Rapture

Well, so far, so good.

As Measure of Doubt reported back in January, months before the Johnny-Come-Lately second-stringers at The New York Times and on CNN did, a small group of very vocal fundamentalists centered around an evangelical preacher named Harold Camping and his Family Radio Network are saying that today’s the day. Pack your things, ‘cause Jesus is Coming Back.

It’s currently 2:44 AM, May 22nd, on Christmas Island, which is the world’s farthest forward dry-land Time Zone. No Rapture has been reported there. They skated through the whole of May 21st with nary an Apocalypse in sight.

Well, it’s only 1:51 AM in Apia, Samoa. So if we’re taking Coordinated Universal Time into consideration (and what is this blasphemy of time being different in different places, anyway?) He has another 22 hours to show up.  Maybe we haven’t dodged that bullet yet. I’m drinking beer and running up the credit cards for the rest of the day, just in case.

I’ll check in tomorrow, when it is definitively May 22nd, 2011, everywhere, to see if y’all have come back. Or if I’ve been Left Behind.

In the meantime, consider the innovative business opportunities being pursued by the Damned.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/18/atheists-offer-to-rescue-christians-pets-after-judgment-day/

Arguments

Ne nuntium necare.

The Ontological Argument.  Famously associated with Anselm of Cantebury. The argument holds that the existence of God follows from the concept of God in language. It works like this: God is the most perfect thing that can be conceived of. But if He didn’t exist, He wouldn’t be perfect. So He exists.  Rejected by intellectuals ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Bertrand Russell (who admitted that he had a fifteen-minute flirtation with it in his youth.) Currently returning to fashion in a modified form, the argument basically contends that if you write a good enough job description, the ideal employee must exist.

The Cosmological Argument.  Holds that all things must have a first cause, and that the first cause of all things is God. Dates from antiquity, but is hoisted by its own petard, as the ancients well realized. Complicates rather than simplifies the problem, thus answering nothing. Why is there something instead of nothing? Because of the Creator. Why is there a Creator instead of no Creator? Let’s change the subject. Implies nothing about the correctness of any particular religion, let alone denomination. Implies almost nothing about the nature of any alleged creator or creators - neither omnipotence, nor omniscience, nor omnibenevolence, and certainly not gender. At best an argument for a highly conditional Deism.

Argument from Miracles. Holds that the existence of various miracles proves the existence of God. Four problems. First, evidence for the supernatural origins of miracles doesn't pass peer review, except where vested interests are involved. Second, even if the miracles had supernatural origins, this doesn’t imply any particular supernatural origin. Third, if God is the cause of all things, it makes no sense to make a big deal about miracles, which would be just another thing he caused. Four, for alleged “signs from God”,  the miracles are often extraordinarily unimpressive: bleeding statues, low-probability recoveries from illness, bell-shaped watermarks that look like Renaissance portraits of Christ or the Virgin. Statues wandering about churches, getting their pictures taken with parishioners; prayer regenerating amputated limbs; full-colour, 3-D talking images of the Virgin giving interviews on CNN. This would be impressive.

Argument from Design.  Similar to the Cosmological Argument, but focuses on the remarkable complexity of life as opposed to the curious existence of the cosmos itself. See Darwin, Charles.

Gender. The belief that God must be a man runs contrary to claims of omnipotence. 

Deism. The belief that God is essentially indistinguishable from the physical laws of the universe. The default position of most of America's Founding Fathers. They would not be elected two-and-a-half centuries later. 

The Mysterious. Can be appealed to in place of making embarrassing concessions such as, "You've got a point there."

Pascal’s Wager. Famous argument that contends it’s the best bet to believe in God. Maybe. But Pascal left the problem of which God to worship and how unresolved. Rather more critically, he failed to distinguish between the beneficence of belief and actually believing. Belief follows from persuasive evidence; Pascal’s Wager offers none.

Argument from Personal Faith. Simultaneously unconvincing but irrefutable. “I know in my heart that I’m right.” But every devout believer in every god in every society in the history of the world has said the same thing, including many today who are convinced that everyone else, including you, is going to Hell.

Agnosticism. A cancellationist position which holds that the evidence for and against the existence of God is about equal. Good for fence-sitters who don’t like to commit. Agnostics are often found attending United Church services "for the music" and like to recite tautological banalities such as, “Everything happens for a reason.” Intolerable people. 

Russell's Teacup.  Russell once argued that while he couldn't prove that a teacup is not orbiting a distant planet, that was insufficient reason to be agnostic about the issue. This is important.

Suburban Protestants and Cafeteria Catholics.  Polls show that something on the order of 90 or 95 percent of people believe in God. Polls also show that the great majority of ostensibly religious people have no idea why they believe and very little idea about what they’re supposed to believe. A recent poll found that the overwhelming majority of alleged Christians could not name the four canonical gospels. Curiously, such people often get a free pass from the devout on the grounds that, “At least they believe in something.” Non-believers whose atheism is a consequence of sincere, daily, and lifelong study don't stand a chance of getting elected to political office.

Oprah. The dominant religion of our era is a belief in an immensely gregarious God who wants us to be comfortably middle-class and soothingly middle-brow; a celestial Oprah who will one day welcome all of us onto her living room set in the sky and let us jump on the sofa for all eternity.

Impossibility Arguments. Highly sophisticated evolution of ancient arguments that explored the paradoxes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence and which conclude that God, like a square circle or an honest lawyer, is a logical impossibility. Fascinating, but they do not preclude the possibility of an extraordinarily powerful but less-than-perfect God. Human beings went from stone tools to the surface of the moon in 5,000 years.  Imagine a race 5 million years old. Or 5 billion. We build skyscrapers. Could they build universes?

Theological non-cognitivism. The position that all God-talk is cognitively meaningless. Stems from the impossibility arguments. Some theological non-cognitivists are therefore hard atheists; others contend that no discussion about the matter is possible until theists can arrive at a cognitively meaningful definition of what it is that we're supposed to be talking about.

Einstein, Albert.  At a public debate, I sat, jaw dropping, as an atheist and theist argued over whether or not Einstein was religious. Did they think that the existence or non-existence of God was somehow contingent on what Einstein believed? A particularly dangerous argument for Christians to make, because if Einstein was anything, he was a Jew. Similar arguments are deployed for a pantheon of historical giants, good and evil, from Plato to Jefferson to Hitler.  Historically interesting but, as a point of logic, utterly irrelevant in terms of the argument over the existence of God.

Atheism, hard. The position that there is no God. Generally held to be logically untenable, but adherents of impossibility arguments say otherwise.

Atheism, soft. The position that there is insufficient evidence to believe in God. An important distinction. 

Atheists. Very rare. A rigorous philosophical position: not something soft that one can fall into. Atheists are also not to be confused with secular liberals who are mad about organized religion.


New Atheists. A recent breed of aggressively irreligious nonbelievers who hold that a general critique of the beneficence of faith follows from their disbelief. But whatever else they may be, religions are social institutions of enormous importance and cannot uniformly and universally be deprecated for "poisoning everything."

Prayer.  Fortifying for millions, but removed from schools. The worst prayers are the begging kind: the belief that maybe this time God will intercede on your behalf. (“Please let my team win the Superbowl”, etc.) Convincing to some people because of an inability to separate correlation from causation.  “I prayed and somebody found Fluffy, who was lost for three days.” Wow. Now, about that Holocaust...

Praying. It is disrespectful for non-believers to lower their heads, as if in prayer, while others are praying. Listen attentively, instead: you might learn something. But do not disrespect the devout by pretending to be something you are not. In the 7th grade, a nasty old crone who was our substitute teacher for the day made the whole class re-do the Lord’s Prayer, saying the words. Even then I wondered, “What is the point?”  If the words meant nothing to us, did she think we would be fooling God?

Comparative Religion. Should be mandatory in schools. Until 1988, students in Ontario public schools rose diurnally for the immensely symbolic pairing of “Oh, Canada” and the Lord’s Prayer, understanding neither. Nor did most of their teachers, and discussion of religion was verboten anyway. Further proof that the real agenda of the Ministry of Education is to impose ignorance, and for obvious reasons. Educated people would abolish the Ministry of Education.

Darwin, Charles. A visionary genius who both demonstrated the fact of biological evolution’s existence and offered a theory – natural selection – to explain the mechanism by which it operates.  Also, and this is critically important, dead since 1882. He lacked a proper understanding of heredity and did not know about genes. Today, most competent undergraduates in biology know more about evolution than did either of its co-discoverers. School-boards in Texas and Kansas can deny the existence of biological evolution all they want, but what they think doesn’t really matter. Darwin gathered a few pebbles of evidence that subsequently have become mountains. “It’s only a theory,” they say. So is gravitation. They lose. Period.

Evolution, biological. Change in the inherited characteristics of populations over time. As factually established as anything can be science. Has implications for most creation myths and for the Argument from Design, but otherwise has no bearing on the argument over the existence of God.

Catholicism. A favourite target of liberals who are at once relativists but also moralizing crusaders. In other contexts, the same people gleefully will report you to a Human Rights Commission for criticizing a religion or religious group.

Argument from Beauty. Similar to the Argument from Design. Holds that such-and-such a cultural object is “too beautiful” to have been created by a species that emerged solely as a consequence of random mutation followed by non-random natural selection. Bad thinking for obvious reasons. “How do you explain Mozart?” they say. Okay, how do you explain Michael Bolton?

Doubt. Malcolm Muggeridge said that doubt is like a pillar at the center of faith, because no one who is sincere in his or her beliefs need fear argument and disputation about them.

Beer

The problem with wine is that it breeds wine snobs. We are not wine snobs. We love wine. Rare is the night that a new bottle isn’t corked around Broad-Green Estate and a glass with any lunch worth having is customary, too. We are particular about what we like and what we don’t. A big yes to French syrah, a big no to Australian shiraz, even though they’re the same grape. We know the difference, sometimes on sight and smell alone, between major varietals (though Chardonnay, which can be manipulated into almost anything these days, often fools us.)  We reserve our right, in decent restaurants (hard to find in this city), to ask for small pours to sample; we solicit opinions from knowledgable waitstaff (harder still) but don’t always follow them. Amanda and I are also compiling a very substantial collection of futures to open after aging for a decade or two, and I maintain that, yes, there is something to all that nosing and swirling and decanting and tongue-smacking. But we are not wine snobs.  My wine-tasting vocabulary extends as far as such words as, “yummy”, although I confess that the scrupulous avoidance of wine-tasting terminology could be viewed as a form of pretension, too.  I also believe that it’s undeniably true, as the enormously likable and sensible Billy Munnelley says, that “we live in a golden age for wine” where there are a ton of great wines for under twenty dollars and a lot of good ones for under ten. Our everyday go-to pours are screw-top bottles from Italy, France, and, yes, Niagara, and they all come in under twenty bucks, positively a steal when one considers that the cost of psychotherapy ranges upwards of $150 an hour.

An aside for my American readers, who are probably thinking that twenty bucks is a lot to pay for a decent table wine. Indeed it is, at least in a civilized place such as, well, anywhere in the United States of America. Not so in Soviet Canuckistan, where government-owned provincial monopolies are the order of the day in all provinces except one.  The Liquor Control Board of Ontario is the biggest single buyer of wine in the world.  They have a good gig.  It works like this: Ontarians pay taxes to maintain a crown corporation that sells wine back to them at inflated prices. In other contexts this is known as a “protect racket.”

Now, concerning the matter of beer. The words “wine and beer” are often uttered together but the experience of consumption usually is very different.   Unfairly is beer denounced by wine drinkers as nitwit juice, mass produced in watery forms such as “Coors Light”, to be swilled one after another by fellers with big guts, who like football and eating nachos and hitting on the woman from the next trailer over when she’s visiting to watch the game on the big-screen they’re paying down over eleven years, while meanwhile their wives are in the same room, half-passed out on the sofa from too many vodka coolers at four o’clock in the afternoon while their gaggle of kids, all precisely eleven months apart, scream like monsters running from room to room shooting at each other with squirt guns loaded with bleach. This is unfair stereotype, as Coors Light is consumed by many hockey fans, too. 

Moreover, good beer also has its partisans and its snobs. I myself have just downed a rather engaging, bitter and spicy little lager from San Francisco. (Put this in the “Did you know?” file, readers: your noble author almost always consumes some sort of alcoholic beverage while blogging. Can you tell? Hint: the passive-aggression meter goes up depending on the time of night and number of beverages consumed.)

A few weeks ago, the commissars at the LCBO decided that it was in the public interest to remove from their shelves forthwith and forevermore a beer called Smashbomb Atomic India Pale Ale, produced by the cheeky Flying Monkeys brewery (formerly the Robert Simpson brewery). Their reason? Because the name of the beer might promote violence. Read that again, dear readers. It might promote violence. Two observations, if I may. First, of course it will promote violence. It’s alcohol. Second, it’s not the name that’s the problem. It’s the alcohol. From the window where I type, I watch every morning as a group of homeless and/or destitute men gather in front of the LCBO, waiting for it to open, so that they can rush in and buy the cheapest bottles of swill they can get their hands on, and the LCBO sells it to them quite obligingly. But I can’t buy an India Pale Ale because the LCBO is afraid I might go and go and build a nuclear weapon in my kitchen. Good Lord. What goes on in their tiny, tiny brains?

A few days later, I discovered that a local bar and grill that serves serviceable food pours Smashbomb Atomic on tap. It was a done deal. In a fit of rage against the machine, I had a pint at lunch and went back for another the day I wrote this. Take that, Liquor “Control” Board of Ontario! I am drinking the beer because you took it off the shelves. It’s good, incidentally. Positively terrific with fish and chips.

And did I give in to fits of violence? Did the name of the beer make we want to go out and smash or bomb somebody? Well, no. But, after lunch, I immediately went home and decided to turn against everything good and decent in Western civilization and violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a hobby project.

Oh, dear. Did I just get myself flagged by a number of security and intelligence services? Probably. Hey, guys: I was just kidding. It’s a joke. Let me make it up to you. Have a Coors Light on me.

Voting

As an historian, I’m skeptical any time I hear someone say, “History shows us that...” or “one of the lessons of history is...”

History is a series of arguments about the past – it is not the past itself, and rarely does it offer us clear lessons.  Hindsight is not 20/20: if it were, we wouldn’t need historians. And when historians themselves do not agree about what the lessons of history are, how are we to know what lessons to derive from the past?  The problem seems insoluble.
 

I think that the lessons of history are of a more general kind. For instance, I believe that there is a remarkable uniformity to human behaviour over time, probably the result of our evolutionary endowment manifesting itself in a plurality of social circumstances. If there’s one general “lesson of history” to be learned in regards to tomorrow’s election, it’s this: when decent people surrender the political sphere, people who crave power will occupy it for them, and there are no shortage of hate-filled, venomous, cruel, crazy, stupid, and naive voters willing to hand it to them. Never, ever forget: Adolf Hitler was elected. How many times have you heard some pinhead begin an argument with a phrase such as, “Hitler went too far, but...”?

Decent people who actually think about complex issues are often paralyzed, by contrast, because they are so disillusioned by the infantile character of our political discourse. It is understandable that so many of them exercise their right to abstain.  But there is a difference between abstention, which is a considered position, and not voting because you couldn’t be bothered. 

From time-to-time, some of my more politically savvy students on the left tell me that voting is inconsequential. Do they really believe this? I always administer a simple test:  would they not protest, then, if voting rights were taken away or denied to certain groups, and we reverted to an era like the one depicted in the photo above?

Voting is, admittedly, only a small part of what it means to be politically active. But democracies function on participation, and voting is an important part of it. So, for any students who are reading (and I know that some of you are), consider your position, and then get out there and vote for the political party that is least likely to destroy our country in the next five years.

Death

I'm thinking about death because today is my birthday, and birthdays are days for reflection. I have now undeniably used more than half of the upper extremity of years granted me by the 90th Psalm and must face the real prospect that, by the pure mathematical progress of years, there are fewer ahead of me than behind.

Death. It happens to the best of us. I’m not particularly afraid of it — the prospect is more disappointing than anything else — but most deaths these days are drawn out, painful, and personally degrading. Consequently, I want the event to be as brief and trouble-free for me and everyone else when the moment comes, and indeed I’m trying to avoid it, if at all possible. Douglas Adams wrote that the “trick” to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. When the moment comes, I intend to hurl myself, unflinching, at death. And hope to miss.


Many Christians say that life must be considered sacred from “conception to natural death”, although polls show that most of them are willing to make exceptions in cases where they have something personally invested in the matter. I’ll leave the argument about my views on fetal life for another time. Let me instead observe that in our society there is very rarely such a thing as “natural death.”  Most dying patients receive highly unnatural forms of palliative care, which often involves essentially stupefying them for their last few days. But there is far more to it than that, even. In the modern western world, even before we are born, we begin to receive the most radical and decidedly unnatural forms of medical treatment and intervention to extend our lives for as long as possible. Any pregnant woman who has had an ultrasound, teenager who has had symptomatic wisdom teeth removed, middle-aged man who has a prescription for blood-pressure; anyone at all who has had antibiotics for a serious infection, stitches to close a wound, a suspicious mole removed, or his tonsils taken out, simply cannot believe in the concept of a “natural death.”  If we allowed “nature” to take its course the majority of us would have gone down to the same fate as the majority of people throughout history: we would have died in childhood.

Now, to the moment of death.  If we are of sound mind we have a right, of course, to refuse treatment, and when we are incapable of making it for ourselves our family usually is permitted to make it for us. The decision to “pull the plug” is made by thousands of people every day when it is a clear that their brain-dead loved ones are being kept alive only in the sense of having a machine respirate for them. No one serious denies this right, as theoretically machines could keep us all respirating indefinitely, long after the brain has ceased to function. This is non-controversial.

Now, let me put another case to you. Supposing I have been diagnosed with a terminal disease and, at some late point in the disease’s progress, only pain, misery, and total loss of dignity lies ahead.  I have an undeniable right to refuse treatment, of course, but with the consequent and probably quite unbearable pain that would accompany such a decision; I have the right to receive large doses of painkillers and spend my last days or weeks in a narcotic haze, which is the standard method of passing for most people nowadays.  However, I do not have the right, not even in the clearest of mental states, to ask a physician to give me a lethal dose of drugs to end my life as quickly as possible.

Well, not quite. I can ask, but as matters stand no physician in Canada legally can fulfill my request. He or she can leave me dead to the world but not actually dead. But why not? There are, of course, serious concerns about the administration of such treatments, were they to be legal. There would have to be careful safeguards to ensure that people with reasonable prospects for recovery don’t end their lives prematurely. We mustn’t have angst-ridden teenagers showing up at our hospitals, asking for lethal injections because they can’t go on after their most recent breakup. But if I am in the later phases of a terminal illness, with no reasonable prospect of recovery and – most crucially – I have been professionally determined to be of sound mind, I see no grounds on which I ought not be permitted to choose to dispossess myself of the one thing that is most my own: my life. The easiest method for doing so would be to ask for the assistance of a willing physician to administer a lethal dose of painkillers.

And why can’t I? There is one answer. Because of opposition on religious grounds, by those who maintain that even fully consensual, physician-assisted suicide that meets precise criteria is a violation of the principle that life is sacred until “natural” death, even though very few of them really believe in the concept of “natural death” at all. In this regard, the only people who are being consistent are those members of certain religious minorities who refuse nearly all medical treatments on the grounds that it is a violation of God’s will. I regard this as perverse, but at least it has the virtue of consistency.

Canada’s constitution guarantees me religious freedom — a freedom which must necessarily include the freedom to be free from the religiously motivated dictates of others. I therefore regard my inability to secure a physician assisted suicide as a violation of my constitutional rights. Some will attempt to make the argument that all of our laws have religious antecedents, and that therefore my argument applies equally to laws against murder, rape, theft, and the like.  But there are many grounds for opposing such crimes quite apart from the fact that there are religious proscriptions against them. The conditions of human solidarity and of maintaining human society require them whether your particular god wants them or not. By contrast, secular objections to fulfilling the wish of a terminally ill and clear-minded individual to expedite the process are harder to locate. 
 
It goes without saying, of course, that no physician should ever be forced against his or her conscience or under threat of professional sanction to terminate someone’s life; we all recognize that the decision to end a life is, from both sacred and secular perspectives, a momentous one. The suggestion will be made, of course, that to permit physician assisted suicide will serve to further the secular society’s cruelest failing of all: the supposed devaluation of human existence.  But as a historian of war and conflict, I am not at all convinced that, in proportional terms, the century recently concluded was any more violent than others that preceded it nor indeed that it valued life less.   Indeed, allow me to suggest that it is possible that from a secular perspective the value of life is even greater – it has an inherent and intrinsic value, because it is the only life that we will ever have.

Horror

Bad news. For some reason, the dead have risen. All of them. They are now shambling about in search of human flesh and their bite turns their victims into more zombies. They can only be killed by destroying their brain. Brains do their thing because they’re part of a nervous system and fed by a circulatory system, but massive bodily trauma doesn’t stop zombies. Pretty much any poke to the noggin will, though. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, bash ‘em in the head, they go down like bowling pins. The trouble is that there’s too many of them. So, the few survivors of this zombie plague are now huddled together in boarded up buildings, fighting to survive as their food and supplies run low and as internal dissent rises – there’s always one asshole ready to screw things up, isn’t there?

This was the premise of a grim, grimy, grisly and really rather seedy 1968 horror film called Night of the Living Dead, and one think that that would be it, really. What else is there to say? The sequel, where the zombies shamble amok in a shopping mall, nearly indistinguishable from Christmas shoppers, provokes, I will admit, a slight crack at the corner of one’s mouth, but this supposed “social commentary” is just a veneer to conceal the real plot of the film, which is running from zombies. And the exact premise has been retold in literally dozens of films now, including quite pointless remakes of both Night of the Living Dead and its sequel, and in a small avalanche books (including at least one best-seller, World War Z, by Max Brooks), and, of course, in video games, where zombies have become the necrotic analogue to Space Invaders. You keep shooting them. They keep coming. Repeat.

Recently some students commended to my attention a new TV series entitled The Walking Dead. Reading up on it a bit I heard it hailed as as being the very zenith of the zombie drama. This is not the highest accolade, of course, but I did take note of the fact that the show is airing on AMC, the network that brought us two masterpieces of modern television: Mad Men, about 1950s-era advertising agents on the cusp of becoming dinosaurs amidst the social turmoil of the 1960s; and Breaking Bad, about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer in order to provide for his family after he’s gone. I watched some of it and thought that, as zombie television shows go, it was eminently satisfactory, and will be loved by people who love that sort of thing. The producers might want to be careful how they promote their program, though.

The alleged “source material” — as if it needs any — for The Walking Dead is an utterly depraved “graphic novel” (that’s a comic book with sex and swearing) of the same name. I dipped my toe long enough into those waters to wish I hadn’t. A few selective readings revealed, among the usual zombie mayhem, decapitated children, vividly portrayed gang-rapes, and a woman shot through the chest with a shotgun while clutching her baby. They die in a spray of blood and body bits. If you meet people who like this sort of thing, I recommend that you take a step in the opposite direction. The comic's creators offer up the defense that this sort of thing goes on in reality anyway. Okay, granted. The horror genre is about the fear of death. But this isn’t about fearing death - it’s about making pornography out of it.

Zombies seem to be the next big thing in horror, perhaps because nearly all of the vampires have forsaken evil in favour of bedding teenage girls instead. You need only visit the “teen” section of the bookstore to see what I mean. Publishers have apparently given up on trying to get boys to read at all (well, somebody has to vote for the Tea Party) while for girls the teenage girl-meets-vampire-classmate genre has resulted in an avalanche of titles on the bookshelves. I’ve complained elsewhere that I invented this genre in 1986 and won’t renew this complaint here.

Anyway, in any other context, the efforts of a very elderly man to have sex with borderline or flat-out underage females would be called statutory rape or worse. (Edward is 98, Bella is 17; Angel is 240, Buffy is 16; Bill is 140, Sooki is, about 20, I guess.) Now add to it the fact that he is not merely elderly but, according to the genre’s own lore, deceased, and moreover almost invariably trembles on the brink of ripping her apart and eating her, and we have something else entirely. Let’s call it sadocanabalistic necro-adolescent-philia shall we? Something for the DSM V, as apparently millions of teenage girls have it.

Is there nothing new under the horror-genre sun? I am tired of vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves, ghosts, science-experiment run-amok monsters, and, above all, the slasher film, where people, usually teenagers, get butchered by a mask-wearing psycho because they act as if the live in a world where they don't have slasher movies. So I admit that I am curious about this, Rubber. It's a movie about a tire that comes to life and starts killing people. And I hereby claim copyright to the genre of teenagers falling in love with tires that come to life and start killing people.

University

There is a tremendous amount of finger pointing going on in Japan these days. Officials are asking why this emergency procedure and that emergency procedure failed; about how responses such as rescue work and the distribution of food and water might have been improved, and about what the government could have or should have done. All these things should be talked about. But the real problem wasn’t the response. The problem was the earthquake. And the tidal wave.

Charlie

The catastrophe that befell Japan late last week came on the very anniversary of another: the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo, in which perhaps 100,000 people perished by fire. I had intended the raid to be the subject of this week’s column — complete with a sober assessment of the realities of wartime Japanese imperialism — but when the earthquake, tsunami and now, it appears, partial meltdown of at least two nuclear reactors occurred in the past three days, I recalled something George Orwell said during the London Blitz: that there was much to criticize about England and its history, but now was not the best time to do it.

As of now, the official death toll in Japan is approaching two thousand and many thousands more are missing. The horrific images of the tsunami sweeping remorselessly over towns and fields, devastating everything in its path would, one would think, be enough to move even the most cold hearted reactionary to tears. But a quick perusal of message boards on CNN and Youtube suggests that a great many people are positively busting at the seams to sign up the next time the Brown Shirts role around. A small sample, shall we? (Brace yourself.)

xstongue
Theres a meltdown going on in America, can you news people focus on that instead of other countries news, we need to think about U.S. FOR A CHANGE....

primerib
What goes around comes around nips! Remember, Pearl Harbor, nips? Yeah....

BIG RED 1
Hasnt been that long ago old Tojo and his slaant eye folks were trying to killl all us Americans. They killed a whole lot of our grandparents. Please think before you start praising these people. BY THE WAY . . . THE BIG RED 1 WAS THE HONORED FIRTS ARMORED DIVISION. AMERICAN HEROES.

THEY DESERVE TO BE HIT BY QUAKE AND TSUNAMI,THEY ARE VERRY CRUEL AND HEARTHLESS,I HOPE THAT THEY WILL BE HIT AGAIN (JAPAN,JAPANESE) BY MUCH MORE POWERFULL MAGNITUDE 11 QUAKE AND TSUNAMI 100 METERS HIGH,,FUCK YOU ALL JAPANESE PEOPLE,GO TO HELL!!!
TheCityhunter08 1 hour ago

Who cares about the Japs and their bastard kids!!! They all deserve to die and the ones that r still alive need to melt from those reactors! Whoever does not die, we need to Nuke them to rid these Japs from the world. Justice for Pearl Harbor Baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
notre2010 4 hours ago

And so forth. Need I even get into the immense number of replies that contained the words “God” and “Jesus” “wrath” “revelation” “end times”, etc? Oh, what the heck:

i dont know much about japan but our preacher says they must have done many bad things for God to smite them in this manner. he says that many Japanese are atheists it is no wonder God would eventually take notice this should be a warning to all unbelievers. i pray for the japan people and that they will accept Jesus Christ.
ptl8888 7 hours ago

saudisRbest
Until Japan becomes an Islamic nation, it will continue to experience the wrath of Allah

We are living in a time of history like no other. We are living right at the very end of time. We are that last generation. Every time that God has brought judgment, he has warned the believers (1 Thess 5: 1-5). God is warning the entire human race that the Rapture of the true believers is going to occur on May 21, 2011. That will be followed by what the Bible calls the Day of Judgment after which, on October 21, 2011 God Himself will destroy this entire cosmos. (more info at familyradio,com 
horseandhisrider 5 hours ago

As Jesus approached the boat where the disciples were, Peter said, "Lord, if it's really you, tell me to come to you, walking on water." Jesus said, "Yes, come." Peter than walked toward Jesus on the water, but started to sink when he was frightened by the large waves. "Save me, Lord!" He shouted. Jesus grabbed him. "You have so little faith..."
racenuke 8 hours ago

this is only the start of it, earthquaqe, tsunami, earth axis change, vulcan eruption, nuclear plant explosion, and more too come :( the peple are greedy and fill they pockets with money, but what cann you doo with money now ? man kind doesent concentrate on the future :( the power and welth drives us twords selfdestructin :( 2012.12.21 is aproching :( god take care of all japanese victims who didnt hade a chance. PEACE

Now, stay with me. A very large number of postings argued that the real truth is being concealed by the main-steam media, with its corporate (or socialist, take your pick) agenda. In response to a terrifying Youtube video, one poster commented:

In a world full of lies few seem to know the truth. And the truth is simple - this video is fake.
Antikrew 1 hour ago

While others grafted their own social concerns onto the catastrophe since the corporate fat-cats who pull the news-anchors' strings wouldn’t:

glennsky
These are the Great Revenge of WHALES' AND DOLPHINS' HOME. Don't forget THE COVE movie. If Japan won't stop killing these animals there will be another GREAT REVENGE AHEAD.

And don't get me started with the numerologists, who found all sorts of associations using variations on the date of the earthquake and other catastrophic events. For example:

If you add 9/11/01 and 3/11/11 you get 12/22/12!

December 22nd, 2011 being the supposed date of the end of the world. Or, rather, the day after. But never mind.

One idea that many, many posters alleged (try Googling it) is that the earthquake was the result of secret military testing, probably the HAARP program. Officially, this unclassified program involves research of the ionosphere, but, as everyone in the tinfoil hat brigade knows, HAARP is responsible for the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and now off the coast of Japan, as part of an evil experiment being conducted by the CIA. I'm not sure why they're doing it. Just because they're evil, I guess.

Luckily, the world’s celebrities took to Twitter to solve this whole earthquake business — whatever its real cause — overnight. For example, in British Columbia, the cast and crew of the forthcoming Twilight movie were relocated a little further inland as a precaution, as elevated sea-levels might pose a mild risk to the west coast when the waves arrived in a few hours’ time. Thinking fast, an actress from the film Tweeted that, if this was to be her last Tweet, she wanted her family, friends, and fans to know that she loves them. Confronted apparently, with the paranoia, self-absorption, and absurdity of this shout-out — did she really want what she apparently thought might be her last message to be a Tweet? — she replied, in another Tweet, that she was just “speaking her peace.” No doubt this gave her piece of mind. Or peace of mind. Like, whatever, LOL. Who has time for correct spelling when the cold, steely embrace of Death itself is closing in?

Well, at least the news of the earthquake did something that even the emerging civil war in Libya could not: keep the most appalling and most boring of Hollywood stars – Charlie Sheen — off the front page. For two or three weeks the antics of this raving conspiracy theorist, who starred in two overblown Oliver Stone epics in the 1980s and nothing of worth since, made headlines everywhere. But, no wonder. Read the message boards. He has a potential audience of millions who think just like him. He’s the most famous Internet troll in the world, and gaining greater and greater fame not for the quality of his mind but for having completely lost it.

Some day, I fear, all of this internet chatter will make fodder for a thousand PhD dissertations about the collapse of Western Civilization. They will tell the story of how the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated people in the history of the world decided to make a howling wasteland out of a garden, and all because of their incapacity to stop and think.

Incidentally, one very popular HAARP conspiracy video making the rounds on Youtube is narrated by one Martin Sheen. I admonish my students not to use cliches, but here it seems inevitable.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Spartacus

Many readers, no doubt, are familiar with the hit TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, about the famous Roman-era gladiator. This is the greatest show ever made in the history of the world. It has no need for such bourgeois banalities as “plot” or “scripts.” Instead, it has full-frontal nudity, graphic sex, decapitations, and nonstop virtuoso swearing that would make a Marine Corps drill sergeant blush like a home-schooled teenager given her first valentine. And abs.

Spartacus is set at a time when Western Civilization was in its infancy, and made as if it died there in the cradle. The first six episodes consisted of Spartacus chopping heads off while bellowing, “I must find my wife!” When he found his wife, and she was dead, he spent the next six episodes chopping heads off and bellowing, “I miss my wife!” I realize that readers who have not seen the show may be baffled by the byzantine nature of its storyline, but try to keep up nonetheless.

Longtime friends can confirm that my real talents, such as they are, lie in the realm of fiction rather than non-fiction writing. As proof, I offer my own script for a new episode of Spartacus, which I humbly submit for consideration to the producers of series. As this is a family blog, I have omitted all swearing, though you should feel free to imagine certain four and twelve-letter swearwords sprinkled liberally throughout.

--------------

Exterior, Gladiator training school. Enter SPARTACUS and his six-pack abs. The sun reflects off them, blinding several stage hands.

SPARTACUS

“I need a new wife!”

Enter BATIATUS, his master, having sex with a slave.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring DISHONOR on the House of Batiatus!”

Enter CRIXUS, another gladiator, preceded by his abs.

CRIXUS

“I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA!”

SPARTACUS

“No, I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA! Still, you think maybe a Gaul like you and a guy like me..."

CRIXUS attacks. They fight, making a point to hit each others’ swords. A tidal wave of blood knocks everyone off their feet. They are about to resume fighting when DOCTORE, the gladiator trainer, appears and cracks his whip.

DOCTORE

“You can’t fight in here! This is the gladiator school! Ah...Ah...get it? Get it? Plus it’s a Kubrick reference, from Dr. Strangelove. But he also directed the movie version of Spartacus. You see, what I’m doing is subverting your expectations by inserting a metafictional reference, and...er...ah...come on, people. Work with me. You can win independent film awards for this sort of thing.”

Enter XENA, naked, with an entourage of NAKED SLAVES in tow.

XENA

“My husband, could you have Crixus brought naked to my room? Make sure he’s spritzed with a thin but glistening sheen of oil.”

BATIATUS

“Certainly, my dear wife. My goodness, how you two seem to be getting on well these days. No doubt you’ll have an enjoyable conversation or something. Anyhoo, I’m off to the market for precisely the amount of time it would take for you to have sex with a gladiator, if you were doing that behind my back, which you’re not, of course. Ciao.”

SPARTACUS (from below)

“While you’re at the market, can you find me a wife? I really need one. Seriously.You have no idea.”

Commercial.

Interior of BATIATUS’S digs. BATIATUS sits at his desk, writing a love poem for his wife, XENA. XENA and CRIXUS can be heard GRUNTING and MOANING and SIGHING and POUNDING THE WALLS in the next room. This goes on for twenty minutes. Enter SPARTACUS, with little frowney faces drawn on each of his abs. When he flexes, they become smiley faces.

BATIATUS (shouting over the noise coming from the bedroom)

“Ah, Spartacus. Your presence brings GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Now pack your things. You’re fighting a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS in the arena this afternoon. I must warn you. No ONE has EVER defeated the TEN FOOT NINJA with FOUR ARMS. There’s nothing I can do. I owe the man a dollar fifty.”

SPARTACUS

“Is he looking for a good husband?”

Commercial.

Exterior of arena. By which I mean interior of arena. The part of the arena that’s interior to the physical structure but actually is open to the air. You know what I mean. Thousands of HALF NAKED ROMANS await the arrival of SPARTACUS. They pass the time by the doing the wave. BATIATUS watches from his private booth. An IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN is there. XENA and CRIXUS are making out in the back row.

IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN

“Oooo how I totally hate that Spartacus. And why do all Romans have British accents?”

BATIATUS

“Spartacus may yet bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Or GREAT DISHONOUR. Or, his effect might be more-or-less neutral in terms of its impact on the relative honour standing of the House of Batiatus. There’s no way of knowing without an objective consideration of his win-loss record over the course of the gladiatorial season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, entering the arena. He is BUCK NAKED except that he is carrying a sword in each hand and is also holding a shield. Don’t ask how. The CROWD begins to chant his name.

SPARTACUS

“I am SPARTACUS! Are any of you ladies single?”’

ENTER a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS. He is carrying a sword, an axe, a spear, and an atom bomb. He and SPARTACUS fight. They make sounds such as “ARAAGH” and “OOOGHA” and “BLAGH” and say such things as “Hey! Careful there!” SPARTACUS is slashed across the chest, arms, legs, and nearly gets his shield-holder taken off. His hair is ripped out. His teeth are smashed in. He loses both eyes and has to put them back in to see, but he puts them in BACKWARDS and sees everything upside down. One of his six abs gets removed with a cake-lifter. He is finished off with a horrendous noogie. Spartacus collapses all dirty and sweaty. Four men throw buckets of blood on the camera. The NINJA pauses for a few hours to GLOAT.

Cut to: SPARTACUS, having a vision of his WIFE, who is named MILDRED.

MILDRED

“Is that the best you can do? Typical. You never could keep it up. What will the neighbours think? And you never help around the house. I should have listened to my mother and married a doctor.”

SPARTACUS

“I want my wife!”

MILDRED

“Not now. I have a headache. And If you think I’m washing your loin-cloths later, you’ve got another thing coming, mister. Anyway, get up and kill this Ninja. Get that promotion you’re always bragging about.”

SPARTACUS

“But why?”

MILDRED

“Because everyone wants to see you have sex with Xena next season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, raising both his swords and his shield. The NINJA goes to finish him off but stubs his toe. While he’s hopping around on one leg, saying “Ow! Ow! Ow!”, SPARTACUS cuts it off. Then his other leg, his ears, and each one of his fingers in turn. Then his arms, which SPARTACUS uses to wail on the NINJA for about half an hour. A thousand-gallon drum of blood is thrown at the camera. Finally, SPARTACUS chops off the NINJA’S head and punts it for twenty-five yard field goal. The CROWD goes WILD.

SPARTACUS

“That one’s for the ladies!”

Cut to BATIATUS, who is being jostled by XENA and CRIXUS who are rolling about the booth naked in a sweaty embrace.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus!”

SPARTACUS

“So you’re saying you find me attractive?”

Fin.

Next week on Spartacus: SPARTACUS searches a mail-order tablet for a wife. BATIATUS accuses him of dishonouring the House of Batiatus, and condemns him to fight a BRONTOSAURUS. The IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN tries to frame SPARTACUS for tax evasion. Everyone has sex while DOCTORE throws buckets of blood around. XENA and CRIXUS continue their secret affair.

Heaven

A parable.

So there’s Gordon. In Heaven. Why? He has no idea - he’s a religious dissenter, after all. He’s holding a tray and is in a short, fast moving line in Heaven’s Cafeteria, which queues past a breathtaking waterfall. The day is sunny and a positively blissful 24 degrees centigrade. A live string quintet is playing a new composition by Mozart and Beethoven. As he approaches the counter, Gordon notices a small sign, written in gold. “Tomorrow’s special: Simon Peter’s catch of the day.” It’s an old joke, but everybody gets a good chuckle out of it.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a day-planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM Continental breakfast
9 AM Stroll on the beach
10 AM Ecstatic reunion with lost loved ones
12 PM Lunch
1 PM John Lennon and Elvis Presley in concert
2 PM Pedicure and foot massage
3 PM Nap
4 PM High Tea with Queen Victoria
5 PM New episodes of Firefly on Heaven-on-Demand
6 PM Dinner

He makes a mental note to get High Tea with Queen Victoria changed to burning.

Gordon gets to the front of the line to discover that God himself is serving today, which explains why things have been moving even more quickly than usual.
“What can I get you?” God asks. He’s wearing a big apron that says “Kiss the Cook!” and he sounds like Humphrey Bogart.
“What’s on for today?”
“Anything you want. Name it.”
“Whew...so many choices. Ummm...Pad Thai. And a side of McDonald’s French Fries. Oh, and a Cherry Coke.”
“I knew you’d say that. Coming right up.”
“God?”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
“Can we talk?”
“Sure. Drop by my office later.”

Later, Gordon takes the cable car up to God’s office, which is at the snowy peak of an immense but gracefully curved mountain. God’s secretary (an in-her-prime Grace Kelly) presses the button on her intercom. “Gordon is here to see you.”
“I know. Send him in.”
God is sitting on a blue exercise ball at a big Ikea desk. Behind him there’s a poster of a kitten holding onto a rope. It says, “Hang in there.” On the desk is an iMac, a name plate that says “God”, and a Magic 8 Ball.
“Got a minute?” Gordon asks.
“All the time in the world. Take a load off.” He waves Gordon towards a chair. “So, how you liking it so far?”
“I’m not sure about this whole bliss thing,” Gordon begins. “I mean, struggle was one of the things that gave my life meaning. I enjoyed it.”
“Uh-huh,” says God, who is finishing up deleting spam from his e-mail. “There’s a book you should read. All about struggle. Guy named Hitler wrote it.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean that it was the expectation of serious effort now in return for future satiety that was motivating in life. Here, everything’s handed to me on a silver platter. Literally. Lunch was on a silver platter.”
“Look, it’s your Heaven. You want some struggle, you can have struggle. Have an argument with Socrates. Talk politics with Machiavelli. Play chess with Morphy. Box a few rounds with Rocky Marciano. Try to figure out season six of Lost. Whatever. You could even go back, if you want. The Buddhists do. Oh, how they love to go back.”
“Okay. Fair enough. But there’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask. I assume you know already-“
“Of course.”
“Exactly. That’s the problem. Omnipotence.”
“Oh, Me. Here we go,” says God.
“It’s self-contradicting, isn’t it?”
“Not to me.”
“I mean, if you’re all-powerful and all-knowing, you must be the cause of evil. At the very least, you either can’t prevent it or won’t. If you can’t prevent it, you’re not omnipotent. If you won’t, you’re malicious. No offense.”
“None taken. Ever heard of free will?”
“Of course, but can we even have free will if your omnipotence includes omniscience, which it must? And, moreover, tidal waves aren’t a matter of free will. Plague isn’t free will. And what about the innocent victims of the acts of free will committed by others? Jews in the Holocaust, that sort of thing.”
God bounces a bit on the exercise ball and says, “I see things long term. Trust me, there’s a good reason for those things. Your puny monkey brain couldn’t understand it. No offense.”
“I have a PhD, you know,” Gordon says, rather indignantly.
“Well, I don’t have a PhD, I admit. But I created created space and time. I invented the physical constants of the universe. I directed biological evolution to ensure the developmental of higher-order intelligence. I solved the Rubic’s Cube in, like, two minutes flat. Two minutes. The first time I laid eyes on it. It took you six years to write your dissertation and half your committee didn’t even read it.”
“They didn’t?”
“Of course they didn’t, pea brain. Didn’t you notice the one guy’s proofreading comments stopped at about page fifty?”
“Oh, wow.”
Gordon reflects for a moment and then says, “So...why am I here? In Heaven? A non-believer like me? All kinds of people said I’d end up in Hell.”
“Meh,” God shrugs. “You seem like a good guy.”
“Okay. But there was this philosopher, Pascal...”
“Speak of the Devil," God interjects. "I’m hitting the links with him tomorrow afternoon. You should come.”
“...and he said it was the best bet to believe in God. But he didn’t say which God. And he didn’t distinguish between the idea that you should believe and actually believing. I mean, it’s not like I could believe in something for which there wasn’t sufficient evidence, even if belief is the best bet.”
“Me knows. Look, you don’t need to explain yourself. We get all sorts up here, and we do our best to make everyone feel at home. But not everyone expected it to be like this. Some wanted virgins, for example. Virgins! What’s up with that?”
“You should talk.”
“Don’t be a wise guy.” He really does sound like Humphrey Bogart. “Anyway, I’m a softy, basically. I’ve got a generally salvic disposition. I let in all sorts. Pagans, Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jainists, Scientologists, Wiccans, Secularists, Agnostics, Atheists, Theological Noncognitivists. Nearly everybody gets in. You’ve got to be a real A-Hole not to get in. Some people bug me. Every day I meet Biblical literalists, and I say to them, ‘Really? Seriously? You thought there was a big boat with two of every animal on it? How the hell do you think the koala bears made it from Australia? Did they swim?’ But then I get all soft and let them in anyway.”
“But they believed. I didn’t.”
“So what? It’s not like I gave you guys much proof, and it tends to be the smart ones who picked up on that. I like smart people being around. Smart by your tiny little monkey brain standards, that is. You used your God given intelligence for a purpose other than devotion. Bonus marks in my book. Not that book, though. I mean ‘book’ metaphorically.”
Gordon is about to speak when the phone rings.
“I gotta take this,” God says. “They want to know if I’m interested in saving money on long distance. I am. Really, you have no idea. Could we pick this up later? And don’t forget golf tomorrow. We tee off at 11. Einstein will be there, too, but he’s always running behind.”

That evening, Gordon is back in line in the cafeteria. Ahead of him is the Reverend Pat Robertson. Gordon knows perfectly well who he is, and so decides not to strike up a conversation. But Robertson looks over his shoulder at Gordon and examines him rather dubiously. “So...what are you here for?” he asks.
“Skepticism,” Gordon replies. “And you?”

Hell

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Armageddon

Bad news. The world is ending December 21st, 2012. Or at least a lot of people seem to think so, on the grounds that that’s the day when (they claim) the Mayan calendar “runs out”. I’m not quite sure why the pre-Columbian Mayans should be taken as authorities on anything at all, let alone prognostication, especially since things didn’t work out all that well for them. By contrast, the 2012 crowd don’t seem much cheered by the fact that, for instance, China’s calendar doesn’t run out in 2012.

There’s been so much public concern about 2012 that some folks at NASA decided to take time out from unimportant work such as exploring the universe and unlocking its secrets to create a number of public-relations web-pages assuring people that they can go ahead with their advance planning for New Year’s Eve, 2012.

This is probably futile, since people who believe in this sort thing usually are immune to rational argument. Still, it’s good to know that somebody’s trying. Take these people, for instance, who are waging a radio and pamphlet-based campaign against this poppycock that the world is ending in December 2012. According to them, it’s ending May 21st, 2011. Get with the program, people.

I know this because some supporter of theirs handed me a pamphlet outside of Shopper’s Drug Mart yesterday. “The End of the World Is Almost Here! Holy God Will Bring Judgment Day on May 21, 2011!” I did some quick mental math and then headed straight to the LCBO to stock up, because if the world’s coming to an end, I’m getting wasted.

At home, I perused the pamphlet and their website over a cheeky little Beaujolais. Family Radio, I discovered, was founded in 1959 and now has several dozen FM radio licenses in the United States. (According to Wikipedia, these licenses would be worth several hundred million dollars today.) Day after day, these stations broadcast this end-of-the-world business to whoever happens to be listening. Their arrival at the precise date of Judgment is based on a complex numerology explained on their website. Incidentally, they also reject the usual Creationist nonsense about the world being 6,000 years old. Turns out it’s 13,000 years old. Again: Program. With the. Get.

At any rate, their website insisted that “well-known denominations such as Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, etc.” are “still in deep trouble with God”. At this, my heart rose slightly— perhaps I might be okay after all. I read on. Alas, it was not be so.

It’s often said that religions are automatically to be accorded respect, and that people are not to be criticized on the basis of their religion. The cultural relativists who dominate the academy are particularly insistent about this, going so far as to argue that criticism of religion – and of certain religions in particular – is tantamount to racism. But this is not a position that they themselves believe, since they are perfectly willing to cast aspersions in the direction of, say, the Catholic Church, over such things as the ordination of women and other issues that shouldn’t concern non-Catholics. By contrast, I remember well how they fell all over themselves to defend those who sought the death of Salman Rushdie, arguing that he really did hurt the feelings of millions of people who never read The Satantic Verses.

Respectful behavior can be mandated but actual respect cannot be. Whatever else they may be, the world’s religions are social institutions into which people have vested enormous and all-too human effort. Some of those people are morons, and it’s hard to treat them respectfully. Some of those efforts have been violent, and preach violence, and we have a right to defend ourselves against them. This goes, too, for crude and crass theological arguments mounted by the likes of Family Radio. If you tell me that I’m going to hell, I get to tell you to precede me there.

The suggestion that religions are beyond the scope of criticism can hardly be taken seriously. Certainly no one who is a devout follower of any given denomination takes such an argument seriously, since his own beliefs almost invariably constitute an implicit or even explicit criticism of other beliefs. Either reincarnation exists or it doesn’t. Either a certain messiah is divine or he isn’t. Either the world will end May 21st, 2010, or it won’t.

I am currently taking bets – of any size – that it won’t.

Treaties

Merry Christmas to the whole human race from the United States Senate, which ratified the new START treaty with Russia yesterday. Under the terms of the treaty, the total number of operationally ready strategic nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals, already hugely diminished since their 1980s peak, will be reduced to their lowest levels since the mid-1950s. More crucially, the number of launch platforms will be reduced further still – to a maximum of 700 per side. This is far too many, of course, but since those two countries possess over 95% of all nuclear weapons in the world, the significance of the treaty cannot be understated. By the end of the decade, the total number of operationally deployed nuclear weapons in the world will have been reduced to under a tenth of what it was at its peak in 1986, when the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a high alert. The new START is a straightforward and very good treaty – almost noncontroversial, in fact. It makes the United States and indeed the whole world a safer place. It is Obama’s first major foreign policy achievement, and goes some way to adding some post-facto credibility to his ridiculous win of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which is precisely why twenty-six Republican Senators voted against it, why Senator Kyl of Arizona fought a desperate, almost hysterical rear-guard action to delay its ratification until the next session of Congress, when a somewhat different Senate with more Republicans might have derailed it. For anyone who has been following the debate closely, no other possible conclusion can be reached about what motivated those twenty-six Republicans. Their goal was to hand Obama a political defeat, regardless of the implications for American national security. The red flags they sent up were all false flags. Senator DeMint of South Carolina actually dismissed the treaty as part of “a continuing pattern of appeasement.” Appeasement! The favourite boogeyman word Republicans use describe whatever Democrats happen to be doing at the moment on the international stage, even if they’re waging war in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan and Iraq. (And need the Senator really be told that, historically, it was his party that enthusiastically endorsed isolationism even after the Second World War began in Europe?) “Appeasement!” Obama’s last defense budget – a staggering $700 billion – was the biggest in American history in absolute terms and the biggest, adjusted for inflation, since 1946. Bigger than any defense budget at the peak of the Cold War. Bigger than any during Vietnam or Korea. “Appeasement!” And who are these liberal “appeasers” who supported this treaty? Well, in addition to the Democrats, of course, there were such famous bleeding hearts as former President George H.W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice and every other living former Republican Secretary of State, the admirals and generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military head of the Strategic Command (the branch of the armed forces that actually controls America’s strategic nuclear arsenal) and seven of his predecessors, and, notably thirteen Republican Senators, including Senator Corker of Tennessee, who as much as called the treaty a no-brainer. “This is not one of those votes where you wonder,” he said. “This is not even a close call.”

There are, of course, real grounds for concern about the manner in which this administration has conducted itself in terms of foreign and domestic policy. But that’s true of every presidential administration. The exigencies of holding high office in such an immensely powerful but also profoundly internally divided country as the United States probably fatally compromises the ethics of even of the most sincere office holder.

This morning, of course, the Tea Party blogs and websites exploded with predictable rage. Their whole conspiracy-driven worldview has received powerful reinforcement. This is yet another sign of what they already know to be true. The President is a Muslim and a communist and a foreigner and this is all part of his master plan to weaken America. Measure of Doubt does not play the race card lightly. But let us be clear about something. There are those on the Tea Party right who say that Obama would not be President if he weren’t black. Perhaps. But there wouldn’t be a Tea Party if he weren’t black, either. They have made that abundantly clear. So if you prefer to read what rational people have to say, there has been excellent analysis of this treaty on the venerable The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. If you prefer your political coverage with a dose of gun-shootin’, Bible thumpin’, Good-Ole’ Boy twang, well, you hardly need pointers from me about where to look.

There is, however, one foreign policy expert who opposed the deal, and whose views might give us a moment of pause, because they carry such immense weight, having been informed by years of dedication to understanding geopolitics. The former partial-term governor of Alaska, who obtained a U.S. passport nearly five years ago and who has been taking occasional trips outside of North America for almost four years now, Sarah Palin, called on the Senate to defeat the treaty.

On Twitter.

Satire

Note: As you might appreciate, the task of producing a bi-monthly column, written to the extraordinarily high standards my thousands of devoted readers have come to expect, is beyond even my literary talents, talents once described in glowing terms by a former professor as “generally adequate.” For fear of drawing too deeply from my well and coming up empty, I outsourced this week’s column to Toby Guffrey, a senior student at an Ontario high school. His essay, only the second to be written on Measure of Doubt by an author other than myself, appears below. GB.


"In order to understand why Christmas is important we must first try and understand it's origin's. Christmas began in the Year 0 in Isreal when Jesus was born to his parent's Mary and Joe in a manager by sheep and a drummer boy nearby who was one of three wives men who brought presents for Jesus and Mary who was immaculate.This means that she was virginal. Thus establishing the Christmas tradition of giving presents. Although Christians would rather give the present's to someone else they didn't know that yet because Jesus was very young and could not talk his language which was arabic yet. Next Jesus was killed by the Roman's; for trying to make everyone into Christian's the Roman's did not agree with this so Jesus was killed by them after he said "oh Lord why have you forgotten me?" on a cross before he was killed by the Roman's who used him as an escape goat. It was a very sad day but later he came out of his cave and sat on his father’s right hand. Jesus also walked on water that he turned into wine. Now that we understand the origin's of Christmas we can explain how Christmas has an influence today in Canada and Americain society. One problem with this is in Canada is Multiculturalism. This means that everyone get's to give there opinion about things like Christmas tree's and present's. One problem with this is that people like Indian's don't have Christmas but our Government can't make them because of mulitculturalism. Like you can't just stand there and tell people that they have to have Christmas because this would be an unfringement of they're rites and who would it be for then? But we have to remember that everyone has there own views about things like Christmas and also one problem is things like global warming can be caused from people buying too much One other problem s that many people like Christmas music so there has been many teen-agers buying Christmas music now because of inventions like iPod's and computer's. The problem with this is that more car accident's happen because people are listening to Christmas music on their iPod's while their driving car's and on their cell phones'. Also drinking and driving. "As anthropological relativism, once the province of a minority, gradually assumed the position of an organizing philosophy within the academy, the moral significance of religious observances declined proportionately among the professoriate." This quote shows that people don't like Christmas but because of the multiculturalism can't show it but this is unfair because of the Charter of Rights and freedoms. Next we should consider America where Barrack Obama is president after beating George Bush. George Bush was a Christian but Barrack Obama is Catholic. In America they have a melding pot not multiculturalism; because of this they have a Christmas tree at the Whitehouse. In conclusion its' important that every one in December remember Jesus because he died so we could have christmas but also one problem with this is at Christmas many African's and also in Nigeria are starving but because of global warming we should not by present's unless there green."


Postscript: As you can imagine, Toby is currently on his school’s Honour List and will be attending university next year. He plans to major in English and History and then become a teacher.