Old Ex Cathedra

If atheism is a religion, then OFF is a TV channel. – Unknown, cited by bunrab

It’s a lovely quote, but there’s something wrong with it. It hides an important distinction, and so for at least one class of nonbelievers, it’s wrong.

Let me explain. I think we need to keep two assertions quite separate: (1) there is no god; versus (2) there may or may not be a god, but neither my picture of the universe nor my daily life requires the existence of a god.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, assertion 1 is called atheism and assertion 2 is called nontheism. Nontheism is pretty clearly not a religion, at least not in the sense that believers use the word. Now if you want to use “religion” the way many Buddhists and Unitarians and members of other non-Christian religions use the word, Katy bar the door! But let’s stick with the meaning of “religion” we’re used to, where there’s (a) something supernatural that’s (b) accepted at least in part through faith.

So if assertion 2 doesn’t constitute a religious belief, how about assertion 1, that there is no god: is that a religious statement? Maybe. Certainly it makes assertions about supernatural beings. But when you say there is no god, it seems to me you’re saying one of two things: (1a) evidence from nature and reason [ demonstrate | indicate | prove ] the absence of a deity; or (1b) nature and reason cannot disprove the existence of a deity, but I assert it anyway, just as some believers assert God’s existence, as an article of faith.

There are refinements of both points of view: there never was a god; there once was a god but he’s dead. And along another dimension, God is transcendant but not immanent: he created the universe and once he was finished, he left it alone. But I don’t think we need to go that far to say that assertion 1a is close, but not religious, while assertion 1b is pretty clearly religious. And to that extent (and only to that extent) that one kind of atheism is religious. It’s a religion that probably won’t have a building fund, and the hymns aren’t very good, but it’s an assertion (a) about the supernatural that’s (b) arrived at at least in part as an act of faith.

The question then becomes, does the set of people making assertion 1b have any members? I think it does. I also think it has far fewer members than some believers want to acknowledge. It suits them to lump all nonbelievers into that one category. But once again, the real world confounds the more primitive and visceral believers: there are many varieties of nontheistic belief and philosophy, not just the one. Some are religious, but others — perhaps the ones held by the majority of nonbelievers — simply aren’t. And for them (us, actually), the sigquote is perfectly fine.

Neil Young – Living With War. As good as ever. Maybe even better. And a couple of songs (e.g., “America the Beautiful”) lay back from my appreciation just enough that I’m going to have to re-hear them to get what’s happening.

My older son Patrick tells me his new video series Computer Privacy and Security Essential Training, is now available at lynda.com.

Go see the free videos (pretty good, actually — I think even a non-parent would say that) and go buy them so my kid will become rich enough to put us up in a little guest house in the back of his estate. Right now he’s just got a condo, so please buy till it hurts.

Courtesy of my older son Patrick, here’s an instrument every band needs, the Victory Siren, a monster 12 feet in length by 6 feet tall that runs on a 180HP V-8 engine and produces a 138dB sound 100 feet away.

Actually I knew a band that packed a siren (it was a smallish electronic box, I recall) just for the purpose of spicing up the Beach Boys song “Student Demonstration Time”. Back when I worked for the Oakland YMCA in Pittsburgh, a band I’d known from Wilmerding, Free Birth, held a free rock concert on the 2nd story balcony of the Y building. It blasted out to the basketball court in front of the building and well beyond. So far, in fact, that not long after the band started playing, up roared a police car and out popped a red-faced police officer cussing at everything in sight.

Kim Fellner, who worked at the Y, trotted out to confront the officer, Skip Butler, if I recall correctly. He was waving his baton around and threatening all and sundry, and I was about to come to her rescue when Officer Butler’s face drained of color and he hopped back in the car. I never did find out what Kim had said to him, but later on he was reprimanded. Kim, you see, knew everybody in Oakland.

The band moved off the balcony and held the rest of their concert inside. Their first song after they got all plugged in again was “Student Demonstration Time”, complete with siren, and we all gave a mental finger to the pigs, because that was what we were up to. Or what we talked like we were up to.

I dimly recall the leader of the band was Dave Gash, and while there’s a Dave Gash who’s a musician on the net, and he looks kind of familiar in the picture, I hesitate to say it was him. Still, since the human member of the famous Kiss Chihuahua’s pack wrote the other day, perhaps I’ll hear from Dave again too.

WNYC’s Hawaiian War Chant extravaganza. Two hours of this inane song. The radio station that did it is offering a prize to anybody who survives the whole thing. I don’t know what the prize is, and I don’t imagine I ever will. I’ve ripped streams before — bring up Audacity, set the input on Audacity to “Wave/MP3″ (which records anything that goes through your sound card), adjust the system and player volumes to something sensible, push Audacity’s the little red Record button, and play your stream in e.g., WinAmp. Later on you can chop it into tracks, put fades on the track heads and tails, normalize the volume, etc. So that’s no big deal. But what I’d have after I’d ripped that stream is dozens of copies of a song I hate. And I remember how long it took me to calm this poor computer down after I went off and left it to record that Coldplay concert — the screen saver was flashing “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLAY ‘IN A BIG COUNTRY’ AND BE DONE WITH IT!”. So I’ll pass.

But perhaps you need suitable background music for something. Perhaps you’re performing a bris (my blog demographics plugin tells me that 82% of my readers are mohels and the remainder are lesbians from Paraguay), or rendering some lard, seducing a slow loris….

Spoiler Warning

If you’re waiting for the replay next Saturday of the Grand Prix of San Marino, please skip this article.

I now know I have absolutely no future at CBS announcing F1 races. I know far too much about F1, and I can speak English. Occasionally, when I promise to talk about something, I actually talk about it.

I can’t think of a better word for Ralph Shaheen and Derek Daly’s speculation about the fuel situation with Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso than “ditzy”. First Fernando started off considerably heavier than Michael, but somehow fuel materialized in Michael’s tank during the race? No doubt that’s what the church bells in Imola will be celebrating. Speed TV’s Steve Matchet, by contrast, tells you the facts about the fuel, he has educated guesses, and on one occasion he even corrected Charlie Whiting’s formula for fuel consumption on a particular track.

Shaheen and Daly, the Pride of CBS Sports, completely missed one yellow, then commented about another yellow “that’s usually something serious” at the exact time the cameras were panning past DC’s car whose slowdown was the reason for the yellow. Well, I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that we never got to hear why Derek Daly found the chicanes at Imola “brutal and boring”. And our congratulations go out to Nick Heidfeld Christijan Albers who, according to the CBS Sports team, will be driving for Ferrari next year.

But the result was worth it. God finally smiled down on Michael Schumacher. Though we’d never learn it from CBS, it looked for all the world like Alonso’s supernaturally reliable Renault finally broke something (in the suspension? Robert suggests he beat his tires to death CRASHING over the CURBS) about 7 laps from the end and he decided that keeping up with Michael wasn’t worth a visit to the kitty litter.

Shout out to Wonderduck, who has just an even more twisted view of F1 and CBS’s awful coverage of this race than I do.

From Father Dan, one of the heretics I read most faithfully, an Easter Quiz. This was actually purposely late. It’s churlish to mock “Christians” on Easter, but a week later? Just fine.

Here’s an example from the quiz:

1. Who first came to the tomb on Sunday morning?
a. one woman (John 20:1)
b. two women (Matt. 28:1)
c. three women (Mark 16:1)
d. more than three women (Luke 23:55-56; 24:1,10)

2. She (they) came
a. while it was still dark (Matt. 28:1; John 20:1)
b. after the sun had risen (Mark 16:2)

It goes on in the same vein for quite a few more. 18 in all, a lot more than I thought. And while less sophisticated people (or more mischievous people) might use this as “proof” that the resurrection is a bunch of malarkey, we’re a little better educated in the nuts and bolts of Christian theology than that, and we can think instead about a fairly interesting and perhaps even important point.

There are people for whom the Christology of Jesus is almost the only important thing about him. For those people, his birth, death, and resurrection aren’t just more important than his teachings, they’re orders of magnitude more important. The Wikipedia article on Christology is itself a pretty good example of this point of view, since in discussing things other than “the minor details of his life”, it doesn’t say “Jesus said” or “Jesus taught” at all! Evidently the whole of Jesus’ teaching is among the “minor details.”

I have great affection for Bultmann, but there is a tremendous temptation to “demythologize” all Jesus’s teachings out of the scripture and end up with just Jesus as the Word — a Word that doesn’t say anything. Bultmann himself doesn’t fall victim to that temptation, by the way. And I was only partly unfair to the Wikipedia article, since any Christology must take into account what Jesus himself said about it. He wasn’t silent on the subject!

Some churches — Roman Catholic Churches and mainline Protestant churches were often accused of this — used to spend so much time on intellectual Christianity that the cry went up from the pews, “the teachings of Jesus, not the theology of Paul!” And many conservative Christians (I’m thinking of our Probably Alabamian Bible Thumper in yesterday’s article) find themselves quoting the Old Testament and the Epistles, but somehow never manage to get around to quoting Jesus himself. I’ve sat through Sunday services where the same thing happened. I’ll bet you have too.

Many Unitarians go the other way: they think the teachings of Jesus are pretty much the only important part of Christianity, and the Christology is an open question (perhaps left as an exercise to the student?) Lots of folks would think that’s going too far, but Unitarians aren’t the left wing of the Protestant Reformation for nothing.

It seems to me that Christianity is about something. Beyond salvation, there’s content to Christianity. And the content is what Jesus taught. When you “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”, you have to believe in more than his death and resurrection. You have to believe what Jesus taught. That’s not optional.

If you doubt that, then perhaps you might want to ask yourself one question: If the Christology was so much more important than the teachings of Jesus in the early church, then why couldn’t the gospel writers agree on the simplest and most fundamental details of the resurrection?

I occasionally send an article from Ex Cathedra to a Huntsville newsgroup. Yup, there’s an actual hsv.* (our airport code) top-level hierarchy thanks to our early appearance on the Intarnets and yeoman effort at keeping Usenet going on the part of some highly respected Huntsvillians. A little less often I’ll post the fruits of an exchange back here, often after the esprit de l’escalier has led to some improvements.

This is one of the latter, and this time I have to run it verbatim, because I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t believe it otherwise. A friend wrote a good post about the “prosperity gospel.” I’ve written a few words on this blog about that hideous distortion of religion, so I chimed in, and others replied and so on.

And up popped a Probably Alabamian Bible-Thumper — “Probably” Alabamian because he’s one of a legion of annonymous right-wingers who infest the hsv.* newsgroups, and finding out where he really lives is too annoying to bother with. And in a single post, he illustrated why Alabamians have a reputation for being as dumb as dirt.

Our PABT quotes a bunch of bible verses and then concludes:

> It is plain to me from the above, among others, that God does bless
> believers–and make many promises of blessings to them–not just in the
> hereafter.

But let’s look at those quotes. In them is high comedy worthy of Jesus’ General:

> James 1:25 “But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and
> continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of
> the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.”

OK, that verse seems to support the prosperity gospel. Alas for our PABT it only seems to support the prosperity gospel because it’s taken out of context. “Taken” out of context? “Wrenched” out of context. Here’s the whole passage:

1:22 But be sure you live out the message and do not merely listen to it and so deceive yourselves. 1:23 For if someone merely listens to the message and does not live it out, he is like someone who gazes at his own face in a mirror. 1:24 For he gazes at himself and then goes out and immediately forgets what sort of person he was. 1:25 But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out – he will be blessed in what he does. 1:26 If someone thinks he is religious yet does not bridle his tongue, and so deceives his heart, his religion is futile. 1:27 Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their misfortune and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Let’s read that last verse again, shall we?

1:27 Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their misfortune and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Oops. Rather the opposite of the prosperity gospel there, isn’t it? Widows and orphans are victims of “misfortune” (James’s word), not some sin or character defect. And what’s more (a stick in the spokes of religious conservatives who are also political conservatives) it’s every Christian’s responsibility to care for them.

Well, perhaps that’s a one-off and James is really for the prosperity gospel after all. No such luck. Earlier in the same chapter we read:

1:9 Now the believer of humble means should take pride in his high position. 1:10 But the rich person’s pride should be in his humiliation, because he will pass away like a wildflower in the meadow. 1:11 For the sun rises with its heat and dries up the meadow; the petal of the flower falls off and its beauty is lost forever. So also the rich person in the midst of his pursuits will wither away.

Finding that kind of thing in the Bible shouldn’t surprise anybody. This is Christianity we’re talking about, not some sham religion concocted by Ralph Reed and James Dobson and the rest of the apologists for greed. Well, let’s see how our PABT does with his other verses.

> Rev 1:3 “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words
> of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein:
> for the time is at hand.”

No prosperity gospel there.

> Ro 4:7 “Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven,
> and whose sins are covered.”

Or there.

> Ps 119:2 “Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that
> seek him with the whole heart.”

Or there either.

So what have we got so far? Our PABT has come up with one verse that’s taken out of context and three more that have nothing whatever to do with the prosperity gospel. But his last example is the pièce de résistance:

> Job 1:10 “Have You not made a hedge about him and his house and
> all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his
> hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.”

OK, I suspect my regular readers are falling down in gales of mirth, but for the benefit of the one or two who didn’t get it, think about the story of Job. Who would be saying this? Yup. It’s him:

1:9 Then Satan answered the Lord, “Is it for nothing that Job fears God? 1:10 Have you not made a hedge around him and his household and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his livestock have increased in the land. 1:11 But extend your hand and strike everything he has, and he will no doubt curse you to your face!”

I’m not making this up. Here in North Alabama (probably), we really, truly have an annonymous bible thumper who offers as his authority for the Prosperity Gospel… Satan!

Yesterday, my wife and I enjoyed a quiet morning while our kids slept in. Thank you, Ether Bunny! – John Gardner

I was thinking about loading WinAmp bookmarks into MediaMonkey and how it would be easier if there were an XML variety that worked for both. OPML looked like a good family of candidates, so I went out looking for an OPML schema or DTD that might fill the bill. I didn’t find one, but I did find OPML Workstation (formerly RSSLabs), which — you’d never guess this from either of their site names — is the coolest little repository of people’s OPML files. Want to find a nifty list of free MP3s? A blogroll of blogs that write about OPML? Can we get more self-referential, please?

And even people’s personal lists, which I have to tell you get a little disturbing. I think I was better off not knowing that there’s a person who has links about hairless dogs, Kate Moss, and Cytherea porn. I was much better off being utterly ignorant of Cytherea. Trust me, you are too. Some things humankind just wasn’t meant to know.

I’ve been updating my WinAmp and MediaMonkey radio station bookmarks and scripts, and I haven’t blogged about them for a while, so I figured I’d better let you on in the updates. Thanks to Steegy who wrote the MediaMonkey Streams script that I hacked a little bit and helped me get the right event routed so it would close the popup window in the Pandora script, they’re much better than they were. Find out for yourself: http://blog.crispen.org/etc/NetRadioGoodies.zip. There’s even a README file if you’re new to WinAmp bookmarks and MediaMonkey scripts.

By the way, I’ve still got the WinAmp bookmarks installed, but I don’t use them any more. I’ve gone over to MediaMonkey 100%. I’ve even changed my file associations to open MediaMonkey for .mp3 files, and I’m fixin’ to do it for .ogg, .flac, and .ape files.

Oops. One more thing. Here’s a much better MagicNodes script for classical composer. Originally by Bex, and I tweaked it a little:

Classical Composer|filter:left(genre,9)='Classical'\<composer>\<album>\<artist>

Families have ways of managing food scarcity. I mean the kind of temporary food scarcity that results from running out of things or forgetting to pick up a favorite item at the store. We’ve never known real scarcity, of course. We’d plan our meals instead of throwing the kitchen open to rummaging, and we’d buy the cheap cookies, but it never got much worse than that. I’m talking about the food scarcity as an annoyance, not as a prelude to starvation and disease.

Kelly’s family had the expression FHB for “family hold back.” An announcement “FHB on the potatoes” as the serving dishes were going around the table would ensure that the guests had enough for seconds because Mrs. Kelly had underestimated the demand for potatoes. Mrs. Kelly did that a lot, come to think of it. It’s a wonder Kelly didn’t turn into a shrew. The animal, not the character trait. Real shrews are alleged to be constantly on the go and in a bad humor because their metabolism requires them to eat every n minutes or starve to death. Kelly’s mother would get two meals for three people out of a package of Kraft spaghetti. I didn’t even know Kraft spaghetti existed. There wasn’t enough in the box for one of me.

I’d been raised by parents whose philosophy was “deny the kid nothing”, so I never paid any attention. The only things to come down on from my parents’ previous condition of scarcity (which I suspect were always closer to the real thing than ours) were two pieces of advice: to eat slowly and enjoy it, and to eat everything on your plate. I always suspected that my life-long struggle keeping my weight down (the alternative to the early push-back from the table is getting some exercise, but that’s absurd) might have resulted from that last piece of advice, so I never said that to my kids. Turns out they didn’t need to be told. No matter how much we’d served up, they’d scraped the glaze off their plates in 15 seconds and were looking hungrily at the dog.

I did say one fatherly food management thing that turned out to be a disaster: “You ate all those cookies?” Never ever do that. From that day on I’d find a package containing two Oreos, milk bottles a flea couldn’t drown in, and 6 cereal boxes, each with a quarter of a bowl left. Rasin Cocoa Krispies Bran isn’t that bad, but still. Once I even found a potato chip bag with one chip. It was a decent sized chip, but they’d taken it out, eaten the crumbs, and put it back. Hey, they hadn’t eaten all of the chips, had they?

And we aren’t slavering jackals. Sometimes we’re even considerate. There have been occasions where we let a quarter of a cake go stale because we all thought we’d had our share and were saving it for the other guy.

Finally Kelly found the way to cut through all this nonsense. She learned it from the dog: if somebody’s teeth are in it, it’s theirs. Otherwise it’s open season. They’ll make more. Or if we look we’ll find something just as good. The law of the teeth. I recommend it.

Happy Easter!

I was out this morning getting some Coke and snacks. Bad mistake. I nearly got creamed coming out of my driveway by an SUV going like a bat out of hell, then the same thing in the Walgreens parking lot. All of the drivers were dressed well, so I figured out they were on some desperate errand between Sunday school and church (though what could be more important than enjoying coffee in the social hall I’m sure I don’t know). But just as you’d better not get between Unitarians and their coffee, you’d evidently better not get between those Christians and their schedules.

Back at the rectory it’s quieter, and we slow down enough to appreciate things. So, what to talk about this morning? I know. There have been some blog communities springing up (geddit? Spring? Easter?) even more chaotically than these communities usually do. Every couple of weeks a different blog hosts the community’s newsletter, and there’s a community blog that just has links to the newsletters. Let’s call them carnival blogs. You’ll see why in a minute.

A carnival blog is a cross between a cafe blog and a webring. That’s an information architecture that solves a lot of problems. For one thing, it splits the writing and editing work and keeps the annual load on any one site down to something manageable and cheap. All the bloggers involved generally post an article that promotes the newsletter on their own blog, which means you’ve got a whole pile of blogs promoting the blog that’s hosting the current issue.

Anyone can submit an article, so there’s there’s something for contributors from the dilettantes to the obsessed without setting up an in-crowd and an out-crowd. And there’s no ownership issues. Ex Cathedra is hosted on crispen.org, so it’s undeniably my blog, and the other contributors probably contribute less than they would if their name was on it and they didn’t feel quite so much like braceros. They certainly contribute less than I’d like them to. And my ego is involved, even if all I do with my blogmates’ articles is write a comment or two or drop them a note to show my appreciation. By contrast, all the carnival blogs need is a few housekeeping functions like choosing the next host and getting the word out that they want articles for the next issue.

There’s two carnivals I’ve found that have some lively writing and can easily serve as a biweekly (or so) summaries of their fields. And topically they’re just my cup of tea. Carnival of the Liberals showcases some of the latest topics in liberal politics. And the Skeptics’ Circle collects articles on the skeptical approach to science and belief. A perfect choice for Easter, particularly if your cup of tea is camomile (You know, Peter Rabbit? Easter? Geez, what’s wrong with you guys? I don’t hear a peep out of you. Geddit? Peep?).

Both the sites have links to the latest issue and archives, and they have an RSS feed so you can put them on your Google homepage or in your feed reader. I’ve set them up on my Google homepage to show just one posting and the color on the link tells me when there’s a new issue.

Want some more, or want different ones? Go to the mothership, Blog Carnival.

You may remember it was just yesterday when I said

Google took something useful, versatile, and a little geeky and turned it into something disorganized, confusing, and corporate. Mind you, it’s their website, and they can do whatever they want to with it. But I’m not playing any more. For now the Ex Cathedra home page is my portal.

That resolution lasted less than a day. I went exploring, and I discovered I could put this on my Google homepage:

Curse you, Google!

I’m such a slut.

However, I did a little (shudder) work — very little, but never mind that — and came up with a “To Google Home Page” bookmarklet. Drag this to your toolbar, then whenever you want to, click on a site’s feed button, then, while you’re looking at the XML gibberish, click the bookmarklet.

RSS->GoogleHome

Later: The one below is much better. Forget about having to click on the feed link and see the XML. This bookmarklet tries to find an Atom or RSS feed in the page you’re viewing. Whichever it finds first, it adds that feed to your Google home page.

->GoogleHome

Later: I had to take a couple of tests out to accommodate Blogger blogs (which use the title attribute in an oddball way, imho). I’ve verified it works on blogs on Blogger and LJ and blogs powered by WordPress and MovableType (unless their owners have gone deep into their innards and royally screwed them up). Let me know if you find any blogs it doesn’t work on. I’ll stop fooling with it for a while so everybody can comment on the same version.

Former Military Air Traffic Controller Claims Comet Collision with Earth on May 25, 2006

KEALAKEKUA, Hawaii, April 13 /U.S. Newswire/ — Eric Julien, a former French military air traffic controller and senior airport manager, has completed a study of the comet 73P Schwassmann- Wachmann and declared that a fragment is highly likely to impact the Earth on or around May 25, 2006.

Comet Schwassman-Wachmann follows a five-year orbit that crosses the solar system’s ecliptic plane. It has followed its five year orbit intact for centuries; but, in 1995, mysteriously fragmented. According to Julien, this is the same year that a crop circle appeared showing the inner solar system with the Earth missing from its orbit. He argues the “Missing Earth” crop circle was a message from higher intelligences warning humanity of the consequences of its destructive nuclear policies. He links this crop circle to May 25, 2006, and identifies the comet Schwassmann-Wachman as the subject of higher intelligence communications….[more]

Why do I get the impression that the ‘crop circle’ thing is not going to do much for his credibility?

I’ve often fallen for portal pages. Just case you’ve been frozen in a glacier for the last decade, I’m not talking about the main page for a website that helps people who are visiting your site find stuff there. It’s pretty useful in that regard, but I don’t want that to be the default home page in my web browser. For one thing, it screws up my hit counts. For another, I already know what’s on my website. Why go there?

What I’m talking about is pages like my first web page. I bet your first web page was like this too back in the day: a bunch of bookmarks somewhat organized and prettified. Or in the case of that page, uglified. What were we thinking? I actually had several pages like that, but I won’t burden you with them. They were even worse. And that was my whole website, pretty much. Hardly any content of our own, but a great set of portal pages. We even won an award.

Gradually we started adding some actual content to our website. A list of VRML links eventually became a list of organized and annotated links and then we added howtos and worlds, and there was our content. Kelly built a site about Tudor England that still gets most of the page hits for crispen.org. And the portal pages got pushed farther and farther into the the backwaters of the site.

I realized after a while that we never clicked on a tenth of the links on our portal pages, so I did some serious weeding and built another portal page and let the original portal pages quietly die. I used that page for quite a while, and I even updated it so that it’s halfway decent semantic XHTML. You may remember that I blogged about how and why I did that. But I eventually got tired of it.

At that point I didn’t do what lots of folks did: use a corporate portal. The pages on those portals weren’t customizable enough, and you had to do a lot of studying up on the one-off features to get the really interesting stuff onto your page. I did play with a Yahoo portal page for a while, but I never actually made it my browser’s homepage, and eventually I moved on to the next big thing.

Which was FeedDemon, an RSS reader. For a while I used FeedDemon instead of a web browser and checked my daily news there. I even saved off the lists of RSS feeds as OPML files for each of my categories and whipped up a nice XSLT ruleset to browse them. After a while, though, the new wore off, and the annoyances with FeedDemon (principally, the broken OPML file generation which never seemed to stay fixed and the Hobson’s choice of either using an MSIE browser control with all its security problems or a Firefox control that was out of date, broken and unsupported) outweighed the convenience.

I flirted with the Sage RSS reader in Firefox, but it wasn’t a tenth as nice as FeedDemon. Finally, I went back to the web and set up a Google home page. I put the feeds I usually read on the page (it was easy, and the user interface is fabulous), and for a while everything was peaches and cream.

But a couple of weeks ago I went back to add something to the page, and I discovered that Google had changed the way you add content to your Google homepage. Gone was the sorta geeky interface you’d use to add RSS feeds to the page, and in its place was a huge pile of feeds and gadgets. I suspect the sites on the list (nearly all corporate sites) paid Google to get on the list.

The problem was, the gadget that let you add any feed, not just a Google approved feed, was gone. You have to rely on people to put a Javascript bookmarklet on their websites that will automatically add their websites to your Google page (ours is in the right-hand column under “Steenking Badges”). But this is silly, and when Google turned on their calendar the other day, but didn’t have a way to put a link to it on my personal homepage, I gave up.

Sorry, that doesn’t quite cover how bad the Google homepage has gotten. It wasn’t that they didn’t have a way to add Google calendar to your Google homepage. It’s that there’s so much crap in there that I couldn’t figure out whether there was a way to add your calendar or not. Half the stuff there, I don’t know what it is or what it does. That’s an information disaster, especially for a company that purports to be geniuses at making information usable.

Google took something useful, versatile, and a little geeky and turned it into something disorganized, confusing, and corporate. Mind you, it’s their website, and they can do whatever they want to with it. But I’m not playing any more. For now the Ex Cathedra home page is my portal.

I have kids on the mind this week. It must be the evil influence of the Easter Bunny.

I grew up a Methodist, which is a tremendous advantage for anybody who can whistle a tune. Methodists have great hymns. Even the children’s hymns are good. One of my favorites went

Praise Him, Praise Him
All Ye Little Children
God is love
God is love

Well, it turns out that generations of little Evangelical Protestant Christians were misinformed. For some influential and well funded Evangelicals, God isn’t love at all. He’s hate. And people are suing for the right to be just as hateful as they please.

Can’t manage to be nice to gay people? You don’t have to!

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. “Christians,” he said, “are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.”

In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.

Yup. For free.

Stop and think about that for a minute. How can they offer that kind of deal? Their contributors must outnumber the haters about a hundred to one. Otherwise the whole scheme would collapse.

Bingo!

This isn’t about the legal cases, it’s about the contributions!

“There really is confusion out there,” said Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, which is affiliated with Vanderbilt University. “Finding common ground sounds good. But the reality is, a lot of people on all sides have a stake in the fight.”

People living the plush lifestyle that comes with being a leader in the Religious Right don’t just have a stake in the fight, they have a stake in the fighting. No fight, no contributions. No contributions, no bling.

I’d love to see them starved for plaintiffs. That probably won’t happen, but they may be starved for plaintiffs with good cases and they’ll end up looking like fools again. And it’s a virtual certainty that they’ll overreach. Maybe this time they’ll overreach enough that a majority of decent Americans will see their true colors.

There’s a winning strategy for those of us who want to send the American Taliban back under their rocks for a long time: remind them of the other people conservatives thought they ought to have a right to hate. And the past tense is probably too charitable for a number of the people supporting the Christian conservative campaign against gay people.

By equating homosexuality with race, ["Christian activist" Gregory S.] Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

“Think how marginalized racists are,” said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom. “If we don’t address this now, it will only get worse.”

Damn right racists are marginalized, Mr. Baylor. And all your whining isn’t gonna stop America from marginalizing you too.

I used to work with a very conservative Christian colleague. No, he didn’t make the sign to ward off the evil eye whenever the office’s token liberal passed by (that would be me). He was really quite a nice person, and as far as I know, never did me or anyone else a lick of harm. It would astonish me if he had, since he wasn’t just civil and tolerant, he was kind. If ever there were a living example of an ultraconservative upbringing turning out a decent person, he was it. But there was no getting around one thing: he really, truly did believe TEH GAYZ recruited straight children to “the gay lifestyle” which “the liberal media” and “the liberal teachers’ union” were forcing into our schools.

I never did ask him whether he thought he could be recruited — whether he would be attracted to guys if he were exposed to the influences of the Fab Five. Asking that was certainly too confrontational, and it might have been mean as well.

But I kind of regret not having asked him about this story of Mark Morford’s. Here’s the gist:

I have a friend who has a very young and beautiful son with a woman to whom he is not married or even dating and with whom he has never actually had sex because he is quite perfectly in love with someone else and she is quite perfectly single and, well, it’s sort of out of the question.

My friend, however, he has good sperm. He is, as they say, good breedstock.

He goes on to talk about how the people involved still have issues, how neither the gay people nor the straight people in the Bay Area are saintly and free from hangups and plain old human stupidity. And that’s a good story and it’s a story worth hearing. And of course, my take on it was, where’s the damn numbers? Mark’s kind of down about the story, but I just wonder, even with all their issues, how do they stack up against the hideous failure rates of { straight | traditional | old-fashioned } marriage and parenting?

My other take on that story was, I’d dearly love to have asked my friend at work whether, if he was infertile, he’d accept sperm donated by a gay man. Because I think that might highlight what’s really going on here. Is it the gay lifestyle or gay genes? Or is it gay cooties? That’s not so confrontational as the other question, but it still makes people think.

And fair’s fair: if I’m going to make him think, I’d better think about it myself. And I had to think about it. That surprised me. It wasn’t a matter of “of course”. I had to consider what was right. Let’s assume that having a gay parent increases the “risk” of a child being gay, which I think is far from proven and may never be proven one way or the other because of the Bayes Rule problem when you have low antecedent probabilities, but just assume. Would I want a child who had a higher than average probability of being gay?

The answer still came out yes. Kids challenge you in all kinds of ways, and if the child turned out to challenge my remaining prejudices against gay people (I don’t kid myself, they’re there), I figured that was small potatoes in comparison to the way my children challenged my selfishness. And patience, and distaste for bad odors and annoying noises, but mainly selfishness. That’s a serious test, and not all parents pass it. Some parents don’t even know it’s on the test. I saw a lot of their kids when I worked at the Y.

It’s so postmodern to judge religions on the basis of their TV commercials, but I’m heartened by the latest UCC commercial [embedded Flash], and when I showed it to Kelly she said she’d seen one from the United Methodist Church that was even better. Its message was “God don’t make junk.”

And that is today’s lesson.

My coach once told me “there’s no “I” in “team.” I responded by pointing out that there’s also no “I” in “hackneyed.” Then I had to run 12 laps. – Lev L. Spiro

Why couldn’t I have been born brilliant instead of merely shiny? – Jenn McNanna

A sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth has attracted a flood of complaints even before going on display. The statue depicts a naked Spears crouched on all fours and about to give birth. “Britney has worked all her life to maintain a wholesome image and this could jeopardize her career,” read a terse statement from Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Spears’ public relations director and former Iraqi Minister of Information. – Mike Ranston

A new report released recently shows that nearly 30 percent of adolescents who begin drinking at an early age do so because they saw it in the movies. That is still better than the nearly 40 percent who began drinking at an early age after accidentally walking in on their parents having sex. – Jerry L. Embry

They laughed at the Wright Brothers.
They laughed at Thomas Alva Edison.
They laughed at Alexander Graham Bell.
Then someone finally realized the valve was still open on the nitrous tank.
- Lev L. Spiro

Public school teachers… are the cannon fodder in the War on Thinking. – Chris Clarke

Religion allows people by the millions to believe things that only a crazy person could believe on his own. – Sam Harris

And to top up, a delightful list of totally untrue facts.

Last night we watched The Gospel of Judas on the National Geographic Channel. There’s a formula for shows like this. Before every commercial break they tell you what they’re going to tell you, and after they return they tell you what they told you, because a trip to the fridge is bound to confuse you enough that you’ll forget what show you were watching. But most of these shows dispense facts in homeopathic doses and repeat everything 20 times. The Gospel of Judas was considerably better in that regard. They moved right along.

I won’t spoil the story, except to justify the title of this article by saying that there are in fact some Benedictines who are trying to canonize Judas Iscariot. But I will talk about something they hinted at with a huge wink wink, nudge nudge.

They said this much: Christianity in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries CE was incredibly diverse. The gospel you heard depended in great part on where you lived and where you met with other Christians. There was no Christian canon, and when Christians finally got around to writing the gospels down, there were dozens of them, not just the four we have today.

What they didn’t say is that Christianity was a people’s religion, and a major reason Christianity and the other “mystery religions” caught fire was people’s reaction against the authoritarian and pietistic religions of the time.

The official Roman religion was intertwined with the state: how could you be a good Roman if you didn’t pay your respects to the Roman gods like everybody else did? After all, they’d accommodated other religions by offering the local gods a place in the Roman pantheon. What more could anybody expect? And anyhow, all they really cared about was going through the motions.

If the idea of observing the official religion as a patriotic duty didn’t convince Romans, then the Great Jewish Revolt certainly did. People with the “wrong” religion are troublemakers. So the Romans stressed religious observance. When you do that, something has to suffer, and in this case it was the spiritual and intellectual side of religion. Their religion became less and less religious, less satisfying to the impulses that drive people to religion in the first place.

Jesus was a living example of the dissatisfaction Jews felt with their religion, so Judaism wasn’t much of a candidate to replace Roman religion, even if the Romans weren’t busy hunting down and squashing the remainder of the Jews who had given them such a scare.

And so the ground was prepared for religions that offered more spiritually and experientially. And so a host of alternative religions sprang up, and with them — for religions inspired by Jesus — a host of gospels.

Not everybody thought the wild diversity that resulted was a good thing. Irenaeus is the poster boy for the effort to take Christianity under control and to impose uniformity on Christian belief. This wasn’t just because Irenaeus was in love with authority. The four canonical gospels had a spiritual resonance the other gospels lacked. As one of the experts said, these were the stories early Christians wanted to hear. What’s more, the canonical gospels differ from one another in very small ways in comparison to the wild divergence in some of the non-canonical gospels.

Here’s an example: Christianity has wrestled with dualism and defeated it, 2 out of 3 falls. Resurrection of the body is an article of faith largely because the gnostic rivals of the Christian orthodoxy Irenaeus was trying to establish believed that the body was at best merely a prison for the soul. Some gospels revealed the God who created the world as evil, and the good news of those gospels was that Christ’s death defeated that God. You certainly don’t see that kind of thing in the canonical gospels! And, more to the point, you certainly don’t see those books in the bible alongside books that assert that God the creator is good and loving.

Unitarians would have felt right at home in the intellectual ferment of the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era when Christians believed all kinds of things. Once Irenaeus stuck his flag in the ground and declared here is where Christians stand, the church became a place where Pope Ratzinger would feel at home.

Whenever the church has left people’s spiritual and intellectual needs unfulfilled, the cry has gone up, “back to what the original Christians did!” And either the church reforms itself, as in the Counter-Reformation and Vatican II, or the people who need more leave the church.

For the number of times this has happened, it’s remarkable how few of the Protestant and Protestant-from-Protestant religions that resulted capture — or even value — the intellectual and spiritual freedom of the real original Christians.