38% of Americans Are Insane

What happened in Japan recently was terrible. The aftermath, and continued crisis is devastating. But is it "divine retribution," as one Japanese official put it? 38% of Americans seem to think so. So, with a well-deserved leap over the middle (the excluded one, that is), I have concluded that of those Americans polled, 38% of them are utterly insane.

What causes an earthquake is pretty basic: shifting of tectonic plates.  It is a natural occurence not needing divine prompting.  If God sees fit to dip his hand into the Sisyphean burden of pushing giant rocks, well then whatever.  Who's going to argue?  In the meanwhile, until we have some evidence of that reality, I'm content to take the operations of the planet on an evidentiary, naturalistic basis.  Because I'm not insane.

*Thank you Atheist Media Blog for this gem.

Campingatology

Harold Camping.  False toothy prophet.

Remember Harold Camping?  Apparently he's littered the earth, and wasted donations on a campaign sounding a clarion-call for the end of the world.

May 21, 2011.  Mark it on your calendars, folks.  Make sure to love much, and have all sorts of ludicrous fun because when you wake up on May 22, 2011 and you're still alive, and the rapture hasn't happened, you will at least not have wasted your time.

Oh, and keep up the hard work at living life to the fullest, even beyond May 22, 2011 because we have another end-of-the-world to get through on December 21, 2012.

Here's another look at the same silliness, but with a tad more detail.  Enjoy!

Sometime in the future, you're going to die.  Get over it.  But if Harold Camping is right, you're going to die a whole lot sooner than you think.  Isn't Camping such a comforting messenger?  Don't you just want to invite him into your home and let him tell you all about how godless your existence is, and how you're going to burn in hell forever?  Such a nice old man.

I wonder if he'll shut-up about this nonsense when he's wrong for the second time...


Thank you to The Thinking Atheist for this video.

Muzzle the Man, Please

Darth Benedict, head of the Catholic Empire, has used his force to publish a book.  Again.  This time, in Light of the World, one of the topics he tackles is the subject of condom use -- something he and his other spindly-fingered, virgin Sith Lords know a lot about.  I suppose when we want advice, we're all be beholden to the experts, right?

Anyway, Catholicism's chief mouth-breather has announced it to the Empire, and to the scattered remnants of the Rebel Alliance (i.e., Protestants and Non-Catholics alike) that people can hereby use condoms in exceptional circumstances; e.g., if you're going to have sex with a male prostitute.  Or perhaps he should add "if you're going to have sex with a priest."

In any case, people are going to hit the sheets.  There's no exception to that reality.  So, just what kind of "exceptional circumstance" warrants capping one's John-Thomas?  Why, if one's John-Thomas is going to potentially threaten the life of another, of course!  But if you just want to have an hour well-spent with your partner, and not be given over 9 months later to an 18-20 year responsibility, well that's just wrong, evil, sinful, and damnably ungodly.

So are condoms valid in AIDS-riven Africa?

"The Pope made clear in his view condoms were no answer to the Aids pandemic."

So there you have it, commmoners, Darth Benedict has indicated that despite the exceptional circumstances of sexually transmitted diseases that will kill you, they are not the kind of exceptional circumstances that warrant a latex moment. But if you're an African male prostitute, perhaps with AIDS, well that's fine. Go ahead. It's exceptional only when it's exceptional, and not all exceptions are the same. Excepting exceptional circumstances, your circumstances are only exceptional if they're exceptionally exceptional. Then you can put a cap on it. But don't do it if you're just out for some fun. That would make you an evildoer.

Happy Meal Half-Life

If you leave food on the counter, or somehow exposed, the best predictions would assure us that that food will rot. How long it takes may vary. But the long and the short of exposed food is that it will rot. Simple wisdom.

How complicated things must get then, when that wisdom is confounded by McDonald's Happy Meal. Author Nonna Joann Bruso has been keeping an online journal about the half-life of the Happy Meal. So far, a year has gone by, and the meal has shown no signs of rot, moulding, or decay.

My Conclusion: Food that doesn't break down is not actually food. The infamous Happy Meal may be one of North America's most gleefully recognised packages, but if it defies natural order, it is a paragon of sickness, uselessness, and a plague more than a food. The FDA really ought to have pseudo-foods like this incinerated. Permanently. McDonald's may have the golden arches, but it is inescapably obvious that "all that glitters is not [actually] gold."

*Thanks to the lads at BoingBoing for tipping me off to Bruso's experiment.*

Anti-Facebook

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago. The reason: I find it to be an inexcusable waste of time. When I mentioned deactivating my account with Facebook to a friend of mine, he said, "Good! I was going to tell you to get off that thing. It's addictive. It's like crack cocaine. Besides that, you were being too conformist being on there."

Aside from the wry chuckle I enjoyed at his comments, I found his perspective on Facebook insightful: it's addictive, and it promotes conformity.

First, let's look at some behavioural characteristics of addiction.

1. Obsession - person cannot stop thinking about an activity.
2. Relentless Pursuit - person will engage in activity even to the detriment of his/her physical and psycho-social well being.
3. Compulsiveness - person will engage in an activity despite not wanting to, and finds it difficult to stop.
4. Withdrawal - once the addictive activity is stopped, person becomes irrational, irritable, depressed, restless.
5. Lack of Perception of Time - person cannot control how long, when, or how much s/he will engage in an activity.
6. Denial - person cannot, and will not accept that s/he has an irrational attachment to an activity, even despite the negative effects.
7. Covert-Ops - person hides his/her activity from friends, family, and concerned individuals.
8. Blackouts - person simply blanks-out during activity, which results in a lack of recall about what went on during addictive activity.
9. Depression - person experiences depressed states surrounding, and even during activity.
10. Poor Self-Esteem - person deals with personal anxieties and low self-esteem issues by "filling in their lack", as it were, with an addictive activity.

As a loose gauge for my own participation with Facebook, this list shows me that I fit at least 7, possibly 8 of the characteristics usually associated with addictive behaviours. As a family man, and a man with a conscience, I find that unacceptable. So, for this reason alone, I shut down Facebook.

Now, just so we're clear, I am not blaming Facebook for my problems. I am solely responsible for how I attend to an activity, how much time I spend doing it, and in what manner. Facebook itself is simply a computer application and has nothing to do with my addiction to it. But, as a vehicle for part of my social life, I cannot trust myself to use Facebook anymore because I was not able to control myself around it. Also, because I was allowing my time on Facebook to interfere with my family, my real-life relationships were starting to break down. So, for me, having parrotted the common sentiment that I would "take a bullet" for my family if I had to, why would I allow myself to shoot my loved one's down with an inordinate compulsion toward Facebook?

The answer to the rhetorical question above is an easy, "I wouldn't." But I did. And I did so unintentionally, and to my shame. But even unintentionally having hurt my family because of my own addictive behaviours surrounding Facebook, the result is the same: my family was hurt. Intentionality does not exhonerate me from the pain my family has felt this past while. My work is ahead of me; I have a lot of wounds to heal.

Coming at this from a different, more 'academic' angle, however, there is a certain conformity proffered in applications like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et al. That is, applications such as the ones listed dole-up a common denominator people can easily access and use. The fact that applications like these offer the same basic templates for social interaction, aesthetics, and mindless pursuits (e.g., Farmville) now strikes me as a little creepy. I don't ascribe anything apocalyptic to it, but the fact that there is a definite sense of sameness across the board comes across a little Hux-Wellian.

Facebook is a little like a prototype for the 'Feelies' so excellently imagined in Huxley's Brave New World: slip into a virtual reality where everything surrounding you is a template for homogeneity, and predictability. The best part about it is that you don't actually have to carry on a real relationship with a real person. You can simply 'Add' and 'Delete' on a whim, and at will.

At the same time, Facebook is also a little like Big Brother. Mind you, the government is not prescribing Facebook as a means of mass-control, so the comparison is very loose. Still, people are screened for jobs by employers looking up Facebook accounts. Corporations actively monitor people's use of Facebook to keep an eye on the corporate reputation. Facebook does not protect your privacy, but instead, allows your information to be readily accessible to marketters (data-mining), industries, government, etc. It is a wonderful vehicle for corporate voyeurism (ever wonder why your stuff is hyperlinked without you having hyperlinked your information?). It is not quite Big Brother, but it is like having Big Brothers.

Facebook promotes uniformity not in people's ontology, but in people's expressions. That is, you don't stop being who you are by using Facebook, but you begin to alter how you express yourself to fit the mold offered. Eventually, this will impact who a person is. The same principle is illustrated in a positive light in the movie Patch Adams: if you change the conditions, or parameters of a persons environment, you affect their response. This in turn affects who the person is on a fundamental level. Seeing as Facebook is generally a breeding ground for poor grammar, thoughtless banter, useless games and quizzes, ambivalent attachments, and techonological distancing (i.e., moral ambivalence via technology), it shouldn't come as a surprise when people start communicating in real life as they do on Facebook. I imagine conversations would sound like Valspeak, but less eloquent.

I refuse that measure of conformity. I refuse that common denominator, which, as I see it, will continue to get lower and lower as the phenomenon of social-networking applications trim out the fat of human-to-human contact, and unwittingly inject us with the narcotics of virtual reality, and pseudo-relationships. I will not follow suit any longer. I am officially anti-Facebook.

Jesus The Bruiser

At some point there has to be an end to this kind of absurdity. I'm talking about the absurdity of seeing Jesus in things like irons, mirrors, or MRIs. Yeah, sure, maybe you saw a face and it had a similar look to the typical pale-skinned messiah so often depicted just inside the narthex of local churches, or hanging on the sanctuary doors, maybe even adorning a spot above the sink in the vestry.

In any case, have God and his heavenly attendees become so bored that they've reduced their theophanies to mundane objects like toast and irons and mirrors? Have miracles (e.g., water into wine, resurrection, curing leprosy, et al.) become somewhat passé such that God and the saints are aiming on level with supra-blah?

It's one thing to be devoted. It's another thing to be kinda weird. I see patterns, faces, animals, common objects, and symbols almost every time I look at a stippled ceiling, or a ceiling with those awful dropped-tiles so popular in offices. I don't chalk those coincidental visual cognates up to a miracle, or preserve them somehow so I can sell them on eBay for $28,000. 'Cause that's just crazy!

Dear Americans

I'm sure this is something you'd like to be aware of.

All Roads Lead Away From Rome, Too

Well, given the abuse scandals going on in Ireland this past while, it comes as no surprise that people are banding together and rejecting Rome.

"So far more than 300 Catholics have indicated their intention formally to leave the church through the website countmeout.ie, set up last month after publication of the report. The creation of three young lapsed Catholics, the facility is designed to provide clear information and the necessary documents to help people leave the church for good."

It should also come as no surprise that a good many of the people leaving the Catholic Church on the Emerald Isle are lapsed Catholics, agnostics, and atheists.

"'There are many so-called lapsed Catholics as well as agnostics and atheists in Ireland but the church continues to count them as members,' said Dunbar. 'Formally defecting will mean the church can no longer use their large membership to justify continued involvement in the provision of education and health services.'”

So what could possibly lead the Roman communion into such rampant abuses? I'm sure there are a good many factors. There always is. However, I'm fairly certain that one thing in particular gives rise to lewd and lecherous priests preying on their parishoners: mandatory celibacy.

When people are denied follow-through on their fundamental urges to procreate, they'll find some other way of gratifying their urges. And since the Catholic Church has had a long-standing negative view of sexuality, things like masturbation are also denied the clergy. So with no reprieve or outlet allowed to these clergy members, some of them find themselves in nefarious situations hoping all-the-while that their position of power and influence will afford them anonymity on the lips of their victims.

And let's not hear any scurrilous excuses like, "well, they don't have to become priests" because it does nothing to address the issue already at hand: people who have already become priests are diddling kids, and the developmentally needy. Those priests don't have an excuse, no matter what latitudinarian attitude the Roman See feels find to adopt; e.g., shipping pedophile priests off to South America where they can continue their abuses under cover of a less fortified media, and a generally ill-provisioned social safety net. Or shuffling them off to remote Alaskan towns where they can do more damage to the Natives than has already been done.

So while the Roman pontiffs may conclude that because Christ was celibate, so too should priests be, I'm quite happily certain that Christ never suffered the children to come unto Him for a chance at carnal satisfaction. So what excuse does the Roman Church and its coterie of pervert priests have on that account? Afterall, aren't the priests supposed to represent Christ to us?

Pricks

So it seems there's going to be a vaccine for the swine flu. The flu itself is very mild and most people recover easily. Kinda like having a common cold, really. Which is why we should roll up our sleeves and let those pricks stick us with it (oh, and all of the toxins that otherwise wouldn't be in my body).

Seems a little overblown, doesn't it, to inject a vaccine that will potentially be more harmful than the thing it's supposedly vaccinating against?

"The decision to start vaccinating people against swine flu — which so far remains a mild virus in most people — will ultimately be a gamble, since there will be limited data on any vaccine. Until millions of people start receiving the shots, experts will not know about rare and potentially dangerous side effects."

By all means! Experiment on us.

Since only 429 people (of who knows what age, level of fitness, and dietary habits) have died out of the reported 95,000 people who have contracted swine flu, it seems it would be worthwhile to jump headlong into the 1976 swine flu fiasco.

"The public health community may still be scarred by the U.S.' disastrous 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign, which was abruptly stopped after hundreds of people reported developing Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing disorder, after getting the flu vaccine."

But of course we wouldn't repeat that mistake. We're much smarter now. We have more better technologies. And we won't use the same ingredients. Your cocktail will be shaken, not stirred. And we may just put stuff in it to make an extra-strength version, but don't tell anyone that we really don't know what that stuff will do to you.

"Several drugmakers are currently considering using adjuvants, ingredients used to stretch a vaccine's active ingredient, which could allow for many more vaccine doses. But little or no data exists on the safety of vaccines with adjuvants in populations including children and pregnant women. And in the U.S., there are no licensed flu vaccines that use adjuvants."

Perfect! Stick 'em all with something potentially more harmful than the flu itself, and make sure it includes a little extra bang for our buck just to make sure it maximizes possible adverse events. That'll get 'em.

I think there's a good parallel between gangsta culture and Big Pharma: one says "blap, blap" when you take a shot, the other says "ca-ching, ca-ching"; and they both pump you full of heavy metals. And make sure you don't cross either one, 'cause they both know somebody, and they're not afraid to call in favours.

E.F. Briggs: An Ignoranus (Yes, the misspelling is intentional)

Now, when it comes to horrifically ignorant signs like these (and there are many spread across the United States), I can completely understand, and sympathize with why secularists would desire the abolition of religion.



If religious people are so willing to publicly mischaracterize their fellow civilians because they may, or may not believe in God, what does that say for a) the integrity of their beliefs; and b) their desire to see an actual united civilian loyalty?

Or, as my wife pointed out to me, "God is certainly not a patriot. You don't have to believe in God to be an American." So there's really no correlation (or at least, a stupendously wide gulf) between what a person believes and how loyal they will be to their country.

More unfortunately, the sign seems to suggest that a civil war could be warranted if atheists don't repatriate by becoming believers. I wonder if these same believers would be just as quick to throw the switch, or pull the trigger as a punishment for treason, if in fact they actually believe non-belief is as much a danger as treason? Wouldn't that be an abrogation of the 5th Commandment (6th depending on your tradition)? How would they legitimize such an action? Personally, I don't think they'd do it. Which is what makes Rev. E.F. Briggs's statement the statement of an ignorant blowhard.

Benignly Deceived

Please, regulate me.

I'm a person; I'm a database priority.

Filter in your umbrella controls --

Binary virtue, policies extolled.


Administrate my conscious day

So I can doubt and question, nay,

'Believe' that I'm free

And watch the truth bleed away.

Hellvangelicalism

It came to my attention today as I was watching The Root of All Evil -- a documentary by famed atheist biologist Richard Dawkins -- that religious fanaticism in America is indeed a sick and grotesque parody of the message of love, and non-judgmentalism that Christ demonstrated. Dawkins brought to light the oppressive, fear-based tactics of a particular group of fundamentalist evangelicals who caper about under the name Hell House Outreach. This particular brew of insanity purposefully sets out to frighten people -- children in particular -- into belief in God.

Really, it's not unlike the equally distorted, and fear-mongering tactics of Canada's Heaven's Gates Hell's Flames. A shameless, base production that feeds off of people's confusion, ignorance, and (like has been said already) fears.

I do have to wonder what drives a person to the point where they find it morally acceptable to make a circus display out of separation from God? And why is it permissable to promote hellfire and the cruelties of the demonic world to particular target audiences -- more specifically, children 12 and up? Are they mature enough at 12, suddenly, that depictions of callous hatred, malevolence, torture, and brutality are reasonable psychological tools to win their minds over to Christ? Is that what Christ said would display the love of God the Father? Are we looking to fashion the theater after the Inquisitions? And why do these kinds of productions always present good and evil, God and the devil, heaven and hell in such simpleminded, hackneyed ways? Haven't we exhausted the market on binary notions of good and bad, light and dark, God and the devil, etc.?

I put this kind of stuff on level with Fred Phelps and his band of bigoted butt-holes.

The Twilight Zone of Advertising

By way of "10 Creepiest Old Adds", I bring you the following:

(Thank you to: Unrepentant Old Hippe)