I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man
I compared the travelers I caught with this bed
it was hard to avoid–I admit–stretching limbs cutting legs
the patients died but the more there were who perished
the more I was certain my research was right
the goal was noble progress demands victims

I longed to abolish the difference between the high and the low
I wanted to give a single form to disgustingly varied humanity
I never stopped in my efforts to make people equal

– Zbigniew Herbert, Damastes (also known as Procrustes) Speaks, Translation: John and Bogdana Carpenter

poem in full here

Thelema Quotes’ fifteenth installment deals with the concept of ideals. As always, all quotes are from Aleister Crowley or The Book of the Law.

Quotation #1

“…we are born into a World which is in Bondage to Ideals; to them we are perforce fitted, even as the Enemies to the Bed of Procrustes.”

-Liber Aleph, “De Vita Corrigenda”

Quotation #2

“The man who fails to recognize [life as an attempt to realize one's own nature in one's own soul] is hopelessly bewildered by the irrational character of the universe, which he takes to be real; and he cannot but regard it as aimless and absurd. The adventures of his body and mind, with their desires for material and moral well-being, are obviously as foredoomed to disaster as Don Quixote’s. He must be a fool if he struggles on (against inexorable fate) to obtain results which he knows can only end in catastrophe, a climax the more bitter as he clings the more closely to his impossible ideals.”

-Commentary to The Book of the Law I:29

Quotation #3

“What is necessary is not to seek after some fantastic ideal, utterly unsuited to our real needs, but to discover the true nature of those needs, to fulfill them, and rejoice therein.”

-Magick Without Tears, chapter VIII

Quotation #4

“…thou art born into Dis-Ease; where are many false and perverted Wills, monstrous Growths, Parasites, Vermin are they, adherent to thee by Vice of Heredity, or of Environment or of evil Training. And of all these Things the subtlest and most terrible, Enemies without Pity, destructive to thy will, and a Menace and Tyranny even to thyself, are the Ideals and Standards of the Slave-gods, false Religion, false Ethics, even false Science.”

-Liber Aleph, “De Via Libertatis”

Quotation #5

“Each child must develop its own Individuality, and Will, disregarding alien Ideals. … Let children educate themselves to be themselves. Those who train them to standards cripple and deform them. Alien ideals impose parasitic perversions. … Standards of education, ideals of Right-and-Wrong, conventions, creeds, codes, stagnate Mankind.”

-”On the Education of Children”

Quotation #6

“[The Law of Thelema] admits that each member of the human race is unique, sovereign and responsible only to himself. In this way it is the logical climax of the idea of democracy. Yet at the same time it is the climax of aristocracy by asserting each individual equally to be the centre of the universe… The Law of Thelema does not require the individual to behave himself because God set the squire and the parson to boss him… Modern social unrest is largely due to misunderstanding of the Law of Thelema… Under the Law of Thelema, all false ideals and incongruous ambitions will be driven away as delusions.”

-Confessions, chapter 87

Quotation #7

“Know then, o my Son, that all Laws, all Systems, all Customs, all Ideals and Standards which tend to produce Uniformity, being in direct Opposition to Nature’s Will to change and to develop through Variety, are accursèd. Do thou with all thy Might of Manhood strive against these Forces, for they resist Change, which is Life; and thus they are of Death.”

-Liber Aleph, “De Lege Motus”

Quotation #8

“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.”

-Confessions, chapter 65

Feel free to leave your thoughts on these quotations and suggestions for future topics in the comments.

For more information on these topics check out these links:

• Liber Aleph
• The Old & New Commentaries to The Book of the Law
• “On the Education of Children”
• Magick Without Tears, chapter 8
• Confessions, chapter 87
• Confessions, chapter 65

Love is the law, love under will.

Feel free to leave your thoughts on these quotations and suggestions for future topics in the comments .

Is Your Media Shop the Right Fit for the Digital Age?

Nassim Taleb’s marvelous book of aphorisms is called The Bed of Procrustes, named after the myth of Procrustes, a cruel owner of a roadside estate between Athens and Eleusis in ancient Greece. According to Taleb,

He abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched.

Taleb’s point is that we humans tend to “squeeze the world into crisp, commoditized ideas.” In short, we try and fit things we don’t understand into our particular worldview. But, what if the new things don’t fit?

As a digital media agency owner faced with keeping up with the times and (more importantly) earning margins from notoriously labor intensive digital campaigns, it is tempting to fall back on time-worn models. If you think about the tried and true “agency” model, it is exactly what the dictionary says it is: “a consensual fiduciary relationship in which one party acts on behalf of and under the control of another in dealing with third parties.” In other words, the client can do the work himself, but would rather stick to making widgets or selling plane tickets than have 300 different media and technology relationships to contend with.

The problem? That’s not enough anymore. What clients want—and an increasing number of them expect, is a different definition of “agency.” Maybe even a legal understanding of the term: the person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved. Is your digital agency exerting true power on behalf of your clients, or are you just buying media? I believe that, in a world where technology enables most agencies to have ubiquitous access to media and software tools, the modern digital agency needs to go beyond traditional notions of “agency” and provide their clients with unique expertise.

The traditional agency “bed” is still rather misshapen for the world of emerging technology. Most shops still don’t have a cohesive social strategy (beyond Facebook); the technology to properly target audiences through exchanges; or the ability to leverage technology to wring performance from digital creative. Some do, and are leveraging relationships with social technology providers, DSPs, and creative optimization companies. The problem here is that many of those technology providers are going directly to your clients as well.  So, how do you defend against disintermediation and start building proprietary expertise to enable you to win and retain digital business in the future?

• Data: Create it, analyze it, tie into your clients’ data, and make it actionable. I know an agency in upstate New York that only gets paid every time its client performs an oil change. The agency is tied into their client’s POS system, and gets a true end-to-end view of attribution. They know how they are getting people to the business, when, and how they are getting them to return. I know other agencies that, through tools like Datran’s Aperture, are getting a household-level view of who is converting on their online campaigns, and using online data to go offline to seek new customers and reengage them. If you are not leveraging the data you currently have—and seeking to partner with your client to create or get access to new streams of data, then you are not being an extension of power to your client.

• Technology: How is your shop leveraging available technology to gain efficiency? Media platforms like Transis, Facilitate, and TRAFFIQ (disclosure: I work for TRAFFIQ) offer agencies the ability to let workflow technology handle the blocking and tackling of digital media (RFPs, AdOps, billing, etc) so agencies can work on things that have value (strategy, creative execution, data analysis).  What about real time bidding technology that uses machine learning to auto-optimize campaigns based on performance data? If you are not leveraging technologies like these, then you are already in danger of becoming extinct.

• People: If you are in fact going to leverage data and technology to transform your agency business, then you are going to necessarily need different people. In the good old days, you could hire a 22-year old for $25,000 and bill them out at $40,000. Unfortunately, the 22 year old wants $35,000 these days, and by the time you train them to be a “digital media expert,” a larger shop will pay them $50,000 to take advantage of the free training you gave them, and start billing them out at $75,000. Also, that 22 year old media person who used to good at collating spreadsheets and ignoring publisher e-mails is not the person who is going to transform your business. Someone who can dive into data to determine media placements—or someone who is passionate about the social space and understands the new social technology ecosystem are the folks that are going to make a difference (and profit) for your agency now.

In the end, Procrustes faced poetic justice. One of his guests was the mighty Theseus, of Minotaur-slaying fame. Theseus invited Procrustes to lie in his own bed and, seeing it slightly too small for his frame, decapitated him to create the perfect fit. Your agency may not currently be the right fit for clients that need advanced digital agency help. The answer, however, is to make your bed fit your clients better, rather than shrink them down so they fit into your legacy paradigm.

[This article originally appeared in Adotas 3/16/11]

In Greek mythology, Procrustes is an innkeeper.  He feeds his guests, than measures them against his bed.  Those too long have their legs chopped off until they fit the bed precisely.  Those too short are stretched on the rack.  Theseus puts an end to the horror by lopping off Procrustes head, when he proved too long for his own bed.

The bed may be looked on as a fixed standard and the guest’s size as something, somehow to be fit to the standard.  My friend meant the bed to be the theory. The people, the evidence, are to be adapted to fit the theory.  For example, we might hypothesize that government intervention is important in creating jobs in a time of high unemployment.  Liberals might say yes: Conservatives no.  We might argue about the available evidence—with both sides busily stretching the evidence to support their claims.  Does that sound as wonderful to you as it does to me?  We might actually be arguing about evidence.  We could do research on each other’s claims and perhaps come to a rational conclusion. 

Today, some have extended the idea of Procrustes bed, to make it nearly unrecognizable.  We might, for example, have Palinsbed, where neither the theory not the evidence matters—provided only that the bed was made by hard-working American workers, working without job destroying regulations, in the solid, workaday, heartland of America.  Glennbeckbed might have both the theory and the evidence made from whole cloth, as in—the three legged bed must be better as it was built by the founding fathers, as it clearly states in “The Book of the Founding Fathers,” by John Birch.  Or perhaps, we might run across religiousbed, where the evidence doesn’t matter worth a damn, as the bed is sacred to Jesus or Mohammed or Moses or a prophet of your choice.

Give the exercise a try.  What beds can you come up with?

Thus: ‘For any phenomenological question “why do I experience X”, there is a corresponding heterophenomenological question “why does the subject say ‘I experience X’?”.  To quote Dennett, “The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness.”

While I can readily understand that reported experiences may not seem to tally with measurable body states (any partner or parent knows ‘I’m hungry/not hungry/tired/not tired’ as what have been called Freudian denials), and may also not seem to tally with their real experiences when these are examined free from normative constraints of various sorts on their experience of their experience, it seems to me that along with the ‘heterophenomenological’ question – “why does the subject say ‘I experience X’?” – there is a ‘homophenomenological’ question: – “why do I say ‘I and others experience X about the subject’s reported experience’ is more valid than the subject’s experience?”

This is to make what seem to me two important errors.  One is to deny one form of existence and experience its own validity as existential experience, which undermines experience of experience as experience, the experience being investigated here, missing important information on experience of experience. The other is to deny that form of existence and experience its own validity as experiential existence, which undermines experience of existence as existence, so reducing existence to only those experienced existences that are agreed, missing important information on existence as experience.  Perhaps most importantly, it franchises and farms out examination of existence and experience to ‘experts’.  This goes nowhere; all it produces is emerging middles for ‘expert experience’ to examine, as a sort of ‘rent-seeking’.  Animal Farm eat your heart out.

Theseus killing Procrustes, 570–560 BC

Procrustes had a house alongside a well-traveled road in Greece, a strategically placed bed-and-breakfast. Somewhat stout, he seemed an affable man with a gracious manner. He liked things clean and tidy. And he wanted his guests to leave his hospitable place better than when they arrived, looking like a perfectly proportioned Greek statue. Most days he could be seen sitting comfortably in his rocking chair on the porch of his house, smoking his pipe, welcoming travelers and offering them hospitality. Smoke from his pipe conveyed a homey fragrance and his beard was a reassuring grandfatherly white. The house was neat and well-kept. It looked like a safe haven to tired travelers. Most evenings there was a guest or two. After welcoming them and providing them dinner, Procrustes had a bed in his house that he described as having the unique property that it would exactly fit the frame of whoever slept in it. What Procrustes didn’t say was how this was the case: After his guests were fast asleep, Procrustes would enter their rooms and complete his hospitality. A short person would be stretched on a rack until he or she filled the bed; for a tall person whatever hung over of arms and legs would be cut off to fit the bed. Everyone was made over to fit the dimensions of the bed, either by stretching or by amputation. When his guests left the next morning, whether aching or hobbling, they measured to the dimensions of a perfect Greek.

That stud on the vase is supposed to be Theseus, the Athenian hero who went on to slay the Minotaur, dealing with a ruffian named Procrustes.

Procrustes was famous for his bed. He invited passers-by to spend the night and to lie* in his bed. The bed was always too short or too long. So Procrustes “adjusted”, not the bed, but the guest as he was sleeping. He either stretched the guest (Procrustes = ‘the stretcher’) or cut off his legs.

Theseus eventually dealt with Procrustes by making him, Procrustes, fit his own bed. So there.

But from this myth we have the great term Procrustean bed. It applies whenever we force something into a size or a result (as with statistics) that is not natural and thus incorrect or inelegant.

I was thinking of the Procrustean bed once again while writing my piece for The Economist this week.

You recall my musings on the subject of a text’s optimal length, and how important it is neither to go under or over it. Well, in most print media, and certainly in The Economist, lengths are fixed in advance. What determines wordcount is the line count in the page layout of the print edition, which is done before the editor even has the “copy” (article) in question.

In my 12 years at The Economist I have, as you might expect, become very good at writing ‘to length’–ie, at delivering copy that fits exactly (thus evading any Procrustean tendencies by editors). Often I even enjoy the discipline of that constraint.

But it increasingly strikes me as bizarre, indeed unsustainable: We invariably cut good stuff out of articles, add unnecessary words to ‘turn lines’, or even entire paragraphs to fill a page when a chart shrinks. Sometimes this means sacrificing color and detail, or even logical connectors. Other times it means adding noise to signal.

And what happens next? People read the print edition, then pulp it. So much for the beautiful page layout.

But the same text survives forever online, where it faces no obvious layout constraints. Thus, all posterity reads a suboptimal text, stretched or amputated as Procrustes’ guests were.

The ancients (Homer, Virgil, etc) did not have this problem. They (or rather, their slaves) wrote on scrolls, which scroll as our web pages do, into infinity if necessary. Perhaps our evolving media habits will take us back to that future.

Currency speculation and derivatives, playing the spreads… it adds up to too much money chasing a return, which distorts asset values and creates bubbles.  That’s all fine, except that the underlying asset is often a necessity for a population or a business.  The distortion leads to destruction.

I just finished reading the first of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, The Lightning Thief in preparation for the upcoming movie.  I liked the book a lot considering that it wasn’t at my reading level at all.  It really was written for children.  I loved seeing all the Greek myth references.  I just wonder how much I would have liked the books if I knew nothing at all about Greek mythology, like some kids out there that may be reading these books.  Most of the references are considered common knowledge, whether they are or not depends on who you are, like Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, and Medusa.  Some of the references were really obscure like the giant Procrustes who enjoys making people fit beds and Papisae, the mother of the minotaur. 

Only thing I had a problem with about the myth was that Athena had a daughter.  Like Artemis she pledged to stay a virgin so what’s she doing having a child? Except that since the female goddesses all pledged eternal virginity or faithfulness (except Aphrodite), I guess the author wanted to have at least one child of a female goddess.  And technically Athena may have had a child, that she did not give birth to, but I’m not going in to that right now.  It was rather gross.

And I think the author used the common occurance for ADHD and dyslexia for his advantage in the story.  And if any kids with these conditions do read this story or hear it they get to feel special in a good way for once.

Kagehime

Starting us off is Winter Harvest’s Neosnowqueen delivering a really intense and personal post that you really must take the time to read and ponder in full:

If there is one thing that I have learned as an introvert, it’s that you can only ever know yourself. What you know of other people, even if they tell you what seems like everything, is just surface. The Earth’s surface seems like a huge thing until you realize that there are all the layers beneath that we can never see. I personally hide a great deal of myself from the world, either by a great sense of boundaries and privacy or by necessity. I present a portrait of myself, sometimes distorted (especially in real life). What ends up coming out of my mouth or what I write is just … detritus. These things that I do, say, write, these are all you get to know of me, and it’s barely 1 percent of my self. Maybe extroverts present more of themselves in their lives, but even then, I think that you barely tap into the full range of their selves. Actions are a slightly altered microcosm of the much larger sense of self. Actions are often representations of self – inadequate, but they’re all we have since we aren’t psychic.

The only way you can know a person is by their actions – what they say, what they do, the information that they consciously and unconsciously put out for the world to interpret. So for a person to try and sound like they are full of Christian love by saying that they love the sinner and hate the sin – loving the person but hating the actions – they lie.

When you say you hate my homosexual actions or my atheist words, you are really saying that you hate a part of my identity, parts of my identity that make up a big part of who I am right now. I go through the motions of ordinary life at home, knowing that my parents love me and hate me at the same time, even if they do not know the full depth of their hate, for they don’t know the full depth of my self. I think that if I were to reveal as much of that full depth as I could to them, they would still love me, but mostly I think they love the me that they think I should be or that they thought I was. Similarly, when you say that you hate the sin but love the sinner, what it ends up meaning is “I hate you, but I love the you that I think you should be.”

I wish I could tell people to say what they mean, to consider the destructive power of pretty, well-meaning, masking words.

The whole post is Hating the Sinner.

Sara of Sendai Anonymous fame (not to mention occasional Camels With Hammers fame too), fisks a recent article that drew the undersupported conclusion we were “born to believe in God”:

Some researchers argue that humans’ innate tendency towards supernatural beliefs explains why many people become religious as adults, despite not having been brought up within any faith.

This is a joke, right? Because, show me a person from any western culture that was raised with absolutely no faith in their social environment, ahahahahaha. I’d be very thrilled to meet them.

I’d be also very thrilled to meet a unicorn.

“It is a small step from this to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible.” Boyer holds out little hope for atheism. “Religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems,” he said. “By contrast, disbelief is generally the work of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.”

Yeah, sure, go and quote-mine Boyer, why not. He wrote a book too, though, and it’d be better to read the book than this.

It’s also very ironic, considering both of the above scientists seem to be atheists, as far as I know***.

And finally, for the Incoherent Opinion of the Better, Holier than thou Side:

“I am quite sure there will be a biological basis to religious faith,” Reiss said. “We are evolved creatures and the whole point about humanity is that we are rooted in the natural world.”

LOL WHUT. Does the reverend want to say that we’ve evolved in such a way as to hinder us from non-believing? WHAT ABOUT FREE WILL!

Well, that made baby Darwin cry.

Greta Christina at the curiously named Greta Christina’s Blog,  is rightly ticked that atheist arguments are not being met with counter-arguments but rather insistence that we should shut up for being rude instead.  She draws the obvious conclusion:

We’re not the ones saying, “We have faith in atheism that cannot be shaken; no possible argument or evidence could make us change our mind.” We’re saying, “The atheism hypothesis seems to be the one that’s best supported by the available evidence. The God hypothesis doesn’t make sense, and there isn’t any good evidence for it… so we’re going to proceed on the assumption that it isn’t true. If we see better evidence or better arguments for God’s existence, we’ll change our minds.”

And again, I ask: Why are so many believers so strongly opposed to the mere act of atheists doing that? Why is so much anti-atheist rhetoric focused, not on flaws in atheists’ arguments, but on our temerity for making those arguments in the first place?

I can only assume that it’s because, on some level, they know they don’t have a case.

If they had a case, they’d be making one.

They don’t have one.

And so they’re reduced to trying to get us to shut up about ours.

(((Billy))) The Atheist at the bafflingly named (((Billy))) The Atheist relates a revealing story from his elementary school days about the dangerous, willful, fearful ignorance of fundamentalists.  Below is an excerpt to whet your appetite, but be sure you also read the whole thing:

As they talked, comparing the ins and outs of the children’s stories through which they learned their people’s history and how to live in harmony, we all began listening.  I was fascinated.  I had been exposed to bits an pieces of it before, but the compare and contrast was enjoyable.  In retrospect, I am also intrigued in that all four of them, in fifth grade, knew that these were myths;  they knew that this was how their ancestors tried to understand the world and, more important (and far more valuable) how they taught the next generation how to live.

Then, one of our fundamentalist Christians laughed.  He laughed out loud.  He told them that their myths were nonsense.   They were, in his words, lies inspired by Satan.  So the Havasu girl asked him to explain his creation myth.

He, very quickly, got angry.  In rather terse language, he told her that the bible tells how god created the earth, the moon, the stars, the sun, the animals, the plants, and the land.  He gave a quick rundown of the Old Testament creation myth (with corrections from all of us (including the Native Americans who appear to have understood his creation myth better than he did (there are shitloads of missionaries in the reservations))).

One of the Navajo boys asked what the lesson was.  Fundie boy answered that there is no lesson, it is the real history of the earth.  I fought back my laughter.  The Native Americans didn’t.  They laughed in his face.

The Ponderer, Mauzzie, muses about the meaning of celebration as a Muslim apostate son of a religious mother contemplating the extent of his social obligations to her religious festivals—in this case the festival of “Eid” (which means “happiness” in Arabic), which he grew up hating:

I refused God long time back. Social obligation, though, is a different story altogether. I know- you don’t have to be a Muslim, to celebrate Eid; just like you don’t have to be a Christian to celebrate Christmas. But it hurts my heart to be not able to have control over my choices. I NEED to have a choice to reject or accept religious festivities, just like any cultural one. Eids, thus, continued to be pure torture when I was back home.

Being free from religion in my mind was not enough. I left my country partly to be free from social obligations; so that I am not dragged to the milads, so that I am not made to praise a God when I see a beautiful art rather than the human to painted it. I would like to thank the doctor who saved my life than the God… so that I am not made to bow down and say that things will happen if it is indeed the will of God.

As I was saying- yesterday was Eid. As far as I was concerned, it was just another day for me- a lazy Sunday eating left-overs and chatting over cups of tea and coffee with Crazy and a friend who is staying over at ours. We celebrated too, not Eid- but the freedom to have control over our weekend on an Eid day.

We realize it has been a long walk to this supposedly small personal freedom.

… and it’s priceless.

At The Uncredible Hallq, Chris Hallquist reviews Finding Darwin’s God written by Christian evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller and comes to the conclusion that it is “one of the more notable attempts to reconcile religion and science.” His final verdict on the book: “surprisingly good, but also reveals just how damn hard the task is.” There are two major problems he nonetheless highlights about the book:

One of those interesting mistakes comes very early in the book, discussing how our scientific understanding of the world works. Miller says that the way we know about what the sun is like depends upon assuming that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, and this is simply an assumption–a “leap of faith.” Miller doesn’t use the “leap of faith” phrase in a pejorative way, but there’s still an issue here: it doesn’t match the actual history of cosmology. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scientists (and proto-scientists) used to assume that the celestial sphere operated under radically different laws than the earthly sphere, and they did so with good reason: superficially, they appear radically different. The heavenly bodies move around in simple, regular patterns unlike anything that the ancient Greeks or Medievals could find on Earth. Only once Newton showed that you could use the same mechanical laws to explain both the motion of the planets and earthly ballistics did scientists begin to suspect that that’s how everything works. And as Miller himself shows through the sun example (which is wonderfully well explained), that assumption gives us results that “merge into a tight and consistent web of theory and phenomena.”

one of the reasons I’m skeptical about attempts to reconcile science and religion is that pro-science believers seem to be so half-hearted about it. They say they accept the conclusions of such-and-such scientific discipline, and then throw a fit every time they’re reminded that science has pushed God out of those areas. Even scientists who have been relatively kind to religion, get this: Carl Sagan caught flak for casually mentioning in The Demon Haunted World that scientific medicine is more reliable than prayer. The message from people like Miller seems to be: we’ll accept the findings of science, just don’t remind us what they are.

The whole review is worth the read.

Procrustes asks whether atheists should let themselves relish victories over Christians in legal challenges, debates, etc:

I don’t ask all of these questions rhetorically. I’d really like to know what others think. I, myself, am guilty of feeling pleased, perhaps in an act of self-righteous justification, when I read about court decisions that interpret the First Amendment the way I think it should be interpreted, despite the fact that somewhere, there is a person who lost that case who cared deeply about it. Do I owe that person a modicum of respect? Do I really disrespect that person or show some sort of evil “true colors” if I choose to cheer when I think justice has been done and freedom from religion is further secured? With these thoughts I am struck.

You heard the man, he wants your opinion!  What are you still doing here??  Go to State of Protest and offer him your two cents so he knows whether to exult or shrug already!  He needs your help, he’s crying for it, how could you be so cold as to deny it to him???  I don’t even know the answer to his question about what our obligations entail in the scenarios he describes, but I do have enough compassion in my heart to know you need to go help him.  Ahem.  What are you still doing reading this paragraph?  Shouldn’t you have left already?  Don’t worry, we’ll pause the carnival and resume it when you come back.  You must come back of course.  We’re far from done here.

Welcome back!  Now Greg Laden of the sublimely named Greg Laden’s Blog wants your opinion too!

Imagine finding the following quote on the wall of your teenage child’s social studies classroom:  ”‘No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.’—George H.W. Bush”  What would you do?

You heard the man, he wants your opinion!  What are you still doing here?? Etc, etc. you know the drill.  Really.  Go on ahead and give him Your Thoughts.  We’ll still be here when you’re done.

Rick Foreman of Waiting for the Singularity, warns us to be vigilant against the following means by which religious memes spread and “take over” our minds without our consent:

The first method of infection is through conditioning or repetition. By hearing something repeated numerous times, it begins to infiltrate into our brains “programming”.

The next method is through cognitive dissonance; the uncomfortable feeling people have when they try to hold two or more incompatible ideas in their mind at one time. Our minds struggle to make sense and will seek some sort of rationalization to resolve the difference. Religion provides many examples such as: god will punish you if you do not follow the rules of your religion combined with the message that god loves you. This cognitive dissonance is sometimes resolved in believers’ minds by resorting to marginalization even to the point of violence towards those who do not follow your religion

The third way new memes enter our minds is by taking advantage of our human nature to instill a meme in the manner of the Trojan horse. Because of our nature we tend to pay special attention to certain things such as danger warnings, cries of children, and sexual attractiveness. Fear and sex are two of the most popular tools used in marketing.

God has delivered a postcard to Ken Ham which is being showcased and I can only imagine being protected day and night by an elite guard priests with ninja skills at “Gone Fishin’: Postcards From God”. The Almighty Himself writes,

Dear Kenneth,

There comes a time in every “father” and “son” relationship when the “father” must tell the “son” some difficult things.

now the time has come for Me to sit you down and have a difficult talk.  Well… I say “talk”, but I learned My lesson with Hippy Jesus and now I just fire off a postcard.  While I’m at it, I should point out that when I say “father and son relationship”, I’m being metaphorical and ineffable at the same time.  Don’t get any crazy ideas that you’re some sort of illegitimate, backstairs sprog, demi-gawd sort of thing.  You’re not.

Michael Fridman presents “a parable about the problem of evil inspired by the biblical Job himself” entitled, The Tale of the Bad Workplace (Job 23-24) and posted at a Nadder! The parable depicts a company run into the ground in which employees are even subjected to daily violence.   The company’s owner justifies the insanity he permits on the grounds that he does not want to meddle with his employees’ freedoms.  In reply his uncle retorts:

“If a person cannot come into work every day without worrying about being raped, tortured and killed, what kind of ‘freedom to choose their course of action’ are you referring to?”
“But a lot of good can come even out of such terrible things. Just last week, Anderson came up with a new way to save on deliveries, after having to deliver tasers to her team for protection from attackers.”
“So if attackers bring out the best in your employees why don’t you just go hire some more yourself?”

Hey, do you remember the other day when you saw Glenn Beck out of left field blame atheists for everything wrong in America?  Remember how we were scapegoated for gang violence that had nothing to do with atheism whatsoever?  Remember thinking to yourself, there’s so much stupid in this that it would take at least 12 points and 1,605 words to articulate the mere tip of the iceberg of everything wrong here and I don’t have the energy to deal with all the blood curdling that would happen as I endured thinking of Glenn Beck the entire time it took to type even that much out?  Well, Transplanted Lawyer has graciously taken one for the team and cathartically spelled out the ABC’s of stupid found in Beck’s rant for us.  Below is just the outline of his detailed refutation, Glenn Beck Spews A Densely-Packed Set Of Hysterical Lies posted at Not A Potted Plant:

1.  “In God We Trust” appears on all the money, you lying sack of shit.  I defy you — I challenge you to swear to forfeit on that immortal soul that you believe in — to produce a single piece of U.S. tender in circulation that does not contain, somewhere on it, the phrase “In God We Trust.”

2.  The Decalogue is allowed in courthouses.  Sometimes — when it’s part of an artistic display about the law and history.  We are, on our public buildings, allowed to acknowledge the role of the Ten Commandments as part of our cultural and legal history.  When the Decalogue is offered for religious indoctrination, however, that violates something inherently American, specifically, the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  You should read it sometime.

3. You can pray in school.

4.  What court, what political institution, what police officer, what legislation, what rule, what anything stops you from singing a Christmas Carol where and when you want to?

5.  Aren’t these Americans who have the Constitutional* right to be atheists if they want?  Why, then, do you object to Americans using their freedom, Glenn Beck?  What is it about liberty that offends you so very much?

6.  To suggest that atheists have a “void” in their lives is condescending in the extreme.

7. To further suggest that atheists fill the “void” in their lives with “power, career, money, celebrities, politics, government” is even more ridiculous.

8.  “Why do you think we are as powerful as we are, or as we have been?”  Several answers here, Glenn, which need to be examined together.

9.  When he asks, “What did we do different than other countries?” Beck cannot be seriously suggesting that other nations throughout history have been irreligious.

10.  And that reference to the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence — who, exactly would that be?  It’s not like Jefferson didn’t know about the Christian diety when he wrote it.  T.J. could just as easily have written “All men are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights” but he used the phrase “their Creator” instead.

11.  Nor does the failure of other countries to adopt some version of this language mean that they necessarily believe that human rights are dispensed by the government.

12.  “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is…not the national anthem and I’d resist efforts to make it the national anthem.

For blasphemy day Cubik’s Rube, at the fittingly named Cubik’s Rube, scandalously crosses the line—with a Z and then adds an O at the top and adds a little upside down v to make for a cute little dancing Mohammed pictue that looks like this:

O-Z—<

And then he goes on to explain that the point about blasphemy day is not that offending people is no big deal but that it’s a big deal that things which shouldn’t even be offensive are being denounced as “blasphemy” across the world and threatening people’s lives:

What some religious people deem unacceptable – even what they deem punishable by death – doesn’t even come close to being hate speech. You really don’t have to try very hard to offend millions of people, and if you’re just speaking freely without “respecting” their made-up nonsense the way they want you to, it’s not up to you to tread oh so carefully to avoid bruising any delicate egos.

Yes, being irreverent and satirical can often overflow into being an obnoxious ass for no good reason. But going not an inch further than “calling attention to Biblical, Koranic or scientific criticisms” in a rigorously scientific way, as this article suggests, is too much to ask. Some times it’s entirely appropriate to say, “You and your holy book want me dead if I don’t fall in step? Well fuck you, and fuck your god.” We’re not being the first to trample the line of civility.

Elsewhere, Cubik revels in the joys of Christmas as an atheist and makes me surprisingly nostalgic and eager for some Christmas in October:

I’ll take a pass on the worship, but look forward to putting on a compilation CD with some choirs singing Silent Night. Yes please to the angel on the tree, the rousing harmonies of O Come All Ye Faithful, and Elf ; no thanks to the eggnog, chestnuts, nativity plays, and “remembering the true meaning” of anything. I’ll wish people a Merry Christmas, a Happy Holidays, and whatever other festive greeting they’d prefer. I’ll revel in Christmas spirit, and I’ll co-opt whatever sacred traditions I damn well please.

I can even use the obvious Tiny Tim reference as a sign-off, and not care about the faultiness of the premise:  God bless us, every one.

Phil B., who is decidedly for Humanity, presents takes a stand against superstition, he shall indulge none of it:

when I hear someone repeating superstitious nonsense, I always reply with one of these sayings: “superstition is not logical” or “please stop spreading your outdated beliefs”.

If enough people also do this, then superstitions will become extinct as they should be.

Either that or there will be a superstition that it’s bad luck to tell people to give up their superstitions and Phil’s going to be told he has bad luck an awful lot.  Which, ironically, will actually be bad luck.  Sorry Phil!

Jim Linville does his usual job of filling a post to the brim with great pictures and cartoons, this time as part of coverage of the Calgary Zoo controversy over an elephant statue modeled off Ganesh:  He has an excellent and thorough post that explores all the various aspects of the issue.  Forgive me for boiling it down to only one of his pictures.  This is his take on the fundamentalist Christians’ position in a nutshell:

Jim’s blog is Dr. Jim’s Thinking Shop & Tea Room, go there.

J.R. Braden has an eye-opening post fisking the common apologeticist’s meme that Josephus referred to Jesus and therefore Jesus is confirmed as a historical figure:

Antiquities is a book in 20 volumes written by Titus Flavius Josephus.  In it, the Jews wander around killing people most of the time.  Occasionally, someone will do something arguably moral and the bloodbath stops temporarily to allow the reader to learn a little bit more about that particular Jew.  Other than that, it’s pretty much just a bunch of murderous Jews who don’t know how to read a map.

The author, Josephus, was a first-century Roman Jew whose accounts of the destruction of Rome, the Jewish revolts against Rome and the partially-fictional history of the Jews all the way back to Adam and Eve are well worth a read.

Because Josephus is such a respected name in the history of historians, the Christians have raped his most famous book, The Antiquities of the Jews, so that they could attach his name to their theology and make the Jesus myth more convincing by association.

The problem is, Christians–at least the ones who go around doctoring manuscripts–are borderline retarded.  Out of the two possible references to Jesus Christ of Nazareth in Antiquities, one of them has been revealed as a transparent forgery since the 1600s.  By the middle of the 1700s, no one took that passage seriously.  Now, all of a sudden, the Christians are waving this same passage around as if it was some sort of clinching evidence that a god exists and he sent himself to Earth 2,000 years ago to give a very vague message to a bunch of illiterate desert folk.  It makes me wonder if any Christian who trumpets the name Josephus proudly in debates has ever read Antiquities.

The other reference to Jesus is most likely accurate.  It mentions a Jesus (a common name for that region and time) who was called Christ (a common claim among loonies of that region and time), but only in passing as the brother of James (another common name), who is the pertinent character of the two brothers to that story.  Wow!  I’m convinced already!

The Gaytheists.

Andrew Bernardin of Evolving Mind shares my personal irritation at people who try to make up for their disbelief by trying to fall all over themselves about thinking Jesus is nonetheless an incredibly cool cat.  Andrew provides a helpful compendium of quotes from the Biblical accounts of  Jesus which make the point that Jesus does not really “deserve to be granted an honorary doctorate in advanced humanity.”  So you can either go look up Matthew 5:22, 8:21-22, 10:34, 11:25, 12:47; Luke 12:47, 12:49, 18:29-30, 13:3, 16:15, 14:26; and John 6:54-56 for yourself to track down the uncensored Jesus that Christians don’t want you to see or you can go over to Evolving Mind where Andrew’s typed them all up for you!  And while you’re visiting Andrew’s site, his attack on the charge of scientism is among the several other really great posts worth reading too.

Archvillain rants and raves about the threat from curiosity hating theocrats at A Dark and Sinister Force for Good, and along the way reminds of us of this classic joke:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well…are you religious or atheist?” He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?” He said, “Christian.” I said, “Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?” He said, “Baptist!” I said,”Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?” He said, “Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?” He said,”Reformed Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!” I said, “Die, heretic scum“, and pushed him off.

Finally a few things I’d like to highlight which were not submitted for the carnival officially beginning with Proud Atheists’ collection of wild videos of Christians behaving badly.  Here’s the worst of it:

Those Christians in that video seem way too amped up on DarkMatter2525‘s Religiousil if you ask me:

If you don’t already read Peaceful Atheist then you need to stop that.  Stop not reading her.  Seriously.  You have a problem.  And you need to admit it.  Your problem is all your not reading of Peaceful Atheist.  Here she is describing an encounter with a freaking necklace so beautifully that it almost makes you cry and begin to believe in Not-God.  It makes you believe in Peaceful Atheist:

While I was in the city last week I went to the Anchorage Museum of Art and History.

I’ve really missed going to museums so it was a treat.  One of the art exhibits wasEarth, Fire and Fibre, an exhibition of crafts, fabric and metal arts—things like quilts, silk scarves, jewelry, and pottery.  I’m not usually into this kind of art, but it was really well done.  One item that caught my eye was a necklace made of intricate beaded charms embellishing a thick chain.  When I looked closer, I saw that the chain was actually a chain saw blade.  That totally blew me away.  It struck me as a completely genius piece of art.  The necklace was part of a collection of 3 necklaces and a purse made out of materials like drill bits, high caliber bullets, and a pair of scissors used as a pendant.

A rare few pieces of art possess something that makes me feel like I am connected to it.  They almost punch me in the chest with the force of their profundity, like a realization that they contain something that is also in my heart.  The deep undercurrent of thought in that necklace is the kind of thinking with which I aspire to live and view the world.

Finally, I want to salute one of the atheist blogosphere’s bigger stars for a terrific month of activism and blogging.  Jennifurret McCreight of Blaghag has kept something of a must-read running chronicle of one activist atheist college student’s relentless efforts to wake her school from its dogmatic slumbers.  Her Society of Non-Theists ran a “Blasphemy Day” free speech event in which students could write anything they wanted about any topics on poster boards that filled up quickly. And they even got good press for it. Before that she attended a Christian propaganda event on campus denouncing pornography and wound up with her site becoming a battleground for war between her commentators and the people who ran the event after they found her blog posting on-line.  She also gave a lecture about her “Creation Museum” trip, which drew the attention of Ken Ham himself.  Later the Hamster posted a review from a pastor who was in attendance.

But the real highlight was their “Pastafarian Preaching in honor of Talk Like  A Pirate Day,” which experience she encapsulated for us in this great video:

And during the time since the last carnival of the godless, the online atheist community shattered a milestone by not only passing 1,000 members on the Atheist Blogroll but hitting 1,030 already!  In celebration Mojoey dusted off a great tribute to the blogroll made by the ever-terrific blogger TooManyTribbles a couple years back:

And here are Too Many Tribbles’ latest gorgeous photos:

Last but I certainly hope not least, there is this post, “Camels With Hammers Philosophy” wherein I summarize almost all my major ideas pieces on philosophy, atheism, and ethics and provide links to all the pieces where I spell out each idea.  I hope when you recover from this long carnival you will take some time to peruse my ideas using either this “Camels With Hammers Philosophy” post or the rather thorough list of links found down the right hand column of the blog as your guide. Then remember to subscribe with your feed reader of choice and to follow us on Twitter at “CamelsHammers”.

In closing,  I have to sincerely thank so many great bloggers for so many great contributions to this carnival.  I was really impressed and found at least a couple blogs I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on in the future.  Click here to have one of your articles appear in the next “Carnival of the Godless.”

Your Thoughts?

This is more of a phrase than a word per se, although the adjective Procrustean will do just fine in a pinch.

Wikipedia actually has a good article on the phrase’s mythological origins and some of its uses here. Long story short: it signifies enforced conformity by referring to a famous host/bandit who invited travelers to stay the night and then trapped them on an iron bed; if they were too short for the bed, they were stretched until they fit, and if too long the excess was chopped off.

To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaption. But for people who have far more ability than the average, for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work–for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness. As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former, the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead “abnormal” lives.

- Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”

The Lightning Thief

And yet another Young Adult Fantasy novel. I don’t know where I have got this sudden obsession from, but whenever I go to Eloor Library, I am drawn more towards the left- most corner where the children’s books are.

So, when I came across “The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan in the Returned Books pile I pounced. I just found the cover so appealing that I borrowed it without even checking the back of the book to find out what it was about.

Turns out, that was a good thing. When I went home and read the blurb, I was like ehh…not my thing. But once I started reading, the book had me just hooked.

This is an amazing read!

Percy Jackson, the hero of the book, has dyslexia and ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). He has been kicked out of 6 schools within 6 years because of his hyperactivity, which gets him into lots of trouble with school authorities.

He faces some weird incidents in his life, which he is unable to explain away. Then, one day, when he is on a vacation with his mother, he comes to know the hard way that his father is a Greek God.

No, I don’t mean “Greek God” as in handsome, I mean an actual immortal Greek God. Now, contrary to what we have been thinking the Greek Gods are not myths, they exist and are currently living in Olympus located in the 600th floor (non-existent in reality) of the Empire State Building in New York.

Once he finds out this truth, his life is one big adventurous roller-coaster ride. He is asked by the Gods to hunt for Zeus lightning bolt, which has been supposedly stolen by Hades (the Lord of the Underworld). For this, he needs to make a journey to the Underworld to get back the lightning bolt. Along the way to stop him are Medusa, Ares, and Procrustes, but he is able to get away from them all and finish his task!

What I loved about the book:

• Perseus (Percy) Jackson is not some super-duper extraordinary kid. He is a boy who struggles with his disorders and people around him. But he is courageous and clever, stubborn and loyal. He tries to be the best that he can be. Some portions of the book deal very movingly with his emotions and his relationships with people around him (especially his mother).

  When Percy realizes that his father is a God, it explains his dyslexia – by birth he is more attuned to the Greek lettering rather than English, which is why he struggles with his studies. His ADHD is because as the son of a warrior God, he needs to be able to focus on different things happening in the battleground. I thought this was a very nice explanation that makes him feel better about himself.

• For those who are familiar with Greek mythology, this is an interesting read, as all the Gods are updated for the modern world. So, you have Ares the God of War behaving like an immortal bully on a motorcycle. I also loved Cerberus (the 3 headed dog who guards the entrance of Hades). He turns out to be just another dog who wants someone to toss a ball over to him !
• The chapter titles are extremely funny ( for example, “I vaporize my Pre-Algebra teacher”), and the cover of the book very attractive and reflects the spirit of the novel.

What I did not love:

Practically, nothing, which is why I rate it 5 stars!

Now, off to queue up for the rest of the books in this series.

“In other words, the therapist listens to the patient and gets the plot of his script first, then he looks in Andrew Lang or Stith Thompson, and not vice versa.  In that way he will get a sound match, and not just a bright idea.  Then he can use the fairy tale to predict where the patient is headed, verifying from the patient (not from the book) all the way.”

You were clever, weren’t you, and read all the Greek tragedies and comedies and learned all the gods and goddesses by heart.

Me, I can hardly tell my Agamemnom from my Lysistrata. Of course, I know Homer and the Odyssey. But I only know them because I had to study The Wasteland, that impenetrable poem by TS Eliot. I know Kappa Kappa Gamma because I was one of them briefly.

It’d be good to know more. Not for dinner conversation. (Although, I bet when Greek scholars get together, it’s quite sparkling – from sparkos, Greek for keeping everyone on their toes. Wait a second. Let me google that. Nope. Apparently, it’s Middle English.)

Procrustes is just a real good example. You can do what everyone else does and find some back story on the web. Or you can let me tell you.

Procrustes had a bed. A one-size fits all bed. Which couldn’t possible exist, unless you were Procrustes. Oh you bet, he made it work. Too short? He stretched you. Too long? He cut off any dangling bits.

(Why yes. You CAN click that little image up there and watch an animation about Procrustes. Brian has all sorts of pretty darned fun and really funny twists on myths).

I don’t know how or when or where I learned about Procrustes, but as soon as I did, it started coming in might handy. It’s kind of amazing how many arguments are out there, meant to persuade us, that lop off critical information to fit the point. Or stretch an idea til it nearly – pop! – snaps. That’s Procrustean. And it’s kind of nice to be able to detect it.

If knowing stuff is only for your arsenal, for impressing people, showing off, winning arguments – well, good luck with that. You’re almost guaranteed that someone else knows more. People are tricky that way. They’ve been there, done that, read it.

I wish I knew more just because knowing anything stretches my mind. It feels pretty literal. History, language, science – they get in there and they shove all the furniture over so there’s more room for other stuff and when that gets dropped in, it makes more room for other stuff. It shouldn’t work that way, but it does. Sort of the opposite of how it works in real life.

posted by Cris, Santa Barbara

The Leveller is brewed, like almost all Springhead’s beers, with Maris Otter malt, plus, in this case, some roasted malt and some amber malt as well – enough to give a mid-oak colour, but not as dark as a brown ale and without the ruddy cornelian hues that are apparent in darker bitters and dark winter warmers.

While Northdown hops bring a fair degree of bitterness to the party, the roast grain is present in sufficient quantity to give a distinct toasty, almost coffee flavour, which kicks the beer out of the circle marked “bitter” (though Camra, apparently unable to find another home for it, awarded The Leveller a runner-up place at the Great British Beer Festival in the “best bitter” category.)

If The Leveller isn’t a bitter, though, it doesn’t have the sweetness, or the rotundity of mouthfeel, or any hint of chocolate, that might let it slip comfortably into the circles on the Venn diagram of beer styles marked “brown ales” or “milds”.

Springhead themselves say The Leveller is “brewed in the style of Belgian Trappist ales”, to which I can only say that it didn’t taste anything like a Trappist ale to me. It did taste like a very fine beer, though, even if it is one that fits no known existing style. Draw a new circle on the diagram, and call it “English dark ale”.

I was tasting The Leveller on a trip to the Springhead brewery with the Zythographers’ Union to meet the brewer, Shirley Reynolds, and try some of the brewery’s range of beers, on their own and with food combinations.

Springhead, which began 18 years ago as the smallest new brewery in Britain at the time, is now based on what seems to be the typical modern-small-brewery mini-industrial estate site. Four years ago it powered up to a 50-barrel brewing operation. (I had forgotten before I arrived in Sutton that I have seen their old kit in operation in its new home at Twickenham Fine Ales, just about a mile from where this blog is being written.) The new plant is German-made, and a cliché of Teutonic efficiency and shining steel.

It is clear, listening to Shirley Reynolds, and looking around the brewery, that she has all the essentials of a successful brewer, including utter dedication to cleanliness, rigorous adhesion to the highest standards of consistency in her products, and at the same time a willingness to tweak recipes until the beers are exactly how she feels they should be. Whatever the Latin is for “consistency and experimentation”, it should be the motto for brewers everywhere.

The brewery’s biggest seller, at 40 per cent of all cask sales, is Roaring Meg, named after a Civil War cannon, and all of 5.5 per cent alcohol by volume: there can, I suspect, be few breweries in Britain with a beer that strong as their best-seller. It’s also now available in bottle in supermarkets, which will undoubtedly help lift sales in pubs as drinkers spot a familiar name. Roaring Meg is a beautifully fruity, flavourful golden beer, made from Maris Otter malt; bitter, at 34 to 37 EBU, and with plenty happening on the palate. That, I guess, would be down to the beer being late-hopped 15 minutes before knock-out, but at a time when boiling has ended, giving the Northdown hops a chance to infuse beautifully. Roaring Meg does well in gastro-pubs, according to Steve Reynolds, Shirley’s husband, and the brewery’s marketing chief: diners are apparently choosing to have one decent pint in the bar before going on to drink wine with their meal, and the Meg fits the spec.

But shouldn’t they stick to the beer? That’s what we were at the brewery to discover, as Springhead lined up a variety of dishes to sample with their different brews. The Puritan Porter wasn’t available, alas, but eight or so other beers were, including one I was delighted to find: Goodrich Castle, flavoured with rosemary (grown by the brewery) alongside the hops. This is the brew for roast beef, and lamb, and pork, and a great many other meals besides. The quantity of rosemary in the brew was perfectly targeted, and the bottled version, in particular, as well as having the carbonation to cut through any fat in a meal, also had hints of ginger and lavender coming through.

Interestingly, it failed completely with the lamb dish Springhead supplied, which had been made with mint. Ales brewed with mint, like ales brewed with rosemary, were an old pre-hop tradition, but the two tastes together did not work. However, with a tomato-and-pasta combination the rosemary beer triumphed: whoever is putting together the menu for this year’s Beer Writers’ Guild Christmas dinner, please note …

 

We begin, as all do, as squalling children demanding to be fed. And by the grace of God and our parents, they feed us both food and instruction, so that on the verge of adulthood we think we know right from wrong, truth from falsehood, justice from oppression. Then comes the Fall, when we or the world disappoint us. For most, it is the world, but for the sensitive, it is us. We would like to run away, to pretend to be a child again, to wish it all hadn’t happened, but we can’t. For we are confronted with a cognitive dissonance, an insoluble dilemma that involves us, and wherever we flee, there we are. So we have several options: we can conclude that the facts are falsified, we can conclude that rules aren’t valid, or that we misunderstood the application of the rule to the facts. That is, we can reject a syllogism by denying the major premise (the rule), the minor premise (the facts) or the conclusion (the logic).

So we discover that when our world is shaken and the symmetry destroyed, we find release in doubt. Doubt that the facts are as they get reported, doubt that the rules are as rigid as we were taught, doubt that we can properly understand causation. Doubt is our friend, and like a child frightened by a horror movie, we leave the theater laughing at our naive fears, but holding tightly to the hand of our new mentor, Doubt. The skeptic becomes the captain of kickball, the king of the mountain, the one who can laugh at calamity and disaster. Ubi dubium ibi libertas, “where there is doubt, there is freedom”.

And what freedom it is! When we fail an exam at school, we can doubt that the grades were fair, or doubt that the material was useful, or doubt that the teacher appreciated our genius. When we fail in personal relationships, we can doubt that the other was rational or human, or even that relationships are worthy of our tears. When we fail in morality, … And on it goes, doubt becomes the magic key that releases us from the jail of guilt, of shame, of cognitive dissonance. We can get out of any jam with Doubt.

Doubt always lets us out, but it never lets us in. Doubt leaves us king of the mountain, when all the others have gone back to class. Doubt leaves us outside, looking back through the brightly lit windows and the laughing conversations that we can’t follow. Doubt gives us the street with hurrying figures who will not look up for company. And we find that having been booted out of many doors and climbed out of many windows, there isn’t a place left to call home. We live in the streets and the alleys, like wild dogs, snuffling among the garbage cans for a meal, curling up by the door for heat, disdaining those that live in houses, telling ourselves that leftovers are a varied diet, that outdoor air brings good health.

Wait. Look at the hand you are holding. Look at the wrist, the arm, the shoulder, yes look at the chin and especially the eyes. Can he hold your gaze? Why is it that Doubt takes you out of many places, but you never doubted where he led? Whose hand does Doubt hold, with the one that is not gripping yours? Will he tell you if you ask? Could you not have found a better friend?

“Your problem, Pro, is that you believe in your beliefs”. I paused, long enough to consider whether this was another Russian-English translation problem from my erstwhile friend, so he repeated it, with a slight condescending tone. “But isn’t that why they are called beliefs?” I asked. “No, no”, he insisted, “holding beliefs too rigidly is what causes so many problems, like your Inquisition. You think you are closer to the truth than they are.” I shifted gears. “You only say that because you were brought up in Russia,” I reply, “you are homo sovieticus, you don’t understand.” I had touched a nerve. “You have never been there, and you want to tell me what homo sovieticus is? I have seen it, I have lived it, what can you know about it?” “So you believe that you understand homo sovieticus better than I?”, I persisted, “You are closer to the truth than I am?” He reflected, and reformed his argument. “Facts are one thing, religion is another.”

This was just one more volley in a long-standing argument. Religion for him was something distant, something theoretical, something unprovable. It was Kant’s “noumena”, existing in the thought and minds of men, yet without substance, without proof, without “phenomena”. And religion, as he was fond of reminding me, had caused the death of thousands during the religious wars that wracked Europe, even wars between flavors of the same religion, between Catholics and Protestants. Wasn’t this all due, he would argue, to a rigidity, a dogmatism, a belief in beliefs? And wasn’t the modern understanding (post WWII no doubt), of diversity, of tolerance, all due to a modern skepticism of dogmatism, a disbelief in beliefs?

This Myth is so pervasive, so prevalent that I despair of ever chopping off it’s hydra-like heads. Here is a random sampler of sword blows, not intended to be comprehensive or even guaranteed to work.

a) Medieval man was far more violent with a sword, in a vivisection sort of way, than Modern man. The slightest insult would often end in a deadly duel. And attributing this to “dogmatically held beliefs” misunderstands the deep significance the Medieval man put on words, on honor, on the fragility of life. We moderns who claim to value life so much, also have an unfounded belief in the power of science to prolong life well into the 80′s, so that a man dying at 60 is now considered a tragic early death. But when a life span rarely went beyond 45, when life was fragile and brief, then what better way to finish it, but in a blaze of glory? If this is dogmatic belief, then it was not theological, but anthropological belief.

b) Pascal said that all men have a god-shaped vacuum in their souls, that they must and will fill with something. Bob Dylan used to sing, “you gotta serve somebody”. So the question isn’t whether one holds a belief, whether one has a god, but which god you hold. In the 20th century alone, the god of science, the god of Modernity, the god of Immanuel Kant, produced the Russian civil war, the Chinese civil war, two world wars, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Cambodian civil war, and numerous smaller conflicts in places like Peru and Nepal. The death toll from atheist wars is well over 100 million souls, and if we include the famines that came from the chaos of these wars, it is well over 200 million. In other words, there were more people killed for the atheist god in the 20th century than all the wars that have been fought in the name of Christianity in the previous 19. This is probably still true if one counted deaths as a fraction of the world population. Both absolutely and relatively, there has been no god more voracious than atheism.

c) Finally, in an age when Islam is ascendant, and Iran is attempting to get the bomb, from a president who refers to Israel as “a one-bomb state”, are we more or less safe from genocide? We no longer kill individually, as crazed Rwandans with machetes, but rather we kill clinically, scientifically, with one touch of a button. Even suicide bombers, who give the ultimate sacrifice for their beliefs, are killing indiscriminately, anonymously, without even looking in the eyes of their victims. “Oh, but isn’t that a perfectly clear case of holding your beliefs too firmly?” No, absolutely not. These are people who are depressed, discouraged, desperate, and easily manipulated by the dogs of war, by the psychological Eichmann’s of Islam, who are the heirs of the Assassins, and will likewise vanish like them. It is not that suicide bombers value their faith over their life, but rather they despair to their death over their faith. Despair is not a firm foundation to build a religion on. And had these pitiful wretches had more faith, they would have had less despair. Chesterton addresses this difference between martyrdom and suicide in Orthodoxy, and it is well worth the read.

There is just no part of the Myth that holds up under scrutiny, but perhaps it is the last hope for a dying faith. For as the Modernist watches the dogs of war, the proliferation of the bomb, the religious unrest boiling to the surface in Europe, in Asia, in the world, he can cling to the belief that he alone has the moral superiority not to believe his own creed too much.

If only, if only he would be a little more doubtful about doubt.