I have come to one very depressing conclusion: humanity is screwed. The environment is collapsing, the water is polluted, political systems are failing, society is crumbling, and civilization is on the verge of a mediocre smothering. I know, it’s been said thousands of times before, but come on people. The writing is on the wall. The worst part is most of you are too illiterate to read it.
Now notice I don’t claim the world is going to end, nor that life will cease to be. Trust me, we are way too full of ourselves if we think we’re capable of obliterating this rock we exist on. And life will continue to thrive long after we become extinct. That is what evolution is all about. Sure there will be tons of cockroaches and rats, but they have the tools to survive. Hell, we’ve thrown everything at those creatures short of an atomic bomb and even if we did that, those twin species would continue to scramble to all four corners of the globe.
So why is humanity doomed? Well, it’s quite simple. It’s our mindset. We all know the all important question posed to humanity: Why am I? Now we’ve come up with some interesting answers as well as some very skewed ones (scientologists, I’m looking at you). The problem is the question shouldn’t be “Why am I?” The question is “Why should I be?”
First, why the initial question is not only worthless but a threat to the human mindset. To think we are so unique that we warrant an investigation into our origins smacks of narcissism. Do you want the literal reason for why you are here? Sex, my friend. Do you want to understand how life came to be? Chemicals, energy, and chance. Do you want to realize your purpose? It’s balance. Always has been, always will be. The universe is a complex equation of check and countercheck, everything balancing everything else out because too much of anything is detrimental to the whole. So to believe that humanity ranks above the ecosystem, the plants that make it up, or the animals who thrive in it is to remove ourselves from our natural environment and place us in a land of confusion. Just because we have a gift called reason doesn’t mean we should do the equivalent of masturbating with it by dreaming up tons of questions that will never lead anywhere. Reality is a subjective thing. What you think makes sense I know I sure the hell don’t agree with. So seeking out some universal answer to some philosophical enigma is nothing more than a waste of time. You have reason for a reason: to figure out real world problems and create solutions. We are a part of the grand equation, each of us serving as a cog in the machine. The only question we should be asking is what cog are we meant to represent. Believing ourselves special because we are human and sentient is ridiculous. Sure, I know I’m an entity. What is so special about that? If we were to make man vanish, the world could easily get on without us. That is because we’ve so removed ourselves from the life cycle that we’ve become more of an irritant retarding life’s growth. We don’t balance things. We tip the scales in our favor. We play the role of the measurer rather than of weight on the scale. We are so distant from the world, sealed in our tombs called the modern home, seeing the world through television instead of through windows, we really have no clue what is going on around us. We’re oblivious to the fact we are destroying the world. Luckily, tipping the scale too far will only lead to us sliding down and out of the picture allowing it to bounce back. We, sadly, won’t be there to see it.
Now I’m going to shock you. All that crap you’ve been told since birth about being special: you’re not. Yeah, mommy and daddy wanted to build up your ego, aid in the building of some self-esteem. Well, face it. You’re not special. In a world of over 6 billion (6,000,000,000) humans, what exactly sets you apart? You have the same organs, the same senses, and likely the same skin and hair of some fraction of the rest of humanity. So are you a stand-out? Are you some demi-god or messiah, some superhuman? No, you’re not.
Let me shock you some more. We are not all equal. Yeah, the introduction on the United States’ charter would have you believe otherwise: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. First off, if that were true then why were only the educated upper classes representing the rest of the colonies? Why was there an aristocratic elite even in a backwater like America in the eighteenth century? It was a nice little idealistic spiel but not an honest one. If ol’ Tom Jefferson wasn’t winking when he wrote that then the man was obviously broken in the brain. No my friends, we are not all equal. There are those who are smarter, stronger, more aggressive, more creative, more innovative, etc. We are a multifaceted species and that is a good thing. It allows us to look at problems from different angles, to each play some role. If we were all exactly alike, all “equal”, then why should one guy get the chance to hold a position over another? Why are there hierarchies? We all have gifts, usually not the same as others. The pathetic part is television, the media, and our very culture rams down our throats that we are all capable of the amazing and nothing is beyond our grasp. People, stop driving yourselves insane. Not everyone is capable of being the greatest. The slots are limited, the competition intense, and you very likely do not possess the tools to accomplish victory. Sad but true, yet it doesn’t make you pathetic. You play a part, you’re just not meant for greater things. There is no shame in realizing your limitations. But to believe yourself capable of far more than you really are; that is hubris and that is the direction humanity is going. If we continue to believe we can do the impossible, the frustration is going to kill us.
Another problem with civilization is our glorification of those who feed our hunger for illusions. We deify athletes, movie stars, and musicians yet forget soldiers, teachers, and others who contribute far more to our society. Sure, that boxer overcame the odds and knocked out the champ in the last round in a Cinderella comeback, but what about the soldier who took a bullet in a unknown battle in a forgotten part of the world? Wow, that actor was really good in that movie. Real blockbuster stuff. Did you see all the explosions? What about the teacher who taught the actor to read the script, the writer to write, etc. We glorify our dreams and forget the reality. There is a reason why past societies considered entertainers lower than prostitutes: because they take you out of the world. Sure, they can make you forget the problems in your life for a few hours because of them, but when it’s over you sure the hell still have the same problems. Why not glorify people who actually strive to change the world, not make you forget about it?
So, I ask you, why should you be? What do you have to offer humanity? What do you have to offer the world? If you’d just drop the damn narcissism and realize you’re part of a larger whole, that you’re not special or unique but belong to a larger whole that can’t function without you, then maybe we could stop the fragmenting of civilization and actually turn the world around. You exist so that there is a tomorrow. That is why you are. Try to find a way to make it happen. A life well lived is one where you left the world better off because of you’re life. It’s not material possessions or fame, historical precedent or a even a large family. It’s having done what you could that things improved.
Come on guys. You all have reason for a reason. Stop wasting it, shutting it off, squandering that potential. Stop letting other people tell you what to think, how to act, what should be. Make a mark. Let those sparks of thought fly, burn bright with your inquisitive nature, illuminate a path to a greater tomorrow. Make me eat my words. I’m challenging you. Now do it!
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2008
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
What It's Like to be an Atheist
A few folks wanna know why I'm an atheist. I'm not planning on sugar coating this with any platitudes about how religion helps some folks cope with the brutal facts of life they never asked for and don't deserve; it does do that and it does lots of useful things. But that's not what this is about.
If you don't want to know, stop reading ... now. I mean it, stop reading this right now. If you've recently lost someone or are about to lose someone and religion is the one thread you're hanging onto to keep from going bonkers, don't read this; If you need to feel that humans have some kind of special place in the universe and without that special dispensation, it's all 'for nothing', don't read this; If you're easily offended and/or intolerant, don't read this. Normally I'd be happy to indulge all that, but in this one singular case I'm not going to be terribly empathetic about people complaining.
And, I'm gonna do this thing in two parts; one today and one tomorrow. The first trying to explain what it feels like to be an atheist, the latter part on why I'm an atheist. There will be some overlap.
What it feels like to be an Atheist
I've always been an atheist, I know nothing else. From my earliest memory of considering the question, I'm talking maybe age three or four, I was skeptical as hell. The God stories just didn't add up. I'm amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn't an atheist like me. But they're not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I'll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes.
Imagine that you live in a world where 90% of the people around you sincerely believe in something that appears to you to be downright whacky, if perhaps relatively pleasant on the surface in many respects. Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it.
But in this fantasy world, they're not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they're not strange or childish for believing in this. They don't just limit it at that even, they insist everyone kiss their ass about their Santa belief every damn day of their lives and if you don't humor them at the drop of hat under any circumstances, you're being disrespectful, you're out of line. No matter how much you humor them, they always demand more.
Imagine, seriously imagine for a moment now, that these people, the vast majority of the electorate, vote for politicians based in large part on what they think Santa wants, campaign speeches all end with "Be good or Santa won't come to visit". And most of these voters won't even consider voting for someone who doesn't believe in Santa Claus and his factory at the North Pole. Yet they routinely congratulate themselves as belonging to the most graciously tolerant and open minded people in all of history.
Imagine that large sections of the country, the majority in fact, reject modern geography and want to teach that Santa lives at the North Pole in a giant Dickensian factory manned by elves as part of that curriculum. They don't just want to teach it at home or in Santa Mass every Sunday, they wanna teach it as geographical fact and they're militant about it. They lobby the school board and stack them with Santa-ists who want to 'teach both sides of the geographic controversy' and let the kids decide if they wanna believe in Santa's Workshop at the North Pole, or not. They want to 'teach the evidence against naturalistic North Polism" and no amount of evidence, no sat photos, no onsite reports, no live North Pole Cams, will dissuade them from this effort.
Imagine that if you even voice the possibility that Santa might be a pleasant legend or some aspects of the story may be more allegorical in nature rather than literal, at the local school board meeting when this issue comes up, you're shouted down, called everything from a Nazi to a demon to a terrorist, exiled from the neighborhood and maybe isolated at work. Because while a bunch of nice things get done in the name of Santa, a lot of nonsense and out and out bullshit also is justified with the same. For example; your kids better not repeat any Santa skepticism, or they'll be teased horribly at the very least and might get the shit beat out of them by other kids from time to time.
Now further imagine; although the underlying story is sweet enough on its own, the actual uses it is put to by various self-serving factions are about as ugly as it can get: The ruling party is supported by a large block of truly radical Santa believers who want to run the entire country like they believe the North Pole facility operates, including sweatshops with kids all busy working away seven days a week 365 days a year in long assembly lines, with hand tools, in the freezing cold arctic winter, all for benefit of a few old men with long white beards who live in complete splendor on that labor. Because that's how Santa wants it, see?
And even though Santa loves children, it is wrong for government to do Santa's work, so really, it would be going against Santa's will to ever just give the millions of working kids a decent meal, but throw a couple of dozen of them a toy once a year you're A-OK with Santa. That's what they want and they're working hard to get it.
On top of that, based on their Santa beliefs, they also want to outlaw all cortical steroids and hormone treatments of any kind for any reason; cancer, growth defects, hormone deficiencies, replacement therapy, arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, muscular dystrophy, and on and on: Because they claim with utter certainty that Santa likes elves. Elves are Divine, and some hormones could be used to treat dwarfism. You might accidentally prevent the normal development of midgets and the bone pathologies associated with it, if hormones were legal and widely prescribed. So no hormonal or cortical drugs, no exceptions. Some of them want to reclassify all drugs as hormones ... just in case.
They try to stack the courts with Santists and they stacked the regulatory oversight boards with Santists at every chance and anytime someone rules against the interest of the sweatshop lobby they're labeled Activist St. Nicks. Anyone who presents evidence to the contrary to Santa or any of these government approved concentration/work camps or ideological Santist Policies is viciously smeared by a professional media, most of whom share the same set of Santa beliefs, and that's on the rare, once in a year occasion when someone who will argue against the literal existence of Santa is even allowed airtime. The nation slides slowly towards Santacracy year by year.
Their entire rationale for this belief system and all the ugliness and oppression associated with it, is based purely on one long Christmas Carol handed down through the ages and some self anointed speakers for Santa--who happen to be in the employ of the wealthy bearded caste--and one or two old children's books.
And BTW it's the same story with various minor differences all over the world; across the ocean are people who reject Santa by name, but who believe in Kris Kringle or Father Christmas or St. Nick with equal or greater intensity than these domestic Santa believers. And some of those pagans are ready and willing to kill each other, kill you and your entire family, in a split-second, up to and including strapping explosives to themselves and blowing up a kids daycare or turning a jet into a missile kamikaze style and plowing it into a factory; all because of that minor quibble over the name and/or suit style of Santa, just to make the point that they really believe their story more than our Santists believe theirs.
Picture your life unfolding in this world: As a child you also believe in Santa because your parents told you to, but as you grow up you become skeptical, some things just don't seem to add up. By the time you're six or seven years-old, you start asking legitimate questions like "How does Santa get down the little chimney, how does Santa get the time to visit each house, how does Santa know the kids who've been good from the ones who've been bad" and so forth. These questions elicit first strangely evasive answers devoid of content and a general sense of unease among the adults you're asking. Over the next few years that moves onto reactions of scorn, patronizing insults, and open hostility. But never, ever one single answer that holds up over time.
Finally you come to suspect there is a real possibility that there is no literal Santa Claus at the North Pole with a toy factory run by elves and flying reindeer. You began gently asking other folks about your concern. But, when you confide in a few of your most trusted friends and closest family members that the whole Santa idea is a nice sentiment to be sure, but it doesn't make much rational sense and there is no evidence for it, the reaction ranges from puzzlement, to pity, to shock, to anger, to open accusations and implications that you're some kind of mental defective for even wondering about it.
You don't understand what's going on, none of this Santa stuff makes any sense and there's zero evidence for it, why can't everyone just admit that? What's the big conspiracy about? Why is everyone pretending there really is a Santa? Then it slowly dawns on you, around age ten or eleven ... the chilling, horrible truth:
They're Not Pretending. They REALLY Do Believe There Is a Santa Claus.
Egads! Holy Shit! You suddenly feel a little bit lonely at age sixteen as you come to realize that you may surrounded by fully grown adults who are delusional incompetents that cannot distinguish fiction from fact and are enthralled by some kind of massive group hysteria! They're most of them all like that! And they all think you're nuts for not buying into their delusion! What the hell is wrong with these fucking people, can't they see how crazy this shit is?
So, being an adolescent who wants to know things and unafraid, you confront people who are trying to convince you about the existence of Santa with what seems to you to be pretty obvious shortcomings in the story. The result is a torrent of stupidly phased questions, anger, at times hatred, usually disguised as pity or concern, but not always.
"Where do you think Christmas came from? How do you think the idea of giving gifts arose in the first place?" you're asked repeatedly.
Some of the questions you're being badgered with now are utterly exempt of any semblance of logic, "I've seen Santa so how do you explain that one?" or "How do you think the North Pole came to be Santa's Workshop if there is no Santa for crying out loud???? Huh? Huh? Answer THAT ONE Mr. Smarty-pants!!!"
And no matter how many times you explain it's more likely Santa was thought up and refined over time by earlier generations, that there is in fact a long historical trail of Santa like characters in the cultures of your ancestors seamlessly leading up to the present day version, you are ignored or laughed at. And over and over the same tired old questions incessantly get thrown in your face again and again as though there was never a response on your part and there is no possible explanation outside of Santa (Or St. Nick or Kris Kringle or Father Christmas, if you happen to be questioned by those respective adherents). It's baffling to you.
Come your college years, more serious folks around now, I'm talking otherwise fully functional adults who hold jobs, sport an array of impressive degrees in Law, Philosophy, Science, or Mathematics, and who make important decisions, bombard you constantly with "Without Santa there would be no reason for us to be good, where do you think morality and ethics come from?; What's your 'world-view' and what evidence do you have for it, if you have no origin for morality?; I mean what's to stop you from going on a killing and raping spree if you don't believe in Santa?"
And no matter how many times you freely state you have no 'world-view' outside of an intuitive 'reality' and that such ideas regarding morality and ethical behavior and what is or is not a crime, likely stem from the culture you are raised in where they're acquired as a child unconsciously and then refined over time as one matures, they ignore you and keep throwing back the same question. The same question over and over in a dazzling variety of slick, pseudo intellectual wrappers, while they practically dance in victory with glee every time they hurl the same dumbass question, as though they proved their Santa belief beyond any questionable doubt.
As you begin your adult life, marry or have a family of your own, the arguments don't get any better, they in fact get noticeably worse at times. Irate e-mailers demand, "How do you explain Rudolph's glowing red nose?"
And no matter how many times you patiently explain that Rudolph's existence and his nose is no more rational or supported than Santa's, that the question exhibits a fundamental logical fallacy by assuming the premise, you are ignored as if your response is invisible to your questioner and the same question is thrown endlessly back in your face as if it's a dead-cinch proof of Santa. You begin to understand that these folks aren't only whacked in the head, they're either liars or unable to think beyond the level of a toddler. Because it really is like arguing with a two-year old most of the time, only these aren't two-year olds, these are grown educated human beings. And you start to really worry now; what if most people are insane and you just happen by the luck of the draw to be one of the few sane ones? A lucid person in a world gone mad?
Hey, maybe you've not given this Santa thing a fair shot. Maybe if you talk to a pro, or meditate or think on it long and hard, something will click into place you're missing. So you embark on a multiyear voyage asking Santa ministers and reading the theology of Santa. You look at other beliefs like the ones who worship St. Nick or Father Christmas, you try, you really try to make it work. You play with altered states of consciousness and talk to people from other cultures about their version of the Santa belief.
And sure, you learn some useful tips, like how to distinguish fresh blotter acid from stuff that's been laying around turning into strychnine, and you might be able to lower or raise your heartbeat using biofeedback after a few sessions. But you find in the end none of the actual Santa like beliefs make any more sense than your own homegrown version. And you can no more force yourself to believe any of them, than you can flap your arms and fly away.
Still, incessantly they recruit you, incessantly they beat you down anytime you open your mouth and try to engage in a real, honest, thoughtful discussion, with the same damn cheesy worthless lines you've been hearing for years now. And from time to time, when you finally convince someone, say someone who is trying to recruit you to accept that Santa is a real entity and really does all those amazing things, that you're not buying it merely on their say-so, they stalk off screaming things like "OH I get it! You HATE Santa Claus and you HATE Christmas and you HATE getting presents, and you're trying to get even by pretending you don't believe in Him. Well, I'll be laughing this Christmas when I'm opening my presents and your only gift is a brand new brain tumor for being bad".
Imagine, as you puzzle your way through this temporal menagerie called life, full to the brim with more of the functionally insane humanoids that make the fabric of experience; bosses, girlfriends, pals, enemies, and role models, that Santa reminders are on every coin, every paper dollar, on every street corner, on every news show, on every cable network, that there are radio and TV stations that are dedicated 24 hours a day to extolling the virtues of Santa and the power of his mighty Sled. Every now and then you come across a fellow traveler who also marvels at the insane people, and you might become friends, compare notes, and laugh about the crazy mother fuckers, but it's a rare thing to meet them in person.
And in every one of those Santa reminders on every five cent piece and every dollar bill, lurks a tiny hint, a latent glimpse of those ugly components of Santa-ism and open wounds of rival Santa-like beliefs that are always at each other's throats; the wars justified and condoned, we're assured, by Santa; the sweatshops and pagan suicide bombers and the political opportunists who want to outlaw a huge class of life saving drugs based on Santa belief; the crazies who want to enact laws forcing everyone else to suffer horrible pain and disfiguring fatal diseases, all to humor their belief in mythological elves. Sometimes as you get older, all you can do is laugh so that you don't cry at the immense human tragedy of it all.
And sure, you're used to it, it doesn't really bother you most of the time because you just don't think about how totally fucking nuts the people around you are or what easy prey they are for the shameless predators of this loony jungle, as long as they're kept from hurting you or enacting their crazed legendary tenets into law and screwing up your life, but it's every damn place you go and it's getting worse and worse. The Santa Clausians are becoming more demanding, more powerful, more delusional and more arrogant every year. You grew up swearing your allegiance at the start of every school day that America was One Nation Under Santa from kindergarten on, and now some people are questioning the usefulness of that tradition, and pointing out it could be seen as blatant brainwashing, and they're being attacked day and night by Santa apologists and compared to pedophiles in the process. The entire Congress shuts down to pass a unanimous amendment supporting saying Santa in the Pledge in School and recites it on the steps of the capitol, shrieking the word Santa out, playing to the cameras and the demented Santa believers on the other side of the optical pipes they're attached to. Which is more comforting? That the leaders of the nation are lying and pandering to Santa believers? Or that they actually believe it also? Hell of a choice, eh?
It starts getting uglier: Imagine that one very loud group of Santa believers regularly demands that you move to another country and/or that you be prevented from giving or receiving gifts or having Christmas Day off because you don't believe in Santa, while members of the same group are attacking you in an even louder voice claiming you are trying to ruin or cancel Christmas, and they demand that you be forced to celebrate it and participate in each and every Santa Claus ritual they personally deem requisite. It's pretty clear to you now: These seemingly normal people are not just fucking insane when it comes to Santa, they're incoherent, dangerously unbalanced, demanding mutually exclusive sets of behavior from you that would be impossible to comply with.
Now imagine: Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn't believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they're still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa's good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don't believe Santa can really fly. Now imagine that that still goes on in some parts of the world AND there's a whole bunch of people in your country who are clamoring to bring that all back.
Imagine that when your mom or dad or heart surgeon or teacher or your best friend tells you they firmly, devoutly, believe in Santa replete with the flying reindeer and the ability to get down every chimney in the world in one evening, that you'd better believe also or you won't be getting a damn thing in the will or in life from them ever, or maybe they'll just treat you like shit in front of the rest of the family, AND THEY'RE NOT KIDDING IN THE SLIGHTEST ABOUT ANY OF IT.
You are under a barrage of Santa believers from the cradle to grave who act everything from shocked to disgusted that you don't believe in Santa, they're getting increasingly militant, yet not a one of them has the slightest bit of evidence that an entity called Santa really exists; not one of them is willing to explain why the North Pole is nothing but a barren, frozen wasteland, except maybe to vaguely explain that the "Workshop" is incorporeal or not meant to be taken "literally"; a claim which other Santa believers disagree with vigorously. Not one of them offers up the slightest tidbit of convincing scientific rationale for how reindeer fly and tow an arial sled, or how Santa reads the minds and keeps tabs on 2 billion kids, and visits them in a single 24 hour period once a year to deliver toys built at his workshop by magic miniature toymakers. Not one of them can offer any compelling real-world reasoning for why Santa would want to do this anyway, what he gets out of it, how he obtains supplies, feeds himself and his workers, treats disease, avoids old age and death, or how they all came to play this role in the first place. And yet you are portrayed as an imbecile and one chip short of Adolph Hitler for not believing it.
Pretty ridiculous, huh? A world gone bonkers, populated and completely run by a majority of people who are frankly clinically insane, dangerously immature, often violent, historically monstrous, completely irrational, closed to any internal questioning, convinced you're either stupid, evil, or dangerous, and hoping for all they're worth to infect you with the same mimetic virus. Can you even imagine how whacked it would be to have to deal with that kind of shit? To have to go through life walking on eggshells on the subject of Santa lest you offend a believer and they blow their stack at you, target you for persecution for political purposes, and/or question your worth, your job, your very life?
Well, if you can imagine all that, you know for just a few moments how it feels everyday to be a grown adult surrounded by wishful childish thinkers clinging to nonsensical myths as if they were real and insisting, in fact force feeding, that mythology to you; people who sometimes turn quite violent, get downright nasty if you express the slightest disagreement with their specific version of the Jolly Old Guy; people who happen to wield incredibly powerful arsenals of WMDs and massive traditional military might as well as running everything from the local police department to the IRS; people who are now are reopening torture chambers and gulags with armies of pundits cackling with delight at the very thought of returning to the good ole torture days.
It's not like we're living everyday in mortal fear, but it's nevertheless a little nerve racking that we find ourselves surrounded, defenseless, and at the mercy of hordes of people that for all the world appear to have lost their minds. And it's a bit depressing that this is the best the human species and/or our own nation can do or has done in millennia, especially now given our potential and the technology/knowledge now at our disposal.
And in the end, you can either pretend to be a Santa believer, basically live a lie 24/7 and try to avoid any showdowns over it that would expose you. Or you can be yourself, embrace reason, live truth, and take your chances, thanking your lucky stars the whole time you don't live in the past or somewhere else in the present; hoping to hell that the Santa believers don't completely dominate everything and go on some kind of anti-Santa purge.
That's kind of what it feels like to be an atheist. If you try and imagine further why you don't believe that Santa is real regardless of how nice a story it is or all the nice things about Christmas you enjoy, you'll be ahead of the game for tomorrow's post on why I don't believe in deities, including yours. More then.
If you don't want to know, stop reading ... now. I mean it, stop reading this right now. If you've recently lost someone or are about to lose someone and religion is the one thread you're hanging onto to keep from going bonkers, don't read this; If you need to feel that humans have some kind of special place in the universe and without that special dispensation, it's all 'for nothing', don't read this; If you're easily offended and/or intolerant, don't read this. Normally I'd be happy to indulge all that, but in this one singular case I'm not going to be terribly empathetic about people complaining.
And, I'm gonna do this thing in two parts; one today and one tomorrow. The first trying to explain what it feels like to be an atheist, the latter part on why I'm an atheist. There will be some overlap.
What it feels like to be an Atheist
I've always been an atheist, I know nothing else. From my earliest memory of considering the question, I'm talking maybe age three or four, I was skeptical as hell. The God stories just didn't add up. I'm amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn't an atheist like me. But they're not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I'll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes.
Imagine that you live in a world where 90% of the people around you sincerely believe in something that appears to you to be downright whacky, if perhaps relatively pleasant on the surface in many respects. Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it.
But in this fantasy world, they're not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they're not strange or childish for believing in this. They don't just limit it at that even, they insist everyone kiss their ass about their Santa belief every damn day of their lives and if you don't humor them at the drop of hat under any circumstances, you're being disrespectful, you're out of line. No matter how much you humor them, they always demand more.
Imagine, seriously imagine for a moment now, that these people, the vast majority of the electorate, vote for politicians based in large part on what they think Santa wants, campaign speeches all end with "Be good or Santa won't come to visit". And most of these voters won't even consider voting for someone who doesn't believe in Santa Claus and his factory at the North Pole. Yet they routinely congratulate themselves as belonging to the most graciously tolerant and open minded people in all of history.
Imagine that large sections of the country, the majority in fact, reject modern geography and want to teach that Santa lives at the North Pole in a giant Dickensian factory manned by elves as part of that curriculum. They don't just want to teach it at home or in Santa Mass every Sunday, they wanna teach it as geographical fact and they're militant about it. They lobby the school board and stack them with Santa-ists who want to 'teach both sides of the geographic controversy' and let the kids decide if they wanna believe in Santa's Workshop at the North Pole, or not. They want to 'teach the evidence against naturalistic North Polism" and no amount of evidence, no sat photos, no onsite reports, no live North Pole Cams, will dissuade them from this effort.
Imagine that if you even voice the possibility that Santa might be a pleasant legend or some aspects of the story may be more allegorical in nature rather than literal, at the local school board meeting when this issue comes up, you're shouted down, called everything from a Nazi to a demon to a terrorist, exiled from the neighborhood and maybe isolated at work. Because while a bunch of nice things get done in the name of Santa, a lot of nonsense and out and out bullshit also is justified with the same. For example; your kids better not repeat any Santa skepticism, or they'll be teased horribly at the very least and might get the shit beat out of them by other kids from time to time.
Now further imagine; although the underlying story is sweet enough on its own, the actual uses it is put to by various self-serving factions are about as ugly as it can get: The ruling party is supported by a large block of truly radical Santa believers who want to run the entire country like they believe the North Pole facility operates, including sweatshops with kids all busy working away seven days a week 365 days a year in long assembly lines, with hand tools, in the freezing cold arctic winter, all for benefit of a few old men with long white beards who live in complete splendor on that labor. Because that's how Santa wants it, see?
And even though Santa loves children, it is wrong for government to do Santa's work, so really, it would be going against Santa's will to ever just give the millions of working kids a decent meal, but throw a couple of dozen of them a toy once a year you're A-OK with Santa. That's what they want and they're working hard to get it.
On top of that, based on their Santa beliefs, they also want to outlaw all cortical steroids and hormone treatments of any kind for any reason; cancer, growth defects, hormone deficiencies, replacement therapy, arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, muscular dystrophy, and on and on: Because they claim with utter certainty that Santa likes elves. Elves are Divine, and some hormones could be used to treat dwarfism. You might accidentally prevent the normal development of midgets and the bone pathologies associated with it, if hormones were legal and widely prescribed. So no hormonal or cortical drugs, no exceptions. Some of them want to reclassify all drugs as hormones ... just in case.
They try to stack the courts with Santists and they stacked the regulatory oversight boards with Santists at every chance and anytime someone rules against the interest of the sweatshop lobby they're labeled Activist St. Nicks. Anyone who presents evidence to the contrary to Santa or any of these government approved concentration/work camps or ideological Santist Policies is viciously smeared by a professional media, most of whom share the same set of Santa beliefs, and that's on the rare, once in a year occasion when someone who will argue against the literal existence of Santa is even allowed airtime. The nation slides slowly towards Santacracy year by year.
Their entire rationale for this belief system and all the ugliness and oppression associated with it, is based purely on one long Christmas Carol handed down through the ages and some self anointed speakers for Santa--who happen to be in the employ of the wealthy bearded caste--and one or two old children's books.
And BTW it's the same story with various minor differences all over the world; across the ocean are people who reject Santa by name, but who believe in Kris Kringle or Father Christmas or St. Nick with equal or greater intensity than these domestic Santa believers. And some of those pagans are ready and willing to kill each other, kill you and your entire family, in a split-second, up to and including strapping explosives to themselves and blowing up a kids daycare or turning a jet into a missile kamikaze style and plowing it into a factory; all because of that minor quibble over the name and/or suit style of Santa, just to make the point that they really believe their story more than our Santists believe theirs.
Picture your life unfolding in this world: As a child you also believe in Santa because your parents told you to, but as you grow up you become skeptical, some things just don't seem to add up. By the time you're six or seven years-old, you start asking legitimate questions like "How does Santa get down the little chimney, how does Santa get the time to visit each house, how does Santa know the kids who've been good from the ones who've been bad" and so forth. These questions elicit first strangely evasive answers devoid of content and a general sense of unease among the adults you're asking. Over the next few years that moves onto reactions of scorn, patronizing insults, and open hostility. But never, ever one single answer that holds up over time.
Finally you come to suspect there is a real possibility that there is no literal Santa Claus at the North Pole with a toy factory run by elves and flying reindeer. You began gently asking other folks about your concern. But, when you confide in a few of your most trusted friends and closest family members that the whole Santa idea is a nice sentiment to be sure, but it doesn't make much rational sense and there is no evidence for it, the reaction ranges from puzzlement, to pity, to shock, to anger, to open accusations and implications that you're some kind of mental defective for even wondering about it.
You don't understand what's going on, none of this Santa stuff makes any sense and there's zero evidence for it, why can't everyone just admit that? What's the big conspiracy about? Why is everyone pretending there really is a Santa? Then it slowly dawns on you, around age ten or eleven ... the chilling, horrible truth:
They're Not Pretending. They REALLY Do Believe There Is a Santa Claus.
Egads! Holy Shit! You suddenly feel a little bit lonely at age sixteen as you come to realize that you may surrounded by fully grown adults who are delusional incompetents that cannot distinguish fiction from fact and are enthralled by some kind of massive group hysteria! They're most of them all like that! And they all think you're nuts for not buying into their delusion! What the hell is wrong with these fucking people, can't they see how crazy this shit is?
So, being an adolescent who wants to know things and unafraid, you confront people who are trying to convince you about the existence of Santa with what seems to you to be pretty obvious shortcomings in the story. The result is a torrent of stupidly phased questions, anger, at times hatred, usually disguised as pity or concern, but not always.
"Where do you think Christmas came from? How do you think the idea of giving gifts arose in the first place?" you're asked repeatedly.
Some of the questions you're being badgered with now are utterly exempt of any semblance of logic, "I've seen Santa so how do you explain that one?" or "How do you think the North Pole came to be Santa's Workshop if there is no Santa for crying out loud???? Huh? Huh? Answer THAT ONE Mr. Smarty-pants!!!"
And no matter how many times you explain it's more likely Santa was thought up and refined over time by earlier generations, that there is in fact a long historical trail of Santa like characters in the cultures of your ancestors seamlessly leading up to the present day version, you are ignored or laughed at. And over and over the same tired old questions incessantly get thrown in your face again and again as though there was never a response on your part and there is no possible explanation outside of Santa (Or St. Nick or Kris Kringle or Father Christmas, if you happen to be questioned by those respective adherents). It's baffling to you.
Come your college years, more serious folks around now, I'm talking otherwise fully functional adults who hold jobs, sport an array of impressive degrees in Law, Philosophy, Science, or Mathematics, and who make important decisions, bombard you constantly with "Without Santa there would be no reason for us to be good, where do you think morality and ethics come from?; What's your 'world-view' and what evidence do you have for it, if you have no origin for morality?; I mean what's to stop you from going on a killing and raping spree if you don't believe in Santa?"
And no matter how many times you freely state you have no 'world-view' outside of an intuitive 'reality' and that such ideas regarding morality and ethical behavior and what is or is not a crime, likely stem from the culture you are raised in where they're acquired as a child unconsciously and then refined over time as one matures, they ignore you and keep throwing back the same question. The same question over and over in a dazzling variety of slick, pseudo intellectual wrappers, while they practically dance in victory with glee every time they hurl the same dumbass question, as though they proved their Santa belief beyond any questionable doubt.
As you begin your adult life, marry or have a family of your own, the arguments don't get any better, they in fact get noticeably worse at times. Irate e-mailers demand, "How do you explain Rudolph's glowing red nose?"
And no matter how many times you patiently explain that Rudolph's existence and his nose is no more rational or supported than Santa's, that the question exhibits a fundamental logical fallacy by assuming the premise, you are ignored as if your response is invisible to your questioner and the same question is thrown endlessly back in your face as if it's a dead-cinch proof of Santa. You begin to understand that these folks aren't only whacked in the head, they're either liars or unable to think beyond the level of a toddler. Because it really is like arguing with a two-year old most of the time, only these aren't two-year olds, these are grown educated human beings. And you start to really worry now; what if most people are insane and you just happen by the luck of the draw to be one of the few sane ones? A lucid person in a world gone mad?
Hey, maybe you've not given this Santa thing a fair shot. Maybe if you talk to a pro, or meditate or think on it long and hard, something will click into place you're missing. So you embark on a multiyear voyage asking Santa ministers and reading the theology of Santa. You look at other beliefs like the ones who worship St. Nick or Father Christmas, you try, you really try to make it work. You play with altered states of consciousness and talk to people from other cultures about their version of the Santa belief.
And sure, you learn some useful tips, like how to distinguish fresh blotter acid from stuff that's been laying around turning into strychnine, and you might be able to lower or raise your heartbeat using biofeedback after a few sessions. But you find in the end none of the actual Santa like beliefs make any more sense than your own homegrown version. And you can no more force yourself to believe any of them, than you can flap your arms and fly away.
Still, incessantly they recruit you, incessantly they beat you down anytime you open your mouth and try to engage in a real, honest, thoughtful discussion, with the same damn cheesy worthless lines you've been hearing for years now. And from time to time, when you finally convince someone, say someone who is trying to recruit you to accept that Santa is a real entity and really does all those amazing things, that you're not buying it merely on their say-so, they stalk off screaming things like "OH I get it! You HATE Santa Claus and you HATE Christmas and you HATE getting presents, and you're trying to get even by pretending you don't believe in Him. Well, I'll be laughing this Christmas when I'm opening my presents and your only gift is a brand new brain tumor for being bad".
Imagine, as you puzzle your way through this temporal menagerie called life, full to the brim with more of the functionally insane humanoids that make the fabric of experience; bosses, girlfriends, pals, enemies, and role models, that Santa reminders are on every coin, every paper dollar, on every street corner, on every news show, on every cable network, that there are radio and TV stations that are dedicated 24 hours a day to extolling the virtues of Santa and the power of his mighty Sled. Every now and then you come across a fellow traveler who also marvels at the insane people, and you might become friends, compare notes, and laugh about the crazy mother fuckers, but it's a rare thing to meet them in person.
And in every one of those Santa reminders on every five cent piece and every dollar bill, lurks a tiny hint, a latent glimpse of those ugly components of Santa-ism and open wounds of rival Santa-like beliefs that are always at each other's throats; the wars justified and condoned, we're assured, by Santa; the sweatshops and pagan suicide bombers and the political opportunists who want to outlaw a huge class of life saving drugs based on Santa belief; the crazies who want to enact laws forcing everyone else to suffer horrible pain and disfiguring fatal diseases, all to humor their belief in mythological elves. Sometimes as you get older, all you can do is laugh so that you don't cry at the immense human tragedy of it all.
And sure, you're used to it, it doesn't really bother you most of the time because you just don't think about how totally fucking nuts the people around you are or what easy prey they are for the shameless predators of this loony jungle, as long as they're kept from hurting you or enacting their crazed legendary tenets into law and screwing up your life, but it's every damn place you go and it's getting worse and worse. The Santa Clausians are becoming more demanding, more powerful, more delusional and more arrogant every year. You grew up swearing your allegiance at the start of every school day that America was One Nation Under Santa from kindergarten on, and now some people are questioning the usefulness of that tradition, and pointing out it could be seen as blatant brainwashing, and they're being attacked day and night by Santa apologists and compared to pedophiles in the process. The entire Congress shuts down to pass a unanimous amendment supporting saying Santa in the Pledge in School and recites it on the steps of the capitol, shrieking the word Santa out, playing to the cameras and the demented Santa believers on the other side of the optical pipes they're attached to. Which is more comforting? That the leaders of the nation are lying and pandering to Santa believers? Or that they actually believe it also? Hell of a choice, eh?
It starts getting uglier: Imagine that one very loud group of Santa believers regularly demands that you move to another country and/or that you be prevented from giving or receiving gifts or having Christmas Day off because you don't believe in Santa, while members of the same group are attacking you in an even louder voice claiming you are trying to ruin or cancel Christmas, and they demand that you be forced to celebrate it and participate in each and every Santa Claus ritual they personally deem requisite. It's pretty clear to you now: These seemingly normal people are not just fucking insane when it comes to Santa, they're incoherent, dangerously unbalanced, demanding mutually exclusive sets of behavior from you that would be impossible to comply with.
Now imagine: Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn't believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they're still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa's good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don't believe Santa can really fly. Now imagine that that still goes on in some parts of the world AND there's a whole bunch of people in your country who are clamoring to bring that all back.
Imagine that when your mom or dad or heart surgeon or teacher or your best friend tells you they firmly, devoutly, believe in Santa replete with the flying reindeer and the ability to get down every chimney in the world in one evening, that you'd better believe also or you won't be getting a damn thing in the will or in life from them ever, or maybe they'll just treat you like shit in front of the rest of the family, AND THEY'RE NOT KIDDING IN THE SLIGHTEST ABOUT ANY OF IT.
You are under a barrage of Santa believers from the cradle to grave who act everything from shocked to disgusted that you don't believe in Santa, they're getting increasingly militant, yet not a one of them has the slightest bit of evidence that an entity called Santa really exists; not one of them is willing to explain why the North Pole is nothing but a barren, frozen wasteland, except maybe to vaguely explain that the "Workshop" is incorporeal or not meant to be taken "literally"; a claim which other Santa believers disagree with vigorously. Not one of them offers up the slightest tidbit of convincing scientific rationale for how reindeer fly and tow an arial sled, or how Santa reads the minds and keeps tabs on 2 billion kids, and visits them in a single 24 hour period once a year to deliver toys built at his workshop by magic miniature toymakers. Not one of them can offer any compelling real-world reasoning for why Santa would want to do this anyway, what he gets out of it, how he obtains supplies, feeds himself and his workers, treats disease, avoids old age and death, or how they all came to play this role in the first place. And yet you are portrayed as an imbecile and one chip short of Adolph Hitler for not believing it.
Pretty ridiculous, huh? A world gone bonkers, populated and completely run by a majority of people who are frankly clinically insane, dangerously immature, often violent, historically monstrous, completely irrational, closed to any internal questioning, convinced you're either stupid, evil, or dangerous, and hoping for all they're worth to infect you with the same mimetic virus. Can you even imagine how whacked it would be to have to deal with that kind of shit? To have to go through life walking on eggshells on the subject of Santa lest you offend a believer and they blow their stack at you, target you for persecution for political purposes, and/or question your worth, your job, your very life?
Well, if you can imagine all that, you know for just a few moments how it feels everyday to be a grown adult surrounded by wishful childish thinkers clinging to nonsensical myths as if they were real and insisting, in fact force feeding, that mythology to you; people who sometimes turn quite violent, get downright nasty if you express the slightest disagreement with their specific version of the Jolly Old Guy; people who happen to wield incredibly powerful arsenals of WMDs and massive traditional military might as well as running everything from the local police department to the IRS; people who are now are reopening torture chambers and gulags with armies of pundits cackling with delight at the very thought of returning to the good ole torture days.
It's not like we're living everyday in mortal fear, but it's nevertheless a little nerve racking that we find ourselves surrounded, defenseless, and at the mercy of hordes of people that for all the world appear to have lost their minds. And it's a bit depressing that this is the best the human species and/or our own nation can do or has done in millennia, especially now given our potential and the technology/knowledge now at our disposal.
And in the end, you can either pretend to be a Santa believer, basically live a lie 24/7 and try to avoid any showdowns over it that would expose you. Or you can be yourself, embrace reason, live truth, and take your chances, thanking your lucky stars the whole time you don't live in the past or somewhere else in the present; hoping to hell that the Santa believers don't completely dominate everything and go on some kind of anti-Santa purge.
That's kind of what it feels like to be an atheist. If you try and imagine further why you don't believe that Santa is real regardless of how nice a story it is or all the nice things about Christmas you enjoy, you'll be ahead of the game for tomorrow's post on why I don't believe in deities, including yours. More then.
The Deity in the Data
Brother, have you heard the bad news?
It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn't go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren't prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.
If the data had turned out the other way, clerics would be trumpeting the power of prayer on every street corner. Instead, the study's authors and many media outlets are straining to brush off the results. The study "cannot address a large number of religious questions, such as whether God exists, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work in the same way as prayers from other groups," the authors shrug.
Bull. If these findings involved any other kind of therapy, doctors would spin hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms and why the treatment failed or backfired. And that's exactly what theologians and scientists are doing as they try to explain away the data. They're implicitly sketching possibilities as to what sort of God could account for the results. Here's a list.
1. God doesn't exist. This is the simplest explanation, favored by atheists. You pray, but nobody's there, so nothing happens.
2. God doesn't intervene. This is the view of self-limiting-deity theorists and of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. God may be there, but He's not doing anything here.
3. God is highly selective. The positive effect of prayer on the study's participants "could be smaller than the 10% that our study was powered to detect," the authors suggest. Maybe God heeds prayers, but not enough of them to reach statistical significance.
4. God ignores form letters. According to the study's protocol, if you were assigned to pray for patients, the only information you got about them was a daily fax listing their first names and the initials of their surnames. A script told you to pray in each case "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications." This cookie-cutter approach may have "impacted the quality of the prayer," according to a scientific editorial that accompanies the study. Form letters don't impress Congress; why should they impress God?
5. God requires a personal reference. "Intercessory prayer makes much more sense in community, in family, [where] we're concerned about the well-being of one another," one of the study's authors argued in a teleconference on the findings. A congressman may care whether your lobbyist knows the congressman, but what God cares about is whether your intercessor knows you.
6. God is unmoved by the size of your lobbying team. The authors lament contamination from "background prayer" as though it were radiation. Patients "may have been exposed to a large amount of non-study prayer" from friends and family, they warn, possibly swamping "the effects of prayer provided by the intercessors." Evidently, the 1,000 prayers delivered on your behalf by strangers in this study added no discernible effect to the prayers God heard from people who knew you.
7. God ignores third parties. Why should God do what a fax from one stranger tells another stranger to ask for on your behalf? The person God's going to listen to is you—and maybe you want relief or salvation more than life. As one author puts it, "What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves."
8. God takes His time. Maybe the study didn't follow patients long enough, the authors suggest: "The occurrence of any complication within 30 days of surgery may not be appropriate or relevant to the effects of intercessory prayer." When ordering from Heaven, allow at least one month for shipping.
9. God has a backlog. Patients' names were faxed to intercessors "starting the night before each patient's scheduled surgery," according to the protocol. Was that too late?
10. God ignores you if you don't pray hard enough. "Maybe the people weren't praying very hard," a monsignor tells the St. Petersburg Times.
11. God ignores you if you're wicked. Responding to the findings, a Baptist pastor cites James 5:16: "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." No righteousness, no effect.
12. God helps those who help themselves. "Many if not most of the wonderful hospitals in this country were built through the intercessory prayers of religious communities of various denominations," a member of the study team observed during the teleconference. "Theirs was the prayer of action instead of word." Deeds, not pleas, save lives.
13. God does not hear the prayer of a Christian. The protocol says prayers were delivered by members of a Benedictine monastery, a Carmelite community, and a Protestant prayer ministry. "We were unable to locate other Christian, Jewish, or non-Christian groups that could receive the daily prayer list required for this multiyear study," the authors explain. Oops! Maybe Jerry Falwell had it backward.
14. God chooses His own outcome measures. The study measured the effect of prayers on "postoperative complications defined by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons." But as the accompanying editorial notes, "many prayers for the sick contain the implicit objective of easing the passage of the spirit out of the body, an outcome which, by Society of Thoracic Surgeons definition, would be coded as death." If God doesn't pass your test, maybe you're using the wrong test.
15. God doesn't participate in studies. The authors say 1,493 people refused to participate in the study because they had other priorities or were "not interested in clinical research." Why should God, who has a lot more to do and nothing to learn from a study, react differently? "I don't see him cooperating in a test," opines a Baptist theologian.
16. God hates being told what to do. Several clerics argue that the kind of intercessory prayer used in the study is "manipulative … of divine action" and sinfully treats God "as our instrument." The editorial accompanying the study, noting that patients who were prayed for "had worse absolute rates of complications" than those who weren't, asks "whether it was the intercessory prayer per se that may be unsafe." Is the prayer study, like so much in the Bible, a sign of God's wrath? "Researchers must be vigilant in asking the question of whether a well-intentioned, loving, heartfelt healing prayer might inadvertently harm or kill vulnerable patients," the editorial concludes.
17. God is malevolent. Patients who received prayers were marginally more likely to develop complications (52.5 to 50.9 percent) and substantially more likely to develop major complications (18.0 to 13.4 percent) than patients who received none. You can't blame the major-complication gap on psychology, since both groups were told that they might or might not be prayed for. In the teleconference, one of the study's authors tried to explain the gap away—"We don't feel confident statistically that that difference is at the level of significance barely that it's actually perhaps real"—whatever that means. But another called it a "possible hotspot," and the editorial warns that in clinical research, "assumptions of Divine benevolence … could only be considered scientifically naïve," since "in the history of medicine there has never been a healing remedy that was actually effective without having potential side effects or toxicities."
Warning: The surgeon general may determine that prayer is hazardous to your health. That's what can happen when faith sets out to prove its power through science.
It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn't go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren't prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.
If the data had turned out the other way, clerics would be trumpeting the power of prayer on every street corner. Instead, the study's authors and many media outlets are straining to brush off the results. The study "cannot address a large number of religious questions, such as whether God exists, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work in the same way as prayers from other groups," the authors shrug.
Bull. If these findings involved any other kind of therapy, doctors would spin hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms and why the treatment failed or backfired. And that's exactly what theologians and scientists are doing as they try to explain away the data. They're implicitly sketching possibilities as to what sort of God could account for the results. Here's a list.
1. God doesn't exist. This is the simplest explanation, favored by atheists. You pray, but nobody's there, so nothing happens.
2. God doesn't intervene. This is the view of self-limiting-deity theorists and of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. God may be there, but He's not doing anything here.
3. God is highly selective. The positive effect of prayer on the study's participants "could be smaller than the 10% that our study was powered to detect," the authors suggest. Maybe God heeds prayers, but not enough of them to reach statistical significance.
4. God ignores form letters. According to the study's protocol, if you were assigned to pray for patients, the only information you got about them was a daily fax listing their first names and the initials of their surnames. A script told you to pray in each case "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications." This cookie-cutter approach may have "impacted the quality of the prayer," according to a scientific editorial that accompanies the study. Form letters don't impress Congress; why should they impress God?
5. God requires a personal reference. "Intercessory prayer makes much more sense in community, in family, [where] we're concerned about the well-being of one another," one of the study's authors argued in a teleconference on the findings. A congressman may care whether your lobbyist knows the congressman, but what God cares about is whether your intercessor knows you.
6. God is unmoved by the size of your lobbying team. The authors lament contamination from "background prayer" as though it were radiation. Patients "may have been exposed to a large amount of non-study prayer" from friends and family, they warn, possibly swamping "the effects of prayer provided by the intercessors." Evidently, the 1,000 prayers delivered on your behalf by strangers in this study added no discernible effect to the prayers God heard from people who knew you.
7. God ignores third parties. Why should God do what a fax from one stranger tells another stranger to ask for on your behalf? The person God's going to listen to is you—and maybe you want relief or salvation more than life. As one author puts it, "What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves."
8. God takes His time. Maybe the study didn't follow patients long enough, the authors suggest: "The occurrence of any complication within 30 days of surgery may not be appropriate or relevant to the effects of intercessory prayer." When ordering from Heaven, allow at least one month for shipping.
9. God has a backlog. Patients' names were faxed to intercessors "starting the night before each patient's scheduled surgery," according to the protocol. Was that too late?
10. God ignores you if you don't pray hard enough. "Maybe the people weren't praying very hard," a monsignor tells the St. Petersburg Times.
11. God ignores you if you're wicked. Responding to the findings, a Baptist pastor cites James 5:16: "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." No righteousness, no effect.
12. God helps those who help themselves. "Many if not most of the wonderful hospitals in this country were built through the intercessory prayers of religious communities of various denominations," a member of the study team observed during the teleconference. "Theirs was the prayer of action instead of word." Deeds, not pleas, save lives.
13. God does not hear the prayer of a Christian. The protocol says prayers were delivered by members of a Benedictine monastery, a Carmelite community, and a Protestant prayer ministry. "We were unable to locate other Christian, Jewish, or non-Christian groups that could receive the daily prayer list required for this multiyear study," the authors explain. Oops! Maybe Jerry Falwell had it backward.
14. God chooses His own outcome measures. The study measured the effect of prayers on "postoperative complications defined by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons." But as the accompanying editorial notes, "many prayers for the sick contain the implicit objective of easing the passage of the spirit out of the body, an outcome which, by Society of Thoracic Surgeons definition, would be coded as death." If God doesn't pass your test, maybe you're using the wrong test.
15. God doesn't participate in studies. The authors say 1,493 people refused to participate in the study because they had other priorities or were "not interested in clinical research." Why should God, who has a lot more to do and nothing to learn from a study, react differently? "I don't see him cooperating in a test," opines a Baptist theologian.
16. God hates being told what to do. Several clerics argue that the kind of intercessory prayer used in the study is "manipulative … of divine action" and sinfully treats God "as our instrument." The editorial accompanying the study, noting that patients who were prayed for "had worse absolute rates of complications" than those who weren't, asks "whether it was the intercessory prayer per se that may be unsafe." Is the prayer study, like so much in the Bible, a sign of God's wrath? "Researchers must be vigilant in asking the question of whether a well-intentioned, loving, heartfelt healing prayer might inadvertently harm or kill vulnerable patients," the editorial concludes.
17. God is malevolent. Patients who received prayers were marginally more likely to develop complications (52.5 to 50.9 percent) and substantially more likely to develop major complications (18.0 to 13.4 percent) than patients who received none. You can't blame the major-complication gap on psychology, since both groups were told that they might or might not be prayed for. In the teleconference, one of the study's authors tried to explain the gap away—"We don't feel confident statistically that that difference is at the level of significance barely that it's actually perhaps real"—whatever that means. But another called it a "possible hotspot," and the editorial warns that in clinical research, "assumptions of Divine benevolence … could only be considered scientifically naïve," since "in the history of medicine there has never been a healing remedy that was actually effective without having potential side effects or toxicities."
Warning: The surgeon general may determine that prayer is hazardous to your health. That's what can happen when faith sets out to prove its power through science.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles
MARADI, NIGER—More than 60,000 urgently needed Bibles arrived to allay suffering throughout the famine-stricken nation of Niger Friday, in one of the largest humanitarian-relief operations ever attempted by a Christian ministry.
"Come rejoice, and feast upon the word of Our Lord, Jesus Christ," said Christina Clarkson, executive director of the Living Light Ministries of Lubbock, TX. "Those who were hungry, hunger no more, for the Word brings life."
An exuberant Clarkson said the Bible drop was the culmination of one of the largest and most aggressive grassroots fundraising drives ever undertaken by the organization, which was able to fund the mission largely through local charitable events, such as bake-offs, barbecues, and pie-eating contests.
"We absolutely would not be here today if it were not for the amazing generosity of the people back home," Clarkson said. "People everywhere opened up their hearts and checkbooks to us and said, 'Dig in.'"
Niger, ranked as the second-poorest nation on Earth, is experiencing its worst famine in more than 20 years, as a brutal drought last year was followed by a plague of crop-destroying locusts. An estimated 3.5 million of Niger's 12 million people are currently at risk of starvation.
"That's why it was so important for this mission to happen right now," said Clarkson. "So many people here are suffering. Disease, starvation, and lack of shelter are day-to-day realities in Niger. But once they hear the Good News of Jesus Christ and accept Him as their Lord and Savior—once they really take Him into their hearts—then they will see what poor comforts are the things of this world."
Due to the tireless efforts of Clarkson and other members of the congregation, the ministry was able to provide the needy with Bibles superior to the ones they use in their own church services.
"Handcrafted, genuine leather—best money can buy," said 61-year-old missionary Don Kostic as he ran his hand along the book's ornately embossed spine. "It's like my wife back home says: Nothing is too good for people who are ready to receive the Living Word of Christ."
Although the fundraising efforts were unprecedented, congregation members said Living Light would never have succeeded had they not obtained the generous support of an array of corporate sponsors, including Applebee's and Church's Fried Chicken.
"We spent so much money just to get here," Kostic continued. "After we had all the Bibles engraved, we still had to charter the plane. When we landed in Niamey, we could barely even afford ground transportation."
Undaunted, the missionaries purchased the best vehicle they could find, which turned out to be a used bread truck. "That old thing!" recalled Kostic, laughing. "We must've scrubbed it down a hundred times. You couldn't get the smell of freshly baked, vitamin-fortified bread out of it if your life depended on it."
Reaction among Niger residents has been mixed.
Moussa Yaouli, a 35-year-old farmer, was particularly interested to learn more about the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Living Light personnel told him involved the eating of wafers. "It is said to be a big wafer. I am sure it will feed many of my children."
Though "spiritually gratified" by their work, many of the missionaries spoke about the difficulties of working in an impoverished country.
"It can be so hard being away from the comfort of our homes and our loving families," Clarkson confided. "I will admit, there have been times when I prayed, 'Lord, just help me get through this mission and get me back to Texas!' But when we rolled into town and people started running after the truck with those big smiles on their faces, I couldn't help but smile back."
Clarkson added: "And when we opened up the back of the truck and they saw that it was full of Bibles... Grown men and women wept in front of their children. That's how moved they were by the Holy Spirit. That's how I know it's all been worth it."
Clarkson said her mission will succeed in bringing the people of Niger "the spiritual sustenance they've been deprived of," despite such obstacles as the nation's 18 percent literacy rate.
"You say you're suffering. I say, let the good Lord do the suffering for you," she said. "You say you're exhibiting the deleterious effects of severe dehydration and chronic malnutrition. And I say that no matter what ails you, the Holy Bible is the best medicine there is."
"Come rejoice, and feast upon the word of Our Lord, Jesus Christ," said Christina Clarkson, executive director of the Living Light Ministries of Lubbock, TX. "Those who were hungry, hunger no more, for the Word brings life."
An exuberant Clarkson said the Bible drop was the culmination of one of the largest and most aggressive grassroots fundraising drives ever undertaken by the organization, which was able to fund the mission largely through local charitable events, such as bake-offs, barbecues, and pie-eating contests.
"We absolutely would not be here today if it were not for the amazing generosity of the people back home," Clarkson said. "People everywhere opened up their hearts and checkbooks to us and said, 'Dig in.'"
Niger, ranked as the second-poorest nation on Earth, is experiencing its worst famine in more than 20 years, as a brutal drought last year was followed by a plague of crop-destroying locusts. An estimated 3.5 million of Niger's 12 million people are currently at risk of starvation.
"That's why it was so important for this mission to happen right now," said Clarkson. "So many people here are suffering. Disease, starvation, and lack of shelter are day-to-day realities in Niger. But once they hear the Good News of Jesus Christ and accept Him as their Lord and Savior—once they really take Him into their hearts—then they will see what poor comforts are the things of this world."
Due to the tireless efforts of Clarkson and other members of the congregation, the ministry was able to provide the needy with Bibles superior to the ones they use in their own church services.
"Handcrafted, genuine leather—best money can buy," said 61-year-old missionary Don Kostic as he ran his hand along the book's ornately embossed spine. "It's like my wife back home says: Nothing is too good for people who are ready to receive the Living Word of Christ."
Although the fundraising efforts were unprecedented, congregation members said Living Light would never have succeeded had they not obtained the generous support of an array of corporate sponsors, including Applebee's and Church's Fried Chicken.
"We spent so much money just to get here," Kostic continued. "After we had all the Bibles engraved, we still had to charter the plane. When we landed in Niamey, we could barely even afford ground transportation."
Undaunted, the missionaries purchased the best vehicle they could find, which turned out to be a used bread truck. "That old thing!" recalled Kostic, laughing. "We must've scrubbed it down a hundred times. You couldn't get the smell of freshly baked, vitamin-fortified bread out of it if your life depended on it."
Reaction among Niger residents has been mixed.
Moussa Yaouli, a 35-year-old farmer, was particularly interested to learn more about the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Living Light personnel told him involved the eating of wafers. "It is said to be a big wafer. I am sure it will feed many of my children."
Though "spiritually gratified" by their work, many of the missionaries spoke about the difficulties of working in an impoverished country.
"It can be so hard being away from the comfort of our homes and our loving families," Clarkson confided. "I will admit, there have been times when I prayed, 'Lord, just help me get through this mission and get me back to Texas!' But when we rolled into town and people started running after the truck with those big smiles on their faces, I couldn't help but smile back."
Clarkson added: "And when we opened up the back of the truck and they saw that it was full of Bibles... Grown men and women wept in front of their children. That's how moved they were by the Holy Spirit. That's how I know it's all been worth it."
Clarkson said her mission will succeed in bringing the people of Niger "the spiritual sustenance they've been deprived of," despite such obstacles as the nation's 18 percent literacy rate.
"You say you're suffering. I say, let the good Lord do the suffering for you," she said. "You say you're exhibiting the deleterious effects of severe dehydration and chronic malnutrition. And I say that no matter what ails you, the Holy Bible is the best medicine there is."
Sunday, June 3, 2007
My Current Status...
Oh me oh my, a wild weekend tis has been! I reached #31,753 on the Amazon sales list! Not bad, especially with how I've been busting my hump to get my book out there. Hopefully by the end of the year the good ol' brick and mortar stores will carry it along with their internet incarnates. Then I feel sales could get real interesting, and my ass into some major controversy. Mock God and America hates you. Go figure. And no, I haven't forgotten you, the consumer, buying my book. I am grateful. I swear never to become an arrogant prick. If you ever run into me, probably in a coffee shop or book store, feel free to come up and start a chat. Not like I haven't done that to others before. I'm very approachable and I do owe each of you a thank you.
I did finally finish another video for YouTube that I'll be posting tomorrow night (Around 11:30 PM Eastern Time, and don't ask how I know the exact time. Just know my OCD dictates certain things. And the vid is up!). I've titled it "The Birth of George Bush". My sick and twisted humor really comes out in this flicker and yes, I do make an appearance though probably not in the way you'd think. I am so vague, you must wonder what the hell that means. Watch the vid and you'll see.
Meeza outta here.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Corruption in Heaven
Recently uncovered papers from the Kingdom of Heaven have revealed grave incompetency in the creation and execution of Existence.
Matthew Moses came across these papers while compiling information on the history and future of Creation for his book, Anti-Christ: A Satirical End of Days. What he discovered was staggering.
It seems that God had crafted only a single draft for Creation, failing to revise uncovered errors or to seek out the professional opinions of others before setting out on what was history's greatest project. Claims that "professional had not yet been created so how could their opinions be sought" have been rejected by the administration's critics.
"This administration knowingly began a flawed policy, refusing to correct deficiencies in construction or to adapt policy to growing concerns as to the continual survival of said project," said renowned Heavenly adversary, Satan.
Satan continued, "God is nothing more than a despot unwilling to listen to the will of the people. Continually he has followed a path that has led to grave destruction, suffering, and repeated warnings of collapse. Has he not read the various Armageddon scenarios? Something has to be done. Impeachment is growing as a fine option."
God could not be reached for comment, but his spokesman, Pope Benedict XVI had this to say: "If you don't like Heavenly policy, then you can go to Hell."
The problems cited in the revealed documents concerning Creation are numerous. First and foremost was the creation of the Void, known by the common term as Space. Rumors of corrupt suppliers not delivering enough materials to build a single, coherent universe have been blamed.
Construction itself has likewise proven shoddy. Unstable stars going supernova, planets either uninhabitable or unstable, highly destructive meteorites, and black holes have all been shown of examples.
Life itself has been shown to have been conceived incomplete. Various failed models exist upon the Earth surrounding God's final selection, Man. None hold the grace or perfection of Heaven's previous efforts. In fact, Life's workmanship is crude and fragile.
Many have claimed that God did not even finish the project, taking off the final day rather than completing his duties as Almighty Father.
The difficulty of communication between Heaven and Earth has led to many mistakes in continuing policy. Human sacrifice was one error blamed on a miscommunication. "God meant sacrifice oneself spiritually, not one's neighbor physically," the Pope has stated.
With communication difficult, God's unwillingness to step up and lead, and no coherent agenda, various factions emerged in the leadership of Earth. These factions led to cultures which developed not only differing policy initiatives but languages and views. Quite a bit of infighting has resulted.
It was rumored that God decided to simply scrap the entire project to either start again or simply abandon it altogether. Of course, due to various reforms in Heaven leading to the establishment of a legislature (due to the Treaty of the Firmament signed after the rebellion and civil war between God and Satan), action proved half-hearted and difficult (neither God nor Congress agreeing on a set decision) resulting in the controversial step of wiping out all Life on Earth save for selected mortal representatives who were meant to carry out a policy to be decided on later. Squabbles between Congress and God have prevented any sort of policy to as yet be ratified.
God was then accused of overstepping his boundaries as Executive by going straight to humanity and dictating Earthly policy without the consent of Congress. This led to Congress likewise reaching out to elements considered heretical to counter growing executive power leading to counterviews on religious belief and doctrine. All of this infighting led to eventual paralysis of the Heavenly administration as Congress and God began to launch Holy Wars upon one another.
Eventually, a reconciliation was sought between God and Congress. Talks began and led, finally, to some progress on setting future policy. Jesus, Heaven's ambassador to Earth, descended to give these policies to humanity. It was quickly rejected out of hand by most of Earth's inhabitants.
Humanity protested against what they saw as an administration gone soft. The policy given to man by Jesus was useless legislation. Without coherent rules setting language, government structure, articles to solve disagreements between the various states, or even sound economic strategy, man decided to veto Heaven's newly passed laws. This led quickly to a heavy tilt in God's policy.
In the seventh century AD, Muhammad was granted a new set of voted upon rules by a now hawkish administration unwilling to allow man's growing independence. Stronger ties of allegiance were demanded from humanity in the way of prayer. Likewise was there finally a set law code. Unlike Jesus' declaration, which disallowed war, Muhammad's demanded death and conquest of all who rejected Heaven's rule. Thus began a millennia long civil war between the various factions of Earth.
The Age of Enlightenment proved the most damaging for Heaven as parts of Earth seceded from Heaven declaring their loyalty to the newly created policy of science. Many other states have quickly followed suit threatening Heaven's control of a project that is rapidly threatening the stability of all of Existence.
The discovery of these papers can only further rattle the loyalty of those few who still hold faith in an administration which is increasingly being revealed as corrupt, incompetent, and outdated. One can only wonder at the future of this project called Existence.
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