NOT A SPIRITUAL PERSONAGE, BUT. . . .

every once in awhile, I’ll entertain a spiritual view of the Cosmos just to make sure my mind is not closed to it. I’ve referenced Eckhart Tolle before, and in this post, I’ll mention him again. The following paragraph is from that July 2002,The Sun, pp. 9-10, I mentioned before:

Tolle: “More and more, you realize that you are not your thoughts, because they come and go. They’re all conditioned. . . . Instead of deriving a sense of self from those contents, you realize that you can simply observe the contents. A deeper sense of self arises. That is the aware presence, and it feels very spacious and peaceful, no matter what happens in your mind. You no longer identify with your mind, which is just conditioned thoughts and, instead, identify with the observing presence, which can see the conditioned thoughts and emotions in flux. When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth.”

That may sound very mystical and spiritual, but what Tolle describes is exactly the way thoughts “come and go” in perception and is clearly described in many modern psychological viewpoints. Consciousness is momentary and fragmented because that’s the way it’s constructed. It’s always scanning and accepting the information entering the senses, moving from one input to another and on the look out for trouble and for ways to get the human animal’s needs met. One thing after another enters the consciousness, then is driven out by the next thing. Poor, old human consciousness; it’s never at rest. We’re never at rest.

The awareness of awareness which Tolle calls the “aware presence” is, of course, the definition of consciousness which modern psychologists are currently debating as they try to define it and describe it. Consciousness is the “awareness” of awareness under discussion. But let me tell you, after reading “The Origin of Minds”, I’m willing to imagine that consciousness is a very concrete phenomena. Why complicate it? Consciousness is the synaptical presence of words and sentences running and looping through the brain and its inner ear (or any other sensory site). It’s a “hearing” inside of us of the words we know come from outside of us which triggers our awareness of ourselves. I’m sure our consciousness is intimately connected with the world outside our brains. By recognizing those outside of us, their words and presence, and the environment outside of us, we become conscious of the self we are inside the receiving mechanisms in our brains. Consciousness is a group phenomena.

Finally, I have experienced a few times in my life what Tolle describes as being at “depth”. Most recently, when I was taking some drawing classes, I happened to be staring at some trees outside the window of my A.A. meeting, staring intently at their forms, the play of light and shadow. As I stared at the scene, I suddenly filled up with a sense of love for everything around and inside of me. I was at peace. Several times I repeated the experiment just to make sure I could do it. Sometimes I ask myself why I still continue to play these word games when drawing would more often make me happier?


GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. . .

people with guns kill people, 70 percent of the time.


A CHILLING THOUGHT

Am currently readingIn Plato’s Cave by Alvin Kernan. It deals with the intellectual currents which have ripped through the academic community in the last 50 years or so, specially through Yale’s yard where Kernan taught. He’s now retired. He mentions in passing the plight of one of his colleagues who taught French literature and was killed by an icicle which plummeted from a skyscraper in the Big Apple.

GOSPEL ERRORS PROVE GOSPELS NOT WRITTEN
BY PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH PALESTINE OR THE JEWS OF THAT TIME

In plain language: the Gospels were not and could not have been written by the Apostles. See the following information found in “The Fallible Gospels”:

“It would no doubt be an unwelcome revelation to many churchgoers that analysis of the gospels reveals that they were not written by disciples or different eyewitnesses to the same events, but years later in different countries and another language by collectors of traditions and editors of documents; and that two generations of oral transmission and theological development had by then resulted in exaggeration, suppression, reinterpretation and invention.

“This is not just a cynical or secular ‘attitude’ towards the Gospels. We have already seen examples of the kinds of ‘corrections’ made to Mark by Matthew and Luke. These are never the corrections of eyewitness detail, but always the reinforcement of justification of theology and belief.

“The distance of the Gospel writers themselves from Palestine and the Jews is revealed in endless ways. They have lepers wandering around Palestine, when they were confined in caves and camps for fear of contagion. Their need to convert the casually brutal disposal of a troublemaker into dignified formal proceedings for a significant figure reveals a woeful ignorance of Jewish legal proceedings. This gives us the impossible trials, with the Sanhedrin dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and the blasphemy charge that makes no sense. A proper trial for a serious offence against religious law would firstly not be able to take place at night if it could involve a capital charge; and secondly it would have required two separate sessions of the court on two consecutive days before passing sentence. It was therefore impossible to have such a trial starting on the day before a sabbath or a feast day, as this would prevent the holding of the second session on the next day.

“Another revealing feature is their unfamiliarity with Palestinian geography:

“‘Returning from the district of Tyre, he went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee....’ (Mark 7.31)

“If Jesus was starting from Tyre, Sidon would have been in the opposite direction from the Sea of Galilee. This would have been a bit like going from Manchester to Newcastle-upon-Tyne by way of London, or from Sacramento to Carson City by way of San Francisco. Furthermore, in the first century there was a road from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee - but there wasn't a road from Sidon to the Sea of Galilee.

“Luke says ‘he resolutely took the road for Jerusalem’ (9.51), and then has Jesus wandering all over the place for a long and leisurely journey. He starts out by the short route to Jerusalem, through Samaria, but he arrives the long way round, via Jericho. Although by 13.22 he is still ‘making his way to Jerusalem’, four chapters later he seems to have gone backwards as he is ‘along the border between Samaria and Galilee’ (17.11).

“Luke's alienation from not just the geography but the climate and culture of Palestine is revealed in other interesting ways. In Mark, there is a story of the cure of a paralytic at 2.1-12, probably most famous for the phrase "Pick up your stretcher and walk". He is carried to the house where Jesus is, but his friends can not get near him for the crowds. They have to actually dig a hole through the flat mud roof and lower him through. The flat mud roof is typical of the construction of an ordinary house in Palestine, but it was not typical of houses where Luke lived. He turns it into a Roman style house with a tiled roof, and the paralytic is lowered through the tiles (Luke 5.17-25).

“Luke also misunderstands the technical detail (but not the moral point) of a parable from Q. Matthew preserves the original Palestinian story (7.24-27) of the comparison between a man building his house on rock and a man building his house on sand. In Palestine, this would have referred to a wadi, dry in summer but a raging torrent in the rainy season, knocking the house down. Luke, unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the wadi, thinks that the essential difference is between building on the surface and digging down to build foundations on the underlying rock. In his version (6.47-49), the house built on the surface is washed away by the flooding of a river. The meaning and essence of the story remain the same: this is just another interesting illustration of the change in the form and content of the stories, as they spread from one location to another and responded to the needs or understanding of a new readership."
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"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." —Ambrose Bierce

DO YOU WONDER ABOUT THE BIBLE? LOOK HERE!

The following information comes from a wonderful site for looking into the truth about the supposedly infallible Bible, called “The Fallible Gospels”. This is the kind of information that fundamentalist Christians don’t want you to get ahold of. These findings, many of them, were developed not by non-Christians nor atheists, but by Christian scholars who preferred truth to fiction and who wanted to get at the truth of the origins and sources of the collection of writings that early Roman prelates decided would be accepted as the authentic spiritual sources of their religion. The following few paragraphs are just the lead in to much interesting information about the Bible writers:

“The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke have numerous differences in style and emphasis as well as events, but, nevertheless, there are many sayings and incidents which are in two or all three of them. They can therefore be set out in three parallel columns, so that scholars can study corresponding passages side by side (and extract individual features). In 1774 a German scholar called Johann Griesbach first described these three Gospels as the ‘synoptic’ gospels, from the Greek for ‘seen together’.

“The favourite Gospel of the Church quickly became Matthew, and a tradition was handed down that Matthew had been written first. It therefore took scholars some time to set this aside and realize that these synoptic correspondences could only be explained if Mark had been written first, and both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source document.

“They were not three separate ‘witnesses’ at all, but one original document and two edited and expanded copies.

“There were about another 200 verses which did not appear in Mark but on which Matthew and Luke agreed. As Matthew and Luke were probably writing at around the same time but many hundreds of miles apart, they did not know about each other. Neither of them used the other for this extra material they had in common. As the wording often agrees exactly, this indicates the use of another written source by both of them. It was German New Testament scholars who first referred to this lost document as Q, from Quelle - the German for ‘source’.”

More to follow in future posts.


TIME MARCHES ON

In a recent Newsweek (October 25, 2004), some interesting concepts for the future are almost here.

1) One scientist, Bradley Edwards, believes that someday, humans can send robots into space by having them climb “space ribbons” made of carbon nanotubes, a “molecular chain many times stronger than steel”. Of course, I can also imagine huge spider webs of nanotubes anchored over the U.S. to trap and explode incoming missiles too. Of course, the airline industry might have something to say about all these nanotubes dangling in the atmosphere also.

2) Scientists are now “wiring together genes” to make circuits for injecting into bacteria. “Scientists are already inserting genes into bacteria to make them produce precursors to insulin. . . . The first programmable cells may serve as sensors that detect biowarfare agents or produce drugs that aren’t possible with genetically engineered bacteria. . . . It may be possible to make gene therapy far more precise by injecting entire gene circuits into human cells.”

3) Ted Berger, a biomedical engineer. . . “is designing a computer chip that might one day bolster the brain’s memory banks. The most immediate beneficiaries would be victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s and other ailments. . . . Berger has devised computer programs that replicate the cells’ behavior and has built chips to run them. "

Here’s what I say. Imagine an American world of science so altruistic that all America does is use its might and wealth to produce medical and scientific breakthroughs which benefit mankind and does it in such a world-benefiting way that everyone wants to be on our bandwagon rather than blowing it up with roadside bombs. Islam may resist our modern social culture, but if our scientific culture produces many good things, perhaps they’ll have second thought about destroying the hen that lays the golden egg of health for all the globe. The hell with Bush and his medieval views of science which still talks of when an egg is “ensouled”. There ain’t no science in it, the stupid ass!
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"I have an intense desire to return to the womb. Anybody's. —Woody Allen

MORTALITY (INFINITY?) KNOCKS AGAIN

Let’s just say I was a very drunk alcoholic that night, and it was Halloween. My life was falling apart, had been for years. With a wife and two kids at home and me working at minimum wage in that shitty little machine shop I talked about a few posts back, I couldn't see a way out. As the song says, "Been down so long it looks like up to me." This moment of enlightenment followed not too much longer after having worked as a janitor at the very University I had five years ago graduated from with a B.A. in English with a respectable “B” average. A long fall of comeuppance.

A work acquaintance of mine, Bill, owned this bowling alley. He worked at the machine shop, where I worked, to help him make a go of his business. His alley was in a rundown neighborhood and still used pin boys because Bill couldn’t afford to put in the automatic pin setters the bigger alleys had all gone over to. He bowled for money too and had once played triple-A ball in the Boston Red Sox farm system. He pitched and claimed to have been a good junk ball pitcher, but his family came along and took first spot in his heart, so he gave it all up, he said.

I was a little in awe of his tall, dark-haired athleticism and competence which is sort of why I felt as I did when this particular encounter with mortality happened. As I said, I showed up drunk at Bill’s place after already drinking for a good part of the night. I ordered a beer and sat down at a table in the empty alley. I don’t know how many more beers I drank that night. May have been only one, and I can’t even recall why I went to Bill’s bowling alley that night.

Next thing I knew, I woke up face down on the table in a pool of spilled beer. Jerking upright, I saw Bill behind the counter, talking to a leggy woman who slouched on a tall stool on the other side of the counter. My head was spinning and I was, as usual in those days, ashamed to be caught “POWD”, that is "passed out while drinking". That was a sign of a man who couldn’t handle his booze. Not that I hadn’t been passing out since my early days of drinking in high school, but, still, passing out was always a shameful act which I promptly forgot next time I went drinking. Saying nothing, I staggered to my feet and headed out the door, hoping Bill and the woman didn’t notice me leaving. I hoped not to hear a voice calling after me. None did.

Outside in the dark, my head was splitting and I was sick to my stomach. Blinded by misery, I walked toward my car which was parked at the curb a few houses down the street from the alley. I always drank while driving. Using the bowling alley facade for support, I was holding down the vomit rising in my throat by swallowing wildly. When I reached the end of the building and came to an alley, I quickly ducked into it, rushed well back from the street and bent over to vomit. I knew this part of the drinking finale as well as I knew my own name, when I knew it, which was most of the time.

Vomiting helped the sickness temporarily and with some relief, except from the headache, I turned and slid down the wall into a sitting position beside my little pool of vomit. I thought I might sleep for awhile, and I had a moment to look around.

Above me on a pole, from the opposite side of the alley, hung a tall blue-hued yard light which illuminated a garage. The rest of the alley was in deep night shadow, and I suddenly became aware of myself, as a person separated from myself, watching me slumped in the alley under a blue light like a stage spotlight. I could often detach from myself like that in the throes of my drinking and morning hangovers. That night, I sensed myself illuminated by the yard light, in a pool of light, like a figure in a movie, I suppose and, then, back in my own body, I looked up into the narrow patch of starry sky revealed between the shadow buildings on both sides of the alley.

My sense of aloneness and alienation was total and overpowering. I knew, right then, at that sick moment, how alone I was in the universe. I knew that there was no god up there in that starry heaven and that there was no love anywhere in the universe for anyone to find, and I, specially, knew myself as loveless and incapable of loving. I recall thinking at that moment of the stranger in his prison cell at the end of Camus’s, The Stranger. That was me and it was awful and utterly demoralizing.

“There’s no god,” I thought. “And no love anywhere in the universe. No one loves me and I don’t love nobody!” O, god, it was a scary world for a little man/boy like me. My chest filled with a cold, dead absence of feeling as I repeated these words to myself.

I suddenly pictured my wife at home and the loveless marriage we were in. Only my consciousness was alive; the rest of my being was in cold storage, holding my mind, tilted up, in the darkness to the sky. Then, still staring at the sky, and in an angry challenging inner voice, I pulled all my non-feeling into a ball of despair and from it, issued a challenge to nothing, to myself, to my pain, to the whole Cosmos: “Yeah, and only I am tough enough to take this.” Stunned, I let the cold death of non-feeling ice my body up. I found little consolation in the thought.

Soon, I arose and, on rocky feet, stumbled to my car and drove home to swallow Alka Seltzer and soak my head in a shower until the headache eased up a bit so I could pass out and sleep.
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"A woman drove me to drink, and I never even had the courtesy to thank her." —W.C. Fields

THE ORIGIN OF MINDS

This book by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham continues to entrance me. I think they’ve got it right, developing a picture of human behavior which is both deterministic and flexible, a behavior model that gives genetics its due as well as allowing for the strong input of personal history. They demonstrate how consciousness may have evolved in response to our animal needs to eat and procreate. They explain how an individual can still have a united sense of himself even though he can only experience himself within the limited window of consciousness. I could almost say that they show the human animal to be a determined individual. Allow me to introduce another couple of passages from their book which, I hope, show some of the steps on the way to their conclusions:

“To do anything—locate food, find a mate, reproduce, compose a sonata, solve an equation—you have to stay alive with enough surplus energy to perform the task at hand. Energy management drove the foundational adaptive design of all ancestral intelligence systems.” (p. 5)

“The key component of this framework [ancestral intelligence systems] is what we call an adaptive representational network [ARN].” (p. 6)

“The main function of the hypothalamus is maintaining homeostasis [the state of being in balance with enough energy to achieve the tasks for maintaining health and procreating].

“... to do it’s job, the hypothalamus receives constant inputs about the state of the body [i.e. energy reserves]...

“Because it [hypothalamus] is sitting in such a pivotal position at the center of its own subcortical empire, the hypothalamus is ideally placed to help the cortex generate the most fundamental kind of self.

“At any point in time, the activational state of the hypothalamic nuclei defines the behavioral problem [sex? or food?, etcetera] that your intelligence system needs to solve.” (p. 64)

Further:

“As your experiences multiply, you build up a dynamic virtual-reality archive of scenes from your life and the adaptive solutions (or failures) to problems you have encountered in the marketplace [the social scene where transactions between yourself and other buyers and traders of social goods, like sex and food, takes place]”. (p. 66)

And finally:

“Over time as your adaptive representational networks [ARN] are constructed—scene by scene, episode by episode—you build up an autobiography.... A sense of personal history emerges. And a sense of causality....

“From this behavioral track record, you have a sense of your performance over time—which allows you to form a composite sense of your self that has continuity. Even though your self-representation is being refashioned moment by moment, there are so many common elements from time T1 to T2, T3,T4, and so on that you tend to experience yourself as a stable construct.” (p. 67)


EXCUSES? DEPENDS ON WHOSE FOOT IS IN THE OTHER SHOE.

Recently a prisoner in temporary custody, awaiting trial in the Spokane, Washington jail was beaten to death and strangled by his deranged cell mates. How he was put into the same cell with crazies is only the first part of the mystery. The second part of the mystery is just what contributed to enraging his cell mates to the point of murdering him.

Right off the bat, I might guess it was the movie the murderers had just watched: “The Passion of the Christ”. I’m sure Christians would agree with me on this one, eh? As they often claim: if you show people murdering one another cruelly or let them listen to angry music, they’re sure to go right out and kill someone. Isn’t that so? I’ve long thought that “The Passion” was no more than a bloody snuff flick, and here’s the proof. Right here in River City.

AARGH! THE COPPERS GOT ME.

Last month, I bought me a brand new little Kia Rio, 2005. It's a cheap car and gets so-so gas mileage, and there's shimmy in the wheel from about 55 to 70 mph. This weekend I drove over to visit my son in Tahuya and on my drive back, I decided I wanted to take the Kia up to 100 mph and see how she handled. I almost always drive my new cars up to that speed at least once, just to see how they handle. But high speeds make me nervous so I don't drive at high speeds normally nor for very long.

Anyhow, I come to a long clear patch in the road, just west of Ritzville, without much traffic, sunny day, dry pavement, I can see for miles, and figure this is the place to do it, so I take the car up to 100 and immediately let off the gas, get into the right hand lane, and coast back down to 70 mph. I guess I'm breaking the law all of 20 seconds up and back the speedometer. But sure enough, way back behind me, I see him coming, and soon I've got a $228.00 dollar ticket for giving my car a test drive. He got me going one hundred. I must have hit a hundred at the exact moment he tags me with the radar because I was only there a second. Now ain't that something?


GIVING CREATIONISTS THE BIRD

Creationists are fond of saying that evolution can’t come up with any “missing links”, i.e. any fossils which show the moment of transition between one species and another. Well, how about the links we can find between dinosaurs and birds? Would that be a change in species? Well, of course, it would. And those fossil links are coming up in spades in China.

But first, let’s debunk the idea that “missing links” exist. Let’s go back to my trusty series of photographs analogy. Remember, we take a photograph every day of a human being’s life from the moment it’s born until the day it dies, then we ask an independent observer of those photos to identify the days of significant change in that person’s life. On what day did the infant become a toddler? What photo shows the day that the child became an adolescent. What photo shows the first day of the teenage years? When was the last day of middle age? Our independent observer, of course, could not tell which single photograph marks these moments of transition. But he could group together a lot of pictures and guess the change probably happened right about in “here” or “there”, during this “series” of photos. In short, there is no missing link in our person’s slow steady rate of change. There’s just constant infinitesimal change.

Same with species. The changes in species are so gradual that no one would be able to tell at just what moment of species change a dinosaur with wings and feathers became a bird. We’d also have to make other decisions. Is gliding flying or not? How many gliding species would it take before truly flying being became a bird? How many flaps of a dinosaur’s feathered limbs does it take before the dinosaur can be said to be a flying being, well on it’s way to being a bird? Ten, fifteen?

So, there’s this great deception in the creationist attacks on evolutionary fact which needs to be ignored once and for all. Creationists make their naive readers think there is some being which somehow lies exactly between a bird and a dinosaur, a missing link, but there is no such animal. That’s not how evolution works. Certainly, there were hundreds of animals existing simultaneously which were feathered and which glided or flew or flapped or floated down lightly from trees with feathered limbs taking the wind. And no telling which of them became the bird line of evolution.

And, what would a missing link between a fish and a land animal look like, anyway? It would be a being which could live some of its time in water and some in air, but, wait, we have some of animals which already do that. But what of an animal who lived 55% of it’s time in water and 45% of it’s time on land compared with an animal that lived 55% of time on land and only 45% of it’s time in water? Which would we judge to be the land animal and which a fish?

What I’m getting at in this piece is that we will never find a “missing link”, a single creature exactly between bird and dinosaur, because the concept of a missing link is nonfunctional and absurd. What we should expect to find, instead, is a group of fossil “snapshots” of all kinds of dinosaurs with feathers and protean birds, any one of which or several of which might lie in the line between birds and dinosaurs. And that’s what all the recent finds in China are yielding. Lots of dinosaurs with protean wings and feathers and capabilities to glide. Who knows which one of them flapped its wings one, two or three times on its way to being a branch toward a bird? But what scientists are discovering in China is the stuff that evolution is proven with—many feathered bird-like dinosaurs.

Now to return to some specific Chinese fossils which show the pattern I am speaking of. Recently,six four-winged dinosaur fossils were found which “flew” much like a flying squirrel does, “gliding short distances from place to place, and... probably not capable of actual flight.... The study’s authors say their new finds are further confirmation that birds evolved from dinosaurs....” The theory that dinosaurs became birds grew stronger in the past century when “dozens of anatomical structures” were found to be “shared by birds and and the type of dinosaurs called theropods.

Another recent finding of a dinosaur fossil called,“Mei long”, shows a dinosaur fossil curled in a sleeping pose which looks very much like the sleeping posture of a bird with its nose tucked under its wing.
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"To enter life by way of the vagina is as good a way as any." —Henry Miller (I like Henry Miller. I read a lot of his books in the 60s.))

YESTERDAY, I WAS 67 and

I almost forgot to mention it. Gosh, that's even sounding old to me, but my wife and I went to Tony Roma's and I had honey something baby back ribs and corn on the cob (nothing ever beats the corn from back east though) and cauliflower, and tonight I finished watching Camille with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor and, boy, you can see how romantic a fool I was when I was young because I loved that movie and also Cyrano. . . . Now look at me, the old reprobate skeptic and atheist. . . .


TOMORROW I'M HEADING OVER TO THE WASHINGTON COAST TO VISIT MY YOUNGEST SON

in Tahuyah (as in, What's it Tahuya, Bub?) Washington, then I'll observe his improv group in Paulsbo on Saturday night which he put together on his own, and . . .

so no more posts for a couple of days. . . .


THE ILLEGITIMACY OF BUSH’S WAR

Well, a few more weeks and this war will no longer be Rove/Bush’s war. It’ll either be Kerry’s war or it’ll be America’s war, for, if we return Rove to office, America tells the world that all Americans support Bush’s war, and we all become responsible for our dead and wounded soldiers and Iraq’s civilian deaths and maiming. Frankly, I don’t want that sordid charge on my head. Do you? It should remain on Bush’s shoulders, the man who rushed to an irresponsible judgment and got us into an illegitimate war. Take away Bush’s opportunity to do us further harm by electing Kerry, but make sure Bush can’t shift the disaster onto our shoulders.

Some happenings tell me that Bush/Rove doesn’t even consider his own war legitimate. The desertion in battle of a U.S. platoon of the 343rd Army Reserve Quartermaster Company will go unpunished it seems. To refuse a direct order when a nation is at “war” is a crime usually punished by court martial and death or imprisonment. It seems the only punishment these troops are going to get is to get the hell out of Iraq and to go home. Gosh, Bush, what a punishment that is!

Sadly, Bush’s failure to punish desertion under fire shows just how weak and illegitimate Rove and Bushman company must feel about their war. If they were really tough on this war, they’d come down with both feet on failure to perform under fire. But they aren’t going to do that. That would not be politically popular, and, so far during this four years of one catastrophe after another, Rove has directed Bush to do nothing unpopular while in office. War support must be pretty thin, if Bush/Rove can’t even punish serious failure to perform duties in a time of war.


BUSH BRINGS gOD’S WRATH ON AMERICA’S HEAD

A friend of mine came up with an interesting idea. He noted that some old-fashioned Bible prophets might take some meaning out of certain things which have happened to America during Bush’s term.

Early on in Bush’s term, after the Florida vote count debacle, one of our space ships disintegrated and burned brightly over Texas, like an early warning sign in the sky over Bush’s home state to mark a natural disaster coming to visit America because of his election. More to the point, what would an Old Testament prophet make of the four hurricanes that have devastated Florida, the very state in which Bush stole the election? Quite a visitation of god’s wrath, don’t you agree? What would a prophet make of god’s turning plenty into deficit during Bush’s term? Then, what would that prophet make of the Twin Towers being smote by our enemies on our own shores? And what of the war which has come to us through the actions of Bush? Add on elders being left without flu vaccine and poverty increasing in the land and more people falling out of coverage with health care, an old time prophet would have his scrolls full, trying to tally up how god is showing his anger with the Bush presidency.
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"A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls." —George Bush (Why, of course! Why didn't I think of that?!)

WHY DOES BUSH GET ALONG WITH DICTATORS?

In a New York Times piece (October 12, 2004, p. A20), Condoleeza Rice notes that Bush “... has the best relationship that any administration has had with Russia... [and] ... the best relationship that any administration has had with China.”

Wonder of wonders! Why not? Putin, who’s now deeply involved in undermining Russia’s fragile democracy, was head of the KGB and Bush’s father was head of the CIA. Dictator love comes easy to him as long as the dictator likes him. Russia could sure use a George Washington now who would turn over power for the good of democracy!

My question is why does Bush have trouble with democracies like France and Germany but is comfortable relating to dictatorial types, either in opposing or glad-handing them? The quick answer is “Why not?” His religion is based on a dictatorial, murderous god who has condemned all mankind to die. He’s comfortable with that? Why not with any dictator?

China is led by dictators too. But, according to Bush, good dictators rather than bad dictators. How do Republicans decide between good and bad dictators? I think it’s all relative to them. They like whoever suits there purposes at the time. Liberals, who are a little more nuanced about these things, don’t like any dictators.


ESCAPE FROM THE BUSH MOMENTS IN LIFE

Eckhart Tolle says, “The tendency to escape is a form of collective mental conditioning that is at work almost all the time in people’s lives, not just when situations turn out to be unpleasant or unsatisfying or difficult. In ordinary life, there is a continuous moving away from the moment to an imagined future that is unconsciously regarded as more important. Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever I ‘make it’.”

Tolle’s are nice sentiments to contemplate, but what are we to make of the consciousness of life which needs to be always “on alert” to the dangers which surround it? We’ve got this highly evolved system of warning that Tolle and others ask us to disengage and turn off. Can the human animal survive without it? Would those of us seeking inner peace find ourselves at the mercy of those who still aren’t evolved enough to seek full consciousness? I think I read somewhere that all of history could be seen as one civilization after another forming up and becoming soft, only to be overrun and conquered by tougher more primitive cultures who, then, also are softened up by the civilization which they conquer.
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"We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic."
—David Russell

THIS IS NO LONGER FUNNY

In today’s news (Oct. 14, 2004) we come across the unhappy knowledge that in Nevada (and probably elsewhere) Republican front organizations have been registering Democratic voters and, then, destroying their registration forms. Combine this news with the news of a few weeks ago about Republican plans in other states to go to the polls and intimidate minority voters before they can vote by asking for picture ID, by plans in Detroit to “suppress” the African-American vote, by Florida Republicans to cleanse voter lists of Democratic voters, and by Republicans in other states who send out false information in heavily Democratic precincts about the location of polling places, and we get a picture of a concerted effort by Republicans to steal a second straight election from the American people.

Those with knowledge of history recognize the continued effort by Republicans to undermine democracy, to shut people out of democracy rather than to bring them into it. The GOP is the party of special financial interests, the party of privilege and power. Their goal for the past 60 years has been to return America to the days before Roosevelt when America was awash in poverty-stricken desperate workers who’d work for pennies and make capitalists rich. The Republican goal is not to put a chicken in every pot; it’s to pluck every chicken in their pot. Since Reagan, it’s no wonder the number of American working people in poverty has increased while ever more money flows to the richest among us.

One other example serves my purpose here: through Republican efforts to downsize government, the regulators who oversee government spending with private contractors has been cut in half. Naturally, in Iraq Halliburton has been overcharging for its services because who’s to keep on eye on them? Multiply this Republican effort to enrich their friends by downsizing regulation, and you can clearly see the future of America—impoverished workers whose taxes are used to enrich corporate America and their CEOs.

The corruption of freedom by the Republican Party is limitless; their efforts to undermine American democracy ceaseless. In fact, I’ve not witnessed a more callous and sustained attack on the democratic process since Nazi Brown Shirts pulled similar stunts in their successful effort to turn German democracy into Nazi government. Rancorous policy debates are one thing. Even distorting an opponent’s record is not the worst thing that can happen, but to show a callous disregard for the election process itself undermines Americans’ basic rights to choose how they’ll pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.


THE ORIGIN OF MINDS

by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham

This is the book!

I’m only into Chapter Three and I can see these two are walking down a line I think we ought to pursue when it comes to discussions of consciousness and determinism. It’s good stuff and, so far, very understandable to a layman like myself. Read this:

“Your mind is a product of your evolved behavioral intelligence system, which functions as a customized cost/benefit analysis system. It is modulated throughout the life span by the LHRS [life history regulatory system], which regulates and schedules the sequential acts of our lives, using a genetically encoded script as its guide—but it is always responsive, moment by moment, to environmental pressures. And underpinning all this is a fundamental requirement to meet the bioenergetic bottom line.” (pp. 27-28)
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"The Republican Party either corrupts its liberals or it expels them." —Harry S. Truman

SLAVE OR FREE?

A long time ago, I slaved in a machine shop in southern Ohio, owned by a cagey but illiterate graduate of a small southern Indiana mechanical engineering college. Jack, I’ll call him, paid poorly, offered no health insurance and was a conservative Republican, but he was a brilliant inventor and rough as a dried cob. To look at something Jack wrote, full of misspelling and poor grammar, you’d imagine he was dumber than a door knob, but he wasn’t. He’d just been raised roughly beside a railroad track without a mother and by a father who was often gone in the Missouri woods, evaluating timber for saw mills. Jack said he’d been raised by poor black women and their families who took pity on him while his Dad was gone in the woods for long periods of time.

One day in the late Sixties or early Seventies, I was bitching and moaning to Jack about how everybody in America seemed willing to be a slave to Nixon. Jack snorted and brilliantly drawled in his Missouri accent. “Why, George, everyone’s a slave to their stomach.” I’ve never been able to shake Jack’s truism, but lately, watching Bush’s religious “goings on”, I’ve been adding twists and turns to it.

Okay—yes, we are slaves to our stomachs. We humans have got to eat, and we’ve got to make ends meet and that involves us in the economy and in the world. Somehow, by self-employment, laboring or managing, we gotta get food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs and pay rents or mortgages, etcetera. No way around it. We’re obligated to the dollar. So in laboring, we become slaves to financial institutions, to capital, and we become slaves to management or the market or consumer vagaries or to various other tyrannical supervisors.

Now, of course, we can always quit and find another way to get the filthy lucre we need—at least, most of the time. Sometimes that’s not so easy. Financial freedom isn’t always easy to achieve even in a free country. Depending upon unemployment figures and the economy, we are more or less free to change jobs. So, to call us slaves when it comes to the dollar is using the term loosely but semi-accurately.

But, above all this monetary hierarchy, there’s another kind of freedom which has nothing to do with money and that’s freedom of thought and belief, and I’m ever amazed how many people are willing to give up their freedom of mind in order to feel psychologically secure. I’m talking true believers here. I’m speaking of those who surrender their mental life for a belief in one of the old god/kings who began their mental rule in the psychological world of the ancients.

Further, I think it’s no accident that fundamentalists who worship this ancient hypothetical god/king are the easiest for an authoritarian like Bush to lead around by the nose. Believers are prepped to support hierarchies of power and authoritarian dictators. They’re ripe for the picking.

That’s why it’s time for modern peoples of the 21st Century to make the final move against these ancient god/kings of the mind which enslave us and set us up to be led by unworthy world leaders. Let’s just take Christianity, for example.

Currently we’ve got a pile of fundamentalist Americans who worship an ancient god/king who, according to their inventive, psychological story, has killed their father Adam in a fit of pique because Adam disobeyed an order because he didn’t know that to disobey an order was wrong because Adam couldn’t know right from wrong until after he’d eaten of the apple. A real Catch 22 there, eh? Still, this unfair and unjust god/king gets out of the trap of injustice by supposedly sending his son to die in Adam’s place so that Adam can have eternal life in another place far from Earth. Where’s Child Protective Services when some poor Jesus guy needs it?

Still Adam’s got to die, mind you, but he’s been redeemed and has a chance at eternal life. So do we all, according to the king’s tale. All poor Adam’s sons (all of us) have to do to be redeemed is betray our father Adam and all his progeny and acknowledge the unjust authority of the god/king over us. We must accept the second hand tale which is given us at face value. We must become a coconspirator with this god/king against our forebears, and we must believe this god/king’s tale of eternal life who has already proven himself unworthy and untrustworthy by the way he treated poor Adam and his own son. Further, this god/king has the power of life and death over us, according to his legend. If we believe him, we get eternal life. If we doubt him, we get eternal suffering.

And right there, at life and death, is where Christian myth and human reality combine in a very powerful coercion. For, to avenge the mythical father, Adam (the evolutionary father) and to disbelieve the Bible story, we modern humans must, literally, accept our fate to be eternally dead. Now, who among us, has that courage—to lay our lives down in the cause of human freedom? In other words, to oppose the Christian myth of the god/king, we must accept our own mortality. Who among us loves his human freedom enough to die for it, to lay down his life for it?
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"It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune." —Woody Allen

Dear Reader,

The following is another long email exchange between one of my fundamentalist interlocutors and myself. This time, I’ve clearly marked his remarks as “DO” and mine as “Geo” so that the Blog formatting incapabilities aren’t bothersome. Much is probably repetition, but that’s the nature of our debates. In an earlier email I had tried to see what basic facts we could agree on, but he would not reply to my list. I never did pin him down as to what he considered facts and science and what he didn’t. Because of this, we could never close our debate.

The immediate cause of this email was an email by me in which I enclosed a list of pretty basic scientific facts which Dave ignonred in his answer to me and, then, I broke his reply into bits and replied bit by bit, as you can see....

From: "D.O." Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 11:32:17 -0700
To: "George Thomas"
Subject: In reply to Geo’s “How much science does a fundamentalist accept?”

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THE DEBATE
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DO: “george; in your fixated...

Geo: Cuts both ways!

DO: “...manner, you believe you're winning some sort of debate when all you're doing is proving that you have a better science background than i do.”

Geo: Dave, I have a rudimentary scientific knowledge which I got from one chemistry course in high school, a physics course in college, an inquiring and skeptical mind, reading a lot of science books written for laymen, and a healthy distrust of fortune telling (i.e. prophecy) and superstition which a mere glance into history ought to give anyone. All of what I’ve worked hard to become is available to anyone willing to spend a lifetime trying to educate and broaden his or her views of the world. And that is exactly what I’ve done with my life, and I’m not the least ashamed of spending my life in this way. It did cost me something in the way of material comfort, but that’s the trade off I saw that I’d have to make to become really educated, not only in books but in living a variety of life and work experiences. I’m not going to hide my light under a bushel because Bible stories tell me that knowledge is ignorance. When I was a kid, people believed in educating themselves. These days, illiteracy seems to be what people admire. To be educated, I think, is to be considered an elitist by the Bushmen.

DO: “however, you're continuing to insist that faith priniciples of the atheist/evolutionist...

Geo: Many evolutionists believe in god.

DO: “...are fact, based on observable data.”

Geo: Several times, in several emails, I listed items of easily verifiable, common sense scientific data (not faith items) which you seem to be ignoring. Why? Why didn’t you just respond to each of my items in the last email so that I’d see where our minds might meet in common agreement, a place to start.

DO: “rather than grab a rudimentary creationist book off the shelf to challenge you tit for tat...

Geo: Creationism? What does that mean? Early humanoid’s egocentric view of humankind gets in their way here. Having only the example of people before their eyes as their example, who do create things, early people imagined gods and processes much like themselves in order to explain to themselves the mystery of their birth, death and life circumstances. This very human and limited view of a mythological universe made their gods nothing but glorified sculptors (i.e. puppet makers) or painters (the starry heavens). do you see how I might come to that conclusion? You don’t have to agree with me to at least see the rationale of my explanation just as I try to understand your rationales.

“Creationist” books are not scientific books because they presuppose without proof or debate a “creator” for which there is no evidence. Since their beginning premise is unproved what follows can only be hypothetical. And these creationist hypotheses have all been and continue to be disproved by scientific evidence. They are exercises in sophistry. None of those books are scientific because science doesn’t depend only on attacking others’ evidence. Good science comes up with verifiable evidence to prove its hypotheses. I’ve said this several times and you always ignore it. Show me the data that shows how something spiritual creates something material. Until you can do that with science, why challenge science’s theories about the observable universe which at least have some evidence to support them?

For one example of easily verifiable data, observable with telescopes and other measuring devices, is that the universe is moving outward at a measurable rate from an identifiable historical event in the past. You continually ignore and don’t reply to all the evidence for a universe which is expanding as from a central event which science calls, for simplicity’s sake, the big bang. Why can we observe this movement with telescopes and radio telescopes if not true? What’s your explanation for this phenomena?

In this reply, just as several times before when I confront you with facts or analogies, you just fire back these blasts of religious cant at me. Why can’t we stick to a discussion of the facts like good newspapermen?

DO: “-- i assume that you and your fellow unbelievers have conjured an answer to bede's ‘black box’...

Geo: Bede’s “black box” is sophistry, word games and philosophy, not scientific data. This is why I went to specific scientific principles in my last email so that I could see if we were on the same page scientifically.

DO: “...and other tomes -- and waste my time, i'll go back to the four of five principles of your atheistic faith and again stress that you have greater faith in your unbelief than i do in my belief. to be an atheist, you have to believe that everything came from nothing or that matter is eternal...

Geo: To be a fundamentalist, one has to believe that some spiritual puppet master called Yahweh existed before matter. Why does it make any less sense to think that matter is eternal than to posit some spiritual entity as eternal? Both are equally valid. Note: I don’t say true; I say valid. do you at least agree to that? I’ve offered you that option over and over in our debates, but I feel that you must have it all your way or none.

DO: “...and had some sort of system for creating an organized universe...

Geo: Natural selection is the process by which the current state of affairs in flux has come to exist. It’s not finished or organized and never will be but continues its daily rounds of change by infinite steps.

DO: “...that stays in place...

Geo: Nothing in the universe stays in place. The universe is in a constant state of change. do you deny that observable fact?

DO: “...governed by laws that scientists are slowly unraveling. i, of course, see intelligent design...

Geo: I’ve already answered that one. What design do you speak of? Is this design still changing? Is it finished? How can you see a design in an unfinished process? I’ve challenged you on this several times and you keep ignoring the challenge. What design are you speaking of in the middle of all this change?

DO: “...and an eternal God beyond the beginning...

Geo: Prove it, please, just a little scientific evidence will do. I’ll listen respectfully to the scientific evidence of this being. Otherwise it’s just an unproven hypothesis.

DO: “...an evolutionary atheist has to believe -- without justification other than a bias toward reading too much into your scientific tea leaves...

Geo: More insults.

DO: “...-- that matter exploded into the organized universe...

Geo: What organized, completed universe do you speak of?

DO: “...we see around us and our verdant world, in particular, which accidentally had all the ingredients to sustain life.”

Geo: Can this be proven scientifically or is this an hypothesis?

DO: “rather than being a ‘fact’ as you ascertain, your belief in the "big bang" is nothing more than an educated guess...

Geo: You keep ignoring and don’t reply to all the evidence for a universe which is expanding as from a central event that science calls, for simplicity’s sake, the big bang. Why can we observe this phenomena with telescopes and radio waves and you ignore this evidence we can see with our own eyes?

DO: “...by men of your kind who deny God.”

Geo: No, I don’t deny god. I await some scientific evidence, and I’ll believe with the best of them. Until then, I believe only as much as what evidence shows me. I’m very open minded.

DO: “you -- and they -- have to embrace your silly theory...

Geo: More name calling, eh?

DO: “...of everything coming from nothing and then organizing itself because the only other legitimate theory...

Geo: Hypothesis.

DO: “...is that God...

Geo: There’s that unproved spiritual superbeing again.

DO: “...said: let there be. and it was.”

Geo: Did you hear this utterance? Who heard this utterance? Are you taking the word of someone else about this? Then it’s second hand knowledge as Thomas Paine said. On the other hand, we, right in the here and now, can hear the sound of the big bang still echoing in the universe. This is common knowledge but you ignore it. Again, I have tried to find out just what you will or will not accept as evidence.

DO: “your so-called fact can't be considered anything more than a theory...

Geo: No, big bang is a fact way beyond even theory. But, remember how strong a theory is as compared to the god hypothesis. This has occurred several times between us. do you accept the definitions of hypothesis, theory and fact as outlined in scientific literature?

DO: “...because, according to your rules, the so-called big bang can't be reproduced or observed in a lab.”

Geo: The Big Bang can be observed in real time in the material universe. Why would we need to reproduce it in a lab? We’ve got the real bang still going on before our eyes. I’ve said that two or three times too, and you keep ignoring that fact. do you accept that the universe is the experiment we’re observing as it happens? What we don’t have evidence of is this spiritual moment when something unseen, immaterial, and without form created matter. So I don’t care about it. It’s of no importance. All I want to know about is how the material world works. For the fourth time, I say that I won’t argue with you if you want to premise some spiritual superbeing who set the whole shebang in motion.

DO: “then, among your silliest contentions...

Geo: More insults.

DO: “...is the notion that inorganic material produced life -- another unscientific guess because it can't be observed or reproduced -- that single-celled organisms gave rise to multi-celled ones, that invertebrates gave rise to vertebrates, that ape-like creatures gave rise to man, that non-intelligent amoral matter gave rise to intelligence and morality.”

Geo: Whoa, Dave, stop. Every time a conception happens, we see a two cells become four cells and four become eight, on and on. We see purely cellular existence grow vertebra, ligaments and bones and eyes, legs and arms, etcetera. What is happening there?

Dave, there’s a lot to debate on these matters and I can’t even begin to argue them (there’s just too much data to go over and I’m not sure I’m qualified to eke out the details), but, I’ve read the Bible and I challenge you to read the science about all these matters. Except for the idea of how inorganic matter gave birth to organic matter, I believe most of it is pretty well documented. I seriously don’t think you’ve kept up on scientific matters except to read those who oppose science. But the only way to understand and make your own decision is to honestly delve into the sciences with an open mind and find out for yourself. I’ve looked into religion enough to have had a born again experience to have believed in the story of Jesus, to have believed that a miracle was being performed on me to restore me to sobriety, and I did this in my middle ages, but they didn’t hold me. So I’ve been open minded down the way of the Bible story. Have you been as open minded about science? Have you studied science with an eye to believing before you condemn?

DO: “again, i'll say your blind faith in the bias of science's deductions is enormous. yet, you embrace your bias as fact and totally dismiss the other real possibility of how it all began.”

Geo: Tell me, Dave. Why, in all the possibilities in the universe, should you come up with an idea that some invisible being at the beginning of time started all this unless you were taught it at a very impressionable age? Why would you invent this idea? What bias in your thinking would make you invent that idea or would make early peoples invent a god that worked the way they claimed he did? I only say this to show that your claim is as unfounded as you say science’s claims are. I’m not claiming anything but an equality in the validity of the claims as to what preceded matter. I’m granting you an equality of hypothesis as to what happened before time, if there was a “before” time.

DO: “as i've said before, the preaching of the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing.”

Geo: I’m not “perishing” Dave. Speak only for yourself. I don’t think you’re perishing just because we disagree with one another. That would be un-American and undemocratic. don’t forget. My religion is democracy and my Bible is the Constitution and human freedom from all kings and gods is my spiritual compass. To you, I grant the same freedoms.

DO: “you say you once walked in my shoes and have all kinds of notions about what prompted me to believe and why i hold onto my belief.”

Geo: I really can’t say that. It’s just my opinion which we all have.

DO: “i've also walked in your shoes...

Geo: I don’t know if you have.

DO: “...and i wouldn't trade places for the world. watching you agonize about christians taking over the u.s. and forming a theocratic government...

Geo: That “religions” by true believers of all sorts have taken over countries is a historical reality. Even in the Bible such things are recorded and the results are never good, so to be concerned is not out of the realm of reality. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Who said that?

DO: “...(when we met) revealed to me how much fear you have in your life. (i still fight the effects of fear...

Geo: All humans have fear. It’s part of our evolved mechanism, just like all animals, for self preservation and self defense.

DO: “...caused by manmade religion in my formative years, but i'm getting over it.) mankind is not a random accident. he is the pinnacle of God's creation.”

Geo: What about womankind? And the pinnacle stuff is pure hypothesis, but you’re welcome to it, if it comforts you as much as science comforts me.

DO: “if you want to believe you're a monkey's uncle ... without a fossil record (but a fairly good faux theory of why it doesn't exist), go ahead. i'll continue to believe mankind is created in the image of God. at our age, we will both know soon enough who's right. or we'll both cease to exist and others after us will take up the question.”

Geo: Fair enough.

DO: “we've reached an impasse, however. i browsed through a book that challenges the speculation on evolution that you embrace as fact, with the purpose of compiling a list, like the one you have listed below. i realized, however, that this would continue an endless discussion, with you refusing to concede a point. you'll conjure up some more so-called facts...

Geo: This charge is strange to me because I don’t know what facts are to you so-called and what facts we both might accept as true. This is something I’ve been trying to establish for some time now. I really don’t know what you object to except the things which neither side has any evidence for. You keep telling me that the big bang is not factual, and almost all astronomers will accept that this beginning event is a real occurrence, though they may still be believers in god.

DO: “...and i'll have to waste time finding material to knock them down. frankly, as i've pointed out above, you believe a lot of hockum...

Geo: Another insult. Sorry that you didn’t compile your list. I’d like to see it.

DO: “...already that doesn't pass scientific muster...

Geo: In some of my beliefs I admit that I go with the Nobel Prize winning scientists because some things I can’t clearly state. If my ideas don’t pass muster, then neither do the beliefs of all the heavy thinkers and researchers in the sciences.

DO: “...and are too willing to buy any theory that combats anything creationistic, whether it's proveable or not (eternal matter, big bang, etc.)”

Geo: I claimed only that eternal matter is as plausible as some eternal immateriality called spirit. They’re equally plausible. Big bang is another matter.

DO: “this side of God's intervention in your life, you'll never find the truth.”

Geo: Another insult and quite an arrogant statement.

DO: “i don't have time to continue feeding your obsessive nature.”

Geo: Another insult and quite psychological for a spiritual being who, I’d imagine, doesn’t believe much in Freud either.

DO: “i've said that before. at this point, i'll continue to pray for you...

Geo: Another insult.

DO: “...with the hope that God will intervene in your life as He has in mine. but i'm not interested in continuing to debate with your for the sake of debate — dfo”

Geo: Fair enough.

GOD’S NOT AN ASPIRIN

I’ve had my brushes with infinity too, but I’ve managed to escape surrendering myself to a superstitious belief in a personal deity except for a few weak moments. Like most people, I’ve had some tough times in my life. Back in my drinking days, I taught high school for one year in the late-Sixties before the principal decided that I should teach college rather than high school students. At least that’s what his evaluation of my performance concluded. One of several failures I was suffering during that period. Most of my own making, I should add.

I gave him so many reasons to reject me. For example, I enjoyed meeting on the weekends with students who I thought required some special treatment because of their dissatisfaction with school. I took them to plays and to foreign films in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We day hiked all over John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs too and visited the Dayton Art Institute, and we gathered in coffee shops in Dayton to discuss what we’d seen and experienced during our trips. Some people thought that what I was doing was pretty suspicious. My goodness! A teacher who likes the rebels in his class and wants to increase their knowledge of the world. What will teaching come to next?

I don’t think our principal liked the way I allowed students to use my black boards as places to jot down their thoughts, beliefs and sayings which they liked, specially the way one guy managed to write “FUCK” on the board in a kind of Chinese-like characters that disguised what he was really saying. And I know he was threatened by my challenge to my students to bring in any piece of writing they admired for me to read aloud to the class. I know he heard about the book by Marquis de Sade which P. B. brought in and challenged me to read. Gallantly, I stood before the class and began, but after a line or two, I knew that P. B. had mastered me and brought my challenge to heel. I couldn’t do it. P. B. had taken me to a bridge too far, and I folded. Actually, few students responded to my challenge.

I’m also sure the principal didn’t like the eraser fights I participated in in class toward the end of some of our school days. Our kids we’re locked down in school all day long, and I noticed that by sixth and seventh period the young studs were getting pretty restless, so one day I began an eraser fight with them. It was me against them, and I put my chair on its side up on my desk for protection and we began chucking erasers. Wham, bap—the erasers would hit the black board and chair and me with loud whaps. After about 5 minutes, the steam would be let out of them, and we could get to work. Then, one day, the principal opened the door just as an eraser struck the board near the door. His finger crooked to beckon me to come out in the hall where he gave me a talking to. He couldn’t see the benefit of letting off steam that way.

But that’s enough of examples of why the principal didn’t want me to teach in his school the following year. I clinched his dis-ease with me when I gave all my students in all five sections I taught across the board B’s. What’s this got to do with god, you ask?

Well, that summer, for three months financed by the checks I received over a twelve month period, I lived in a remodeled chicken coop on an old estate on the edge of town. My goal was to get away from the wife and kids and to write for three months. Of course, I wrote little over the course of that summer, but I hiked quite a few miles every week to go visit the brand new campus of Wright State University. I did also do a good deal of reading. I read a couple of books by Bertrand Russell, including “Why I’m An Atheist”. He is delightful. I was an atheist, but not fully convinced at this time, and my path has been a rambling one, even to this day.

Anyhow. . . one by one, many of my students came out to visit me, and one night, Mike Day came out to visit me. He was a bright guy who was conservative and who liked to debate with me. He went on some of my student excursions too. I was not one to discriminate, besides, he seemed pretty lonely and isolated too since he didn’t have a lot of friends among the students. He definitely wasn’t one of the in crowd among the regulars or among the hippies who went on my excursions.

It was raining heavily that night, and I had a headache that was fierce. Fierce! Mike had been yammering at me for a long time, and he was making my headache worse. He was definitely a man to put authority over freedom, and I wasn’t enjoying our debate much that night. We were standing in a gazebo, talking, sitting on the picnic table. On the grounds of the estate, floodlights lit the night, and huge raindrops flashed through them. The soaked grass gleamed in the dark.

As I stood there, it came into my head, no doubt because Mike and I were talking about god and conscience, that I could get rid of my headache by just going out there to a floodlit spot of grass before me and dropping down on my knees and asking god to remove the headache. I knew it to a certainty that if I was willing to do that, the headache would go away. Then, I laughed at myself, and decided for agony rather than surrender. I thought, “If I did that, then god would be nothing more than an aspirin.” No, that didn’t fit my idea of what a higher power should be—just a pitiful little pain reliever.

No siree... no cheap, easy pain reliever for me!

BROWN SHIRT TACTICS AREN’T PRETTY

Who are these modern Republicans? What Nazi party did they get their training in?

Locally, here in Spokane, Republicans tear down campaign signs of their opponents with troubling consistency. Nationally, they act like Brown Shirts in the way they plan to intimidate minority voters, make secrecy a center of their policy, throw their opponents out of public gatherings, and seek revenge against distraught Americans.

See the New York Times essay on the vote and Jim Hightower’s essay in the Inlander in Spokane Washington.

Further, in Bush’s second debate with Kerry, according to Jonathan Alter in Newsweek (Oct. 11, 2004 p. 29), the Bush camp “... told undecided voters, hoping to participate in this week’s ‘town meeting debate’ that they are not welcome. Apparently, the president’s having to respond to someone who hasn’t made up his mind is too intimidating fro the leader of the free world.”


THE SNARE TIGHTENS AROUND
THE SCRAWNY NECK OF CREATIONIST BIRDS

The discovery of yet more winged dinosaur fossils, “microraptor gui”, in China gets about as close to a missing link as science is ever going to get. This dinosaur has four feathered wings and was probably a glider, one of the steps necessary to go from land animal to flying bird. Read this!

But, you know, as I read some of the arguments by creationists against all these many fossilized feathered dinosaurs which definitely fall within the range of change from reptiles to birds, I see how they try to narrow down the definition of what a missing link would look like until it could not exist. They continually say that this fossil is still a dinosaur while that fossil is a bird, as if to prove that these peculiar feathered creatures aren’t clearly somewhere between the two but either one or the other. What they are demanding as a missing link would be an animal which was neither dinosaur nor bird but which was both dinosaur and bird. They’re demanding a third species. An impossible thing. What creationists are looking for is nothing which could exist. There is no missing link; that’s not how evolution works.


QUESTIONS FOR A FUNDAMENTALIST

Sometimes I can’t understand exactly how much science that fundamentalists recognize as accurate observations of the world. So I roughed out a couple of questions about, I think, indisputable scientific facts that I’d like to give them. Upon some of these findings, much of big bang and evolutionary fact finding begins and ends.

1) Do continents drift and can their rate of drift be measured fairly accurately?

2) Do radioactive materials slowly lose their radioactivity and can the rate of decay be measured?

3) Does dust in the air drop to the earth and slowly accumulate layers which can be seen with the naked eye? Can the rate of buildup be estimated? Can we, therefore, bore into the earth and see these layers and estimate how long ago these layers were deposited?

4) Can we observe these same rates and build ups on the ocean floors?

5) Can I dig up a dog bone while gardening and call that a fossil?

6) Can I uncover an ancient fossil in a layer of rock and by using the principles in 3) and 4) make some estimate of how long ago that fossil was deposited?

7) Can I look at manlike skulls which show an ever larger brain pan and draw some conclusions about evolution from them?

8) Can I conclude from the oceanic-like salinity of human blood that it’s more likely that “the power some call god” made us from ocean water rather than from earthen material?
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"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid prenancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry." — H. L. Mencken

CREATIONIST GALL

Creationists set no limits to their deceit. The other day I was looking over one of their web sites in which they were discussing how to get around the idea that so many feathered serpents, dinosaurs and lizards are being found in China that they’ve got to face the possibility that, perhaps, science is actually looking at fossils of missing links between dinosaurs and birds. The creationists use many tricks, such as casting doubt on the evidence, saying that it’s manufactured, even suggesting (without evidence) that there’s a factory in China which manufactures false fossils, or they use one argument to discredit one piece of data, then turn that argument on its head to discredit another piece of evidence. This flip-flop is exactly how they pretend to be scientific in order to argue against scientific data but, then, fail to use science to discredit the claim that there is a “spiritual world” out there beyond time and space. A claim for which there is absolutely no data. Creationists are extremely dishonest and duplicitous.

But the most worrisome lie for someone who understands sophisticated lying is their claim that the Bible has nothing to say about “feathered dinosaurs”; therefore, “feathered dinosaurs” must be okay with the Bible. I’ve got to admire their gall, turning ignorance into wisdom. Neither does the Bible say anything about computers or automobiles or gasoline. The list of things not in the Bible would run into millions of items. Now the reason these things aren’t in the Bible is that no one had heard of them in those days. The Bible writers were as ignorant of the modern world as a pile of turnips, but the creationist apologists turn that ignorance into a strength. They claim that everything the Bible writers didn’t know about, had never heard of, is, therefore, okay with the Bible. They pretend that the Bible writers knew about all these things but just didn’t bother to write them in.

How can you argue with such gall, such conceited and conscientious lying? See some feathered dinosaurs!


BUSH STALLS DEMOCRACY IN LEBANON

George Bush’s attack of Iraq is unsettling one Middle-Eastern democracy:

“The term of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, a staunch Syrian ally, was scheduled to expire this November. The Lebanese Constitution prevents presidents from standing for consecutive six-year terms. Yet there had been rumors circulating for the past several months that Syria, which has many allies within the Lebanese political establishment, might wish to see the Constitution amended to allow Lahoud to stand again for a new term.”

As Bush sought to force his will on Lebanon, a “call went out to the members of the Lebanese government to convene 12 hours later. The next morning the Cabinet voted to amend the Constitution and extend the term of an overwhelmingly unpopular president who had himself publicly admitted that he had failed domestically, even though he had ‘succeeded in his regional strategic policies.’ ”

From the Lebanese Daily Star


BUSH STIFLES DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA TOO

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, (Oct. 11, 2004, p. 29) writes that “. . . the Bush camp has told undecided voters hoping to participate in this week’s ‘town meeting debate’ that they are not welcome. Apparently the idea of the president’s having to respond to someone who hasn’t made up his [sic] mind is too intimidating for the leader of the free world.”


THE JINN GAME

According to Islamic belief, a jinni can take any physical form or possess a human, but according to Abu Yussuf, a Moslem from Michigan, who has caught the faith healing ways of American televangelists, "The powers I command can help people who are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a glance of hope."

Read more at An Islamic faith healer talks about his profession.
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"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked, and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy." —Oscar Wilde

SEX AND STUFF

A Newsweek report (Oct. 4, 2004, p. 44) tells us that “hooking up” is a new campus phenomena. One researcher, Professor Elizabeth Paul, claims “... it’s the campus norm. If you’re a normal college student, you do it.”

Of course, not all the hooking up is actually fornication. Some people just smooch a lot with deep tongue kissing. For others, it’s oral sex and for others, it’s rounding all the bases, a home run, going all the way! That’s what we called “doing the nasty” when I was kid. Professor Paul thinks that as many as 78% of all college students have hooked up by the time graduation rolls around.

Why would this phenomena appear, we ask? One study suggests that college students, because of the pressures of competition, don’t have time for the commitments of full time relationships.

Could something healthy come out of all of this? Allison Caruthers, a Michigan Ph.D student who’s researching “hooking up”, “cites research showing that people who’ve experimented with alcohol or marijuana are often psychologically healthier than people who abstained entirely. She believes there’s a similarity in hookups.”

From my own experience, a once-upon-a-time heavy-drinking, four times married, three times divorced, man, I’d say that experience is worth something. I feel about as free as a person can feel, self-directed nowadays and married by choice finally rather then by the normal obsessive/compulsive drives which used to motivate me. Granted, if you looked back at all the struggle and suffering I put myself and others through, you might agree with those many religious people who turn back quickly to their early religious indoctrination rather than discover the hard-earned ultimate human freedom which is empty of god. They’d say that freedom isn’t worth all the pain; best to turn it all over to their mythology and don’t argue with it. Let me assure you that freedom is precious. . . if you survive the bouncy flight and bumpy landing.


DRAFTING THE BUSH DODGE

In an article about a possible military draft by Jonathan Alter in the Oct. 4, 2004 Newsweek, I came across an interesting comment by the columnist which I think is very true but which conventional wisdom would argue is false:

“One thing we’ve learned about Bush is that he has never taken a position that he knew beforehand would be politically unpopular, including invading Iraq.” (p. 39)

By the way, Newsweek, in Alter’s article, was nearly a week ahead of our local paper, the Spokesman Review, in reporting the threats to our soldiers that they’d better reenlist or face being sent to Iraq. Look, I think there should be a draft with nothing but medical and age deferments allowed. Unless, we put our children and their fathers on the line, we never get to face just how important the cause is. It’s so easy for cowboys like George to send off a few of our fathers, mothers and children to war if most of us have nothing at stake. It’s so easy to pay lip service in support of a president’s bullheadedness if we have nothing to lose personally. That’s always been the weakness in an all-volunteer army, that we have no stake in their deployment.


EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOEVSKY TO SARTRE

I never did finish this book, and this is why:

I do feel that I live in a different world than these ancient philosophers. . Most of their problems are not my problems. Their way of approaching reality is not my way. They seem, and I mean no disrespect, from a far distant time, almost as if their consciousness is of another species. As they try to divide the world into categories for discussion, I see errors and falsehoods in their simplest statements. For example, by Ortega: “The stone is given its existence. . . [man] has to make his own existence.” (p. 153)

What the hell does that mean? Who gives the stone its existence? How simply insufficient for modern men are generalized statement like Ortega’s! So much changes for us when we fully accept the possibility that we are almost robotic in most of our functions and thoughts. All the terms for discussion alter.
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"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." —Gore Vidal

ENDLESS DEBATE IN WHICH I REPEAT MYSELF FUNDAMENTALLY

From: D.O.
To: "George Thomas"
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:46:16 -0700
Subject: Re: Slight corrections on last message.

[Dear Blog Reader: because of the nature of the editing facilities of this web site, I'm unable to use colors as I did during the following exchange with D.O. Basically, he sent me a three paragraph response to an earlier email, and, then, I broke up his message into fragments and responded to each of Dave's observations, charges and claims. In each segment, separated by a line, the opening statement is Dave's, and my reply follows.]


1) i continually am amazed that you refuse to say how much your science and "facts" are based on guesswork and faith. the gradual changes that blend together are not fact.

Science is based on research, observation, and facts, not guesswork. The hypothesis is a “guess”, but no hypothesis becomes a fact until it has become a theory and has been tested and peer reviewed. Science is a method for arriving at the truth; it doesn’t claim to be a finished thing like Bibles and Korans do. The facts are what we see before us. For the thousandth time: science only explains the natural, material world. If you want to say, on the basis of an ancient book of prophecy, that some invisible, intangible force you call god started the whole ball of wax going, then I won’t argue with you. I can’t. Go ahead. But the facts of evolution are in, and those who understand these things no longer have any doubt about what they observe and measure every day.
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2) it wasn't that long ago that science was saying that animals evolved at an extremely slow rate and then experienced quantum development that took them to the next level. how can you look at the universe and not see intelligent design?

Please read Richard Dawkin’s excellent book, The Blind Watchmaker, which explains “intelligent design”. Where you see intelligent design, I see constant change. No design exists because nothing is finished. The constant state, physical principles which underlie change guide the processes of change, but they don’t have a finished design in mind. They are just physical constants which act upon and within matter. If I arrange a drawer in the desk by some principle known only to me, my wife might not see design there at all. She’d see chaos. The principles “arranging” (influencing?) the constantly changing universe are the only constants which act upon the design we imagine we see in the continuous state of material flux which is our Cosmos. The order in the universe is much different than the drawer analogy which most Christians think is evidence of design.

In the forgoing passage you put your finger on the humble strength of science. Science changes as evidence accumulates. Old hypotheses are put aside as the evidence shows that it should be put aside. Science never claims to be god-like. Science no longer accepts what early Bible science accepted: that the world is flat and has four corners or that the earth is the center of the universe. Those old Bible science truths were put aside as new evidence proved them wrong. Now, even most religious people would admit that the earth is round and that the earth circles the sun. Science is open ended, always available for testing and revision. It accommodates human error by giving us a way to arrive at the truth and to challenge old truths with new evidence. This method is superior to the flawed method of appeals to absolute authority. Religions, the dead ones and the living ones, have always claimed to have the absolute truth. That’s why they’re dangerous. Anybody who claims to have the ultimate truth or to be speaking for god is dangerously out of touch with his or her own humanity and fallibility. Science accepts human fallibility by giving us an objective way to challenge it and to change with the evidence. Bible truths are locked in with no way of changing with the evidence.

Here’s a strong reason why science is superior to religion when it comes to arriving at knowledge: its predictive capacity. Another word for prophecy is fortune telling. The Bible is a fortune telling book. Two months back, Cal Thomas quoted the apostle Paul on when to expect the end times: "People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power."

Okay, how successful has this fortune telling been in predicting the end times? How many false alarms have we had in the past 2000 years? In other words, this Bible prophecy is completely useless, yet general enough to be called up should a comet ever appear in the sky which might hit and end life on earth. It’s a fortune teller’s trick to speak in these general ways. It’s always true that people are like the people Paul refers to, so that’s true, anybody can see that, but that truth about humanity’s animal nature has no predictive power as to when the end times will happen. Whereas, science observes the continental drift and can tell you that eventually Los Angeles will appear off the coast of Washington and approximately when if the facts remain the same.
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3) you remind me of a man who can't see the forest because you're fixated on a tree: science. science is part of the whole.

I agree, science is only one field of intellectual endeavor among many, like literature and sociology and Bible exegesis, but the “method of knowing”, called the scientific method, is more basic to the human picture for it deals with epistemology and is fundamental to how we experience reality in our heads. We can approach every field of study and everything in the universe with scientific clarity and methodology or we can stay forever locked in appeals to authority. Literature, like the Bible, which is personal and subjective, is always relative because its depends on what the individual experiences. Those subjective truths are not open to scientific debate. If a man tells me he’s Jesus or an angel, as many a crazy I’ve met with in my volunteer work tells me, I’m not going to argue with him. He really believes that and no amount of objective evidence will change him. He’s suffering from a delusion. But if he tells me the earth is flat, then I’m going to go to the scientific method to debate him.
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4) as far as i'm concerned science merely confirms the overall design described in the bible. as i mentioned before, the opening verses of hebrews sez that everything that's seen was made up of things unseen. hundreds of years later, science discovers the atom.

Actually, the Greek “atomists” were the first to come up with that idea, and the Bible isn’t referring to atoms in that passage. It’s obvious the Bible writers are referring to that hypothetical spiritual world of ghosts, demons, angels and such, to the fearful world they feared was all around them and invisible. The Bible writers also stole the idea of an afterlife from the Persians while the Jews were in one of their diasporas.
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5) and i'm curious about this ... how do you use your science to explain the spirit within a man -- that untouchable part that is the base of our thoughts, desires, emotions, soul, etc.? where did that come from? how does science explain what i call a God-shaped hollow which spurs a man to strive for fulfillment and meaning.

What do you mean by untouchable and by spirit? Are we referring to that invisible world again which is still only an hypothesis, a guess? “Spirit” is a word some people use to explain that which they don’t yet understand. Most of what the they call spirit is easily being observed and explained by current scientific experiments with the human brain. That’s why I’m reading books like Freedom Evolves, The Moral Animal, Consciousness Explained, Going Inside, How The Mind Works, etcetera. Thoughts are measurable and observable electric brain waves and chemically triggered synaptic patterns; emotions are “physical” measurable body states; ambition and love are emotional, animal strivings easily measured and observed with mechanical measuring devices and explained by evolution; desires are another word for the “physicality” of emotions. What others call stress and rage and hope are all physical sensations easily observable with current measuring equipment. Nothing mysterious in any of this except for those who have an enlarged, overly prideful view of themselves and their place in the universe. Lots of pride goeth before their fall.

One of the most daunting findings about how the brain works is that there is no observable control center where a soul or an observer might be functioning. Decisions are brain and body wide synaptic happenings. Data comes in through the senses, many circuits begin firing, feedback loops are energized. There’s a brain-wide competition by incoming data to reach the level of attention. The human animal can’t even control which stimuli will reach its attention. Basic animal instincts come into play here. Threats have a tendency to get attended to more quickly when something dangerous is happening to us. That’s why human animals still have gag reflexes, the ducking reflex, a tendency to freeze all motion when a threat suddenly appears. These are all animal reflexes in us, easily measured and explained.

In short, there is no observable “hollow” or “central place” where a judgment mechanism or a soul sit in the whole circuit of incoming data and outgoing actions. If you ask me, the hard science of brain research is doing more to undermine the ideas in the Bible than evolution ever did. While Bible people are still trying to put down the fires of evolution, the front line has moved on to newer realms and to ever more hard science and indisputable evidence that a soul doesn’t exist. Brain science is a much harder science than evolutionary science, by “harder”, I mean with much more demonstrable cause and effect connections.
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6) you fill your hollow with intellectualism, atheism, helping military veterans, debate and bedding women. others pursue sports, wealth, power, fame, etc.

I don’t have a hollow inside me, and when I thought I had one, I now know it was a physical rather than a spiritual sensation. I think I’m going to regret telling you about “bedding women” as one example of all the experience I’ve ever had that taught me something.
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7) i don't see any animals so possessed with trying to find out why we're here or leaving a legacy. science is only a part of the story. you need to look at the forest — dfo

“Curiosity” (i.e. striving, why-ness, how-ness) is a basic animal instinct. Watch any animal in a trap. Watch an animal ferret out food and act to protect itself. Watch the ceaseless exploratory paths of most animals as they wander through their daily lives. There “curiosity” as expressed in action is the root of our animal curiosity which we express when we ask “why” or, as science does, “how”. Actually “why” is for philosophers and dreamers who ask the unanswerable questions, but “how”-ness (how do I get enough money to get that food, or the bear’s how-ness, how do I get into that house to get that food I smell) is for science. These are answerable questions with predictive and practical power.

Animals don’t “think” about leaving legacies, but they have left us one or two: they’re called the human animal and consciousness. And we don’t know anymore about what kind of legacy we’re leaving than animals do. We just imagine we do. A legacy is only a word which describes the memories in other people’s consciousnesses which our animal ambitions and strivings put there while we lived. What some call “legacies” are only the historical remnants of what alpha people leave behind from their animal striving to be superior beings in the eyes of their herd mates so that they can have power and prestige while they live which will contribute to their chances to have progeny and for their progeny to survive.

[HERE ENDS THE QUESTION/RESPONSE PART OF THE SERVICE. BECAUSE OF MY SIMULTANEOUS EXCHANGES WITH BOTH HOWARD AND DAVE, I MAY HAVE REPEATED MYSELF IN THESE PAST 5 TO 10 POSTINGS. FOR BORING YOU, I APOLOGIZE. MY CLOSING REMARKS TO DAVE FOLLOW:]

I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t supply you with “nobler” views of the human animal, but I can’t. I used to think as you do, but all I’ve got now is reality. Too much is explainable by the facts I have at my disposal. I imagine it disturbs you to imagine the world that I live in. If there is anything more revealing about the “relativity of truth” it should be the two entirely different worlds you and I live in. You get your truths by reference to a fortune telling book while I get mine from seeing the undeniable evidence which the scientific method at work has given us to tame rivers, fly to the stars, explore the brain, go to the bottom of the ocean, understand the atom, explore the physiology of the human body, to create thinking machines, to understand how the continents drift like ships on the surface of the planet, how to slingshot a space ship into orbit. The list of the achievements of the scientific method is endless.

Dave, I wish I could be shorter, but you ask serious questions which trigger serious answers. I keep giving you lists of scientific books written for lay people, like you and me, where you can read about these discoveries and discussions without having to debate someone like me.

Take care and all the time you need to answer.

Geo
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"I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." —Galileo Galilei (One of those people shut down by the fundamentalists of his own time. Though he believed in a hypothetical superbeing, he suffered from a fundamental lack of information on this subject.)

DEATH HAS NO STING FOR THE ATHEIST

Lately, I’m 66, I’ve been thinking about my own death, and my thoughts have definitely matured. When I was younger, I’d shiver with the thought of my body buried under the ground in a coffin. I was very attached to my body at that time for why else would I think of myself alive down there in the ground dead? An impossible situation, yet one that caused me great fear. I suppose it was a very literal feeling of being dead and buried for eternity while still being aware of my predicament.

This morning, I don’t know why, I realized with great clarity another scenario for my death. I’ll just lose consciousness, I might even go to Oregon to do it, if I think the quality of my life is no longer worth maintaining. Death no longer has a sting for me. It’ll be just like getting a needle and going to sleep for an operation. Nothing to it. Only this time, as I fall almost immediately to sleep, I won’t wake up, but more importantly, I will no longer care. I’m asleep forever and no nightmares this time.


MY FIRST ATHEIST

I was just a young kid, 22, recently out of the Navy, and I got a job with the American Optical Company, the company that partnered with Michael Todd to develop the Todd/AO optical system for wide screen movies used in “Around The World In Eighty Days”. Todd was one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands, remember? He was reputed to be a larger than life financial genius. Their yacht once pulled into the harbor of Nantucket when I was stationed there in 1958. Crowds gathered in the street outside the restaurant they were supposedly eating in. I never got a glimpse of them, but I may have glimpsed Sterling Hayden on a beach during my first summer on the island.

Eventually, I became a delivery driver for the AO branch in Dayton, Ohio. I delivered lenses and frames all around Dayton and small outlying towns, drove their red Nash American. It was much like a VW, like an upside down bathtub in shape, but it was economical, and I never delivered anything big.

My last delivery of each day was west of Dayton, in Eaton Ohio, to a Dr. Spitler. He was doctor and optometrist for that small town. He worked out of a huge white building with several outbuildings, and, not only was he a practicing physician, he ran his own medical school. Young students would be there, learning to sew stitches in a side of bacon, practicing giving shots to an orange. I’m serious, a one man medical school!

White haired, goateed Dr. Spitler was accompanied in his business by a trim, very attractive, gray haired nurse, and I heard about their affair which the whole town knew of, I guess. His office, where I delivered the goods was huge, old, carpeted, with tall windows around a bay letting in lots of light. Bookcases and cabinets lined the walls and stacks of books and magazines covered every free surface. Stacks of books bloomed from the carpet all around his desk and desk chair too.

Eventually, the good doctor learned I was leaving American Optical to go to the University of Dayton. That’s when, one day, when I was idling around listening to him talk, he handed me an old, hardcover book, open to a page with pictures. That’s the first time, ever, that I saw a picture of one of those fat round earth goddess figures from the ancient past. He spoke to me about them, and I recall nothing of the moment but the book and the picture inside. He was, I’m sure, trying to tell me things about atheism and mythology, wanting me to get a good, scientific start toward my education, but I wasn’t even close to being ready to hear him. I was going every Sunday to the Lutheran Church with my wife and child. I was blind, deaf and dumb to science. True knowledge would come much later.

To this day, I try to recall how naive I was, even at 22, whenever I’m dealing with a blind, deaf fundamentalist in a discussion of evolution. You are either ready for the truth or you are not. The average mind must develop a lot of wrinkles before it’s ready to understand the obvious and to cast off the mysterious.
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"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!" (No! It ain't the Bushman. It's...
—Samuel Goldwyn, a Yogi Berra in his own right