These Three Things

Religion, among the thousands of very large and very unprovable claims it makes, never even dares to attempt addressing the three most important steps in our species' development.

I Have Made Fire

The oldest definitive evidence of human-controlled fire dates back roughly one million years and was found two years ago in Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape, South Africa. In this cave, quite by accident, archaeologists found carbonized plant material and burned animal bones, with the sharp edges of the bone and undisturbed patterns of ash removing any possibility that the material was blown by wind into its position. This discovery brings us slightly closer to confirming that fire was the key in transitioning between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, referred to as the “cooking hypothesis.” This suggests that the benefits of controlled fire allowed for our caloric energy to be spent on general brainy goodness instead of raw physicality, but to prove it we need as-yet-absent evidence from the 1.8 million-year-old habilis/erectus split.

Without the harnessing of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, and social well-being, civilization never happens. Without fire, food requires nearly as much energy to eat and digest as it provides. Without fire, the predators of the night are free to come and take us at their pleasure, and we stay so cold in our bones that the urge to tell stories and recreate the hunt for the entertainment of others never surfaces. Fire brings with it softer food, the ability to sleep on the ground, a sphere of insect-free bliss, and innumerable other benefits.

If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

In Genesis 4:4, Abel burns an animal sacrifice and thereby gains favor with God over his brother Cain, because God's just not that interested in the ritual wasting of hard-won food unless it's through immolation. Later on, in 8:20, the flood recedes and Noah celebrates his successful endeavor by killing and burning “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Based on Jewish law, this passage can be easily and accurately rephrased as “Noah killed and burned every living thing he didn't plan on eating in the immediate future.” Since there was no provision for feeding animals on the trip, the predators would have long since erased the prey. This means that, despite surviving impossible odds and making it out of the boat to barren dry land, another swath of animals was shepherded into extinction by God's loving hand. In the interest of not inflating the word count of this essay too insufferably, we shall omit discussion of the utter nonsense involved in surviving with no plants and salted water, the inability of the ground to grow crop, as well as speculation on how we have doves at all if the one Noah used as a dry land gauge never came back.

The aforementioned are the first two biblical accounts of humans controlling fire, and both are instances of divinely-warranted needless sacrifice. It seems obvious that these people are familiar with fire and find it neither alarming or abnormal, which clashes with the role of fire as the one and only effective way to curry favor with God. Flame makes many appearances, acting as everything from a font of knowledge to a source of retribution and punishment, but nowhere does the call for sacrifice through immolation or the delivery of fire from God to man appear. The Genesis flood myth, blatantly plagiarized as it is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be placed at roughly 2700 B.C.E, around 2000 years after idiots think the Garden of Eden was a place. It's obvious, once examined, that fire was a pre-existing, human-harnessed secular substance. Equally obvious is that the odious people making all this bullshit up were too stupid to even think of taking credit for it.

Couple veiny dicks over here, pulsing demon anuses over here...annnnnd, done!

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

The wheel brings us monumental advances, but in a circuitous and cryptic way. Pottery wheels appear to have arrived on the scene first, but shortly thereafter the wheel found its vertical orientation. Stone wheels are heavy, and assembling a throwing wheel would likely require rolling the top over to the stand before hefting it. At some point, someone just a little bit brighter than the rest thought to connect two wheels with a wooden shaft, and much rejoicing was heard. They appear on transportation in our archaeological record around 3500 B.C.E., located in the landmass spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Europe, making any further attribution difficult. Packs and supplies could now be borne on the shoulders of an axle, instead of a horse or grandmother. Without a person even needing to understand it, the wheel allows us to further exploit the laws of physics concerning horizontal movement, while demonstrating Newtonian principles effortlessly when ascending and descending every hill.

Wheels are mentioned everywhere in scripture, usually describing the opposing army's chariots when not in flowery use to describe Ezekiel's hallucinations. However, as you can no doubt guess, the moment of conception of this invaluable shape is nowhere in the account. One can infer it, of course, since Noah was said to be near his 600^th year of life for the flood and couldn't have moved the materials needed without mechanical advantage. But, once again, no mention of the divine hand delivering such a treasure. Like everything worthwhile created by mankind, religion first takes it for granted and then takes the credit.

The Ghoul of Calcutta, seen here taking credit for inventing medical malpractice.

Shoes Too Small To Kickbox God

When confronting the presently unanswerable questions of our surroundings' beginning and end, again we find God carelessly omitted the latter while thoroughly and completely missing the mark on the former. The closest either Genesis creation story can come to accuracy is when over-friendly, conciliatory reasoning is applied to the creation of light as an attempt to make it work with how we know photons operate. “Let there be light,” sez God, and light happens, but not right away. A verse later God sees the light, declares it good, and separates it from the darkness, thereby unjustly ruining the reputation of darkness to this day. This might seem to fit with the delay one would expect to see between the creation of a star and the photons it emits striking another object. It falls under scrutiny because it also fits with the disproven, shameful, and arrogant geocentric nonsense preached from all pulpits.

When turning to the end of existence on Earth, our sheer inability to imagine such a thing coupled with our extreme shortsightedness makes forming an impression of it nearly impossible. People are really only able to imagine things through their singular frame of reference, so we unavoidably cut-and-paste a stand-in for ourselves into the picture when we cast our thoughts to the unimaginable. We also tend to have a much easier time with the hypothetical death of others than we do our own, regardless of one's personal feelings. This can create a distinctly skewed and temporally-crippled way of examining things, which we then naturally find in spades in every single religious scripture.

As an example of how narrow our focus can be on the subject of events on the astronomical scale, I offer some solid data followed by speculative conjecture. The age of the universe (which is to say the time elapsed since the Big Bang) is calculated to be 13.8 billion years, with the Milky Way galaxy only slightly younger at 13.2 billion. In a remote and unfashionable end of one spiral arm of that galaxy sits our humble little planet, which clocks in at a barely-old-enough-to-drink 4.5 billion years old. Looking to the other end of eventuality, our Sun's luminosity is steadily increasing to the point that it will evaporate all the water on Earth in approximately 3.75 billion years, and shortly after that swallow our scorched rock whole. Around a quarter billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy will come along and finish the job by colliding with and erasing our galaxy from the sky.

"I'm very, very slowly coming for your punk ass."

Now, on our paltry little scale, we showed up as a separate genus from the Australopithecine right around two million years ago. Generously speaking, it can be said that on the way to anatomically-modern humans a separate and now-extinct subset of human emerged every four hundred thousand years, until H. sapiens reached dominance roughly two hundred thousand years ago.

For wild speculation, if our species were to follow the oversimplified track record I have outlined above, without molestation and a minimum of self-destruction, we have only two hundred thousand years in our present anatomical – and probably intellectual – state before a divergence appears that our side will undoubtably lose. Our tinier frames and goofy-looking heads must have seemed ridiculous to our predecessors, but our cunning way of bashing their fucking skulls in when they weren't looking meant we got to run the show. Similarly, gradual mutations will occur that at some point will give those who come after a distinct advantage over us. And since there's over three and a half million years to go before our heat death, the incredibly imprecise four hundred thousand year cycle I mentioned earlier can revolve almost nine more times before the game is up. Though it's impossibly hard to imagine, the last human to rattle out an arid dying breath will be eight iterations removed from you and I, and wholly unrecognizable to us.

The horror. The horror.

But no reference to this is made in any religious description of the end times. In fact, they all sound like they could easily happen next week or next month, described as they are in tiny little ideas well-suited to illiterate and unimaginative fools. The mere fact that bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of Rapture exist should be more than enough to demonstrate how eager and hurried the religious are to just have done with it all. They really want life – all life – to be over so that they might be happy, which seems reasonable to them because their scripture and leaders told them that's how it would be. It is one of the most disgusting things a person can think, and these groups go one further by claiming such an idea is gracious, humble, and kind. Lies piled upon lies, and all a consequence of claiming to know the mind of God.

Redesigning Honesty

Brian Williams' transgression against the trust placed in him is not only indefensible, it is a clear example of the state of modern journalism stripped of the fog created by personal preference. 

Williams' claims, which throw into sharp focus the difficulty in crafting a comprehensive Stolen Valor Act while not infringing on speech, should be enough to make any thinking person strongly disgusted. But the purpose of our conversation is not to debate the truth or, as is actually the case, utter falsehood of Williams' lie. It is to look at the bizarre and, sadly, unsurprising response from those on the left who should really know better. The habit these people entertain of elevating liberal public figures to give themselves the feeling of being politically savvy and on the right side of the argument never fails to disappoint them. And when, inevitably, these figureheads prove to be just as fallible and unlikeable as the rest of the swine, you will find three basic arguments being resuscitated and marched about the square.

RIGHT! CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

It begins with the minimization and redecoration of the offense through soft and non-descriptive language. Instead of calling Williams a liar, which is the correct accusation, his fellow journalists describe his statements as “misremembered,” “exaggerations,” or “embellishments,” when a child of six could see that's not so. The flowery and stunningly non-evocative language used by our bastions of journalism are a well-worn technique to prevent the communication of clear ideas by selecting words that mean next-to-nothing. As one of our greatest thinkers pointed out, “shell shock” is a two-syllable phrase that forcibly punches the meaning and idea into your ear. It almost sounds like the weaponry that caused the condition, and if you've ever seen the effects I doubt any other term would seem quite appropriate. It is a terrifying state, very difficult to treat medically, and is a terribly unsettling thing for the afflicted and those around them. To make it less so, the condition began to be described in soft, multisyllabic phrases that intentionally distanced the ugliness and the reality of the idea from you. Using phrases like “combat stress reaction,” “postconcussional syndrome,” or “post-traumatic stress disorder” make a cushion of comfort between what the thing is and how we think of it. This kind of language is fear-based, used because it's very easy and comforting for us to pretend wanting a thing makes it so.

This, for example, is my passport photo.

Following the misguided effort to take the sharp edges off the lie comes a wholesale attempt to divert focus. Undoubtably you've heard “Fox News is full of liars, no one there ever tells the truth, etc.” offered as a defense untold times by now. While that may be an accurate statement, and while I may personally agree with it whole-heartedly, it is nevertheless a childish and feeble-minded argument by any measure. When a child is caught stealing, we do not excuse their behavior if they can mention someone else who is also a thief. “America kept slaves” has not been a successful way to defend either Soviet Russia or the Islamic State. Likewise, defending the lies of a newsreader you prefer by bringing up the dishonesty of newsreaders you don't prefer is a tu quoque fallacy ab initio, itself a derivative of defending yourself through personal attack. It is an embarrassment to offer that kind of argument, though a cheap, easy, and effective one.

Broadly, this rare occurrence of a newsreader being publicly exposed as a liar gives me a chance to reiterate that the problem is not any one person or network. We still imagine that journalism – in the large, morning paper/evening news variety – is in any kind of solid or trustworthy shape. The rally of people to one network or another, be it commie or fascist, allows the perception to develop that they are somehow on your side. O'Reilly/Maddow may be a bloated windbag that you wouldn't piss on to extinguish, one goes around thinking, but Kelley/Olbermann is as unbiased as they come and only wants to inform me. This is obviously poor thinking, as no outlet has a monopoly on either information or obfuscation, and the intensely personal connection people develop with these figureheads is an emotionally overwrought delusion of grandeur.