I just watched the latest episode of Moyers & Company with Bill Moyers. He interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a forthcoming book titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. It was a fascinating program. I recommend it, if you haven’t watched it already.

This part of Moyers’ intro sort of sums up Haidt’s premise:

His ideas are controversial but they make you think. Haidt says, for example, that liberals misunderstand conservatives more than the other way around, and that while conservatives see self-sufficiency as a profound moral value for individuals, liberals are more focused on a public code of care and equity.

The thing about any of the social sciences is that they’re tricky to study. You can stick water in a beaker on a hot plate to measure its boiling point, but how do you measure a society’s boiling point? The social sciences are littered with the corpses of theories, plausible and crazy alike, that attempted to explain why we behave (individually or collectively) the way we do.

This Haidt guy has some interesting ideas. Is there any truth to them? I don’t know. I like things that can be measured objectively, and this isn’t it. I know I’m more partial to the ideas of George Lakoff, but I don’t know that he’s right either.

Haidt’s ideas are based on his Moral Foundations Theory. He describes it on its website:

In brief, the theory proposes that six (or more) innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. [emphasis added]

These six foundations are:

1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

When they asked liberals and conservatives how strongly they felt about those issues, this is how it came out:

I guess my biggest concern is how neutrally the questions were worded. It’s extremely difficult to write bias-free questions. Even his choice of labels raises some questions. In the list above, the first word of each pair is clearly the “better” or more desirable trait. But when I see the word “authority”, for example, I have an immediate negative reaction.

I’ve always disrespected authority. And what is “legitimate authority” anyway? There is very little in this country. The politicians have authority by virtue of occupying the roles defined in the Constitution, but it is not legitimate in my view. They have not earned that authority. They bought it with massive campaign contributions from Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and a few other unelected billionaires.

Or maybe he is referring to actual legitimate authority, which would result from free and fair elections. I’m all in favor of that, but we don’t have too many of those.

I score low on one perception of the definition, but high on the other. Since I don’t know how free of bias (conscious or unconscious) his questions were worded, I don’t know how much stock to put in his results.

It sure is peculiar that the liberals are so extremely lopsided and the conservatives are so evenly distributed.

Despite my doubts, he nevertheless has some interesting things to say in the interview. It’s worth trying to listen with an open mind and learn what we can from it.

Oh, and notice at the end of the interview that he shares my opinion that the system is extremely broken. He is of the mistaken opinion that it is fixable, though.

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.]

Rush Limbaugh guest-starred in one of the worst Family Guys ever last night. Normally, the show is unapologetically liberal. I guess Seth MacFarlane somehow felt obligated to give the extremist hate-fringe of the Republican party a chance to whitewash itself last night (because it’s not white enough).

For some reason, it takes over a year to produce one episode of Family Guy. That doesn’t make sense. It’s obviously done on a computer. The conservatives over at South Park can animate an entire episode in less than a week. I guess whether it’s George W Bush’s failed foreign policy (“Saudi terrorists just attacked America! Let’s invade Iraq!”) or an episode bashing Al Gore (“ManBearPig”), conservatives can make a turd in under a week. It takes liberals an entire year to produce something worthless (last night’s Family Guy or Obamacare).

Even if you take extra long to polish it, a turd is still a turd.

In the episode, liberal Brian suddenly, and with no explanation at all, becomes a dittohead. Rush had asked Brian if he had ever read anything that he had ever written. Brian says that he heard what other people thought of Rush, and that’s good enough for him.

That’s ridiculous. I’m sure there are some liberals who are too stupid to do their own thinking (there are millions of conservatives like this, so there are bound to be at least a few comparable liberals), but Brian isn’t one of them. Furthermore, you don’t have to read any of Limbaugh’s books to know the guy is telling lies and promoting selfish and hateful ideas. We’ve all heard this guy on the radio. We all know what his positions are.

Seth MacFarlane doesn’t respect his characters. He has a history of changing them arbitrarily. Stewie used to be an evil genius bent on world domination. Now he’s just a gay toddler. On last night’s American Dad, we discovered that Francine is an airhead. Funny (no, actually, it isn’t), she seemed pretty smart in the past.

I’m not the only one upset about the garbage Seth MacFarlane is foisting upon us. So is Bill Johnson of the American Decency Association! Yay! I haven’t featured one of his rants in quite a while! We’re overdue for a good BJ (rant, that is).

In an article titled “Strange Bedfellows”, BJ says:

The “edgy humor” of Family Guy and its sister show American Dad has crossed the line of decency time and time again. Some of the topics have been “Terri Schiavo: The Musical”, making fun of Sarah Palin’s Downs Syndrome child, a man pleasuring a horse, a teenage boy watching strippers via webcam, etc.

I know. That’s why I watch it.

Limbaugh says he came out “looking like a champ on this thing”…

Which is exactly the problem. Not all ideas have equal merit. Not all are respectable. The hatred that Limbaugh and his ilk promote should not be legitimized and glamorized. It needs to be marginalized.

There are some good conservative thinkers out there. There are some Republicans with good ideas. Feature them. Let the good conservative ideas have a little air time.

While Rush certainly is not always a paragon of virtue, or even a staunch defender of all social issues important to the family…

Meaning what? He’s not extreme enough?

…those of us in the conservative movement expect more. Family Guy regularly and seemingly with malice trashes the values and beliefs of millions – blaspheming Christ,…

What? Blasphemy is a crime now? What is this, the 12th century? (Not yet, but the fundies are working on it.)

…degrading women…

Actually, what degrades women is the fundies’ insistence that they fill their “traditional” role of wife, mother, and maid and leave the careers to the men.

…exposing viewers (of which many are youth) to vile sexual verbiage and innuendo.

The show is rated TV-14, and every TV has a V-chip. So instead of parental responsibility, BJ wants the government to raise our children for us.

So while MacFarlane is throwing a bone to the conservatives…

Uhh… BJ… I don’t think Rush would appreciate your choice of words.

…Rush is jumping to catch it.

BJ, I definitely don’t think Rush wants to catch your bone.

In the article, Hyatt tells us that he watched the MTV VMA awards:

It’s been a while since I’ve seen MTV, but I was flabbergasted. I could not believe the sensuality and decadence I witnessed. Gail and I finally had to turn it off. We just couldn’t take it any more.

It was so terrible I had to watch it all night!

As I thought about my experience later, it made me sad.

I’ve been spending all that money on Viagra, when I could be watching MTV for free!

I am the father of five daughters. So perhaps I’m just a little overly sensitive.

No, Hyatt. I’d say you’re a little overly-sexed. And very selfish and irresponsible. Ever hear of condoms? No, contrary to fundie belief, they don’t cause AIDS. They will, however, reduce your carbon footprint and leave a lot more food, water, and other resources for the rest of the world. It isn’t about how many fundies you can bring into this world or how many “souls” you save from being born into non-fundie families. It’s about being responsible and not using more than your fair share of the world’s limited resources.

But I was shocked at the complete absence of modesty, the ridicule of virginity….
…
Where are these girls fathers? Has anyone ever taught them the concept of modesty? Or have all the men in their lives simply exploited them as sex objects

That’s why it’s such a good thing that fundies don’t treat the women in their lives as possessions that they can control.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a prude.

Ummm…

These are not rules about skirt length or the amount of cleavage you can show.

Although if you want to come up with such rules, Hyatt, be sure to let me know. You could hire me to gather data. I already have a ruler. I’d have to get really close to measure accurately.

Hey, you’re not thinking of keeping that job for yourself, are you? No, you never would. After all, it’s not like you watch MTV all night just to see how skimpy the outfits are.

I gave these to my girls when they were growing up.
…
Here they are: “Four Guidelines for Modesty”:

1. If you have trouble getting into it or out of it, it is probably not modest.
2. If you have to be careful when you sit down or bend over, it is probably not modest.
3. If people look at any part of your body before looking at your face, it is probably not modest.
4. If you can see your most private body parts or an outline of those parts under the fabric, it is probably not modest.

These dictates of his can actually be summarized into one:

I’ve spent the last hour looking for a good fundie “news” article to rip apart. I’ve come up empty-handed. This is happening to me more and more often. Everything they’re writing these days is so derivative. It’s all the same old crap.

“Contraception is abortion!”

“America was founded by and populated exclusively by Christians!”

“The Anti-Christ is FDR Truman JFK LBJ Jimmy Carter Bill Clinton Obama!”

Don’t they have any originality? Must they be so predictable?

Come on, fundies! Say something especially stupid for a change! Make my job easy again! Every time I think I’m getting jaded, that I’m merely over-exposed to their idiocy, I think back to the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s when Jerry Falwell thought one of the Teletubbies was gay and Donald Wildmon thought Mighty Mouse was snorting cocaine.

The conservatives are right. America has lost its way. Its glory days are behind us. Even the fundies aren’t as good as they used to be.

I came across three interesting articles this last week. I thought I’d pass them along.

Somebody Went Postal on Him

Over at the WFMU blog is “The Ballad Of The Walking Postman”. It’s a tale from the Civil Rights Era. Here’s what WFMU says about it:

Today’s musical selection tells the story of Bill Moore, a white civil rights protester from Baltimore who was murdered in rural Alabama in April 1963 while on a one man Freedom Walk. He was killed on the way from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi where he planned to hand deliver to governor Ross Barnett a letter imploring him to accept racial equality and integration.

On his walk, Moore promoted his agenda by wearing sandwich board type signs reading “Equal Rights For All – Mississippi Or Bust” and “End Segregation In America – Eat At Joe’s Both Black & White.”

That alone would have been provocative enough to warrant concern for his safety. But Moore, a committed atheist, also pushed a cart displaying a “wanted” poster adorned with a sketch of Jesus that was captioned “Jesus Christ – Wanted for sedition, criminal anarchy, vagrancy, and conspiring to overthrow the established government.”

Moore had been warned of the danger of undertaking the march by himself while carrying such signs through small towns across the deep South, but he was undeterred. On the third day of his journey, his dead body was found along the side of the road about an hour northeast of Birmingham. He’d been shot twice in the head. An arrest was made, but the grand jury neglected to issue an indictment so no one was ever convicted.

If you go over to the WFMU website, you can download an MP3 of the mediocre memorial song, “The Ballad Of The Walking Postman”.

Christianity as Social Disease

Jeff Eyges alerted me to this article: “Christianity’s early days debated by scientists”. He wanted me to see how retarded some of the commenters are. That’s sort of a given on the internet. I actually found the article itself of more interest, at least a couple of parts of it.

There was a very interesting sentence in the article. Actually, it’s the first half of the sentence that is interesting:

Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, of course, after the death of Jesus around 33 AD, moving from a persecuted minority in the time of the Roman emperor Nero in 64 AD…

The remainder of that sentence is then completely botched in the original article. The rest of the sentence should be:

…to perceived persecuted minority today.

The article also discusses several possible models for how Christianity spread. The one I like is described this way:

The “social” model, where every exposure to an early Christian is seen as possibly leading to a pagan converting, much like the chances of catching a cold.

Don’t yell at me. I’m not the one comparing Christianity to a disease.

Fiction that is Stranger than Fiction

I came across a fascinating website: The Continent of Lost Anime that Time Forgot. It tells us about some of the strangest Japanese pop-culture you’ve never seen.

There is the bizarre journey inside the abnormal Japanese body, produced by the Japanese Rice Growers’ Council.

There is an especially disastrous manga version of Quincy, M.E. (not to be confused with the especially disastrous Windows ME).

There is a simplistic rip-off of Space Battleship Yamato. Not long after the show’s premature cancellation, the producer killed himself in shame. Why couldn’t he have done that before creating this embarrassment?

Next we have a truly bizarre creation that exploits the unhealthy Japanese fixation on underage girls. This show is actually called (loosely translated): We Swear to God, She’s 19 Years Old: Fetishtastic

Finally, we have the religious hired-guns of Hikyou-Kisei Studios. Are you a religion? Do you have money? Do you want to have a cartoon made?

The first example of what they produced was… well, let’s let the website describe it:

[I]t features the adventures of two children, Cash and Penny, who travel around the world accompanied by the disembodied head of preacher Robert Tilton and learn about the importance of giving money (to Robert Tilton)…

If you don’t like that religion, there is always Satanism:

[T]wo children named Damien and Rosemary learn about Satanism by going backward and forward in time with their talking pet goat, Anton.

Wait a minute. A story about The Pet Goat? Stay away. That never ends well.

If that doesn’t work for you, whip out your E-meters! We’re going to explore Scientology!

[T]wo school children, Tom and Nicole, who traveled backward and forward in time accompanied by Elron, a clam who hoped one day to become “clear” and thus a true human being instead of a shellfish.

I alerted ParrotLover to The Continent of Lost Anime that Time Forgot. I was curious how he’d react, since he’s a connoisseur of better anime. I hope he doesn’t mind my reprinting his comments:

Holy crap! I know Japan is weird (by our standards) and that’s part of the reason I am absolutely in love with their culture. The first two in that list [rice & fetish] totally didn’t surprise me. Even the author seemed bothered by the fetish robot and the boy screaming, but to me it’s just a Japan anime company beating the crazy mental illness fetishes on the chans by about 10 years and portraying them through the eyes of a very girl-shy Japanese teenage boy (which is a pretty common character in anime). Crushing? Vore? In anime in the 90s? Thank you, Japan, for not disappointing.

But even knowing that, I was absolutely perplexed by the religious anime. What. The. Fuck?! I could say “awesome” but that would not in any way describe level at which my jaw was on the floor at pure stunning amazement at the weirdness that can and does come out of Japan on a regular basis. Japan found a new way to amaze me in its weirdness—I thought I had seen it all. And for that, I bow to them.

I hope it’s real and not made up. Because if it’s made up, I will be disappointed.

I’m pretty sure it’s real. Nobody could make this stuff up. Except the Japanese.

I haven’t been trying to neglect the blog lately. I was hoping to cut back to two or three articles per week, not two or three weeks per article. It’s amazing how merely re-prioritizing the blog from #1 hobby to #2 hobby has robbed it of so much attention. The photography class I’m taking ends in March, so this isn’t permanent.

The latest edition of the Skeptics’ Circle has just arrived at The SkeptVet Blog. It’s definitely a good one. It’s jammed full of great articles. You need to go check it out.

The best article of the bunch is “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” by Akusai at Action Skeptics. I gave up my cable TV almost two years ago, so I still have favorable memories of the Discovery Channel. This was the home of Mythbusters, after all. Sure, many of the Discovery Channel’s shows had succumbed to the Least Common Denominator, but at least they didn’t have any of those horrible ghost-hunting shows. Then lately I started hearing about some horrid dreck called Ghost Lab. And it’s on the Discovery Channel! How depressing.

Anyway, Akusai fills us in on what little is still good on the Discovery Channel. He lists Mythbusters first, but even that is apparently sliding. Say it isn’t so!

He also mentions a show I’ve never heard of: Time Warp. Apparently the program is full of all sorts of amazing footage of ordinary things photographed in high-speed video. That sounds like a great show. In fact, I was experimenting with high-speed photography myself last Sunday (See result above. That was shot at 1/2000th of a second.).

Akusai then goes on to tell us about the Bad and the Ugly on the Discovery Channel. Some of it sounds very ugly. If you’re as disgusted as I am with the dumbing-down of science television, you should go read “Discovery Channel: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. After that, check out the remainder of the Skeptics’ Circle.

Two retired world conquerors tried to team up to make a comeback tonight, but their plans to take over the world have be thwarted—by fundies!

Former evil genius (and now simple gay sidekick) Stewie Griffin had teamed up with former world conqueror, still-evil, semi-genius Microsoft to produce tonight’s Fox TV special Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show. Unfortunately, the toxic environment that fundies create for TV networks proved too much for the company that destroyed hundreds of competitors. Microsoft got scared and backed out of the alliance.

The whole sorry tale is related by some clown named Brent Bozo Bozell over at—where else?—Clownhall. In an article titled “A Stomachache for Our Sponsor”, Bozell writes:

In the earliest days of television, shows were often supported entirely by one sponsor. … The corporate patron was held responsible for the content within the program. More to the point, the corporate patron wanted the association with the show it was sponsoring.

True. But then the economics of television changed, and this model was no longer feasible. The networks switched to multiple sponsors per show. This is just the free market system at work. You know, capitalism—that thing conservatives are always worshiping (instead of in addition to their nominal God).

On today’s TV shows, it’s all changed. Today’s sponsors run in large packs and appear to make no attempt to monitor shows and have no expectation of being held accountable for the “art” they’ve enabled.

Note the wolf-pack implication there. Fundies are helpless little deer in the dark woods of American culture. Always the victim.

So it is refreshing to learn that Microsoft has backed out of a deal to be the sole sponsor of a commercial-free special on Nov. 8 called “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.”
…
There was only one problem: MacFarlane’s repellent sense of humor and complete lack of taste. Variety reported Microsoft may have walked away since there were “riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene, and incest.”

In other words, Microsoft apparently had never actually watched an episode of Family Guy.

Microsoft sent MacFarlane and Fox chieftains several notes expressing their concern over the show’s contents, but ultimately decided just to wave a white flag and drop out.

This is what I mentioned earlier. The fundies have created such a hostile environment for sponsors these days that companies are afraid to be associated with anything that might offend the people who aren’t even watching the show! That’s the bitterest pill. The fundies have learned to change the channel when a show they don’t like is on. But they aren’t happy just with that freedom. They also want to take away our freedom to choose to watch that show.

Charlie Butts at OneNeuronNow always knows reality when he sees it, so let’s look at his latest article, “She searched, God found”:

Lulu Auger has written a book titled Lulu in which she chronicles her encounter with the occult.

Usually when somebody is screaming about the occult, you think of Satanists and baby sacrifices and poodles (not poodle sacrifices, I mean poodles. Those things are nasty! Certainly the devil’s spawn if ever I saw it. And when is devil spawning season? Do they use the fish ladders? Do you need a license? What’s the limit?). Anyway, getting back to our story, I’m thinking that Lulu must have gotten herself mixed up in something really sinister.

Lulu and her husband own “Blackie’s,” the famous restaurant in Washington, DC, and a meeting with astrologer Jean Dixon initiated her entry into the occult.

That’s it? A fake psychic? She gets cheated out of $50 or whatever for a fraudulent “psychic reading” and she thinks she’s sold her soul to the devil? I went to a new age fair once (or as Penn Jillette likes to say: “newage”, rhymes with “sewage”). Does that mean I get to write a book also? It was pretty fun, too. I wasn’t blogging at the time, or I would have written a hilarious article. I managed to get three free psychic readings that day. They were free, but I still overpaid (hey, my time is worth something! It also cost me some brain cells. I could feel my brain cells throwing themselves off of cliffs and stepping in front of trains—anything to escape the lunacy—as I sat there getting psyched). I’ll have you know, that in one of my past lives, I was a high-level advisor to the Pharaohs! Makes you want to treat me with more respect, doesn’t it? (Oh! And remind me to tell you the Q-Ray story sometime!)

Where were we? Oh yes. Dissecting another one of Charlie Butts’ dreadful articles. You know it’s bad, because I can’t stay focussed on it. Speaking of poodles, I should try to convince my cousin to write up some of the adventures of her dreadful poodle Jacques. You’d like those. That thing was unkillable, despite the Universe’s best attempts.

OK! OK! We’ll get back to the article (don’t say I didn’t warn you):

Auger, 85, describes her encounter with Dixon: “She prayed. She went to church every morning. She said God uses her to help people to show them what they’re supposed to be doing in their life, and she talked more like a woman of God than anyone I ever met.”

That’s her criteria for determining religiosity? Those people tend to be the biggest frauds on the planet. Take a look at the bozo pictured below. Would you trust your immortal soul to this guy? I rest my case.

But the author says she did not realize how far she had sunk into the occult until her family began to raise concerns.

No. It’s when her family began raising the dead that should have tipped her off. Short of that, I don’t think she’s really involved in the occult.

At the time, Auger was reading palms and taking part in other aspects of the occult world before her family convinced her she was very lost.

That reminds me of that time I went to the newage fair. There was a seminar on palm reading. The charlatan running the session said that he needed a volunteer from the audience. I jumped up and down like Donkey in Shrek until he picked me. (Notice that I italicized Shrek. I did that so you’d know I was referring to the movie. I didn’t want you to confuse it with the movie in which Donkey was in Shrek. That was one of those unauthorized X-rated sequels.)

I stood up and the fake psychic looked at my palm for a few seconds, then he said “This looks like a fun hand.” I replied “I have fun with it.” This was followed by an uncomfortable silence. It was his own fault. Don’t feed me a straight line.

Back to our dull story:

She now stresses that her life story teaches a lesson: if you are searching, God will find you wherever you are.

That’s what restraining orders are for.

“I always thought I knew my way and purpose in my life, and yet I was waylaid by the occult…”

That’s one reason I went to the fair. Some of those newage babes are… Oh! She said waylaid!

“…and even when I was deep in it, I thought that somehow [God] was with me,” Auger says. “But still I was caught in a snare, and that is what the occult does to you. It blinds you.”

So here’s a question for all you Christians. If the occult convinces you that God is with you, and Christianity convinces you that God is with you, then how do you know you’ve made the right choice? If both appear genuine, you can’t know! You are spending your entire life and betting your eternal soul on a decision you are incapable of making.

Furthermore, it isn’t just palm reading vs. Bible reading. There are hundreds of flavors of Christianity; the followers of each are convinced that they have the one true interpretation. This is the ironic version of Pascal’s Wager. Even if you are betting right by betting on God, you’re almost certainly betting on the wrong version of Christianity and are just as damned as the goat-worshipers.

Public access TV may be a dying “art”. It used to be that when a company wanted to get the cable-TV franchise for a city, the city would insist on getting their own channel out of the deal. Very often, the rules allowed any city resident to put their own TV show onto that channel.

The heyday of public access TV shows was probably the 1970s and 1980s. You never knew what sort of weird or wonderful show you might stumble across as you’re flipping the channels in those days. (Most shows were weird. Some were wonderful. I even put on a few shows myself back then—and they were awesome!).

These channels still exist on many cable systems, but many people get their TV from satellite providers. That means less exposure for the local eccentrics. Also, with the advent of YouTube, I think a lot of these people have gravitated to the internet (What? Strange things on the internet?!). Sadly, the locally-produced quirk-o-vision is falling by the wayside.

But take heart! Some of it still exists! Take, for instance, David Hart. Apparently this guy is well known in the Los Angeles area as a local oddball, and he has made a few appearances on mainstream TV. However, he is most famous for his public-access TV program, the Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show. The program is best summarized in this video clip from some sort of BBC program about weird Americans or weird TV:

[Note: I'm having trouble embedding this video, but I want to get this article posted. For now, you'll have to go to the Wimp website to see the video (highly recommended!). I'll try to re-embed this video tonight. (If you know how to do this, please let me know.)]

If you want to see the actual show, you can see it on (where else?) YouTube. I’ve embedded it here, but I couldn’t watch more than a couple of minutes of it.

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. The American Family Association is upset that Marge Simpson is posing for Playboy. The AFA has gone beyond self-parody now.

They’ve decided to target 7-11 in this campaign. That’s a big easy target that can stand in for Playboy itself. The fundies can’t very well boycott Playboy and expect it to have any effect. They already aren’t buying Playboy.

Here’s what they write in their press release:

“Most American dads know the dangers that porn represents to young males.…”

That would depend on the material and the age of the boy. However, that is completely irrelevant, since Playboy isn’t porn.

“…It’s irresponsible of 7-Eleven to display porn in front of boys who pop into 7-11s for a hot dog or a Slurpee,” said Randy Sharp, AFA Special Projects Director.

What’s really damaging to young boys is that hot dog and Slurpee and all that other junk food that 7-11 is peddling to kids.

“The cover will create the kind of curiosity that can easily lead them into an addictive porn habit,” he said.

Like I said. Waaaaayyyyyyyyyy beyond self-parody.