protecting the effective functioning of the vice presidency under the Constitution...”

Yah... right.

Now watch this. Rearrange the words just slightly and (as with all lies) viola, out pops the truth:

This case is about protecting the effective functioning of the Constitution under the vice-presidency.

A democracy needs to know what its leaders are doing.

BAM! Take that bitch!

Sam Harris takes on two absurd religious fanatics.

I can't see where the argument is. Maybe I've become like Dawkins and am so far beyond the pale that I can't even understand what the debate is anymore.

Morality and Selection

I wrote this in an exchange in Amazon on Sam Harris.

For a discussion of why there is no "god", read Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion". Letter to a Christian Nation is not really a book providing evidence that there is no God, it was a book challenging those who believe they know what God is, or that they kow what God wants or has written etcetera. As Michael Shermer has said, it's fine if people believe in god, as long as your god doesn't *do* anything. As soon as a person claims that their god does something in the world, it enters the realm of testable observation, and that almost invariably bodes poorly for the belief in question.There really are two entirely seperate arguments, and Christians try to conflate the two. The one is whether there is some sort of creative force that began everything, the other is, if there is a creative force what do we know about it? Christians often forget that a mysterious universe doesn't provide any evidence for the existence of *their* favorite genocidal Middle Eastern deity.Some people can talk about the origins of the universe, but the other more pertinent question is the origin of our earth and species, which to any intelligent non-brain-washed observer certainly evolved through an amoral process of natural selection. The evidence for this is almost as strong as the evidence that the earth is round. The great religious concepts of morality and altruism have clearly been demonstrated to be present for survival purposes in many animal species, and it is not the remotest leap of faith to deduce that morality was invented by natural selection in humans as well for the same survival purposes, by the same process of selection, thus rendering even the concept of a "moral" God absurd to those who understand natural selection. Morality was designed by nature via a violent selection process for the express purpose of increasing survivability on earth, not for an immortal soul. The problem is that most Christians don't understand natural selection enough to even make their ears available for the non-theist's most powerful arguments.

Counterpoint

Today on NPR, on the heel of Fresh Air, I heard the tail end of a report on David Cope's EMI, "Experiments in Musical Intelligence", a computer program which can emulate various musical styles, including Bach, Chopin, Mahler and Navajo (yes, native American music).

Apparently, Cope, a composer himself, has advanced the programming sufficiently enough that EMI can now produce full concertos. During a symposium, three concertos were presented to an audience: a concerto by JS Bach, a concerto by Larson in the style of J.S. Bach, and a concerto by EMI in the style of JS Bach. The audience largely identified Bach's concerto, but interestingly concluded that EMI's concerto had been written by a Larson and Larson's by the computer.

First, my sympathies go out to Larson. I'm not a very good pianist and I'll never forget the day a young woman said that I played the piano like a typewriter. Such efficient and devastating put-downs are rare and to be savored by the victim. As for Larson, poor man, where does one go after an audience picks the computer as being the more soulful composer? A hundred years ago, we would find Larson hanging by the neck from his own rope (in the viscinity of his piano), I'm sure.

Anyway, the organizer of the event was mathematician Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Godel, Escher, Bach". Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize in 1980. Here is a part of what Hofstadter wrote as a result of EMI.

What worries me about computer simulations is not the idea that we ourselves might be machines; I have long been convinced of the truth of that. What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul. This prospect, rendered most vivid and perhaps even near-seeming by the development of EMI, worries me enormously, and in my more gloomy moods, I have articulated three causes for pessimism:

(1) Chopin (for example) is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.
(2) Music is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.
(3) The human soul/mind is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.

Let me briefly comment on these. Pertaining to (1), since I have been moved to the core for my entire life by pieces by Chopin, if it turns out that EMI can churn out piece after piece that "speaks like Chopin" to me, then I would be thereby forced to retrospectively reassess all the meaning that I have been convinced of having detected in Chopin's music, because I could no longer have faith that it could only have come from a deep human source. I would have to accept the fact that Frédéric Chopin might have been merely a tremendously fluent artisan rather than the deeply feeling artist whose heart and soul I'd been sure I knew ever since I was a child.

That loss would be an inconceivable source of grief to me. In a sense, the loss just described would not be worse than the loss
incurred by (2), since Chopin has always symbolized the power of music as a whole, to me. Nonetheless, I suppose that having to toss all great composers out the window is somehow a bit more troubling than having to toss just one of them out.
The loss described in (3), of course, would be the ultimate affront to human dignity. It would be the realization that all of the "computing power" that resides in a human brain's 100 billion neurons and its roughly ten quadrillion synaptic connections can be bypassed with a handful of state-of-the-art chips, and that all that is needed to produce the most powerful artistic outbursts of all time (and many more of equal power, if not greater) is a nanoscopic fraction thereof -- and that it can all be accomplished, thank you very much, by an entity that knows nothing of knowing, seeing, hearing, tasting, living, dying, struggling, suffering, aging, yearning, singing, dancing, fighting, kissing, hoping, fearing, winning, losing, crying, laughing, loving, longing, or caring.

OK. This is all a bit too melodramatic for me. Far be it for me to judge Hofstadter, but there is a very clear fourth possibility and the fact that Hofstadter fails to consider it, or that it possibly doesn't even occur to him, bespeaks a man with an obviously too-elevated opinion of himself. Here it is:

4.) Hofstadter's soul/mind is a lot shallower than Hofstadter ever thought.

I listened to the extract of EMI's Bach concerto on the program, and while it was clearly in the Bach style, I didn't for a minute think it was by Bach. Yes, I was impressed, but it was clearly a modern redux. It had all the soulful trappings but lacked the soul. To be fair, there aren't many things I am an expert on, but Bach is one of them. And this brings me to my next thought:

Fact is, the majority of classical music listeners can't tell the difference between J.C. Bach (Bach's youngest son) and early to middling Mozart. There are few listeners who could tell the difference between Dittersdorf (a second tier classical composer) and Haydn.

Music is a language. Just as the vast majority will never master an instrument (like me & my piano) the vast majority will also be limited in their ability to appreciate music. Only about 2% of America's population listens to classical music with any regularity. That means that 98% of America could NOT tell the difference between EMI and Bach. Does that mean EMI has equaled Bach? No, it means that the American public is not conversant with the language of classical music, and Bach in particular. It would be like asking an American to differentiate the different dialects of Chinese.

Getting back to Hofstadter. Instead of concluding that Chopin, Music, or all of humanity is a lot shallower than Hofstadter ever imagined, maybe it's just that Hofstadter is a lot shallower than Hofstadter ever imagined.

This possiblity doesn't even seem to occur to him . That is, Hofstadter drags down all of humanity with him!

The ego is breathtaking.

I vote for option (4). Hofstadter's appreciation of Chopin is a lot shallower than he ever dreamt. The human soul lives on.

Anybody who thinks they can fool me with a pastiche of Bach, bring it on.

Why I am Technically an Agnostic

So, I finished the first half of "The God Delusion", which is about the major arguments from a philosophical and probabilistic point of view. I'm all fine and dandy accepting atheism within the earthly aquarium. Dawkins had my full support until he began the cosmic anthropic principle, which is where I always get stuck. I get stuck there because that's where one needs to have faith no matter what one believes. Arguments against theism and most ideas of deism are pretty easy for me to deal with. My major disapproval of theisms and moral deisms are:

1.) Nature obviously used an arbitrary process of natural selection as it's design apparatus. Much of the selection process and the design process is foolish, senseless, amoral, brutal, and absurd.

2.) Human beings are unique, but they are still entirely bound into this "evil process". Our brains and nervous systems are designed for self-deception, interpersonal manipulation, tribalism, the achievement of sex over nearly all other goals at all times (within the years of our biological youthfulness). We engage in a perpetually disingenuous tribal politicization of everything imaginable from food to sex to division of labor, class distinction etc..., and we intermix all ideas of morality and spirituality as tools or weapons into this hodge-podge of one-up-man-ship and grasping for social leverage. Morality seems clearly to be used as a social tool and seems no more significant than a peacock's feathers in the scheme of the natural world and it's evolving drama. The illusion is almost air-tight. Secondly, "Truth" and the seeking of it has always been merely a hobby for particular very strange people who are often physically impaired, past sexual prime (a condition nature didn't select for), sexually deprived, homosexual or otherwise outcast, or in that rare distinction of being bright enough or persuasive enough to actually make a living by thinking. In short, truth is not important to the great majority of people, because the human body/mind is designed to falsely equate happiness with truth. The equation of happiness with truth reaches it's apex in the Hindu idea of SatChitAnanda. God is bliss and peace. They forgot to add ignorance to the triad. There is perhaps no greater reason why spirituality must be darwinianly constructed and body based than the yogic concept of SatChitAnanda.

3.) Spiritual experiences are virtually the only reason we have to suspect deism as being true, assuming that our rational observations are clear and unbiased enough to have already rejected theism. In my estimation, neuroscience has put a devastating dent in the postulation of a soul. After being a member of a meditation cult and studying spiritual experiences of meditators I am as close to perfectly convinced that it is mere brain masturbation as I can be. Not that it is worth disposing of. Only that it does not indicate the existence of a soul or God any more than being conscious of anything does. Me being conscious while typing this message is equally and identically as persuasive that there is a soul as having a near death experience and being embraced by the light.

There are two other arguments to consider, one I will name facetiously "The Patrick fallacy", and the other "the argument from consciousness". The Patrick fallacy says that spiritual experiences and psi events are real things which shatter the creed of materialism, but the reason these phenomena are not provable is because the deistic forces of the universe intentionally created this earthly environ as a place for learning via limitation. Thus, proving psi in a laboratory is actively opposed and thwarted by the powers that be and we will never be able to prove psi even if it is real. I'm not sure if even Patrick still believes his own argument. But many people do. To me it seems like grasping and is no more worthy of discussion than Pascal's wager.

4.) People are scared and they make shit up. It took me about three decades to realize this. I was quite slow and sheltered.

Those 4 reasons cover the easy part- dismissing theism and the great majority of deistic ideas.
Then Dawkins tackles the anthropic principle. I can handle the first part of it- where we must assume that if there are a billion billion planets in the universe and only one in a billion of them can support life, then that still leaves a billion that support life. Fair enough. It's rare but not all that scarce overall.

Then we get to the bugaboo. The cosmic anthropic principle. Dawkins provided no compelling argument here. It takes faith to think that somehow science will discover another exlpanatory device as powerful as evolution to explain the design of the universe. Talk of multiverses and black holes creating universes with differing physical properties strike me as no different than genesis creation stories. We've no earthly idea, let alone an idea fit for the universe. The sheer odds against life are staggering. Bewildering. And I don't think our science is even aware of all the odds against that are yet to be discovered. But assuming the anthropic principle is right and the fact we are here means that whatever laws were necessary to create life had to have happened, there is still a profound quandary. One which Dawkins spent a half of one sentence mentioning. Lets go ahead and assume we are just extremely lucky, and we happen to live in one of a billion billion universes where the properties are such that stars can make atoms which can make replicating molecules. Even despite that, we have hit the lottery yet again. We are conscious. We aren't just Terry Schiavos, we have conscious awareness. We aren't just alive, we are aware. Assuming that consciousness requires a specific electrical property to exist, with specific electrical constants which, if tweaked a tiny bit one way or another, would render consciousness impossible in our universe, we must admit we have hit yet another jackpot. A jackpot upon a jackpot upon a jackpot, with inevitably more jackpots yet to be discovered. It's too much for me. Maybe god is not worth knowing, but we cannot rule out pantheism.

Consciousness is equally as mysterious as the origin of the universe. The argument from consciousness is powerful and enough to make me agnostic at least in regards to pantheism. Then there is the zombie element which adds spice to the argument. Why wasn't it good enough to have merely evolved as automatons. We could conceivably be able to function normally without consciousness. We could have sex, cook, clean, work and everything but just be robots instead of conscious participants. The leap to consciousness is just as weird as the leap from the primordial ooze to a replicating cell. Why did nature need it? Did complexity invent consciousness? Or did complexity merely pull something out of nature which was already always there?

I strongly think we are extinguished at death. But I remain unconvinced either way.

The God Delusion

I am reading Richard Dawkins' new book "The God Delusion" and am finding it thoroughly enjoyable. His wit and humor are highly entertaining. I found a passage in there just now that cleverly refutes the entire "logic" of intelligent design in one sentence:

"Predators seem beautifully "designed" to catch prey animals, while prey animals seem equally beautifully "designed" to escape them. Whose side is God on?"

Optical Illusion

The brain is an amazing deceiver. We say that we are sure that something is the way it seems. The schizophrenic is certain that the voices are real etc...

Check this one out.

Pulling One Out

Have you ever had to pull one out from the deep inner recesses of your uncharted cavernous ass?

Holy Balls

Well, I'll be.

At last, I found something I actually agree about with Sean Hannity. In fact, I think his final statement here was brilliant.

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.