Life has been overwhelming me, and in the past this has led me to write copiously about things that are going on.  Things have changed, and the things I used to be able to write about no longer flow out of me.  I used to be able to see a post through to the end.

I have become more private and withdrawn, more moody and less able to talk to people about the things that are bothering me.  I don’t know whether it has to do with my dad dying the same year I turn fifty, and realizing I will never live up to his hopes and dreams and expectations for what I will make of my life, but I think that this is part of it.

It has a lot to do with the realization that the older people get, the harder it is to reboot and start fresh; my dreams of what I wanted to accomplished were thwarted by my bad decisions that I seem to make at every turn.  Dad had been able to plan his life pretty well, and so when things didn’t go his way he had the means to find his way through and fix them squarely.

He taught me well, and I lived his lessons faithfully until my mid-thirties. Then I changed. I tried to do things without planning, and I started taking measures out of desperation thinking that I would be able to fix them later.  But the “later” is caught up with me, and I see so few avenues remaining for straightening them out.

I am not going to go into detail about what is happening in my life, but I find myself tempted to withdraw and resign from most of the volunteer opportunities from which I had been getting pleasure and fulfillment.  Now I am starting to see them more as chores and obligations, and I don’t think that I am really able to give people what they need.

I am exhausted, mentally.  I can’t see how tomorrow is going to work out let alone next year.  Step by step, I am sliding backwards and I just can’t write much about it.

I sincerely hope that this is a funk and that my constant struggle will soon pay off.  But the hours seem to get darker and the promised dawn further away.

When I get arighted, I will pass it along.  In the meantime, please listen to my radio show. It’s the one fun thing that I have left.

“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

A military that forgets its place and decides that it should make the decisions on where to fight comes too close to a dictatorship to protect a democracy. There are far too many countries run by Generalissimos, Supreme Commanders and Sergeants, countries whose people have been disappeared, tortured and imprisoned because they don’t share the enlightened vision of their military.

The recent history of the United States illustrates just how important it is that the civilian authority are in charge.

During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the top military were aghast at Kennedy’s unwillingness to risk war with the Soviet Union by invading Cuba. After Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev found a way to stop at the brink of nuclear catastrophe, both saw more clearly than ever a mutual interest in preventing another such occurrence. This led to a sustained back channel dialog from which the JCS were excluded, and of which they were highly distrustful.

“When all that you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” The military approach to conflict is to effect a military response, to use the tools of war. However, the defenders are not in charge of the republic. If they were, we would be in a perpetual state of war. The military would be used for more than defense; it would be a tool for expanding the empire. We would be preemptively striking against countries that might, in the future, mean to harm us. As we all know, this is not what the United States is all about. We are a peaceful, freedom-loving people who only attack to defend ourselves and our allies’ interests.

In Iraq, for example, we have fought for seven years and three months to prevent the terrorists from invading the United States. Since the start of the Iraq War, there have indeed been no invasions by the terrorists and so the strategy is working. There have been some foiled terrorist attacks on our soil, but the terrorist on the plane to Detroit and the terrorist in Times Square bungled their attacks because of our presence in Iraq. This is a simple matter of reviewing cause-and-effect, people.

In Afghanistan, we are there for a different reason. We sent our troops there to unseat the Taliban, a truly horrific organization of misogynists. These men find any excuse that they can to kill or disfigure women for violating societal norms that keep women in their place. Women under the Taliban’s government were not allowed to see gynecologists because they would then have had to disrobe before a male that is not their husband. Women were not allowed to be doctors. Girls under the Taliban were not allowed to attend school, to learn to either read or write. Schools for girls were burned with children inside them. Girls on their way to school were splashed with acids to permanently disfigure them, to teach them and the women around them that learning is only for boys and men and that their purpose is solely to bear and raise children for Allah’s glory. The Taliban clearly needed to be ousted.

We have also been in Afghanistan for other reasons. We have been there to assist in creating a democracy, a western-style democracy to restore Afghanistan’s rich parliamentary history. We removed the Taliban, but now what? The Afghanistan government is not in control of their country seven years later. Our military is asked to keep things in order until a freedom-respecting government is in place and in control. And our leaders do not know what it will take to achieve such a goal.

I think it is clear that a military mission in Afghanistan is not able to strive for much more than temporary truces, respites that will only last as long as our military is there being asked to surge and strategize indefinitely. How can our generals be asked to do what no other world power has ever been able to do, how can our military subdue Afghanistan? We can’t and we shouldn’t expect them to do so.

General McChrystal has a big mouth. He and his drinking buddies openly mocked the civilian leadership (their bosses) to a reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine. But that is not the problem. It is the reason that McChrystal’s resignation has been accepted by President Obama, but it is not what he is truly guilty for doing. His cadre told the truth about Afghanistan:

McChrystal’s closest advisors speak openly in the article that they do not believe the war in Afghanistan is winnable. Here is how McChrystal’s Chief of Operations told Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings that the war in Afghanistan is going to end: “‘It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win’ said Major General Bill Mayville, ‘This is going to end in an argument.’”

As Hastings writes: “So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.” And that is what key figures in the military have in mind, notwithstanding the president’s commitment to begin withdrawing US troops in July of next year. According to a senior military official in Kabul: “There is a possibility that we could ask for another surge of US forces next summer if we see success here.”

Another surge? Without a clear exit strategy from Afghanistan – and 96 Members of Congress are demanding one by co-sponsoring legislation sponsored by Jim McGovern in the House – senior military leaders are conducting operations in Afghanistan as if escalation, not withdrawal, could very well be in the cards. And why not? McChrystal backed the administration down before, why not again?

This makes a vet with head trauma feel better

Obama fired McChrystal and people applaud, and say that Petraeus is the great choice to replace him in Afghanistan, to turn things around and get some victory going out there in that quagmire that is starting to look increasingly like Vietnam.  It is an unwinnable war, which is something that the military likes because they get to keep on fighting and it keeps them from getting bored. The patriots like it because it gives them more reason to cheer on the troops and put yellow ribbon magnets and stickers on their cars.

We aren’t supposed to allow the military to dictate policy.  After eight years of a Bush/Cheney administration that was more than happy to drop bombs and drag our allies into war to protect us from people who “hate us for our freedom,” we had expected a president who would work towards ending our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and we are not seeing that happen. Instead we are seeing renewed calls for more, more, more money and troops to fight a war with no clear objective.

I am not a fan of McChrystal by any means.  He thought he was the tail that could wag the dog, to tell the President how high to jump. I do think that he is not in charge any more in Afghanistan because he and his drinking buddies spilled the beans about an unwinnable war.

You talk a mite too much, General.

What do you give to a corporation that has cut corners, ignored warnings, skimped on safety and relied on old and inadequate spill cleanup technology when you think that the President of the White House is being mean to them? If you are Joe Barton, Republican from Texas, you give them sympathies and apologies for a government that expects said corporation to take responsibility for its recklessness.

Okay, accidents happen. We understand that. We get it. There are no guarantees that risky oil-extraction ventures in mile-deep water, drilling 13,000 feet through rock, will not have some occasional problems. It ain’t easy to get oil out of there. We are even aware that we need the oil.

Despite the promise of limitless energy available through alternate sources, a transition to a solar and wind economy is many decades away. You and I and our other readers can cut down on our electric usage with the right kinds of bulbs and judicious usage of air conditioning. We can drive fuel efficient cars and take fewer trips. We can use public transportation when possible. We can shop for goods that use less plastic and plastic packaging. We can make these little efforts to cut down on the need for oil. As consumers we can make a small, conscious dent in the demand and thirst for oil, but as consumers we are not going to be able to do enough to reduce demand so that offshore drilling is not necessary.

Given the dangers and risk of drilling, and given the steady demand for petroleum energy and petroleum-based products, I feel no sympathy at this point for the British Petroleum Corporation. They are not suffering. Nor do I feel compelled to “like” them on Facebook. This is a company that recklessly engaged in practices to speed the process of drilling and extraction in an area of the ocean that should be approached with great caution.

Now we have a bunch of oil spreading around the Gulf of Mexico, pluming deep and spreading wide and killing birds, fish, mammals, crustaceans, krill and jobs.

Representative Joe Barton, who along with Minnesota’s native daughter Michele Bachmann has felt the strings of sympathy tugging his heart for BP, apologized for Obama’s strong-arm tactics in getting BP to agree to a 20 billion dollar fund to recompense those who have been financially damaged by the leaking oil. While he has since unapologized and said that absolutely BP needs to be held responsible for their mess, he only did so to stem a political embarrassment. He does feel sorry for them. He weeps for them and the troubles they have faced.

He weeps for BP as they accept deposits from continuing contracts from the United States Military. BP is not going to disappear under the weight of excessive demands from the United States government for money. From the Truthout.org article (originally published at TomDispatch.com):

In 2009, according to the Defense Energy Support Center, the military awarded $22.5 billion in energy contracts. More than $16 billion of that went to purchasing bulk fuel. Some 10 top petroleum suppliers got the lion’s share, more than $11.5 billion, among them big names like Shell, Exxon Mobil and Valero. The largest contractor, however, was BP, which received more than $2.2 billion — almost 12% of all petroleum-contract dollars awarded by the Pentagon for the year.

Does anyone else notice the amount of oil that is used to protect our energy dependence?

They are going to come out okay, financially, despite their track record of safety violations. Consider that they are extracting, recovering and selling oil from the spill, to the tune of 15,000 barrels per day:

It couldn’t be worse, could it? In the Gulf, BP now claims to be retrieving 15,000 barrels of oil a day from the busted pipe 5,000 feet down. That’s three times the total amount of oil it claimed, bare weeks ago, was coming out of that pipe. A government panel of experts now suggests that the real figure could be up to 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons a day, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every four days — and some independent experts think the figure could actually be closer to 100,000 barrels a day.

I don’t think we need to cry for poor British Petroleum getting fleeced by the government. I think that we need to be tougher with them, to make an example of them so that we scare all of the deep-sea oil extraction concerns. It needs to be more expensive to cut corners than to do this the proper way if we are stuck with offshore drilling.

Don’t cry for BP, Joe Barton. They’ll be okay, even if they get shaken down.

There is no possible way to discuss deeply held beliefs without offending someone who either holds or doesn’t hold those beliefs. As a blanket statement laid on with a broad brush and as a generalization to boot, I have not been able to find a way for everyone to be happy when it comes to discussing atheism and religion. I have read and listened; I have spoken and watched. I have said nice things to people about themselves, followed with a critique of religion and then bookended with a nice thing about that person again, only to be told I am a hateful bigot and arrogant.

While I know that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I wonder how positive “positive atheists” should continue to be, with the awareness that somewhere along the line, no matter how we try, someone is going to be offended. If I were to criticize the Catholic Church for not doing enough to root out the pedophiles in the priesthood, or the Mormon Church for putting time and effort into denying the rights of gays and lesbians to marry their partner-of-choice, or Scientologists for sending a team of volunteer ministers to Haiti to provide victims with “touch assists,” or even to complain that my daughter was told by a fellow little girl that she was “going to Hell” for sticking up her middle finger, then someone would decide that I was being intolerant of others’ religious beliefs and just another example of a militant atheist.

It seems not to matter how civil we are when we complain about religion; we atheists become “bashers” and “nasty” and “militant” for being non-believers. We are out to evangelize the believers to be non-believers, and the only way we can win is to shame other atheists.

To me, there seems to be a growing number of atheists who want to see religion destroyed. I think these people, who may have always been around, are the ones who can make the community suffer. It is difficult to form a community around what you don’t believe in and that is what atheists do. Atheists are an incredibly diverse community, however, those who participate in organizations seem to be overwhelmingly liberal politically, don’t have kids, or their kids are out of the house. Most seem to have been raised with a religion and have sought out a community because it can be difficult to, in some cases, be rejected from friends and family because you don’t happen to share the same views on theology.

I consider the writer to be a friend but I think he is wrong in this post. There is good reason that many of us would like to see religion gone, and it is religion itself, not the people who are religious, that we want to see wither and die. Religion is given too much leeway and power when determining policy in our “secular society.” Religion is used to justify prejudices, to justify destruction of childrens’ bodies in order to “protect them” from having sexual desire, to keep women hidden and out of society in order to protect society from chaos and earthquakes, to opt out of filling prescriptions by pharmacists who object to the particular treatment because of their religion’s teachings and to urge prayer when other work can and should be done.

It’s a sweeping generalization to say that dissing religion is bigotry against religious people. Are atheists actively engaged in not hiring religious people? Are we trying to prevent them from holding public office? Are we censoring them or telling them that they can’t depict our heroes in a bad light (or any light at all for that matter)? Are we telling them that they have no place in politics, nor should they even be considered citizens, let alone patriots? I don’t think so, at least not in the United States and Canada. We are telling them that they don’t have the right to use their religion’s rules as the basis of secular laws. We are telling them that it is a violation of the concept of a secular government, and that the National Day of Prayer is inconsistent with the Constitution as written and interpreted. We are telling them that they shouldn’t pretend that their religion is as valid a way of “knowing” as the scientific process of discovery and interpretation.

No matter how carefully I tread on subjects I will find myself accused of being a meanie for violating somebody’s rules, and I will be subject to some “concern” about the way that the overall atheist community is perceived by me. When I was the host of the Minnesota Atheists’ radio show “Atheists Talk,” I invited someone to listen to the show one Sunday because I was personally excited to be on the airways, but his response was not be excited for me. Instead he simply said “Well good for you but I have no interest in spending an hour listening to you bash religion.” He never listened to the show, because he had predetermined that he wouldn’t be interested in it. I cajoled and explained that this was not what the show was about, but was told to change the subject and I was disappointed that as a friend he wouldn’t even give my show a chance.

My dismay comes from an observation that those who don’t like the New Atheists are behaving in the same manner towards them as they accuse the New Atheists of behaving towards the religious, and as the Grassroots Skeptic puts it:

Almost nobody is going to be able to respond to a perceived attack in any positive way. They’re bound to get defensive, or to respond with an attack of their own. If you’ve ever made the argument that some institution or individual was in some way bad for the skeptical movement, ask yourself honestly: did you phrase your assertion in a way that had any hope of persuading your newfound nemesis to take a step back and consider adjusting his or her methods? Or did you grow a big ol’ pair of Internet cojones, call him or her something awful that you’d never say in real life, and enjoy the momentary adrenalin rush you got from stirring the pot with the bitchy stick?

Last November PZ Myers agreed to “debate” Jerry Bergman on whether or not Intelligent Design should be taught in school. During the “debate” Bergman frequently used his own slides to counter a point that Myers was making while Myers was speaking. I found that action to be very rude. I wasn’t as upset over the content of Bergman’s slides, I was angry that while the other person was speaking Bergman was trying to distract the audience from what Myers was saying. During the debate Myers respected the time limits, attacked his opponents presentation methods and conclusions and expressed dismay that Bergman had not even approached the subject of the debate. At no time was Myers rude to Bergman personally, but only to his ideas. And yet, in the comments submitted following the debate people wrote that Myers was the rude and dismissive one. For people who have a set idea that is not gained by reason, any sort of approach that attacks that set idea no matter how nicely done may be considered “rude.”

There are rules we must follow in order to have civil debate, and violating those rules raises concern.

Someone expressed concern that at Minnesota Atheist meetings there was too much religion-bashing going on, and because of that as, she told a friend of mine, she wasn’t going to go back to any more meetings. What I have a hard time with is understanding why someone would go to a meeting at which atheists gather under a banner of atheism and not expect there to be any sort of talk against religion. I think it would be similar to objecting to people bashing Miller Beer at the Surly Brewery, or Apple at a Microsoft Picnic, or contact lenses at a gathering of Lasik Surgeons or Democrats at a Republican Convention. As in “I am for lower taxes and squashing education but those Republicans are so anti-Democrat that I can’t stand to be around them.” I need to ask, “What do you expect?”

There are so many secular groups and organizations to join and have fun and never even discuss religion in any context, positive or negative. Perhaps a bowling league, or a weekly cribbage club may suit you instead of an atheist group. Our community includes people who have been religious and are now disgusted at the effects that an overriding religious tenor to society has on our daily lives and want to be part of a group that recognizes that disgust and gives them an outlet to vent their frustration in a friendly environment. If, as atheists, our only desire and goal should be to be accepted as part of the larger community then our best strategy is perhaps to return to the closet and never say nothin’ about not believing.

Yes, that would be the best way for all of us to “just get along.”

Or we could also stop trying to shame vocal atheists and recognize that some people have a reason to be angry at religion.

In 2010, Michele Bachmann has turned into a conservative cultural icon.  We knew Michele in Minnesota when she was quixotically introducing her Marriage Amendment in the Senate, before she was elected to Congress in 2006 to replace Mark Kennedy. Mark, please come back! All is forgiven.

In these four short years, her stock has risen among the conservatives.  Perhaps I should refer to them as the nouveau conservateurs, those unwashed who think that conservatism is all about “God, guns, and lower taxes.”  The representative has been touted as a possible vice presidential candidate. She is a fundraising force for “Tea Party Conservatives.”

She is an embarrassment to most Minnesotans.  I say “most” Minnesotans, because she does have a large following even here.  The rest of us scratch our heads in wonder at how so many people take her seriously.  We also find it amusing to be accused of sexism when we make fun of her, especially since these accusations made by people who hate feminists.

There is much to mock in Michele Bachmann.  I find it hard to listen to her without laughing at her weird claims and conspiracies, but I also find myself agape at the force with which her supporters defend her.  With that, we at Quiche Moraine have decide to revive yet again, a collection of articles and blog posts noting the weird and wonderful world of the representative from Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District.

To get you warmed up and in the mood, Buzzfeed gives us the top ten craziest Michele Bachmann quotes Photoshopped for your viewing pleasure.

Michele has a fan. He’s an articulate fan, and we know this because he makes up clever 7th-gradish nicknames for people.  I am glad that this person is not a fan of Quiche Moraine:

Okay, so here she is at the historic confrontation. She is a member of the House Financial Services Committee. She is interrogating international swindlers Little Timmy Geithner, pretend Secretary of the Treasury and “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke, chairman of the non-Federal non-Reserve System. This I know you will find hard to believe, but she speaks without a teleprompter. Don’t believe me? See for yourself on You Tube.

She is a tax attorney, but, as she cut these two smirking mountebanks into uniform chunks of smoking stench, I could not help but think of a surgeon. She kept asking them to cite the constitutional authority for each of their actions. Of course they couldn’t do so. They stumbled. Ben refused to say where the money had gone. The farce ended when her time expired and the committee chairman would not allow Little Timmy to say how much money the Treasury would get back from the anonymous banks it had bailed.

I don’t honestly know what to make of Arlen, but I am happy he is not a fan of Quiche Moraine.

The American Spectator takes aim at Bachmann for either being crazy or loving the limelight (they aren’t sure which is the priority). They point out that she has not, in two terms, passed any meaningful legislation in Congress.

Still, Bachman’s headline-grabbing stunts, time spent on talk radio and cable, and even labels from staff and peers would be worth it if she could put her money where her mouth gabbed. This is her second term as a U.S. Congresswoman. She has yet to sponsor and pass any effective legislation at all, let alone any related to the issues that put her in the spotlight — though in her defense she’s outnumbered, and to her credit, she has co-sponsored some good bills.

She’s one of Hannity’s favorite conservatives and she knows how to draw a crowd, but a November Rasmussen poll showed Bachmann’s district may not love her as much as everyone else does. Fifty-one percent of likely voters said they somewhat approve of Bachmann’s job performance and 45% disapprove. That could be more due to the fact that the district has been trending left in recent years, as local Democrats have picked up several state seats, rather than Bachmann’s vocal conservatism.

Bachmann has introduced us to a new way of looking at economics, with the claim that the “private” economy is in the hands of the government. All of that has happened, of course, since Obama took office 14 months ago. And the sista’s are doing it for themselves:

Bachmann’s speech, which included her typical rhetoric about government takeovers of the “private economy” that was previously “100% private,” focused on what she said was President Obama’s weakness on national security weakness. But, she also made gender a theme. “I think I heard somebody say ‘repeal,’” Bachmann said, in reference to the health care bill. “You better believe it, baby. Repeal is what this girl is gonna be all about after November.”

This event was not in Bachmann’s district, but was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in district of Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison.

In introducing Palin, Bachmann spoke of the admiration they all felt for Palin’s fortitude and determination, and her appeal: “Part of it is that she is so much a one of us. And as absolutely drop-dead gorgeous as this woman is on the outside, I am here to testify she is 20 times more beautiful on the inside.”

In February, she sent out a fundraising letter claiming that Obama is out to “annihilate conservativism:”

Just consider Obama’s ties to the radical group ACORN.

For years Obama worked with, advised, and even trained ACORN and its volunteers in community agitation.

So close is Obama to ACORN that his presidential campaign relied on it for crucial get-out-the-vote drives to win.

But ACORN is a corrupt group, rotten to the core. It’s been investigated for voter fraud in 14 states and its workers have been caught on tape in 5 separate cities willing to help set up brothels for underage illegal alien child prostitutes.

Yet, Obama has used his enormous power as president to funnel millions of dollars into ACORN’s coffers to strengthen this radical group and his base.

Because Obama sees ACORN as his ideological “shock troops” leading his “revolution.”

Obama wants to use ACORN to radicalize America because he isn’t interested merely in defeating conservatives…

…HE WANTS TO ANNIHILATE US!

That’s the purpose behind ObamaCare, too.

The frightening thing is that she has been raising money, a lot of money, and the congressional race in the 2010 elections for the 6th district in Minnesota is going to be expensive. Michele Bachmann’s campaign has reported that she has $1.5 million in donations to her credit in this election cycle. Her chief opponent in the race is Tarryl Clark who has raised $1.1 million. Much of the money for both candidates is coming from outside of the district, owing to the fact that Bachmann has been a nationally-known crazy since 2008 when she invited the press to look into “anti-Americans in Congress” and the “anti-Americans” that are Obama’s friends.

The next day I was campaigning for her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg. Most of the people I talked to were extremely embarrassed that their representative had made such a fool of herself, but I knocked at the door of someone who had gotten on to a Democratic list, somehow. She came to the door and saw that I was campaigning against Bachmann and said she was voting for her Congresswoman. I was incredulous and asked her, “Even after what she said on TV last night.” The woman looked me in the eye and told me, “Yes.” Then she shut her door on me.

So, we can all think that only crazy and stupid people will vote for Michele Bachmann this year. If that’s the case, then there are a lot of them in her district. Or we can support the Democratic organizations in the 6th District and the candidate who is running against her in the general election. Quiche Moraine will give you periodic updates on the reasons to help defeat her and get some semblance of sanity back in Minnesota’s 6th District.

Harold Haubrich died on March 2, 2010.  It wasn’t a surprise other than that he lasted a few more days than we expected.  He had made his own decision to discontinue the dialysis that had shored up the work of his failing kidneys.  The doctors told him that he could expect to die 3-5 days after the last round of dialysis.  He was at peace with his decision because even with that treatment, he had been growing steadily weaker over the last year and was unable to perform any of the daily functions of living on his own.  For the sake of his dignity, I won’t describe all of the things that he needed help with, but suffice it to say that his quality of life was fading fast.

He made the decision because the day before he started vomiting blood, and the doctor did a preliminary exam only to realize that in order to determine the cause, extensive testing would be necessary, and then the remedy would quite probably be exhaustive and exhausting.  He decided that with all that he had been through over the last year that it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble to extend a life so far diminished.

Dad had lived a full life and was a relatively happy man, so his was a decision based on his exhaustion rather than a lack of desire to live.  He was tired and he wanted to move on to whatever is next.  When we asked him what he thought was next after death, he answered “I don’t know.”  I don’t know, either, Dad.  The local Lutheran minister apparently knows and described it all to Dad.  He told Dad about reuniting with my mother, dead since 2007.  After the Lutheran minister left following such words of comfort, my sister asked Dad if he now knew what was about to happen after death. He repeated to her the words, “I don’t know.”

Harold Haubrich

In Dad’s last remaining years, he returned to a Catholic Church from which he had lapsed.  I asked him why, and he told me that after he had a heart attack and some bypass surgeries he decided that he wanted to get back to church “just in case.”  I don’t know that Dad was all that serious about his faith in his religion or whether he was just playing at Pascal’s Wager.  He had made close friends with the local priest while they were both recovering from heart attacks in the same hospital.

I am not going to deal with my own grief here at losing my father.  I realize that everybody hurts, and that grief is a process of dealing with loss.  While I feel the pain, I don’t write about it well.  I would rather explain why I am also joyful at his time.

We are the lucky ones, we who have lived.  From Richard Dawkins’ “To live at all is miracle enough:”

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Dad and I shared this planet for nearly fifty years.  That is worthy of a celebration in and of itself.  He taught me how to bait a hook with minnows, he taught me how to check the oil, he taught me how to pee standing up, he taught me how to aim a rifle at a pop can, he taught me how to paint a house, he taught me how to balance a checkbook, he taught me how to cook oatmeal, he taught me how to laugh so hard I cried, he taught me how to take a head of wheat and roll it in my hands to shed the husks and then chew it until it turned to gum, he taught me how to use a blade of grass to whistle, and he taught me how to deal with crises with an even temper.

We shared this planet for fifty years.  We lived through cold below freezing, and we lived through heat and mosquitoes.  We saw Mexico together.  He gave me rides on his motorcycle and let me drive his Jeep when I was far too young. He let me know that Bob Dylan is just a poet and not a singer and wondered why people spend good money on records and tapes when FM radio is just fine and free.

His time on this planet as Harold Haubrich is over, but there is more to the story. Nothing ends, matter never disappears.  It changes form and life makes way for more life.  Yes, his body is preserved with embalming chemicals and is sealed in a coffin in a vault to avoid decomposition and a return to the elements. It is only temporary, and in a few thousand years, his body will finally be returned to nature, broken down by bacteria. The molecules and atoms that were him will be returned to the earth from which they originated.

We, all of us, are materially connected to the planet on which we live.  We eat, drink, breathe and metabolize the substances that make us and turn them into the proteins that build our cells and organs, but we are still mostly carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen even now and long after we have died those elements will continue.  Dad died and made a little room for another person to eat, drink, breathe and metabolize and in a few years I will die and do the same thing.  My ashes will be scooped into an urn and placed in a mausoleum for a few years and eventually will all return to the earth.  We never go away, even long after death.  The C, H, N and O2 that make us are remnant elements of a supernova that burst some 7 billion years ago because we are “starstuff.” He is still here, and always will be.

I am sad, because I miss my father.  I miss my mother. It is difficult to be an “orphan” because I don’t have their counsel any longer. I don’t have Mom to call and tell about the way things are going with the kids, and I don’t have Dad to call and talk about spring training and to speculate on who the Twins will use as a closer for 2010.

People ask me how I am doing after his death, but I feel awkward because I don’t feel like crying (often).  If I admit that I am not having a particularly rough time with it, will they think that I am cold-hearted?  Will they wonder whether I didn’t love him, or think I had a rough relationship with him?  I am not necessarily responding in a way that people expect me to. I am not forlorn and I am not rending my garments.

I am happy when I think of how wonderful he was to be with, how sly his humor was, how fair he was in dealing with people and how I was one of his (nine) favorite kids.  I am happy that he taught me how to be a loving and kind father to my own kids.  I am happy that he was there for me when I needed help financially.  I am happy that he was there for me when I told him about each of my kids being born.  I am happy when I think of all the people who genuinely liked him.

I am doing okay. Thank you for asking.

Hey, Dad.  You were one of the good ones.

Tom Robbins, author of such books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has a unique style of building books and storylines. He adds subplots that seem to be unrelated to the main story, or tangential to the theme as diversions and comic relief. Readers familiar with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will recognize his absurdist chapter breaks, but those who aren’t fans of his work find it off-putting that he doesn’t keep his stories on track.

In Still Life With Woodpecker, he developed at least two subplots that seemed totally unrelated to the story. One subplot, the illustrations on a pack of filterless Camel cigarettes, found its way into the main plot towards the end of the book and gave the main character a revelation that was necessary for the plot’s resolution. The other subplot, that of his difficulties with using an electric typewriter while writing the book, he used to illustrate what I think is an important development in the evolution of modern English writing style.

English has become mechanistic. Various composition teachers have coached me that, in order for my readers to engage in my points, I must follow a trend towards simplification and reduce my use of flowery and poetic language. I remember discussing the work of William Styron in his books Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner and how I love the way that his language flows so that the reader is enveloped in the story. The person with whom I was discussing it complained that Styron has tendency to show off his vocabulary, to “use a fifty-cent word when a ten-cent word will do.”

I was puzzled by this response, frankly. My goal has always been to stretch my vocabulary when both reading and writing. I love the use of words and the play of sentence structure, and I find that my favorite writers have the ability to clarify complex concepts both fictional and factual by pulling in words and phrases that are not in the common vernacular of everyday English. Styron is one of those writers who drives me occasionally to the dictionary but more often teaches me new vocabulary using context.

This is where reading is fun for me, and writing for you is more challenging.

The tools of writing have changed rapidly since the middle of the 19th century and the development of keyboards to convey thoughts. We use a keyboard layout designed specifically to inhibit the speed of typing. Early typewriter designers found that skilled typists were typing faster than the strikers could handle, so keys frequently jammed. The layout that we have on the QWERTY keyboard places the most commonly used letters in English on the left, so that right-handed typists are slightly shackled.

Tickling a Writer's Muse

Prior to the development of typewriters, people wrote by hand. The process of writing was directly connected to the person and the paper. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, people with poor penmanship (I’m looking at you, Andrew Jackson!) were often handicapped in communicating. It seems to me, though, that because writers were more closely connecting their thoughts to the paper, they were more expressive. They had a “feel” for what they were writing, and it seems to me that quill pens had something to do with that.

Classical literature reads as though the words and language had been “tickled” from the writer by the feather of the quill. When I read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I imagine him at a writing desk with a goose quill pen in hand deliberating to come up with these two stanzas:

Only reapers, reaping early,
In among the bearded barley
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly;
Down to tower’d Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ” ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

In my observation, modern writing has lost that tickle and tease in the effort to push writing into a crammed little box of clarity for the most common reader.  In the mix of journalistic and business writing, we are taught to reduce our verbiage and to let the reader skim the works while still getting the full gist of our themes and plots.  Cut back! Clarify!  Stop with the flowery phrases!

I have found that this has had an effect on my own writing.  Not only in the essays and posts I write here, but in the poems I write.  I struggle to make them romantic, or to convey the depth of my meaning.  I write with a keyboard, and I have instant feedback and I can backspace as I need to but I am afraid that the “teasing” is remote and I am dragging the muse along pissing and moaning as I use Blunt Force English.

I have a hard time shifting writing styles between what is needed for work and what is needed for creating more interesting pieces, such as those I write for Quiche Moraine, or even the poetry I write.  My vocabulary has shrunk as I seek similes.  Perhaps I need to go back to writing by hand.

Towards the conclusion of Still Life With Woodpecker, Robbins the writer has added Robbins the writer as a character who has gotten fed up with using a fancy new electric typewriter because it doesn’t give him the language that he needs. He had already discarded his manual typewriter, and so he finishes the book with handwriting.  He is satisfied with the way he has become a writer again.

My birthday is a the end of August.  A quill pen is on my wishlist, as are writing tablets.

I hear the cries and the calls of the religious moderate, and they are, as usual, correct. We have been too uppity, and I apologize on behalf of all of us. We should have known better, of course but in our exuberance at the publication of books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others, we forgot to realize that even though our numbers seem to be growing, we are really riding the crest of a fad. It was something we should have recognized, and we should have told all those who heard that there are other atheists just to go home and pretend that they are religious, just like Mom and Dad.

It would be better for all of us to just sit back and let our rights come to us, because if we ask for them, we are being ungrateful. We really should learn to ignore all the creches and crosses and banners of churches being promoted by and paid for by cities. They aren’t aimed towards us, so they really shouldn’t be important to us. We can just look away, because we aren’t supposed to be offended. We have been wrong, egregiously wrong to think that our opinions matter, and now I surrender.

So I will go back into the closet and start telling everyone who asks me what church I go to “I grew up Catholic.” It won’t be lying, but if I tell them the truth, it might offend them and I shouldn’t be so bold as to allow that to happen. We need to just celebrate Christmas and sing along merrily to the songs we love, and we shouldn’t point out that many other cultures have long standing celebrations at that time of year, too. It’s not fair to spoil it for the majority who want to add a little churching to the crass commercialism and the credit card binges, because, after all a baby born in April must have his birthday and his birthday only celebrated at the solstice. We need to remember it.

We need to just start going along to get along and to stand up for the pledge, because good Christian soldiers fought for the right for the rest of us to be free, and to exercise the freedoms that they fought for would be to spit on their graves. We need to start saying the pledge, every word that has been part of it since 1954 and not to skip over the “Under God” part, because if we don’t believe the whole thing, then we don’t believe any of it. But we shouldn’t let anyone know, lest they think we are troublemakers.

We shouldn’t be setting up information tables at college campuses, even though people might be curious about why we are atheists. We have been wrong to do that, because anyone who is an atheist or agnostic on campus should think they are the only one. It’s only fair, because the nonatheists really have a right not to be offended. We need to stop having events like the “Superstition Bash,” where we have fun with some of the old superstitions like throwing salt over our shoulders or avoiding black cats. Some people might take that the wrong way, and we don’t want them to think that we are “bastard atheists.”

We need to muzzle the scientists who are atheists, or at least those who are publicly atheist. They should stick to the labs and not poke their heads out. If they let people know that they are atheists, no one will want to learn about science. We need to leave the driving to someone else, someone who knows about both science and religion and who is properly embarrassed by atheists even though he claims to be one himself.

We need to let science communicators repeat the meme that atheism is bad for science, and we need to just relax when they put out a book that only tells a tiny part of a story so they can make PZ Myers look like a nasty little son of a bitch, and then we are right to ignore that the incident that led Myers to do what he did led to death threats against a college student. We really should be ashamed of ourselves for thinking that any sort of mockery has its place in a civil society in which good Christian people threaten harm to anyone who attacks the ideas of their religion. It should just not be done, because that wouldn’t be civil.

No, we really need to be quiet about the situation in a country in which bishops threaten politicians with refusal of the host for refusing to back down on principle. Religion teaches us morals and ethics, and speaking truth to power, but there is only one power that shouldn’t be spoken truth to, and that is religion. Religion has our best interests at heart, and is there to prevent us from going to the hell it invented to scare us into following its teachings. We need to not let anybody know that this is all made up, because if we do, then we are indoctrinating them.

We need to stop talking about Christianity and really hone in on the evils of Islam and the planned Muslim takeover of the world through terrorism. If we do this, the Christians will love us again and maybe take up the slack that we will be letting out on issues of liberty (which we don’t deserve anyway, but they will be nice enough to grant to us if we are good). We really need to return atheism to the intellectual stores, and we need to remind ourselves that we really aren’t good atheists unless we can rebut all of the great historical theologians, however much they contradicted each other.

We are not worthy of our country. We are only riding the coattails of the enlightened Christians who fought against the Christian Monarchy (twice) so that we could have the right to be a Christian Nation. We are not worthy of our country, so that when the American Legion wants to lead our kids in prayer in public schools, we should just let it be, even if that is a violation of the Incorporation of the 14th Amendment. Violations of the Constitution are to be permitted when our youth need saving.

We are not worthy of our cities, so when councils want to open the meetings about zoning variances, curb heights, renewing sewage franchises and authorizing the funding for a new speaker podiums, then we really need to let the council members pray about it. We don’t want any of our residents who are religious to get the impression that atheists walk among them.

It is time for Atheists to Stop It. Things were so good for us, and we didn’t know it. We had to start putting up billboards that say such offensive things as “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” Or the really, really mean one that says “Millions of People Are Good Without God.”

It is time for atheists to leave well enough alone. We’ve had our say, we’ve had our moment in the sun and now it is time to go back to being nice and quiet and let the Christians guard over us, so that we can all live and let live and no one will ever talk about the ways that religion rules our lives unfairly again.

To all Christians: I apologize for being so uppity. I promise to be good. My hat is in my hand, and excuse me while I go to the back of the bus and get off at my stop and hope that none of you are dishonored again by having to look at me.

(This is a re-post from Tangled Up in Blue Guy.–MH)