(dis)believer

bumper sticker: "Please, God, protect me from your believers."

Is orthodoxy carbon-neutral?

Officially, according to guardian.co.uk's terms of use, I can't reproduce the article here (even for non-commercial ops). Oh hell, here it is anyway, you never know how long it'll be available for at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/feb/25/religion-christianity, and rationalization of religious customs (like burning vs stoning people and sacred cows) always makes for great discussion:

It is good to know that two bishops are undertaking a "Carbon fast" which will require them to turn off their computers every night, rather than leaving them on standby.

Unfortunately, I am not very good at piety and it made me wonder, in a rather irreverent way, about the the environmental consequences of burning heretics. Is orthodoxy carbon-neutral? It turns out to be quite difficult to calculate this. Cremation is less green than burying people, but this is partly a result of the attempts that crematoria now make to avoid pollution, which requires burning the bodies at very high temperatures.

But an auto-da-fe does not need to be nearly as hot as a modern crematorium. The purpose of the fire is not to reduce the heretic to ashes, but to impress the onlookers with the horror of the crime. But even at these lower temperatures it seems at least as environmentally sinful as a barbecue and we know we are meant to be giving those up, too.

Perhaps the greenest religion ever developed was that of the Aztecs, who kiled their victims with stone knives. In fact their entire way of life has been analysed from an ecological point of view by the late anthropologist Marvin Harris, who concluded that human sacrifice was an ecological necessity for an urban civilisation in central Mexico. So far as I know, they did not sacrifice heretics, only enemy prisoners, but you can see how heresy was discouraged by the practice all the same.

It is a commonplace of anti-Aztec propaganda that the hearts of the sacrificial victims were offered to the gods, after being cut, still beating, from their bodies. This was a waste, and would of course have required fuel for the sacrificial pyres. But Harris was the first man to ask what happened to the rest of the prisoners; and he concluded that their bodies were also cooked, and then eaten. Central America had very few native domesticable sources of animal protein – only birds and dogs, in fact. So the meat from these vast temple sacrifices would have made a noticeable difference to the soldiers lucky enough to be fed. By the same token it would have increased their zeal in battle very considerably. To be taken prisoner really was a fate worse than most other deaths. You can see how the system could become self-perpetuating.

Harris is rather out of fashion now: he analysed all sorts of religious taboos as disguised ecological rules: the sacredness of cow, he thought, was an expression of the fact that the farmer who eats his bullock in a famine year might as well be dead, since when the rains come he will be unable to plough.

Similarly, the taboo on pork in Judaism and Islam makes sense in the Middle East, where the pig is a bad ecological bargain.

Obviously, if you are a true believer, this kind of explanation will be unsatisfactory. It's also unsatisfactory if you are the kind of rationalist who wants all religions and all superstitions to be equally ridiculous and unscientific. And it offends, finally, people like me who dislike the idea that religious practice can be explained away or reduced to anything else.

None the less, the link between religion and ecology is worth thinking about. One of the things that all religions have are prohibitions which have to be obeyed "just because". Heresy is shunned not because it is rationally wrong, but because it is heretical. But these attitudes aren't confined to religion. Nor could they be, because they are indispensable for any large scale social organisation. If everyone stops to question everything, nothing gets done. What religions do, to some extent, is to internalise social disciplines so that they come to seem morally binding and quite impossible to analyse coldly. We're going to need that kind of social discipline to cope with the shrinking resources of the world.

Actually fiddling around to discover the precise carbon footprint of everything we do is absurdly time consuming and in any case unlikely to come up with the right answer. In this sense, environmentalism is indeed a religion, though one without any defined supernaturalist dogmas. Trust in authority, whether Pope Benedict or George Monbiot, is the only way we can hope to link the greater rationality of wanting to preserve humanity with the rationality of the small scale decisions we make all the time about how to live. Of course it is absurd. But so are all the alternatives; and they are worse.

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/feb/25/religion-christianity

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

Given that religion gives rise to all sorts of intellectual, uhm, "self-satisfaction" at the best of times, such as whether Christians got the day of rest wrong, and provides motivation for wars in the worst of cases, the atheist bus campaign is really refreshing.

short-term politics fail to address underlying issues

'Western' democracies usually allow a few years of actual governance between pre-election orgies. That kind of directional stability is usually pretty good provided it doesn't drift too far off-ideological center. However, when it comes to generational trends, 4-year terms doesn't even come close to even giving them the time to grapple, let alone understand or even communicate, the magnitude and complexity of the problem.

But here's a key primer from http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1176152765213
:

PLAINLY, A key to reducing violence is to reduce birthrates. According to Heinsohn, this could be achieved through widespread knowledge of birth control measures and the will to use them. Such an option, however, is unlikely because of religious opposition among traditional Muslims.

Since they can't tackle religion, they can, and do (especially in the current budget) focus on jobs. Giving people opportunities to work forces them to think (hopefully at least a little) more carefully about their own future. A little employment uncertainty (take too much time off and you might be fired) probably "helps" in that regard.

But this is still terribly short-sighted. Jobs in the service industry (Home Depot, Tim Hortons etc) may keep people busy, but they aren't as rewarding as, say, having a loving family. And the construction industry is only going to last as long as the city centres and old suburbs are bedlocked with aging baby-boomers who don't want to turn their 4-bedroom homes over to new families.

Expect the perfect storm in 10 years or so: the boomers will be buried, after straining our healthcare system to the breaking point, there will be a ton of real-estate available (housing market collapse), service industry will follow (no boomers sipping coffee all day every day at Tims anymore), and the public service will be left with a massive gap of experience, and industry as a whole will be staffed with people who were raised in perpetual economic growth and will resent no longer having what they've come to believe as entitlements rather than a reward for a strong work ethic. Economy as a whole will implode, people will stay at home with nothing to do but have kids, and you're set for another generation of extreme violence.

This is why I think the current budget, or even 4-yr politicking, doesn't even come close to trying to balance the underlying pressures that contribute to social stability or collapse. It's purely reactionary and terribly short-sighted.

I'm still hoping for a politician with a vision for the future, that can carve a proper role in the world to give Canadians from shore to shore to shore a sense of pride, common long-term purpose, and opportunity to share peace and prosperity. Perhaps that should be added to the Constitution, so the Senate can fulfill that as part of their mandate to defend, protect and promote it.

from hell to television

according to some ideologies, transgressors of social/moral customs (usually called "sinners") go to a place called "hell" though sometimes only after spending some time in a decision-making process ("purgatory") until a time when history (or some conventionally-accepted authority) has decided they are "good" or "bad" (called "judment day").

IMO, hell is therefore only a dark place in people`s minds where they associate memories of dead people with negative emotions (jealousy, anger, hate, contempt, resentment, etc). sometimes people dwell or even thrive on those negative emotions, and anybody who merely harbour them passively are vulnerable to being hijacked by others (kinda like a computer infected with a virus predisposing it to hacker control). if you forgive them, you let go of those negative emotions, you can focus on things that are more likely to contribute to your good health, and you ensure you cannot be taken advantage of through your emotions.

easier said than done, I know.
deep stuff; I should be charging for this. or at least write a book or run my own cable tv channel.

well said

A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.

So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.

She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview.

'Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?

'Morris Fishbien,' he replied.

'Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?'

'For about 60 years.'

'60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?'

'I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims.'

'I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.'

'I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults, and to love their fellow man.'

'How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?'


'Like I'm talking to a fuckin' wall.'

accu-wrath with bill maher

is it safe to poke fun at people who take things too seriously?

in the public interest?

haven't been keeping up with quebec politics much, so I wasn't aware that the province removed catechism from the curriculum as a gesture toward political correctness (or more probably, fiscal responsibility since they would have had to offer dedicated precious state resources to establish and implement curricula for the other principal religions (though non-RC accounts for less than 17% of the population). many surely agree with this move, saying that the state has no business teaching silly things like religion when half the kids in high school can barely spell their own names.
I disagree.
And not just because I think too much focus on the problem areas probably makes performance in those areas worse.
I disagree because it weakens the state and redirects those seeking that kind of instruction to the Church, thereby re-establishing the influence of religious leaders in society, one that the quiet revolution tried so hard to curtail.
This may sound big-brotherish, but I much prefer a well-rounded education, including religious instruction (and regular classes in gym, music and arts), in state-funded (and therefore state-supervised and accountable to the public) setting. That way all students can taste everything and knowingly choose what they want/don't want to pursue (as opposed to getting spewed out of a meatgrinder with a generic vanilla diploma and no personal, social, nor professional orientation).
And the fact that Radio-Canada is showing off how well the Montreal diocese is recruiting those "abandoned" by the curriculum (so they can teach what was deemed not-in-the-public-interest and actually teach things that may quickly become AGAINST the public interest) without balancing the piece with a counterpoint, really tees me off.

Stonehenge mystery solved?

gotta wonder if Stonehenge wasn't just another case of a clever druid guy showing off or a frustrated druid wanna-be trying to prove something!

For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, people have been trying to
figure out how primitive people could build huge structures such as
Stonehenge and the pyramids out of stone blocks weighing thousands
of pounds. Scientists have been stumped.

Then along comes a normal guy - a retired construction worker - and
he says well, I would do it like this. And he does. This guy uses
the simplest tools known to man and shows how simple and easy it
would have been to create Stonehenge .

This is a really great video clip. Amazing how this guy could figure
out something that has confounded scholars for centuries. And not
only figures it out, but demonstrates it!

This guy could build a replica of Stonehenge single-handedly, while
a committee of 20 or 30 Civil Engineering professors from leading
universities would be debating how it might be done.

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks

we're gonna need the BFG for this one

It's worse than i thought.
All this time I've been optimistic, thinking society is finally coming to its senses. Meanwhile, Christian fanatics have been multiplying quietly in the sidelines like cockroaches in a closet, and with the internet, somebody finally opened the door. What a mess.

---------- Forwarded message ----------


http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=1b5bd6e3e034d00b4f73

Beware of cultural undertows

Canadian Islamic Congress launches human rights complaints against Maclean's
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20071130_111821_7448

Scope and mandate for Human Rights Commissions need to be revisited - pronto.

post-existence

In the end, nobody goes to a heaven or a hell except in the hearts and minds of those whose lives they've touched.

Heaven being that place in our hearts where we preserve the memories of loved ones who have moved on; hell is that place where we shackle our spirits to memories of those who have crossed us.

religion and the survival of mankind

Humanity is blessed with enough different religions, each effective to varying degrees against any particular threat, that, on the whole, allows it (humanity) to survive any and all threats to its existence. The power they (religions) will enjoy will ebb and flow over time in response to perceived threats. Meanwhile, the conflicts between them are necessary to keep mankind's skills, wits and swords sharp and groups cohesive; ready to fight for a common objective, if ill-aimed and (generally) misunderstood.

Religion, in that sense, is the ideological codification of knowledge and the ritualization of survival tips and tricks that have enabled the tribe/race/species to perpetuate itself thus far, and that, ultimately, allow it to carry its part of the greater Knowledge so that one day, It can all be put together again.

morning poetry

was talking about raelians with a colleague this morning. he asked if they were the ones that committed mass suicide a few years ago - i said, no those were the sun cultists (temple of the sun?), or some other group of lemmings blindly following a self-ordained leader into annihilation.
i don't know what inspired that particular bit of prose... maybe the lecture about creationist "science" and biblical "facts" in my carpool this morning? Universe only knows.

pay now, pay later to a whole new level

zero tax increases --> city cutting back its social presence --> religions fill the social vacuum and before you know it, sharia is alive and well here too. taxes and the city services they fund are the only weapons we have to defend ourselves against people with whom you can't debate because they do things in the name of some supreme deity, who conveniently delegates authority only to a few "chosen" individuals.

This is how you get courts sentencing women to 200 lashes and six months in prison after being abducted and gang-raped by seven men.
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Worthington_Peter/2007/11/28/4691235.php

battlefield deciders

"Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," Nagl's counterinsurgency manual says. Instead, it advises troops to get to know the locals — both individually and as groups — and gain their trust. The locals generally know which of their neighbors are insurgents and which aren't; they're already plugged into the communal network. "Arguably," the manual says, "the decisive battle is for the people's minds."

From Wired.com, ironically enough. I believe this is as important in a city like Ottawa, struggling for public confidence in its ability to provide effective and efficient needs. Retreating into service-cutting "0% tax increase" modes is counterproductive. Instead, the city should be an integral part of the community - if not, you leave the door open for other organizations to fill the void, organizations that you typically can't discuss with rationally because [god] is on their side.

lost in a golden age?

This is stupid. Why remove a book because it is controversial? Better thing to do is take your heads out of the sand and ask the students to discuss what they think makes it controversial. Oh but wait, that would lead to free thought...
shortlink
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071123/compass_books_071123/20071123?hub=Canada

"The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) -- and done terrible damage," Pullman writes on his website.

"In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it."

objective science vs guided religion

Faith picks up where confidence leaves off; the fight between atheists and theists is where to draw the line.

Battle of the (Youth) Bulge

wow - shocking, politically unsavoury, but surprisingly sympathetic and logical:

We have two million jobs that we cannot fill - and a welfare-dependent population of six million, and the two do not meet. The welfare group grows each year because of new babies, but the vacant job slots are not filled.
...
Some American strategists are beginning to question whether the USA, with its one-son families, ought send out troops to fight populations with many sons. That is the mistake we have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you have to go in because you have been attacked, then you must do it, but as soon as the danger has been defeated, it is necessary to withdraw. It is up to the Iraqis and the Afghans themselves to ensure that there is a balance between the size of the population and the number of positions society can offer. And as far back in history we look, we can see that this balance has been maintained by young men killing each other. We have done it in Europe, and it has happened elsewhere. We cannot allow them to send their young men over the borders to kill others.

German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, who believes that the game is over for Europe. See full interview at
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/06/continent-of-losers.html

He saw it coming

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism
lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy,
which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a
dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The
effects are apparent in many countries, improvident
habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish
methods of commerce, and insecurity of property
exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or
live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of
its grace and refinement the next of its dignity and
sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every
woman must belong to some man as his absolute
property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine,
must delay the final extinction of slavery until the
faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among
men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but
the influence of the religion paralyses the social
development of those who follow it. No stronger
retrograde force exists in the world.

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant
and proselytizing faith. It has already spread
throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors
at every step; and were it not that Christianity is
sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science
against which it had vainly struggled, the
civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell
the civilization of ancient Rome."

Short speech reportedly by Sir Winston Churchill, in 1899.
(The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages
248-50, London: Churchill saw it coming.)