The Cloud Chamber: Spring 2008

 

“Oh… for the love of God,” Boone said. He was reading the newspaper in the passenger seat as Crimson drove down highway five. The long trip was only half over and they were both punchy.

Crimson didn’t take his eyes off of the road when he observed, “As of yesterday you didn’t believe in God. Did you find religion over breakfast? Were you touched by an angel in your dreams?”

“Touched by an angel? What a charming euphemism for nocturnal emission.” 

“It’s always about sex with you isn’t it?” Crimson said, “I applaud your religious conversion, but one might hope for a more profound transformation. I guess miracles just aren’t what they used to be.”

Nose still in his paper Boone said, “Sorry to disappoint. Still an atheist. You remain my only Imaginary Friend.”

“I’m the Imaginary Friend?” Crimson said, “Who’s driving?”

Boone took a deep breath. It bought him a moment but he had to concede the point. “This is a significant observation,” he said, “and one that I am not prepared to challenge at this time.”

This was a familiar riff between them. It was common practice for Boone or for Crimson to introduce the other as “My Imaginary Friend.” This was invariably the case when a beautiful woman was involved and was understood as a kind of marking-of-territory. The duty of the Designated Figment was to support the other’s play. They’d decided long ago that cock-blocking got nobody laid. Neither of them were particularly competitive about women; they were usually attracted to different types.

Crimson had been driving for four hours by this time and needed the conversation. “Imaginary or not,” he said, “a friend has a right to expect some consistency, don’t you think? You can’t express an appeal for the “love of God” and still claim to have no faith. While it pains me to do so, my duty as your friend, imaginary or not, requires that I bring to your attention this glaring logical fallacy. Or budding personality disorder, whichever.”

Boone lifted his eyes from the Food section of the San Francisco Chronicle and fixed them on the long empty road ahead. “Are you suggesting that one must believe in God in order to love Him? That it is impossible to both utterly reject the existence of a God and yet love love Him at the same time? That’s putting limitations on the Almighty, isn’t it? You demand that the Lord confine himself within the limits of your mortal understanding. I maintain that the Almighty need not exist in order to receive my love. My faith is therefore more pure than your own.”

“Oh, for the love of God…” said Crimson.

“Work with me here.” Boone closed the newspaper. “There are many things that I love which only exist as figments of our collective imagination: Honor. Truth. Beauty. Love itself. All constructs. I have a high regard for all of them though they do not exist outside the minds of men and women. Why should I withhold my love from God simply because He has no greater claim to reality than any of these other hallucinations? And in fact those things that remain abstract, ideal, are far easier to love than anything mired in flawed reality, are they not?”

“No, no. You’re trying to have it both ways,” Crimson said. “When we get to LA I’m taking you straight to a church to get you baptized while the Spirit of the Lord still moves within you.  I’m not going to let you wriggle out of your Awakening with logical fallacies and fancy lawyer-talk.”

“Me?” Boone took a pained tone. “You’re the one demanding that God, Creator of the universe, conform to your expectations of the possible. I suggest to you, my Mythical  Companion, that my devotion to He In Which I Refuse to Believe is just another one of God’s miracles.”

“Mythical? I’m a unicorn?”

“I was thinking along the lines of Sancho Panza. I’d say Robin to my Batman, but you in tights…my eyes…”

“I look great in tights.” Crimson was defensive. “You don’t think I’ve got the package for it?”

“On the contrary: Robin with a grapefruit in his shorts is not a visual I care to entertain. But returning to the question at hand, I must point out to you that this disappointing need to place limitations on The Lord’s powers displays a rather shocking weakness of faith on your part. If not outright heresy. Good thing for you He doesn’t exist. That is, if you exist.”

“If I don’t exist how do you explain the fact that mother always liked me best.”

“You’ve never met my mother,” Boone countered.

“Quite true. Yet still I can say with confidence that she prefers me. Because she knows you.”

“Point taken.” Boone said. “In fact, since you and my mother have never met; and since therefore you do not exist to her; and since therefore you share that nonexistence with God, I will happily concede that she may love you with all of her stony, shriveled little heart. How’s that for consistency?”

“Full-circle.” Crimson said. “Nicely done. Your brain is a knotted ball of yarn.”

 

fp

Let’s all argue about who’s not a Christian

It is so common, so predictable that whenever the silliness or insanity of one pastor or another is discovered (surprise!), some defender-of-the-Faith will declare that this person and his followers are not really Christians. I’ve heard fervent Muslims and Jews say the same thing about their co-religionists and the claim in Islam is frequently used as an excuse for murder.

 

It strikes me that one cannot say that Parsely and Haggee are not Christians. Not any more than one can say that Clinton or Bush or Obama are not Americans just because we don’t agree with them.

 

Christians would LIKE to believe that following Christ is a cure for stupidity, venality, lust, greed and bad hair. Since following Jesus makes you a good person, if you’re an obvious tool, then you can’t be a Christian. They cannot concede that some Christians are simply stupid, evil, barbaric assholes because that would mean the magic doesn’t work. That would mean that you can’t buy personal transformation. Jenny Craig won’t make us thin, Yale won’t make us smart, Chanel won’t make us pretty, an SUV won’t give us a big dick and Jesus doesn’t make us better: We’ve still got to do the work ourselves. 

fp

 

Shameless, or Clueless?

Ben Stein has now invoked the Holocaust, saying that it was science and scientists that dragged millions of jews into Nazi extermination camps in WW2.

“When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.… Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.”

 

“God is With Us” was the slogan emblazoned above the swastikas on the belt buckles of the Nazis that led Ben Stein’s relatives to their deaths. It was pseudo-science they used to cloak centuries of institutionalized religious hatred and their ideology of racial superiority beneath a veneer of card-board legitimacy. In opposition to reason, decency and science, the Nazi’s employed quackery, intolerance, defamation and religious fanaticism. These very tools are being used enthusiastically by Ben Stein and the Creationist movement and have produced a similar result: Dogma slathered with fable. 

We’ve been pummeled by images of 9/11 for the past seven years, by the very people who’s dereliction made the attack possible in the first place, and the tactic has worked very well. In a contemptible homage Stein is now exploiting the holocaust and violating the memory of it’s victims. 

fp

Current Nightmares: An Alternative Future History of the United States

In the final days of the last Republican Administration the President of the United States resigned from office. Those who’d been crying out for impeachment, who’d felt betrayed when Democrats in congress took that option off of the table prior to the 2006 elections actually began to cheer. Those liberals and moderates, there were not that many, who’d been playing the game a few steps ahead all along, realized that the board had been overturned and the pieces scattered.

President Dick Cheney’s first act was to issue the longest list of pardons in the history of the office. On that list appeared the names of the CEOs of every company that had received no-bid contracts to do work in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On that list appeared the names of every CEO of every oil and energy producing company doing business in the United States. But most people never read that far down because at the top of the list was the name of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.

Most of the people on the list had not been charged with any crimes and neither had the former President. The pardons were blanket absolution of any and all offenses and were specifically worded to cover any acts committed in the previous eight years. Dick Cheney’s name was not on this list. A President may not pardon himself. He’d received his amnesty from the hand of the previous President before moving into the Oval himself.

Not that it mattered. Three hours before his successor took the oath of office in Washington D.C., Dick Cheney, 44th President of the United States for only two days, stepped off of Air Force One in Dubai. His company, Haliburton, had moved its headquarters there three years before because of the city’s proximity to their Persian Gulf clients, it’s reverence for corporate culture and the absence of any extradition treaty between the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America.

I Give Up

Someone gave Ben Stein money to make a movie supporting creationism. Ben Stein thinks the theory of evolution is a foundational principle of nazism. 

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/video-ben-stein.html

Ben Stein is an educated man and a jew and so one assumes he has been exposed to a bit of history:

The catalog of anti-semitism, the centuries of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and religious murder that have been universal features of european social and political activity until modern times cannot be lost upon him.

The fact that the mindless brutality which fascism forged into a political and social crusade was a part of Catholic and Protestant education for centuries before Darwin cannot be news to him. 

That those churches which most violently opposed the theory of evolution, as well as the germ theory of disease and observations of a helio-centric solar system, were also the greatest boosters of jewish slaughter.

It cannot be lost on Ben Stein as he conjures the most transparent slanders that in doing so he makes common-cause with the kind of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering which provided the foundation and nourishment for fascism and for centuries of its previous incarnations. 

Ben Stein is not a stupid man. He’s not an ignorant man. So how does one explain his arrival at such stupid, ignorant conclusions and with such mindless and transparently dishonest argument?

 

fp