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 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.

Or in other words…

Instead, I’ll leave you with this reminder of why we fight the terrorists. Shockingly, these terrorists actively—and legally!—operate within the borders of the United States and plot the overthrow of the Constitution. Here is a YouTube video of two of them, recorded just days after the horrific events of 9/11/2001.

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes go back to my grandfather’s farm in South Dakota for a couple of weeks in the summer. I loved that place. It was so different from the world I knew. It was so alien, in fact, that my grandparents didn’t even own a television.

In 1976, when I was in my early teens, we somehow managed to go back for six weeks (I’m not sure, but that might have been the summer of the spreader.). Interestingly, the prospect of spending a summer without a television didn’t bother me at all—except for one thing…

That was summer that NASA landed Viking 1 on Mars. That was a big event. It was NASA’s first robotic probe to land on Mars. Among the various scientific equipment aboard, it had a biology lab. They were looking for life on Mars! Microbial life seemed a very real possibility back then. This was our best chance to find it. And I was stuck in the middle of Buttsuck, South Dakota, miles from a television.

We drove there and back in our 1969 Chevy station wagon. It was decadent! It had air conditioning and seat belts. Our prior car, a 1965 Ford Mustang, had neither (Actually, I think the Mustang had seat belts in the front. I guess the rear passengers, like rabbits, were expendable.).

We’d stop for gas and food at the wonderful truck stops and tourist traps along the interstate. I loved to buy their postcards of giant grasshoppers:

… jack rabbits:

… fur-bearing trout:

… and, the most famous of all, of course, the jackalope:

A lot of the gift shops also sold this book:

It was filled with all sorts of fun trivia about U.S. history. It was a good book to read on the trip, so I bought it. Here are the titles of some of the short articles:

• The last man to invade U.S. ended up as a guest at a banquet
• She was first woman in United States to wear pants—by an act of Congress!
• Five presidents have had beards and all five were Republicans
• Famous ghosts still walk halls of White House
• The day president U.S. Grant was arrested for speeding

Some of this book’s trivia I later confirmed in other books. One or two I’ve found were common myths. But overall, it was a fun read.

I have a good memory. Looking through this book today, I see that I have actually retained most of these stories in my massive brain.

One of those articles that I always remembered was the story of the Millerites, which I have reproduced below. I remembered it during the recent Harold Camping laugh-fest.

Reading this article back then in the summer of ’76 was my first exposure to the concept of the doomsday cult. I had always known that there were crazy fundies perpetually predicting the end of the world. Until that point, I never knew that some of them were insane enough to actually abandon work, leave their fields unplanted, and sit on a hillside waiting to be raptured.

Welcome to the real America, kid. Ugly, isn’t it? (I wonder what I would have thought if I had known that 30 years later, I’d embark upon a 5+ year quest to document and expose the dangers of this insanity.)

So for your enlightenment, here is the article that I read that summer 35 years ago:

I love the last two words of that title: “It Didn’t!” Really? I would have thought he wouldn’t have needed to tell us. (At the very least, he should have preceded it with the words “Spoiler Alert!”)

That article doesn’t tell the entire story, though (and it gets a few of the minor details wrong). Those people didn’t just “[start] life all over again”. Nor did they learn their lesson. They became the Seventh Day Adventists.

Thinking back now on that article, I see a similarity between what I wanted to do that summer in 1976 and what the Millerites wanted to do in their day. Yet in that similarity I see an even bigger difference.

Both of us looked to the heavens.

The Millerites, though, were looking to a delusion of the past and hoping for the demise of mankind.

I was looking to man-made robot on Mars and dreaming of our future.

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:

Anyway, it’s 2:00 AM, so I’ll cheat and just put up a couple of videos. Hopefully I’ll have more time tomorrow to write a longer post.

Both of these videos are by some sort of brain-damaged creationist group out of Florida. They’re somehow connected to Kent Hovind’s bankrupt dino park.

This first video is a commercial for the Cabazon Dinosaurs:

That was just the warm-up. Behold… uh… um… THIS!
(Warning: Not for the squeamish.)

Yes, our nation is well and truly doomed. (How did we win the Cold War, anyway? How did we outsmart the Soviet Union, if 50% of our population is like what you see above?)

This, however, is crap. According to one of the message threads on the site, the 4th Horseman of the Apocalypse was seen moving through the crowds during the protests in Egypt! You can see it on the Rachel Maddow show. Skip ahead to about the 10:27 mark in the video. Here is a screen capture:

It’s that green blob in the center. Yes, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are really just blobs. Why are people so freaked out? Just send in Steve McQueen.

You should go watch the video. It really does look a lot like a horseman when you see it moving across the screen. If I believed in this stuff, I’d be a bit creeped out.

To be fair, the original poster admits that it’s probably an optical illusion. To my eye, it is definitely an illusion. They’re probably shooting through a window, so it’s a reflection off of that. The greenishness is likely caused by a heat-reflecting coating on the window (this is freaking Egypt, after all) or maybe an anti-reflective coating in the lens.

Or everything is true, Jesus is coming back, and us atheists will be roasting in hell next week. Bring your marshmallows. (Hey! We could make s’mores! Just put chocolate and marshmallows between two slices of Billy Graham!)

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.

Santa has consolidated, like any good monopolist. This allows him to cut costs and drive his competitors out of business.

These days, there is one Santa Claus in the entire mall, and he sits somewhere in the middle, not affiliated with any store in particular. It was not always thus.

Back in the late ‘60s (and presumably earlier), every department store in the mall had its own Santa Claus.

I remember my mother dragging me along while she did the Christmas shopping. I don’t know how she bought stuff for me when I was right there. It must have been Christmas magic! (*retch*)

Anyway, the newer malls in those days had the modern technological advancement of having four anchor tenants! (The older malls only had one or two.) Well, this was the prosperity and freedom we fought so hard for in WWII, so all the housewives drove their wood-paneled Country Squire station wagons over to the new malls in the suburbs, leaving the old urban shopping areas to wither and die, destroying the inner city as they collapsed, leading to urban blight, crime, and fear of communist agents provocateurs, which scared the voters, leading initially to the elections of Richard Nixon to the House (and later, Senate) and Ronald Reagan as Governor, eventually, of course, leading to their elections to the Presidency, which sent the country down a very bleak political path that ultimately ended up destroying the nation.

Way to go, June Cleaver!

So anyway, I’d go with my mother on one of her Saturday Christmas shopping excursions to the mall. She had a lot of gifts to buy, or so it seemed, because she always found it necessary to visit every department store in the mall.

We’d usually start at Sears, then work our way around to Penney’s, Capwell’s, and finish up at Montgomery Ward. I’m not sure what other stores were in the mall, because I don’t remember ever going into any of them.

(Oh, I do remember! They had Woolworth’s! I loved Woolworth’s, because it was such a crappy store that even a 7-year-old could tell it was crap. I think all they sold were coloring books and off-brand socks. And the animals! They had a pet section. You could buy a yellow canary, a cheap cage, and a sprig of millet. Bingo! Instant pet! We didn’t go that route. We always bought the turtles! You could get yourself a baby red-eared slider in plastic bowl of water, and the bowl had an island in the center! And it wasn’t some cheap-ass barren island. No! It had a plastic palm tree on it! Those turtles had it made! A life of pure luxury, swimming in circles or basking on the plastic island beneath the swaying fake palm tree. Until they died two weeks later, of course. You see, back in the ‘60s nobody knew how to take care of turtles. They didn’t know that you need an under-tank heater to keep them warm. But what really did them in was that nobody knew you needed to keep them under an ultraviolet lamp. The turtles needed the UV to make vitamin D. Their shells always got soft, and then they died. How sad. Time to run down to Woolworth’s and buy another!)

Now back to Santa Claus. Santa was always our first stop when we entered a department store. He was always over by the toy section. The line was usually short, because there were three other department stores just 50 yards away.

Sometimes Santa wouldn’t be there. The chair would be empty, and there would be one of those flimsy “Will Return At” clock signs. It wasn’t until some years later that they finally dreamed up the “Santa is feeding his reindeer” ploy. Prior to that, nobody put much thought into maintaining the act when Santa wasn’t there. They just gave the impression that Santa is covered by the labor laws too, so he gets his 10-minute break every couple of hours to go take a dump, have a smoke, and sneak a swig from his hidden flask.

In the early days, I don’t remember the photograph always being part of the deal. I have seen a photograph of myself on Santa’s lap when I was very young, so I know that was available in some places. But I really cannot remember the camera being there in every location. Santa was just this promotional service the store provided to get you to come in and shop there.

The camera did become more prevalent in later years, but it wasn’t obtrusive. They’d snap your picture while you’re talking to Santa. If you wanted to buy some prints, that was fine, but there was no expectation or obligation. (But if you did want them, they couldn’t just print them out right then and there. It was all done on this stuff called “film”. You’d have to wait a week for the photos to be “developed” and mailed to you! No, I am not making this up! That’s how we lived back then. I guess the only reason we were happy is because we didn’t know we were technologically poor.)

All of my visits to Santa that I can remember occurred after the age of 5, which means that I knew this whole thing was a charade. I don’t know why I bothered telling him what I wanted for Christmas. I knew he wasn’t going to buy it for me. I should have looked in my dad’s Playboys for some gift ideas.

“Yes, I’d like some nipple clamps, a butt plug, and a French tickler. Oh yeah, I need some K-Y jelly so my sister won’t scream and wake our parents again.”

Alas, I was not that creative.

So I just told him to bring me whatever worthless crap they were advertising on TV that year.

What I was really after was the candy cane Santa always gave you at the end of the visit. Since there were four department stores in the mall, I’d come home with four candy canes. Not nearly as profitable as Halloween, but a mini-jackpot nonetheless.

What pissed me off though, was that some stores were stingier than others. One might give out a medium-sized candy cane. Then you go over to another department store, stand in line, tell Santa that you want nipple clamps, and then only come away with one of those cheap-ass micro candy canes.

“Mommy, mommy! Why was Santa’s cane so much bigger when he saw me this time?”

“He probably just woke up, dear.”

There was one incident that occurred that I still remember clearly, because it bothered me a bit. It was probably innocent. Those were innocent days. We were all naive.

We were at Montgomery Ward. Was I 6? 7? My brother was in line right behind me. He is two years older, so he wasn’t so old that he would have been obligated by social pressure to stop visiting Santa.

After waiting my turn, I got to sit on Santa’s lap. I told him what I wanted. Then he said to me: “Do you love Santa?”

I said yes. What was I supposed to say? “I hate you, now gimme my candy cane”?

So Santa hugged me. This caught me a bit by surprise. None of the other homeless guys they hired to play Santa ever hugged me. I’ve never been the huggy-gropey-feely type, so getting hugged by a strange man was outside my comfort zone.

My turn ended, I shamefully took the candy cane and skulked back to my mother, never to speak of this humiliating experience again.

No, actually, I just walked back, thinking it was slightly odd.

But now it was my brother’s turn. Oh, this will be worth watching. I can’t wait to see Santa hug my brother. That will embarrass him!

So I watched. My brother told Santa what he wanted then hopped off Santa’s lap, and he was done. Hey! Why didn’t you hug him? You embarrassed me, so why didn’t you embarrass him? Something is odd about that Santa.

He did have a big cane, though.

But it still strikes me as odd to this day. Those were simpler days. It was probably innocent. In fact, Occam’s Razor compels me to accept the simplest explanation:

I was hopelessly adorable.