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.

Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Book Review: Clemens Casually Crushes Christians

The Mysterious Stranger by Samuel Clemens
Gramercy, 448pp, ISBN 978-0517150733

Samuel Clemens, as you know, wrote amazingly well in a variety of formats, the collective result of which was the creation and refinement of American satire into an level of craftsmanship unseen since. Best known for delivering Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to their rightful place as classical American novels, Clemens also wrote far better fare that would be impossible to include as required grade-school reading, since there would scarcely be time to clarify the most prominent ideas before recess and math intruded. The Mysterious Stranger is one of these, containing Clemens' dissection of the lofty image humanity has for itself as well as an irrefutable dismissal of “Moral Sense,” a topic he also eviscerates throughout his Letters From The Earth essays.

Will Vinton Studios, the stop-motion studio in Portland Oregon responsible for the California Raisins, released a film called The Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985, telling five or six of Clemens' shorter stories framed by Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher stowing away for Claymation-Twain's airship death march into the tail of Halley's Comet. The entire film is amazing, introducing our Crystal Pepsi-sodden brains to Clemens in an friendly, tangential way and visually representing multiple stunning and complete worlds in intricate detail, using what can kindly be called a clumsy medium. Vinton only included a very small section of the beginning of The Mysterious Stranger in the film, but this five or so minutes is the reason contemporaries of mine remember the movie, as it is a sharp visual and emotional turn from the consistently lighter tone, presenting some very challenging ideas and indelible imagery. I highly suggest you see it, as it caught my young attention immediately and made me revisit Clemens in a new light.

Go find it. You'll remember.



Begun in 1898 and never finished, The Mysterious Stranger was posthumously published in a handful of slightly differing forms, all of which contained Satan, the most important character of the story. Satan (who is either the one and only Satan, or perhaps Satan's nephew, depending one which edition you come across) acts as a clearinghouse spokesman for Clemens' later views on morality and humanity by way of his interaction with three schoolchildren in 16^th century Austria. Wasting no time, Satan's first appearance is a grand adventure for the children as they populate a tiny village with clay people and animals given temporary life. The children's wonder gives way to stunned shock as Satan begins explaining the folly of right and wrong, killing the clay townspeople individually before creating miniature storms and earthquakes to kill them altogether.

Clemens' arguments on the Moral Sense are very convincing, as they do not require external support or permission and are not muddied by idealism or vanity. As in Letters, much ink is devoted to the dissection of the human race's ego and the diminished status the race actually holds in the scheme of things, only temporarily held at bay by our opposable thumbs and inflated self-opinion. Roughly halfway in, Satan has transported himself and one of the boys so they might invisibly investigate the torture chamber of the local jail. While there, they witness an accused heretic being tortured into confession by the driving of splinters into the nailbeds of his fingers. Afterward, the boy rails against the brutality of the event, to which Clemens' Satan replies:

“No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word … it is your paltry race – always lying, always claiming virtues it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing – that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong, for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it – only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his.”

"Satire's great and all, but what I really want to do is typeset."



Clemens was not a friend to religion, and The Mysterious Stranger is a stronghold of straightforward criticism and ridicule to the provincial attitudes and behavior religion fosters. The majority of Stranger is an account of the fervor the townspeople work themselves into accusing each other of witchcraft and heresy, reaching fever pitch with the town turning on its own preacher and burning women at the stake. Satan's ability to change the order of people's lives is explored, along with what it means to die at the proper time and presenting an almost Calvinist view of predestination without the pesky salvation or damnation that comes with it. Page after page, in fact, dismisses the binomial proposition of good and evil as a vile excretion of human Moral Sense, a deluded and useless byproduct of a pointless and pompous machine.

Hindu Hootenanny

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

      -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

I participated today in what could generously be called a debate with someone identifying themselves as @HinduismVideos (no grown-up name provided), very briefly and clumsily touching on a handful of the recurrent themes that are the backbone of the current fight against infantile bronze-age superstition. I found it, in some small way, thrilling to be directly engaged in this manner by a member of the faithful, as I expect the anonymity of his situation allows a person a certain measure of bravery I do not find in many of my face to face arguments.

This argument was spurred by a news article published by the Rationalist website concerning the unequivocal cowardice of the Indian division of Penguin Publishing in their decision to reverse their stand taken with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and pulp all copies of Wendy Doeniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the result of a frivolous and groundless lawsuit brought against Doeniger for her “zeal” and “disrespect” of the multitude of Hindu deities. Setting aside for the moment the crushing of the free press, the sheer arrogance of a handful of people saying they decide what all Hindus find offensive, and the disgusting failure of the collective spine of Penguin Publishing, a young woman replied to the Rationalist's post with an interrogation into why the claimed factual errors in Doeniger's book had not been enumerated. Anonymous Hindu (hereafter A.H.) then responded, provided links to what he claimed was evidence and the young lady reported back as being chauvinist propaganda from a man called Rajiv Malhotra, with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. The young lady's posts were in her own name, while A.H. felt very comfortable lobbing insults from his unassailable anonymity, so without examining his evidence myself I am comfortable ceding the point to the young lady. A.H. then got a little slimy with the young lady, calling her “your highness” and being generally unlikeable, which is when I spoke up regarding his behavior and he engaged me.

He attributed my assertion that he was an asshole to his being Hindu and claimed the young lady agreed with him, which I refuted as well as explaining that his particular glimpse into the untrue was irrelevant. He was, perhaps, unfamiliar with those words in that order, and accused me of being Shakespeare. I am not sure if he was directly asserting I was a reincarnated soul who was previously an English writer, but did not seek clarification as one can only juggle so much crazy at any given time. He imitated a 60's surfer stereotype and suggested I bump up his video views, and I countered with the argument that it's not fair to listen to the mentally feeble's delusions without putting money in their little cup.

We began in earnest. He claimed a fondness for scientific debate and asked me to name a part of his belief system I disagreed with. I informed him that nothing in his belief structure was scientific, that he sullied the word when he used it, and began on dismantling the childish and absurd principles of karma and dharma. Karma, as a word, seems to have a dual meaning in that it describes both an action and the intent behind that action, an extremely oversimplified explanation of something that is not even understood in a unified way among the practitioners of the shattered and jumbled mess that is greater eastern theology. Karma is an affront to the idea of free will, which I hold very dear, and is a petulant construction of a dissatisfied people who wish that there was some kind of retributive order to the universe. It is no different in that way from the western celestial totalitarianism that lies through its teeth about delayed justice and your dead relatives going “to a better place.” Dharma, to force a translation, is a right way of living as dictated from an external source. A.H. would awkwardly try and reinforce this argument with his later claims that our brains are radios receiving ethics and guidance from the Akashic field promoted by the indefensible Stanislav Grof, but no amount of contortion can demonstrate that free will and morality are both externally-generated things. There is no edict from any god or from any vibrating mass consciousness that dictates our behavior. Our life is our own.

A.H. asked me what happens when we die, as a way of continuing the line of discussion on karma and reincarnation I was so fervently trying to immolate. Reminding me to keep things civilized (a remarkably arrogant thing to say from such a normally charming fellow), he accepted and approved of my assertion that there was no verifiable way to demonstrate consciousness after death, and that neither I nor anyone else could provide him with an accurate answer to that question. He explained that he could never accept a materialist concept of the universe because his intuition and experience informed him that nothing could be random, then asked me why I thought so many people were born into poverty. I was a little shaken by the non-sequitur and accused him of explaining poverty as a consequence of being sullied in the view of an unknown pantheon, which he did not deny.

A.H. explained to me that I couldn't possibly be a random collection of molecules, as there was no evidence for a materialist world view and science has no ability to prove the origins of consciousness. He then asked me if I would be comfortable believing in a random universe or one in which karmic laws held sway, which he described as being equivalent to the observable laws of cause and effect. This is a horribly fatuous and casuistic argument that I run into almost constantly in the community I live in, filled as it is with brash young neo-hippies that cannot imagine anyone before them could have possibly thought of this horrible line of reasoning. In no way, I explained to my intrepid A.H., can the vapid premise of a fabricated celestial scorecard be compared – can be, in no way, compared – to the phenomenon of demonstrable causality. Not only this, but the notion that one's preference or comfort is in any way relevant to anything at all has taken dangerous foothold. I don't care about your comfort, or if an idea is displeasing to you, and neither does anyone else with anything resembling intellectual honesty. But, as one could easily expect, in the splintered factions of religious white noise the idea of momentary comfort or respite is all these people have left.

The argument began to spiral at this point, as I could see A.H. was losing the thread and retracing his steps regarding his preference and his intuition. He repeatedly questioned why I thought my preferences were more important, ignoring my reply that preference had no importance or value to our discussion. He made several self-effacing comments about his faith, complete with unreadable smiley-face emoticons. We revisited molecules and karma, where he offered me the false choice between random molecular interaction and the same dictated by karmic influence. This belied, I think, one of the missteps made by the religious when they try and attribute things like ethics or intent to our molecular makeup, an argument intended to make one try to scramble to provide a chemical composition which will suffice. It seems obvious that there is no molecule where ethics come from just as there is no karmic sway at a molecular (or any other, for that matter) level. Ethics, and to a lesser extent, intent are functions of higher organisms; perhaps the earliest example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. There is, I explained to A.H., no one keeping track of the score for him as every slight received and transgression committed was his and his alone.

 

This is the biggest scoreboard in the world. It is in Houston, not heaven.

  



A.H. was in a corner now, and had no choice but to bring out the double guns akimbo of quantum mechanics and Deepak Chopra (the knowledge of the former sadly having come entirely from the latter). He began with the statements that Roger Penrose's argument on quantum behavior in the microtubules of neurons proved the assertion of reincarnation, but never got around to explaining his reasoning. I was unfamiliar with Penrose's work, but a short amount of reading showed me that I sided with one of his primary opponents, a man called Marvin Minsky. I informed A.H. of this, he replied by asking me who Minsky was, and I reinforced for him the folly of offering someone evidence without reading all the way through it first for yourself, seeing as you can be made to look very stupid should you have to ask for clarification on your own points. He rallied about quantum physics' sound thrashing of Newtonian physics, about how scientists couldn't even understand it, about how Chopra does understand it and how there are “TOP guys” who agree with him, linking me to the review section of Chopra's latest copy of chloroform in print. He furiously defended the stone backwards view (that I know for certain he got from Chopra's stunningly ignorant misinformation) that quantum mechanics is something which applies to all things at all scales, and how my molecules were governed based on these rules. Because of snake oil-selling, predatory charlatan idiots like Deepak Chopra, poor A.H. thinks firstly that quantum mechanics has something to do with atoms. It does not, quantum refers to things of a subatomic scale. He also thinks, as Chopra does, that the rules of quantum mechanics mean that the moon isn't there if he personally is not there to witness light reflect off it. Flagrant dismissal of any kind of joy in learning about how our universe is actually put together, coupled with and trading in self-based arrogant solipsism.

 

However unfairly, I expect my opponent resembles this smelly gentleman.

 



The ease with which great holes were casually rent in his carefully-built tapestry clearly frustrated him, as he resorted to challenging me to “educate” him and “shower some knowledge” on him. His slightly unusual sexual fetish-themed plea fell on deaf ears, however, and I reminded him that the point of our argument was not for me to explain quantum mechanics to him, but to destroy and belittle his faith and worldview. I did however, remind him that he was to be welcome and encouraged on my part to educate himself for education's sake. His final responses to me were to clumsily invoke Heisenberg for no discernible reason and to direct me to an article on quantum physics from someplace called Krishna Path which, let's be honest, I'll never read. I won't trust them to sell me flowers at the airport, why would I ever turn to them for an understanding of physics. We parted ways with his very civil wish for my well-being, which was thoughtful but wholly unnecessary.

 

Fuck you, sign! Don't tell me how to live!

 



I don't wish for my tone in describing this encounter to make it seem as if I regard this man as someone deserving of respect. His beliefs are stupid and wrong, a sloppy collection of mismatched holdovers kept around like commemorative plates. His attitudes about science and ethics infuriate me to my core, and what he finds most holy and precious is most hateful to me. We are enemies, him and I, but he did me the respect of challenging me, and by my count I resorted to sarcasm and barbs on more occasions than he did, and not for noble reasons.

 Quick, send money! Those glasses aren't going to bedazzle themselves, people!

I wanted to relate this experience and reinforce the idea that these beliefs are dangerous to us as a society, and that when they are met in the public square or from the cowardly comfort of an anonymous account they must be gutted head on. I hope this is the first of many conflicts I have with the religious outside my narrow purview, as I feel that every time even the smallest antitheist or secular humanist argues with a believer against their nonsense claims and hateful beliefs, in some small way Thomas Paine is vindicated.

 

Not my creation, but this nicely sums things up.