J. E. HILL ASKS AND ANSWERS IN SKEPTICAL REVIEW ARTICLE

"Are there great differences separating the Genesis creation and other creation myths, and is the Genesis account really the closest to the Big Bang?" —JEHill

In this article in The Skeptical Review, John Hill goes over lots of material. After reading this material, you should have no doubt that 1) there is very little difference between many creation myths from that era and place (specially between the myths that the Bible borrowed from and Bible mythology itself) and 2) the Genesis account in the Bible bears almost no comparison to what we know about the undeniable evidence for the Big Bang.

Speaking of Bible mythology, may I also refer you to 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History by Gary Greenberg.

Then, if you find Greenberg's book interesting, as any open-minded curious person will find it, you may also be interested in one or more of the following books which you will find on the Amazon website on the same page as 101 Myths under "Customers who bought this item also bought"

Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman
The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read by Tim C. Leedom
Who Wrote the New Testament? : The Making of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack
The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe
The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S

And if you take all the evidence in this post seriously into account, you will have little trouble understanding why a Bush who takes the Bible literally could also be easily misled by Cheney and Perle and the mythology of Iraq they handed Bush. If Bush were a real president, rather than the worst presidential pretender in the history of American presidents, Bush would be a "burning Bush" indeed, thinking how his advisers misled him into his horrible blunder. He's either "burning" or in on and part of the Big Lie itself. Finally consider how JFK reacted after the Bay of Pigs, how he got very serious about his mistake and how he handled the error in a much more forceful manner.

NIETZSCHE’S ANTI-CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

Religion’s victims eventually come to hate life itself—not just themselves. —Nietzsche

A couple of quarters ago, I took a course in Continental Philosophy—existentialism, that is, as distinct from American pragmatism. I am no philosopher, but I am and have been an atheist for quite some time. I don’t know how anyone can still believe there’s some great power in the heavens who watches over them unless they are already defeated and broken in spirit and can no longer rely on themselves. In short—if life isn’t working out for you, then go ahead and imagine there’s someplace else (an afterlife) where poor little you will come out on top.

In Continental Philosophy: a critical approach (pp. 121-123), William Schroeder summarizes some of Nietszsche’s reasons for being the atheist he is. They’re good reasons, one and all, and I imagine that few atheists arrive at their own conclusions with having thought or read of these ideas in their philosophical development from superstitious pie-in-the-sky thinker to solid pragmatist and skeptic:

“Nietzsche contends that most religions—especially Christianity—displace the inherent value of acting nobly, encouraging people to act ethically only to achieve some reward (entrance into heaven) and to resist evil only to avoid horrible punishment (hell). Nietzsche believes that such incentives undermine ethical action because it should be indifferent to rewards and punishments. Moreover. the otherworldly focus of most religions encourages adherents to ignore this world—to abandon their responsibilities and ignore their failures here—because they can be compensated or forgiven in the next world. Equally suspect is the belief that a last-minute conversion can atone for a lifetime of heartlessness and lassitude, as if deathbed conversions can eliminate responsibility for such failings. For these reasons, Nietzsche believes most religions mock ethical seriousness because they undermine its presuppositions: that virtue is its own reward, that this world is where ethical action is needed, and that every action matters.

“In addition, many religions idealize asceticism—opposing natural human impulses, e.g., sex, pride, self-assertion. and joy in achievement. Nietzsche thinks these natural impulses are incipient sources of excellence. Religion's primary tactic is to extirpate or annihilate them, producing people who are either divided within themselves (insofar as they maintain some identification with their impulses) or hate themselves (because they cannot overcome them). Self-contemptuous people reject life and act spitefully. When others reciprocate, anger, hatefulness, and resentment escalate, creating poisonous social relations. Religion’s victims eventually come to hate life itself—not just themselves. Nietzsche also challenges Christianity's embrace of "slavish" values—values that sustain the weak, the failures, the inept, and the memocre. Nietzsche holds that the concept of "good" within a slavish system of evaluation is derivativedefined solely in opposition to whatever it calls "evil"—and that "evil" maligns noble traits that enhance human flourishing and exceptional achievement. Slavish value systems sanctify humility, passivity, pity, lassitude, dependence. Nietzsche believes that the best relationship to natural passions is sublimation—redirecting and guiding them toward higher goals. Nietzsche celebrates these impulses because they provide the energy necessary to achieve greatness.

“Beyond this, Nietzsche shows that Christianity's emotional ambiance is dominated by sin, guilt, suffering, penance, atonement, and despair. Thus. its psychic landscape is desolate, without vitality, passion, light-footedness, or playfulness—characteristics that Nietzsche believes are essential to higher achievements, This emotional ambiance devastates the faithful. shattering their self-confidence and inspiration, Moreover, historically, religion is responsible for many ethnic wars and hatreds, and soldiers (and terrorists) infused with holy righteousness are more efficient killers. Of course, priests might argue that religion offers "metaphysical comforts" to the masses, making their modest lives meaningful and providing them with hope. But Nietzsche often thinks that illusory hopes are problematic and that religious meaning depends on indefensible assumptions. Without metaphysical comforts, people would be forced to push themselves to achieve meaningful lives. Nietzsche concludes that the psychological and historical consequences of theism have reduced humanity's capacities for excellence. The demise of such a corrupting institution should be greeted with joy.

“Nietzsche also challenges Christianity's embrace of "slavish" values—values that sustain the weak, the failures, the inept, and the mediocre. Nietzsche holds that the concept of "good" within a slavish system of evaluation is derivative, defined solely in opposition to whatever it calls "evil"—and that "evil" maligns noble traits that enhance human flourishing and exceptional achievement. Slavish value systems sanctify humility, passivity, pity, lassitude, dependence, non-responsiveness, and procrastination. These “values” lead humanity down a path opposite from the one Nietzsche embraces. They sustain those who avoid the challenge of greatness, who shun danger, and who mindlessly conform. Slavish values encourage dependence on higher powers, keeping people in a helpless condition.”

IRONY IRONY IRONY

This winter's rise in heating oil prices caused one or two oil exporting countries to come to the aid of America's poorest citizens (since Bush didn't do it). It came from Citgo Petroleum, controlled by the Venezuelan government and its president, fierce Bush administration adversary Hugo Chavez, who promised $10 million in discounts to low-income northeastern heating oil customers. He and his citizens must be getting a few laughs at America's expense. (from US News, Dec 12, 2005)


STERN MAKES A SIRIUS CAREER MOVE

As some of you may know, Howard Stern has gone over to pay radio, but this snippet is about how stupid censorship gets:

"His [Howard Stern] diatribes against the thought police on both the right and the left come spilling out like soliloquies and are often backed up with evidence—like the time he wanted to play a tape of Oprah talking about sexual acts, only to be told that not only could he not say the same words Oprah did, he couldn't even play her on tape saying them. 'Talk about censorship,' Stern says. 'I will go to my grave thinking this was all politically motivated, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist.' " (from Newsweek, Dec. 12, 2005)

It is a conspiracy, Howard, and not just against you, but against all of us who value freedom.


BUSH LINES THEM UP AGAINST US WITHOUT EVEN TRYING

"China has used soft power only in the sense that it has exercised its power softly. It does this consciously to show that it is not a bully, unlike guess who. And it works. America remains unpopular among the peoples of Asia, even in countries like Japan, where the government is friendly with Washington. In most Asian elections in the last two years, being pro American was a political liability." (from Newsweek, Dec. 12, 2005)

And, if you're paying any attention, Bush is getting a lot of anti-American presidents elected in South America too. You got Chavez in Venezuela, and the current Colombian election may swing to the left because Bush has made enemies there too.


FLOGGING THE DEAD HORSE

I know that I keep bringing up this one obvious point, but what I'm trying to show is that it does come up more often than most would realize. The Bible belt South is a poor dumb place to live. The point really being, that if you're not well educated and live in the South, you can be conned by political conservatives into undermining your own well-being. In an article about the after effects of Katrina, Newsweek reports, "Even before the storm, the Southeastern states (nickname: 'the stroke belt') were cursed with a toxic mix of poor health and poverty. In a survey taken of evacuees in Houston after Katrina, half said they had no health insurance; 41 percent reported suffering from chronic conditions, like heart disease, hypertension, asthma, diabetes and cancer. 'We're the poster children for poor health in terms of chronic disease,' says Elizabeth Fontham, dean of the School of Public Health at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. 'Hurricane Katrina was no cure for those problems and they're likely to be exacerbated.' They're also likely to linger—for months, if not years, to come." (Dec. 12, 2005, p.66)

BLOGSVILLE

Today I was going through more lists of interests to see what people who like what I like put into their blogs. Today I checked out "parallel universes" and "reality". I was struck again by how many people fire up a blog for one entry or a handful then disappear from sight. Most claim in their initial post that this will be their deepest soul coming to you on a hot platter of apples. Then, I think, most of them very quickly realize that putting down your soul for others to read on a daily basis is kind of like writing a novel, and writing things down is no more fun than it was when we all were highschool twits with BIG THOUGHTS to share. Writing on a steady basis is difficult and (can be) lonely work. If you are not entertained yourself by the process and what you are thinking and doing, then, writing down your soul thoughts for others will damn soon wear thin. For some it takes only one entry. For others a handful before they cease and desist. May they all go on to happy and fulfilling lives in suburbia with spouse and required number of children, lawns to mow, neighbor's spouses to ogle and lust after and a divorce after one to ten years. At that time, they may have more to say of interest.

MIDDLE EAST IS NOT SIMPLE, says Munich screenwriter

Two photos scanned as one today with text:

The first is from Newsweek and contains a quote from the Jewish author, Tony Kushner, about the Middle East. Just as I think no issue is simple, I must agree with Mr. Kushner on this one. Simple-minded answers on most issues lead to rigid dogma, murder and mayhem. He says, "Anybody who thinks there's a simple line to be taken on the Middle East is an idiot."





ASTROLOGY FOR IDIOTS

Several years ago and for about six years, I edited, wrote for and published a small microzine called George & Mertie's Place. I came across some really comical fortunes predicated on astrological signs. At first I scanned the few I found into the microzine, then borrowing the concept, I actually read a few small books on astrology, enough to begin writing my own comic fortunes. The second is cut and scanned from George & Mertie's Place. Enjoy.

HELEN GREINER, COFOUNDER, IROBOT

Leafing through my US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
(Dec. 19, 2005), I come across this beautiful, clear-eyed young woman's face on page 34. A beautiful face, but on a closer look, her face is more than emptily beautiful, not just an empty fill-in-your-own-fantasy model's face; it's radiant with intelligence. Reading more, I discover this woman is truly intelligent, savvy, an inventor. Lately, reading so much from Dawkins's THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, I've been steeped in DNA, genes, evolution, so I look for info of this woman's DNA and I find it a few pages on:

"Born in London, Greiner grew up on New York's Long Island with her mother, a math and science teacher, and her father, a chemistry major turned businessman.

Mathematically and mechanically inclined, she played daily chess with her father starting at age 5 and was programming a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer when she was a preteen. Before long, she was doing her own repairs to her Volvo station wagon with parts she bought at the junkyard. (For "fun," she recently wired her own house for cable and installed a wireless network.)"

Lotsa good genes in there. I imagine she's just one more of those "elites" the Bush machine loves to put down. Anyone with the smarts of a snail is an elite to those fools so this woman must seem an Olympian goddess to them. In fact, if conservatives like Bush would just realize that most of what they have is the results of good genes, at least adequate genes, they might adopt gratitude as part of their natures rather than their continual blaming of the poor for their defects while tangentally praises their own right stuff.


SPEAKING OF ROBOTS AND IQ

So this man goes into a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies "150" and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituality, bio mimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nanotechnology, and sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool." He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectly prepared drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man responds, "About a 100."

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, favorite fast foods, and guns.

Impressed now, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies, "Er ahh, 50, I think."

And the robot says... very slowly, "Sooooooo. . . ya gonna vote for Bush again?"

[I got this off the internet, passed on to me by a friend.]

BACK TO SCIENCE: ANOREXIA, ANOTHER GENETIC DEFECT?

The more I study, the more I know we are robots. We think we make our own decisions but our bodies more often than not evidently throw those little chemical switches we call decisions. Imagine choosing day after day not to eat, going against all desire to live.

A recent article in NEWSWEEK (Dec. 5, 2005) yielded the following passages:

[OPEN QUOTE]

Not many years ago, the conventional wisdom held that adolescent girls "got" anorexia from the culture they lived in. Intense young women, mostly from white, wealthy families, were overwhelmed by pressure to be perfect from their suffocating parents, their demanding schools, their exacting coaches. And so they chose extreme dieting as a way to control their lives, to act out their frustration at never being perfect enough. In the past decade, though, psychiatrists~have begun to see surprising diversity among their anorexic patients. Not only are anorexia's victims younger, they're also more likely to be black, Hispanic or Asian, more likely to be boys, more likely to be middle-aged. All of which caused doctors to question their core assumption: if anorexia isn't a disease of type-A girls from privileged backgrounds, then what is it?

Although no one can yet say for certain, new science is offering tantalizing clues. Doctors now compare anorexia to alcoholism and depression, potentially fatal diseases that may be set off by environmental factors such as stress or trauma, but have their roots in a complex combination of genes and brain chemistry. In other words, many kids are affected by pressure cooker school environments and a culture of thinness promoted by magazines and music videos, but most of them don't secretly scrape their dinner into the garbage. The environment "pulls the trigger," says Cynthia Bulik, director of the eating-disorder program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But it's a child's latent vulnerabilities that "load the gun."

Parents do play a role, but most often it's a genetic one. In the last 10 years, studies of anorexics have shown that the disease often runs in families.

[CLOSE QUOTE]

According to the same article, “anorexia is a killer—it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, including depression.” Finally, here’s the clincher, the idea that the body is making decisions about its chemistry without the mind knowing anything about it:

[OPEN QUOTE]

The amount of serotonin in anorexics is abnormally high. Although normal levels of serotonin are believed to be associated with feelings of well-being, these pumped-up levels of hormones may be linked to feelings of anxiety and obsessional thinking, classic traits of anorexia. Kaye [professor of psychiatry at U. of Pittsburgh] hypothesizes that anorexics use starvation as a mode of self-medication. How? Starvation prevents tryptophane, an essential amino acid that produces serotonin, from getting into the brain. By eating less, anorexics reduce the serotonin activity in their brains, says, Kaye , ‘creating a sense of calm’ even as they are about to die of malnutrition.’

[CLOSE QUOTE]

Note in the paragraph above a strange phenomenon. The doctor and the NEWSWEEK writer, because of the language we all use, are forced to discuss this possible anorexic instinct as if it were an activity driven by choice. Whereas the truth is that the body is making the anorexic starve himself in order to deal with the chemical imbalance humans have given the name “anxiety” to. I’m sure anorexics are being driven to their behavior without any idea that the “body’s decisions” are being based on their brain chemistry. That is why it is so hard to get people to entertain the idea that they are robots. Our language forces us to talk of “decisions” rather than in terms of our brain chemistry making decisions for us. On occasion I have tried to use terminology in ways that reflect this robotic chemical state that humans live within, and people look at me like I’m nuts or come to think I have no “moral” structure.

On the left, the fourth in our series of Lexus drivers:

These Lexus drivers are sure confused people as our short four person series no doubt shows.

IT'S EVERYWHERE IN THE CHURCH

For 30 years I've been listening to the stories of friends of mine, mostly female but some male too, about the various kinds of sexual abuse that is high, wide and handsome in the most fundamental of churches. Not so much in the moderate and liberal churches, though it happens there too. So here's just a small snippet of the pages in the Freedom From Religion Foundation's paper, listing this past months abusive happenings in the religious world. If I had a child, I'd keep him/her far away from fundamental churches and their leadership.

Click on picture and enlarge it so you can read it.

MONUMENT TO A LOST CIVILIZATION

In our 125th Century (Earth years) Martian culture, little is known of the Earth civilization
of the 21st Century except for the Great Monument of Spokane,
one of the Wonders of the World, uncovered by
the hard labor of archaeologist photog and Cosmotic traveler He Who Towers
who, after searching for years, at last approached the Monument.

Following is a series of photographs that He Who's assistant shot
as they approached the great Monument. Martian linguists are working
diligently at this time to find an American "Rosetta stone" by which
to translate the language at the top of the great Monument.

From the series "Looking Up In Spokane".

“I AM NOT RELIGIOUS”

"I am not religious. Some religions I admire, such as Buddhism. But certainly not Christianity. It has caused bloodshed throughout history. The atrocities of the Crusades is one example.

"The Salem witchhunts is another. As late as 1800 in most European countries, a person could be hanged for blasphemy. Christianity in the past has been as murderous as the Moslem are now, who believe in killing all non-Moslems. Our treatment of the Indians, especially in the West, during the 1800s is a sad story. Since the Indians weren't Christians, killing them was on the same level as killing coyotes. Whites tooks their land without remorse, for after all, they were not Christians. Any religion that thinks it is the right one and all others are wrong is plain stupidity, for none of the beliefs of any religion can be proved. Mark Twain said "Religion is believing what you know ain't so".

"You can read in history books about many famous people who lived in the B.C. time. The route that Alexander the Great followed to India was recorded and came down through the ages, as well as his exploits. He died in 323 B.C. Homer's Iliand and Odyssey comes down to us today, though he died in 400 B.C.

"The dramas of Aristophenes are still produced today. He died in 385 B.C. Aristotle's life was written and became history. He died in 322 B.C. Plato died in 347 B.C. Julius Caeser in 44 B.C.

"BUT there is NO historical record of Jesus. History books refer to "it is believed" and such evasions. If he did one tenth of what the Bible reports, he would have been written about at the time and recorded. Paul WAS a historical figure, but he began preaching 40 years after Jesus was supposed to have died. People like a father figure, an all-powerful mentor, and they enjoy mystery. Christianity supplied this. The Bible supports slavery, women as second class, and there is not a word about kindness to animals. Christians believe in an after-life.

"But only for humans. An elephant is smarter than a lot of people. If an imbecile goes to heaven, but not a seeing-eye dog, I want nothing to do with that religion. "

—Doris Gerhart of Spokane’s Inland Northwest Freethought Society

MORE ANTI-WORKER BUSHLEAGUE ACTION

After Katrina, Bush waived a 74-year-old law that requires government contractors (like Haliburton) to pay a fair wage with government money. Last week, grassroots pressure forced Bush to back down and reinstate the law, called Davis-Bacon, guaranteeing that Gulf Coast workers will be fairly paid as they labor to rebuild their community.

—From a MoveOn.Org release.

PS: The art work is a collage by the editor of this blog.