I made the mistake of going by Clown Hall today. That’s when I realized that their name isn’t descriptive enough. It’s not just a site populated by conservative clowns who bumble and stumble with illogic and misfacts. It should be called “Clown Car Hall”, because no matter how fast you shoot them down, another comes spilling out. (For the record, I am not actually advocating shooting conservatives here. Just clowns. Conservatives are human.)

The first thing spilling out of the car when I arrived was a column by Cal Thomas, titled “Death of An Atheist”. It’s an amazing accomplishment. You have to admire the craftsmanship that went into it. It is one of the most concentrated pieces of fundie fail I’ve seen in ages. I hope you have some free time. This will take a while.

[Christopher] Hitchens railed against those who believe in God. While an original writer, and smart, there was nothing original about his unbelief.

It’s true. The non-existence of God has long been established as a virtual certainty.

Such views have been expressed since the dawn of humanity. They have also been answered by some of the wisest people who have ever lived.

Not answered persuasively, but answered!

There is a difference between “smart” and “wise.”

But you can add “ass” to the end of either word to get pretty much identical meanings!

As that Scripture in which Hitchens disbelieved says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10)

This is a typical fundie debating tactic. They just pull quotes out of their ass the Bible and act like that’s some sort of evidence to support their claim. Here’s a quote for you, Cal:

The end of your teens is the beginning of wisdom teeth.

You can attribute that one to me. I’m sure it proves something. Did I win the debate yet?

I have always found atheists to be interesting people…

…because they just may be the world’s smallest minority group…

Actually, atheists are one of the fastest-growing minorities.

…one that gets smaller still as its members pass on and meet God face to face.

Now Cal has wandered off into the logical brush. Somebody grab a cattle prod and bring him back.

Still, atheists demand physical proof of God’s existence, as if they could bring God down and make Him into their image. What kind of God would that be?

The God of the Old Testament.

He would be their equal and, thus, not God at all.

Wasn’t that what that whole Jesus business was supposed to be about? God made flesh and all that? Then for the next 2000 years, God made into a biscuit.

Evidence, alone, has never moved anyone from unbelief to faith.

By definition, it can’t. If there’s evidence, there is no need for faith.

If proof were enough, all of the unbelieving contemporaries of Jesus (and Moses) would have believed in God because of the miracles they performed.

That suggests that they never performed any miracles. In fact, the evidence that either even existed at all is scant for the former and non-existent for the latter.

Two people presented with exactly the same information can respond in opposite ways. Faith is not based solely on facts. It is a gift from a God who exists.

It’s actually a curse from our evolutionary history. We needed to be able to make correlations based on feeble evidence. Suppose you’re a caveman walking through the forest. You hear the leaves rustle, then a tiger jumps out, yet you somehow survive (perhaps by performing a ritual human sacrifice (i.e., you trip your slow, fat cousin, so he gets eaten and you escape)). The next time you hear the leaves rustle, it’s in your best interest to assume there’s a tiger in the brush, not a squirrel.

It’s probable that religious folks have been worshiping a squirrel for the last 4000 years.

Hitchens wrote a book called “God is Not Great.” It’s a clever title, but how would he have known, since they had not been properly introduced?

They probably had been introduced. People come to my door all the time, trying to introduce me to God.

C.S. Lewis, once an atheist and thus conversant with the subject, wrote after his conversion, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

I hope that isn’t the “proof” that converted C.S. Lewis. If so, he’s even more of an intellectual featherweight than his reputation indicates. If I’m reading it correctly, that’s the old “I see the proof of God everywhere. Just look around!” argument. In other words “Somebody had to create the universe!”

It’s also a good lesson in not believing what appears to be true. The sun doesn’t rise. That’s an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth. C.S. Lewis was not a flat Earther. He knew that was just a poetic expression. However, for millennia, people did believe that the sun rose and set. No, actually, they “knew” it. They looked around, and they saw it every day. It had to be that way.

Likewise, you can’t look at the existence of the universe and “know” that it had to be created. That is a logical jump that you have no basis for making.

Some people exist, however nervously, believing that this life is all there is. The late singer Peggy Lee put the result of such faith this way: “Is that all there is? If that’s all there is to life, then let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.”

Although you can’t swill booze and engage in merriment 24/7, it is nonetheless good advice (in moderation). Too many religious people make themselves miserable in this life in order to buy themselves booze and merriment after death. The tragedy is that they are never allowed to enjoy the one life—the one existence in any form—that they will ever have.

Why contribute to charity, or perform other good deeds? Without a source to inspire charity, such acts are sentimental affectations, devoid of meaning and purpose.

What a cold, sterile life Cal Thomas leads. His only motivation for helping others is to acquire brownie points from God. It’s also selfish. Presumably he plans to spend those brownie points to buy his way into heaven.

If survival of the fittest is the rule, let only the fit survive.

The Straw Man argument actually serves two purposes. One is obvious, and one is less obvious. In its obvious use, the person making the argument invents a simplified (and often mischaracterized) version of the opponent’s position and logically dismantles that. It makes him look like the winner of the debate (at least to those who don’t understand the other side’s actual position). (The crocoduck is the most hilarious use of the Straw Man argument of all time.)

The less obvious use of the Straw Man argument is to convince the speaker himself. Cal Thomas is mischaracterizing evolution as being solely about survival of the fittest. That’s an important element, but the forces that drive selection and evolution are more complex. Furthermore, the survival of the human species is driven by more than just biological evolution. No society could endure if it lived by the animalistic “there’s always a bigger fish” rule alone.

But Cal Thomas likes his oversimplified version of evolution. He can comfortably reject that version. That version doesn’t challenge his beliefs about the universe and his place in it.

That was the sentiment of Ebenezer Scrooge before his visitation by those three spirits and his subsequent transformation. Let the poor and starving die, he said, “…and decrease the surplus population.”

It’s not just Ebenezer Scrooge:

Who is to say such a notion is wrong without a standard by which to judge wrong.

Certainly not the Libertarians or the teabaggers. I have no idea what this has to do with Christopher Hitchens’ death, but Cal Thomas brought it up.

To object to God is to create morality from a Gallup Poll. In Gallup We Trust doesn’t have the same authority.

That’s a cute line, but it’s irrelevant. Nobody is objecting to God. We’re only objecting to the behavior of some of the people who believe in him.

To his other point, we do create morality from a Gallup poll. Not an actual Gallup poll, but by the consensus of the governed. That’s how, over the centuries, we have determined that genocide, slavery, and capital punishment are wrong, to name just a few. All three of which, by the way, are approved by God as “moral” and “good”.

Hitchens was a gifted writer, but who gave him the gift?

This is a retread of the C.S. Lewis argument from above. It exists; therefore God made it that way.

Why was he not a gifted actor, surgeon or athlete? Why was he not talentless? Was it an evolutionary accident, which would mean his gift and his life were meaningless and merely a “chasing after the wind”? (See Ecclesiastes) Apparently he thought so.

And this is a retread of the “quote the Bible for proof” argument. Cal is starting to peter out (See Peter).

An atheist will tell you he doesn’t need God in order to be good, or perform good works. Maybe not, but the very notion of “good” must have both a definition and a definer.

Yes. Good is defined by the collective agreement of society. The definition of good has changed throughout history.

We cannot allow good to be defined by God. He is one of the most atrocious monsters in all of literature.

Who is the author of evil?

Based on the evidence provided in that last link, obviously God.

And if God is nonexistent, why do we call it evil?

Good point. We shouldn’t. Evil is a mythological term that has no usefulness in an enlightened society.

Is one person’s evil another person’s good? Does such a view lead to ethics that must inevitably be situational?

Yes. Not all situations are black and white.

(BTW, the essence of that quote predates the movie.)

Scripture warns, “The fool has said in his heart ‘there is no God.’” (Psalm 14:1)

I love that quote. Fundies love to slam it down on the table in triumph, as if to say “Checkmate, bitch!”

Get back to me when you come up with a better argument for that point, will you Cal?

In this season when many celebrate the object of their faith, there is no joy in the death of one who had faith that God does not exist. Hitchens now knows the truth and that can only be the worst possible news for him.

Actually, Hitchens can’t “know” that. He stopped existing a few days ago.

In the extremely unlikely chance that there is something after death, it cannot be the God and heaven described in the Bible. That book is so full of contradictions and inaccuracies that it can’t be an accurate description of the afterlife. That means that it is the fundies who will be in for the rude shock when they depart this mortal coil.

Since I have a second oddly-suggestive photograph of Kim Jong-Il, I need to write a second article. Here are some comments I found on a fundie “news” site about the Christmas trees that the South Korean fundies are putting on the border to piss off the North Koreans.

A Christian calling himself A_Proud_Infidel says:

Overseas, the Commies persecute Christianity worse than their ACLU brethren in the USA!

I don’t think the exclamation point means he’s shouting the entire comment. I suspect that’s how he always writes USA.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

Along those same lines, raffaro writes:

SHIT aren’t atheists pigs trying that here in America.Looks like they have alot in common with those Staliist pigs after all !!!!!!!

Camarottajr says:

I guess we have to wait for the “JackAss In Chief,” barack hussein obama to weigh in on this after he finishes his meeting with the mu slimes about tolorance…! My bet is JackAss In Chief barack hussein obama won’t say a word, what say you?

I say he needs to meet with the Christians about tolerance.

Orent asks why we allow North Korea to continue to exist, to which Lilly Maus replies:

“Allowed to continue?”…Did you know they have the bomb??? did you know they don’t have morals ???…Now add bomb + no morals = KABOOM…

I’m not sure what evidence the “no morals” claim is based on. I’m guessing it’s because communists are atheists, so of course they have no morals!

glenp827 writes:

CHRISTMAS TREE is a pagan symbol coopted for the holiday

to which Violet asks:

Is that why makes atheists so angry? We stole their Yule Logs and conifer trees.

Yes. That’s exactly why. It has nothing to do with fundies trying to turn the United States into their own version of North Korea.

Elsewhere on that page, Violet also says:

Guess South Korea is getting a taste of what it is to be an American Christian. We deal with this all the time. Somebody is always yapping about how Christians offend them.

Actually, Christians don’t offend me, and I don’t know very many non-Christians who are offended by them. We’re just offended by their actions.

Somebody named jong (really?) writes:

God bless those that put up the Trees. Throw a bag of rice at North Korea that will shut them up. Or even better put a nativity on the US Consulate and make sure it is well lite(I am sorry I forgot we have a muslim homosexual as President and Sec. of State is also a Marxist little chance of that happening)

Not to mention the fact that we don’t have a US consulate in North Korea.

Doug has a treasure trove of gems for us:

The ungodly will go at any length to stop Christianity at all costs. They’ll even risk a war, if need be. This incident is an example of their insane quest to shut down God in our lives. Outside our borders lays a vast world of hate for Christians. If you are a Jew or Christian, they want to kill you. Bottom-line: The world hates Christians and Jews………

And inside our country, these ungodly’s, have crept in like cockroaches bringing mayhem into our streets. We were once a peaceful nation, and now we’ve become a nation in terror. They want to take God out of the equation. And let political correctness rule the day. You want troubles in this life, leave Christ out of your life, because you will get no blessings from God.

And we’ve become a nation under siege by these ungodly nations. Watch how this Christmas tree issue unfolds in N. Korea, and watch how the media will fold into “political correctness”!

I was all set for my big comeback article tonight. It was going to be good. I was going to write about a high-pressure fundie recruitment ploy that utilizes intensive sales techniques, a la the dreaded timeshare sales pitch.

It turns out that isn’t quite what they do, and it was a rather sucky documentary to boot.

The film I watched is episode one of an 8-part U.K. documentary series on religion, titled Revelations (That page at the IMDb is like the documentary: Not really worth your time.).

The series was actually made back in 2009. Apparently it’s in the process of being rebroadcast right now. Depending on where you live, you can watch a few of the episodes online, but not episode one.

That first episode is titled “How to Find God”. It’s about a Christian recruitment program called The Alpha Course. Alpha was developed by a reverend in the Church of England, but it’s used by churches of many denominations. According to the documentary, “there are 30,000 Alpha courses running… in 168 countries.”

The whole shtick here is that churches know they’re losing members. They don’t want the golden goose (that allows them to avoid getting real jobs) to die, so they have to bring in fresh bodies. Like the tobacco industry, they don’t want to steal parishioners away from some other church. That just means they’d be squabbling over the crumbs of a smaller and smaller pie. They need brand new bodies! They’ve had schemes running for centuries to suck in the kids (just like the tobacco industry). That used to be sufficient. Sadly, not even that will stave off irrelevance. They need some other source of bodies. How about atheists? No, that really wouldn’t work. Here’s an idea! Why don’t they harvest some agnostics? Brilliant!

So they developed this course that runs one night per week for eight weeks, plus a weekend getaway (ironic, since “getaway” is the one thing they don’t want you to do). The documentary tells us that more than two million agnostics in Britain have done the Alpha course. One in eight converts. Multiply that by all of the other Alpha courses running around the world. Yow! That’s a lot of very weak agnostics.

The documentary was produced by a chap named Jon Ronson. I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because I didn’t know who he is. It turns out that this is the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats. If you go to his Wikipedia page, the first thing you’ll see is a picture of him speaking at TAM London in 2009. (If I had actually been able to score a ticket to TAM London like I wanted, then maybe I wouldn’t have been so clueless on who he is.)

The documentary itself was somewhat amateurish. It follows eight agnostics as they go through this course, yet Ronson doesn’t even bother to get all their names. One agnostic bails after the first night. We watch her walk away while Ronson narrates “…one of them, I never know her name, says it isn’t for her.” Then in a later scene, his video tape runs out, and he misses a dramatic moment. Later in the documentary, he forgets to turn off the camera. He catches an important scene merely through ineptitude! Despite this, the program did hold my interest, but maybe only because I was taking notes for this article.

The way the Alpha course is structured, everybody piles into the church some evening for the weekly meeting. The head of that church gives a low-pressure lecture about Jesus, what he taught, how we “know” he was real (they claim to have evidence, but it’s just Josephus, who wrote about Jesus years later), and how God loves you so much he’s going to send you to hell to burn and writhe in agony for eternity for not clapping your hands and believing in Tinkerbell.

After the lecture, the congregation of agnostics breaks up into small discussion groups. In the documentary, we follow one of these groups, which consists of eight agnostics (seven after the first night) plus two discussion leaders. In the group, they discuss where everybody is coming from regarding their thoughts on whether God & Jesus exist and if there is any chance in hell of any of them converting.

During these discussion groups, the agnostics raise all sorts of logical objections. Those clever Alpha people can’t be stumped, though! The head office publishes a set of pamphlets that refutes (or so they think) all of the common logical proofs that God & Son are unlikely to exist.

It’s clear that the agnostics in this documentary are not buying any of it at that first meeting. For whatever reason, all seven come back in subsequent weeks and continue to subject themselves to this low-grade sales pitch. Ultimately, some of them falter and find themselves getting drawn in. Don’t these people read science fiction? Never go into orbit around a black hole!

I would surmise that the reason this course works on so many agnostics is because it isn’t hardcore fundie. Supposedly the content is evangelical. It is anti-gay. They even speak in tongues at one point (or fail to in this documentary, thanks to a convention of sports car enthusiasts). But I didn’t see any of the fire and brimstone that we normally associate with fundiegelicalism.

Maybe that’s something that varies by church. Of the thousands of churches around the world that use this course, perhaps some of them whip themselves into a frenzy of Jesus-praising and gay-bashing and porn-hating. I’d be very curious to see what their conversion rate is. As counterintuitive as it might seem, I’d be willing to bet that those fundie churches actually have a much higher conversion rate than one in eight. After all, look how many people buy timeshares.

[If you are unable to find this documentary through your cable system or however else you acquire content, I did find a watchable copy on YouTube. It’s apparently from German TV, because it’s full of German subtitles (or maybe the video is speaking in tongues). Here are part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.]

Don’t panic about that last post. That went up by mistake. I was having too much fun at the Regional Atheist Meeting to run home and stop the post. I figured if Harold Camping was wrong about his rapture, I could be wrong about mine.

When I first arrived (a bit late), I was surprised to see the place crawling with reporters. There were multiple news outlets there, both print/internet and television. I watched one of the 11:00 PM news broadcasts that night, but we weren’t on it. I also barely found any references to us in the papers/online. It seems odd that they’d go through the effort of sending reporters and then not use any of it. Maybe we just aren’t interesting or colorful enough for them.

The San Jose Calif. Mercury News gave us two short paragraphs in their larger rapture-is-a-bust article, although they did give us a few photographs. But of the five photographs, two were of the looney-tune who stood out front all day trying to convert us. So 40% of the news photographs devoted to our event actually covered the religious opposition to our event.

(To be fair, the San Francisco Chronicle gave us more coverage, but they only covered Sunday, which wasn’t the day of the rapture (of course, neither was Saturday!). I didn’t go on Sunday. I had run off to the Maker Faire to see, among other things, Adam Savage stand in a Faraday cage between two arcing Tesla coils.)

Speaking of the fundie out front, I passed him several times, going to & fro lunch and dinner. He was always engaged in a civil, non-emotional debate with one or several atheists. Mostly, he was giving the standard arguments you’ve heard from them before. The one exception was how he justified genocide.

I know that fundies have no problem with murder as long as God does it, but I guess I’ve never heard them articulate it in the flesh before. It’s one thing to read it waved off abstractly on an apologetics website. It’s another thing to have one tell it to your face.

An atheist was telling the fundie that God is an immoral brute, because he killed millions of men, women, and children in the Flood. The fundie said “That’s not murder. That’s not immoral, because God did it. God is the source of morality. If he did it, it can’t be immoral.” (I’m paraphrasing here.)

That is why these people are so dangerous. You would think we would have not just a consensus but a unanimity of opinion in this country that murder, especially genocide, is immoral.

Nope!

The apocalypse was scheduled for 6:00 PM. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, it didn’t happen. But here’s the funny thing. At 7:04 PM, the Earth shook. It didn’t exactly open up and swallow us all, but it was an actual, honest-to-dog earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6! It not only shook our building, but also the Family Radio building, which was just a couple of miles away. And if you take away Daylight Saving Time, the quake actually struck at 6:04 PM, just four minutes behind Harold Camping’s prediction!

Of course, he predicted a quake of much larger size, actual destruction, and actual death, so we have to count this prediction as a bust. There were bigger quakes that day, including a 6.1 in New Zealand. In fact, there were at least nine earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater on Saturday. But, as the USGS points out, that’s about how many you get every day.

I’ve been looking at some of the coverage that failed-prophet Harold Camping’s rapture failure has received since it failed. A “news blog” (whatever the hell that is) on Yahoo reports:

Camping’s PR aide, Tom Evans, told the L.A. Times that the group is “disappointed” that 200 million true believers weren’t lifted up to heaven on Saturday while everyone else suffered and eventually died as a series of earthquakes and famine destroyed the Earth.

I can see how that would be disappointing (emphasis added). Maybe we can get some of them jobs torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. I think they might have an aptitude.

Finally, have you seen that Camping is sticking by his end-is-nigh story, but he’s changed the date? This is just too funny. His original prediction was that the so-called “good guys” (you know, the ones who think genociding an entire planet or watching billions writhe in agony is moral and proper) would rapture on May 21st, the rest of us would be tortured for five months, and then the Earth would kaboom on October 21st. Well now he’s saying that the beginning of the end did start on May 21st after all, but none of us can see it. Instead, the rapture and the torture and the destruction of the Earth are all going to happen on October 21st.

And when October 21st comes and goes, then what’s your new date going to be, Harold?

And for those who bothered to read (or scroll down) this far, here’s what you could have been doing on Sunday. Here’s Adam Savage at the Maker Faire:

Well this is embarrassing. It appears that I have just been raptured.

If you’re seeing this post, it means that God has taken me! (Or possibly I’ve just been run over by a drunk driver while trying to cross the street. Please check outside for a mangled body on the road. That’s probably me.)

I had this post scheduled to run automatically at 6:01 PM on May 21st. I figured that the rapture would run on time (God is like Mussolini, you know). If I hadn’t been raptured by 6:01, I was planning to intervene and prevent this post from publishing. The fact that you’re seeing it now means that I have been raptured!

Hallelujah!

This just shows what those fundies know. They claimed that I’d spend eternity in hell for being an atheist. I’m not going to hell! I’m going to heaven!

…Surrounded by fundies for eternity. Oh, shit!

Francis Crick co-discovered, with James D. Watson and Rosalind Franklin, the structure of DNA in 1953.

Wikipedia has an entire section of his article titled “Views on Religion”. That section starts off with:

Crick once joked, “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.”

To which I ask: How do we know he was joking?

The article mentions his book Of Molecules and Men:

[H]e wondered: at what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul?

This is one of my problems with Christianity. It places humans apart from animals as distinct and special. This belief then affects how we treat the other species we share the world with.

More specifically, can anyone answer the question? Were souls just floating around out in the ether waiting for humans to evolve?

If they weren’t waiting specifically for humans to evolve, then they must also latch onto any other passing organism, just like all other generalized parasites do.

If they were waiting specifically for humans, that would imply directed evolution or foreknowledge of events. I suppose if you’re religious, you can wave your arms and say “That’s it!” That answer doesn’t work for the rest of us.

And if souls were waiting for humans specifically, when did they jump in? Were they sitting around the African savannah watching our ancestors? Cheering and jeering them on?

“Evolve, dammit!”

“No! Not behind the bush! That’s where the lion is! You’ll never pass on your genes if you do that!”

The waiting must have been tedious:

“Well how about that one? It’s called ‘Lucy’. That’s a good name.”

“Nah. It only has a cranial capacity of 400 cc. Where would I hang the Van Gogh?”

Then later:

“Look! There’s a Homo!”

“They have as much right to marry as anyone else!”

“No! The others were Australopithecines. This one is more modern. Surely we can inhabit this one!”

“Maybe, but do you really want to live in something called Homo erectus?”

So if the souls were waiting specifically for Homo sapiens to evolve, when did they jump in? There are no sharp boundaries between species. The parents weren’t Homo erectus and their children Homo sapiens. It was a fluid and gradual transition. So how did the souls know when the species was ripe, and when did that happen?

Returning to the Wikipedia article, Crick wondered:

At what moment does a baby get a soul?

That, of course, seems to be the heart of the abortion debate. Fundies don’t seem to have a problem killing non-human life. They seem to use the alleged existence of the soul as the defining characteristic.

Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years.

This view is held by many scientists, of course.

Crick felt that a new scientific world view was rapidly being established, and predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of humans and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the “soul” would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind.

The brain is amazingly complex. I’m not convinced we’ll ever have it completely figured out. Assume that we do. I know that won’t make “erroneous Christian concepts… [un]tenable”. We’ve known for quite a while that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but that hasn’t made young-Earth creationism go away.

Wikipedia also says:

Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer. He speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray.

From Book Scans

This field of study is now known as neurotheology.

That Was All Foreplay

Anyway, all of the above is just background material to what I really wanted to write about: Sex!

I somehow came across a website called TheBestColleges.org. It’s an odd mix of useful info and trivia.

In the trivia department is an article titled “7 Generous College Donations (With Insane Strings Attached)”. I disagree. The strings aren’t insane, just a little quirky.

The last “generous” donation is by our old friend Francis Crick. They write:

Francis Crick, famed English molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner for discovering the DNA molecule…

They have a factual error right out the gate. DNA was already known. He co-discovered its structure.

…was offered a fellowship (a senior office in British Universities) at the newly opened Churchill College, a constituent college of Cambridge University. However Crick, a staunch and rabid atheist…

Another error! People love to label any outspoken atheist as rabid. He was not. I happen to know he was vaccinated.

…only accepted the honor on the basis that a chapel would never be built at Churchill, a supposed center of science and technology. Much to his chagrin though, a donation was later made to the school for the sole purpose of establishing a place of worship on her campus which was accepted and Crick’s Nightmare was built.

That’s so typical. There’s always somebody out there who is so massively offended by the existence of a public institution that isn’t contaminated by religion that they have to do the infecting themselves. We need a vaccine for that.

Anticipating Crick’s tempter tantrum…

Don’t you love how they characterize his objections?

…Winston Churchill himself (the chairman) attempted to smooth things over by advising him that no one need enter the chapel unless they wished to do so and thus the building could simply be ignored. Crick replied to that letter with a donation to the school of 10 guineas for the establishment of a brothel to operate under the same logic which, sadly for future generations of Churchill’s students, was denied.

Seems logical to me.

The best member of the cast is the youngest daughter:

The only problem is the show isn’t carried in the U.S., as near as I can tell. Maybe I could find it in southern California, probably in Torrance. I hear it’s raining today. It’s coming down (quite a bit) in torrents.

It saddens me greatly to report the demise of my second-favorite blog.

Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes is no more.

Bing McGhandi has announced that his fiery, flamboyant assault on the self-stupid has ceased production.

He is shifting focus and will be starting a new blog under his real name. The new blog will cover a somewhat-related topic.

I wish him well and hope the new blog is as good as the old. If I’m correctly reading between the lines, I fear that the new blog will be toned down a bit. However he writes it, you can be sure it will still be good reading. I’ll post the link when he formally announces it.

It has always struck me as odd that everybody keeps asking kids the same question this time of year: “Do you believe in Santa?”

Why? Nobody asks them “Do you believe in Barack Obama?” or “Do you believe in J.K. Rowling?” or “Do you believe in the +8 oxidation state of ruthenium tetroxide?”

The fact that you’re asking them specifically about Santa and no one else raises doubt about his existence. That’s fine if that’s the goal, but most folks want to preserve that fantasy for them for the first few years.

A fascinating phenomenon is what happens after the kids figure out that Santa is a hoax. The very obvious next step is to apply that exact same test to God, but most of them don’t. He’s a magic man with impossible powers. There’s absolutely no evidence for his existence (at least Santa was providing proof of his existence every Christmas morning, until they discover that the evidence is being planted by fraudsters intending to deceive them).

Most kids don’t take that necessary and obvious next step to revelation. I can think of three reasons:

1. Kids like magic. If one magical mystery man is taken from them, they probably aren’t eager to have the rest of their comforting delusions stolen as well.
2. The logic part of the brain has not yet fully developed (and in many, it remains stunted for the rest of their life).
3. The adults around them believe in God.

So what is the age that the kids figure out that the adults in their life are liars? And how does the Santa myth survive even that long?

I was 5. Until recently, I assumed that’s when everyone else figured it out (or at least by age 6). Apparently some kids don’t put the pieces together until they’re 7 or 8!

We lived an idyllic life in a perfect house with an immaculate yard in a tranquil neighborhood in a glistening city thriving in an America at the height of its prosperity and prestige.

Actually, that’s a crock. It was the height of the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had been hijacked by red-baiting delusional paranoids who had bled off most of the federal budget into feeding the ravenous maw of the Military-Industrial Complex, forcibly conscripting its young men and sending them off to die in an unwinnable and pointless war. Races were rioting, MLK and RFK were being assassinated, smog and environmental degradation were at an all-time high, the world was on the brink of nuclear armageddon, and we lived in the primary blast radius of the nearby naval base.

And to make matters worse, there were only three channels on TV.

That “perfect house” was far from it. It had such a flimsy foundation that I remember one of the walls was splitting because the ground was settling. My dad had to go under the house and prop up the wall with a car jack. As far as I know, it was still under there when we moved out. I guess the new buyer didn’t check under the house. Home inspections, people! You need to hire a building inspector to check out the house before you buy it! If you don’t, you may discover that the previous owner has included a free car jack in the deal.

It really wasn’t a bad neighborhood, though. I remember playing with my wagon on the driveway one day (no, that isn’t a rude euphemism). The most beautiful, drop-dead gorgeous woman came out of the house across the street and walked toward her car.

My jaw hit the ground, my eyes bugged out, and I started shouting “Pretty lady! Come here! Pretty lady! I love you!”

My mother yelled at me in a stage whisper: “Quiet! Stop that! You’re embarrassing me! Get in the house!”

The woman got in her car and drove away. I was 4 or 5, you understand. This was my first lesson in the unattainability of beautiful women.

A lesson I would learn over and over again.

True story. Where was I? Oh, yes, Santa Claus.

So it was December, and I was 5 and living in a not-so-bad neighborhood in an otherwise-unidyllic America. I don’t really remember the name of the family that lived next door, but let’s pretend I do, and their name was Connor.

A Saturday or two before Christmas, the Connors threw a party for all the kids in the neighborhood. I remember attending with my brother, who was two years older (and therefore experienced in the ways of the world).

There must have been cake and games and hookers, but the part I remember was the visit from Santa! Boy, the Connors had connections (or compromising photographs)! Here was Santa Claus, and he came all the way from the North Pole to visit our little party! (He’s also available for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and strip-o-grams.)

He gave us each a small wrapped gift, asked us each what we wanted for Christmas, and then left.

Later that day, after the party was over, I’m sure I had already bent the Slinky beyond usefulness. I was probably just staring at it and fantasizing about how much better my life would be once puberty kicked in.

My brother said to me: “You know that wasn’t really Santa Claus.”

I said “Yes it was!”

“No it wasn’t! It was Mr. Connor in a Santa suit!”

“That’s not true! That was Santa Claus! And you’re a butthole!”

What I experienced next was probably one of my daily beatings.

Anyway, that incident must have disturbed me greatly, because I was still thinking about it the next day. I remember thinking “Wait a minute. His voice did sound a lot like Mr. Connor’s.”

A bit later: “Hey! I think that was Mr. Connor!”

A day or two later I remember thinking “Well if that was Mr. Connor, how do I know that all of the other times I saw Santa that it was really him?”

A bit later: “Wait a minute. How do I know that any of the other times I saw Santa it was really him? I bet they were all just guys in Santa suits! I bet they’re all fakes! I bet there’s no Santa at all!”

So I asked my mother, and she confirmed it.

Then we went to church.

Yesterday, I mentioned that somebody at work was so fearful of offending any coworkers that she was afraid to put up a few Christmas decorations in her cubicle. That reminded me of the days when I used to be offended by Christmas.

I haven’t celebrated Christmas since I was 20. There are many reasons for that. My rejection of Christianity some years before was one of the reasons. Sure, lots of atheists celebrate Christmas anyway, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know any other atheists (actually, in those days I thought I was agnostic, even though my beliefs were little different from now.).

There were several other reasons, though, that were much more important. That was a rotten time in my life, and the stresses and demands of the holiday season just made everything that was going wrong so much worse.

In those days, I worked for a crappy little aluminum distributor. They paid me $6 an hour. No benefits. No medical insurance. And they didn’t withhold payroll taxes. That’s weird, I thought. Aren’t they supposed to do that? That’s fine with me! I couldn’t afford to live on what I would have netted if they had withheld taxes. I didn’t care if they got in trouble with the government!

This shows how ignorant I was of how the tax laws worked. It turns out they had set me up as an independent contractor without telling me. This shows how ignorant I was of business in general. They were taking advantage of me.

Early the following year, I got tired of not accruing vacation and not having medical insurance. I started pushing them to actually give me that stuff. They hemmed and hawed and told me how it would “be just another week or two, but there’s this red tape problem you see, but we’ll have that fixed next week, and then everything will be OK and then we can put you on the company plan.”

This went on for over a month. They actually had no intention of putting me on their insurance (or making me a real employee), but they weren’t going to tell me that. Their plan was to string me along for as long as they could. I finally told them that I needed the insurance, and they had to give it to me now.

So they fired me.

A few weeks later, I had my taxes done. That’s when I discovered the difference between an independent contractor (which I never agreed to be) and an employee (which they had implied I was). I also got walloped with a massive tax bill that sent me reeling.

Oh. So that’s how that works.

Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me these things?

That’s when I discovered that maybe 20-year-olds aren’t smarter than their parents.

Anyway, all of that is just backstory to let you know what a horrible company I was working for.

So it was that December, just two months before being fired for asking for medical insurance. This was the early 1980s. There was little multicultural sensitivity in those days (political correctness was just starting to rear its ugly head). The prevailing assumption in those pre-PC days was that everybody celebrated Christmas, except the Jews (and those crazy Jehovah’s Witnesses, but nobody had any sympathy for a group of people who wake you up on Saturday morning). So if you weren’t Jewish, the expectation was that you were at least nominally Christian, and you celebrated Christmas.

Lots of people decorated their desks (We didn’t have cubicles. They probably would have had to pay us more if we did.) with a few Christmas ornaments or Christmas cards. Did this offend me? No.

We had a secret Santa game. Was I offended? No. I even participated in it. (That’s right. I bought one of my coworkers a Christmas present, but I didn’t give anything to any of my relatives.)

We even had a Christmas party. Everyone was expected to attend. This was primarily because it was during work hours on the last work day before Christmas. I attended, unoffended.

But here’s what did offend me: People coming up to me and wishing me a merry Christmas.

First of all, you have to remember that I hated Christmas in those days. So some of my offense was just my redirected anger. But some of that offense was legitimate and justifiable.

Participating in Christmas rituals at work was OK and non-offensive, because (1) it beat working, and (2) it wasn’t the actual act of celebrating Christmas. Eating a sugar cookie shaped like a Christmas tree is not the same as worshiping the Christ child.

What offended me back then was the assumption that I celebrated Christmas.

“Well of course you celebrate Christmas. Why wouldn’t you?” was the implied message.

That assumption does not exist today. Everybody is tuned in to the fact that there are a multitude of beliefs out there. Half the people at my current job are immigrants. I know we have several Hindus. We have at least one Muslim. I know I’ve worked with Buddhists in the past.

People these days say “happy holidays” at least as often as “merry Christmas”. Many of those “merry Christmases” don’t seem to have that same assumption of rigid adherence to a social norm anymore. It’s like many people are really saying “Merry Christmas, or whichever holiday you prefer.”

Sure, there are always the fundies. There are always those Christians who insist that Christmas is the only genuine holiday this season, and anybody who celebrates anything else is not worthy of their good wishes.

But so what? They’re entitled to their holiday, just as the rest of us are entitled to whatever else. So when a fundie wishes me “merry Christmas” and means Christmas only, I’m not offended. They’re no longer the norm. I no longer have to conform to their expectations. Society at large has moved on.

(And it pisses them off!! But that’s another story.)

We have a relatively new employee at work. Let’s call her KC. She’s probably in her early 50s. She is very obviously Catholic. She doesn’t advertise this. It just comes out in her expressions and anecdotes every so often.

This is her first Christmas season with us. A few weeks back, she said to me: “Do you know if it’s OK if I put up some Christmas decorations in my cubicle? They’d be low-key.”

I said: “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

She said: “Nobody else has.”

“That’s because we’re all a bunch of old sourpusses.”

“I thought there might be a rule against it.”

“Why would there be a rule against it?”

“Because somebody might get offended.”

Wow, I thought. Are we that bad? Have we been so successful at getting Christmas out of the government buildings and off of government land that the Christians think they’re not allowed to have it anywhere?

And what sort of backward companies has she been working for? Are there really employers out there who won’t allow somebody to put a baby Jesus figurine in their cubicle?

It’s her own cubicle! As long as it isn’t garish to the point that it’s disruptive or overwhelming to the point that it causes discomfort, she should be allowed to do it. If you don’t like looking at baby Jesus, stay out of her cubicle.

People decorate their cubicles with little mementos of their life. It makes them feel more at ease at work. It reminds them of the important things in their life. Are we going to tell people they can’t have that stuff? Because, really, how do you say what is acceptable?

Can I have pictures of the wife and kids? Surely that would be OK. What if I’m white, the wife is black, and there is a racist working for the company? He’d be offended.

Or what if I’m living with my girlfriend, and I have her picture on my desk? And what if there is a fundie sitting in the next cubicle? That picture is a constant reminder to him that I’m living in sin!

Obviously you can’t govern by the rule of “somebody might get offended”.

So what is it like at your workplace? Have there been any extreme examples (too far in either direction) at any of the places you’ve worked in the past?

(Tomorrow: When I was offended by office Christmas.)