Already well aware that the film is Creationist propaganda, and previously informed as to the arguments that were to be presented therein, I didn’t particularly expect a rational, thought-provoking piece, but I actually did expect a well-produced, emotionally driven piece that might have served to give its arguments at least the appearance of credibility… Instead what I found was a muddled collage of unconvincing half-arguments poorly paced amidst constipated footage of Stein often doing nothing more than walking or reflecting. In one such prolonged scene, Stein visits a museum of Natural History, wherein he stares into the face of a statue representation of his nemesis, Charles Darwin. Stein’s face is shiftless and rigid, betraying no emotion whatsoever, and one is almost convinced that it is Stein who will ultimately win the staring contest. What this is meant to convey is uncertain, but it does reveal that, outside of his typical undemanding dead-pan roles, Stein is worthless as an actor.

In attempting to establish a link between Darwin’s theory and Nazi eugenics, Stein visits Hadamar, a former Nazi doctor testing facility (now converted into a memorial museum) wherein human subjects - “life unworthy of life” - were cold-heartedly utilized. In a scene more droll and monotonous than Stein’s narrative voice, the viewer is taken through the facility one mostly-empty room at a time as a tour guide wearily explains the significance of each in fractured English. The apparent refusal to employ editing leads to the only real suspense of the film: one begins to dread the possibility that the doddering old Stein will soil his Depends, and the viewer will be forced to watch him use the lavatory (though such a scene would arguably have been the most tasteful in the film). Worse, the point is unclear. The film promotes a concept of Intelligent Design that concedes variation within a species (”microevolution”), but denies that one species might ever evolve into another (”macroevolution”). But does this concession to heredity not allow for an ID-acceptable eugenics? The Nazis were not trying to breed a new species, but an “improved” population of humans, for which only an acceptance of heredity is necessary. Further, is not the relegation of blame upon believers in Evolutionary Theory for the crimes of Nazi Germany rather the same as blaming the grievous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the believers in Atomic Theory?

The concession to heredity adds another element of confusion to the film: one of Stein’s Creationists claims (and I paraphrase for a lack of an actual recording), there are no clear answers in Evolution. ‘They’ can not even tell you where a line is drawn between one species and the next. And yet, without this distinction, how is it that the ID superstition distinguishes between micro and macro-evolution?

The premise of the film, that there exists a conspiracy within academia that acts to shut-out and discredit scientists who have found evidence for design, is very apparently feeble, and seriously under-represented as a core argument. Some professors didn’t have their contracts renewed and suspect discrimination against their public ID convictions. I actually believe that this could be the case - and maybe even should be the case when professors allow their religious convictions to trump reason - but the film didn’t convince me that this was actually happening.

In an attempt to spice-up their bland footage, the film-makers interjected various clips of public domain stock footage, mostly of prison camps and soldiers in combat meant to illustrate the idea of a raging war between science and religion. Unfortunately, this too comes off as excessively contrived - much like an amateur lap-top filmmaker YouTube debut pieced together from archive.org downloads - and quickly grows tiresome with over-use. Just the same, the film does have a few moments of inadvertent humour. Particularly, there is a scene in which an ID advocate is making the case that there has been a coup within academia, carried out by militant atheists. This state-of-affairs, he claims, this atheism within academia is a recent development. He informs us that all of the great scientists of the past were religious. He cites Newton… perhaps Kepler, and - with no apparent sense of irony (or even History) - Galileo!

For its climax, the film commits what I believe to be a cinematic faux pas of the highest order. It’s like this: Stein arranges an interview with Richard Dawkins, who is portrayed as something of a kingpin within The Establishment’s dogmatically atheist Science junta. It is impossible to feel any bit of the suspense during the lead-up to this confrontation - a suspense that the film tries so desperately to build - because throughout the film the viewer has already been inundated with brief clips from that very interview! It is the very definition of “anti-climax”.

And the Dawkins interview is ridiculously handled. The suspense is meant to mount as footage oscillates between Stein being driven to meet Dawkins, and Dawkins waiting in a darkened room for his arrival. We observe Dawkins having his face powdered in preparation of appearing on film. This is probably meant to convey that Dawkins puts on a false front… a mask… has something to hide. It is a cheap trick, of course. Clearly, the powder girl was Stein’s own, and I’d bet heavily that it was Stein’s people who recommended the facial prepping.

Stein pulls up… Dawkins is tapping his fingers on the table. Nervous perhaps? No. The tactless Stein gives the whole game away when he walks in. Richard Dawkins, he greets him, sorry to have kept you waiting. Obviously, this wait was annoying contrivance, an insult not only to the satanic Dawkins, but to the viewer as well.

The Dawkins interview, though, does provide some of the best moments of inadvertent hilarity. The first came when Stein asked (again, I paraphrase), “If God didn’t create the universe, who did?”

What does such a question even mean? How could Stein really not understand that to Dawkins any “who” would qualify as a god? Did Stein honestly need it explained to him that, to Dawkins, the question is not one of who, but what? Perhaps it wasn’t an old guy named God who created the universe, but rather an omnipotent entity named, say, Bob?

Another display of gross ignorance shortly follows. Stein asks Dawkins, “If you were to die and meet ‘god’ today, and he said to you, ‘Richard, why did you despise me so, after everything I’ve done for you? I gave you a good life, a multi-million dollar book deal…’ What would you say?” And so, it seems, in Stein’s delusional mind, it was God who commissioned The God Delusion! Dawkins’s patience in the face of such inanities is nothing short of saintly.

These are only a few criticisms of what I rank among one of the worst films of all time. But I grow weary now, and have decided to retire my observations here. I left the theater with a vague feeling of shame² and disgust, but also with a mild flicker of hope. It’s just possible that this film, rather than achieving its intended goal of advancing Intelligent Design, will help to drive some nails into its stubborn coffin. It’s hard to believe that an ID believer could watch this bomb and not be stricken when faced with how unreasoned and crude their arguments truly are.

1. Most notably, the reviews of Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Meyers
2. I feel I must point out that I agreed to attend the film with a friend of mine on the condition that we purchase tickets for a more tasteful film, Prom Night, instead

My argument is that we, you, I have a choice. For some, that choice is much harder to make than for others but none the less it’s there. I’ve really enjoyed a few books by the late communications theorist Neil Postman. In one book he published what he described as an open source speech for any valedictorian to be who might be in need of one. It’s a very good piece and does a far better job of illustrating my point than I do. Please read on…

MY GRADUATION SPEECH
by Neil Postman

Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely pointless. There are other reasons as well, including the difficulty of saying something inspirational without being banal. Here I try my hand at writing a graduation speech, and not merely to discover if I can conquer the form. This is precisely what I would like to say to young people if I had their attention for a few minutes.

If you think my graduation speech is good, I hereby grant you permission to use it, without further approval from or credit to me, should you be in an appropriate situation.

Members of the faculty, parents, guests, and graduates, have no fear. I am well aware that on a day of such high excitement, what you require, first and foremost, of any speaker is brevity. I shall not fail you in this respect. There are exactly eighty-five sentences in my speech, four of which you have just heard. It will take me about twelve minutes to speak all of them and I must tell you that such economy was not easy for me to arrange, because I have chosen as my topic the complex subject of your ancestors. Not, of course, your biological ancestors, about whom I know nothing, but your spiritual ancestors, about whom I know a little. To be specific, I want to tell you about two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. I think it is appropriate for you to be reminded of them on this day because, sooner than you know, you must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other.

The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them-Democritus by name-conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.

About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. But not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the world so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders-ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics.

Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths.

Now, the point I want to make is that the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us-in this hall, in this community, in our city-there are people whose way of looking at the world reflects the way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. Let me tell you briefly what these ideas consist of.

To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question-these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.

To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.

To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste that are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledged by the Visigoth.

Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our class rooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the wall.

And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We cannot know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. But I will tell you this, with which I will close: I can wish for you no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that among your graduating class the Athenians mightily outnumbered the Visigoths.

Thank you, and congratulations.

Magicians guard an empty safe. There are few secrets that they possess which are beyond a gradeschool science class, little technology more complex than a rubber band, a square of black fabric or a length of thread.

Indeed, most spectators are disappointed to learn the techniques of the theater magician. Knowing that they are being deceived, the audience is always looking for the gimmick, the misdirection, a give-away. Their minds are trying to puzzle out an idea of “how”, and are only impressed when they are capable of none. Theater magic is a difficult and demanding profession, substantially lucrative only to a select established minority. A skilled magician, deft in sleight-of-hand, practiced in illusion, and well-spoken in scripted monologues, most likely works a “day job” while performing his art for extra money on-the-side. On the other hand, a bullshit artist employing but one routine - even (and most usually) very poorly - outside of the context of stage magic, can usually coax large sums from credulous rubes. Thus, a cheap mountebank, having learned the relatively unimpressive carnival routine known as The Blockhead, can declare himself John of God, a “Faith Healer”, so as to bamboozle the sick, superstitious and simple. An unscrupulous charlatan like Uri Geller can build a career from his - at times - clumsily executed spoon-bending routine. Cheap mentalists utilising common magic shop gimmicks convince lay-people of their powers of telepathy with disturbing regularity. Perhaps most perplexing of all, though, is the enormous success of the “psychic” who often displays no skills of illusion, or even the appearance of an increased perception. Using a basic technique of Cold-Reading that utilises vague statements, subtle questioning, and platitudinous advice, these relatively unskilled cons can often extract an indecent fee from their only-too-happy-to-be-fooled clientele.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to observe some cold reading practitioners in action when I stayed in the home of Salem “witch” Shawn Poirier (who has since died… R.I.P.)

* * *

It’s late October 2005 and I’m having difficulty sleeping in the house of Salem’s lead witch. Not for fear of falling victim to some bizarre black magic death ritual - Shawn Poirier is a cordial host - but for reason of more common discomforts; the room smells of cat shit, the temperature seems to remain steady at some level only slightly above freezing.

Shawn crawls out of bed around 8:00 am. It’s an unusually mundane hour for those of ungodly loyalties. The night had been passed in a dreamless unconsciousness following a fit of vomiting. Something about the pain-killers he coerced out of a doctor in the ER didn’t sit well with the liquor. But this is no time to sleep in, or, for that matter, sleep it off. This is the end of October - a particularly busy season for the Witches of Salem, and Shawn is the King of the Salem Witches. It’s a day in The Festival of The Dead, an annual event organized by Shawn and his partner, a fellow “Elder of Salem Witchcraft”, Christian Day that spans the entire month of October. There is a Psychic Fair to oversee, rituals to perform, and tours to guide.

I happen to be there with a notorious promoter, organizer, publisher, internet radio host, and hyper-active Free Speech advocate, Shane Bugbee. Shane and I are to present a True Crime lecture later in the evening as an added attraction to the Festival of the Dead.

Luckily, Shawn has but to don a black, pointed, costume shop witch’s hat over his uncombed mess of long, black hair, throw on a black velvet cloak over his snuggly flannel pajamas, and he’s ready to leave the house to conduct business. Towering - when vertical - at around 6′5″, and weighing in at around 300 lbs, Shawn projects an imposing air. He’s exactly what one would expect a male witch or vagabond Hell’s Angel to look like. The fearsome image is maintained only until he speaks. Shawn communicates in a comically incongruous effeminate lisp.

Shawn’s market consists of tourists who converge on Salem each October for the city’s peculiar Halloween-specific appeal. Since the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the name “Salem” has become synonymous with witchcraft, superstition, and persecution. During that embarrassing episode of American Religious History, 19 people were hanged and one was flattened under the weight of heavy stones - convicted on the accusations of jealous or vindictive neighbors - for imaginary crimes against Christian decency, performed in the name of Satan. During 2004, Salem mayor Stanley Usovicz considered the possibility of pardoning those executed in the early puritan witch-hunt….sometime in 2007.

Today, in less archaic, bleak, superstitious times, Salem is where tourists travel to speak with self-proclaimed witches and pay them large sums to give vague statements concerning - primarily - their love-lives, careers, money, and health. While this may all seem no less superstitious than the Salem of 1692, it is undoubtedly less violent, though, perhaps, not entirely benign.

In fact, Shawn and his witches are symptomatic of a world-wide outbreak of unreason. Poll after poll shows a majority of the lay-person masses to be skeptical of science, yet susceptible to easily disproved notions of supernatural phenomena including abduction by small, orifice-invading aliens, and worthless witch doctor cures from homeopathy to crystals.

Shawn himself is highly amused. Sitting in the Living Room of his modest middle-class suburban Salem home (a home that, according to him, was entirely purchased “by the Dark Arts”), he has just enough time to slip an old VHS tape into his VCR before tending to the Festival. It’s his favorite television appearance: a BBC documentary about witchcraft and the occult in Salem. Throughout the video, Shawn can be seen performing rituals and speaking of Salem history. His own editorial of the film, delivered while smoking marijuana on his couch, is surprisingly honest. To his credit, Shawn has accurately “intuited” that Shane and I are no strangers to mystical rhetoric and aren’t to be taken for rubes.

“I made all of that up.” Shawn says of an “ancient” ritual he performed on camera. Set to highly dramatic music and slick professional camera work, Shawn gives the apparently terror-stricken, intrepid film crew a tour of one of Salem’s most famous landmarks; the ominous, black Witch House, an architectural relic that used to be home to a judge, Jonathan Corwin, during the Witch Trials. Shawn’s on-camera tour of the house, given at mid-night for maximum effect, includes a harrowing tale of an accused witch who, according to Shawn, was tortured while strapped to a chair that still sits eerily against a wall. So as to validate the tale, the BBC brought a professional psychic into the house who, remarkably, felt terrifying vibrations emanating from that very chair. “I made up that whole thing about the chair, too.” Shawn remarks, admitting that he knew very little about the actual history of the Witch House, but felt compelled to produce a “little known” fact for the benefit of the camera.

Shawn loves publicity and attention. He’s appeared on The Discovery Channel, The Travel Channel, MTV, The BBC, Playgirl magazine (though, thankfully, not in the nude) and numerous spots on NPR. Probably Shawn’s least favorite appearance was a spot on Showtime’s “Bullshit”, hosted by Las Vegas stage magicians Penn & Teller. “Bullshit” is a show dedicated to de-bunking quackery, new-age hocus pocus, pseudo-science, and un-truths in general. Shawn was an easy target. Recalling his appearance on “Bullshit”, Shawn claims that he didn’t mind the skeptical, inglorious presentation of his occult practices, but he didn’t appreciate the dishonesty with which the “Bullshit” film crew approached him. Ironic.

Though it is generally agreed that the accused witches of 1692 Salem weren’t actually practicing any occult rituals, and it is almost universally agreed that they never actually fornicated with the devil during unholy Sabbath rituals, enough people seem willing to suspend their disbelief, or exercise their gullibility, to participate in Shawn’s occult antics. Walking with Shawn through the streets of Salem is similar to walking with a rock-star in any other American city. Tourists want their pictures taken with him, people stop and point. In most cities, Shawn would be taken for just another gaudy gothic clubber. In Salem, he’s a celebrity.

Upon arrival at the psychic fair, Shawn’s witches try desperately to impress Shane and I with their psychic talents.

“Who died?” One hapless witch asks Shane who, like me, after the long travel and uneasy sleep, is in no mood to play along. “Where do want me to begin?” He asks her.

Undaunted, she moves to her next victim… me. “Why aren’t you down south?”

More confusion.

“Why would I be?” I dryly respond. Failure.

What was just witnessed was a rather lame attempt at what is known as “cold-reading”, the process by which stage-psychics fish for clues from their chosen marks so as to impress them later with what they have “psychically” divined.

Later, while arranging items ranging from original letters written by John Wayne Gacy, to a hatchet used by psychotic serial killer Ed Gein, Shane and I are perplexed by a wandering psychic who claims to feel the evil “vibrations” from the objects that also, aside from vibrating, seem to burn the skin of the sensitive psychic who touches them.

Unconvinced, Shane produces some standard silverware and holds them out to the psychic while concocting a story about their history of use as brutal weapons in crime. Oddly, the psychic neither detects the deception, nor do the vibrations and burning sensations lessen with the introduction of objects undefiled.

That evening, against the wishes of Salem’s mayor who, despite having no idea what the actual content of our presentation was to be decided that Shane and I would “contribute nothing positive” to the Halloween festivities, we gave our lecture on True Crime to an unresponsive and generally hostile audience. Neither glorifying crime nor preaching morality, I delivered a speech in defense of full factual disclosure. Ignoring the brutal details of crime may serve to sanitize and glorify the act more than if one were to face all the facts head-on.

After a day of psychic readings, divination, and Black Magic, I couldn’t help but feel that Shane and I would have done better had we alluded to an International Satanic Conspiracy and “true” cases of “vampirism”.

We parted politely, yet uneasily from the Salem witches. I had a distinct feeling that both parties felt that they had been bullshitted.

* * *

The Dubious Art of Cold-Reading: An Interview With Michael Shermer

Why is it that ambiguous statements - sometimes no more insightful than those in a poorly hacked county newspaper horoscope - have the power to impress people as evidence of psychic ability? Why is it that with literacy and communication constantly improving, the belief in mystical oracles seems no more diminished?

Dr. Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and the author of such books as, Why People Believe Weird Things, and, How We Believe, explains:

MS: It’s prevalent because we are by nature superstitious. We tend to want to believe certain things and, according to the Confirmation Bias, find evidence that supports what we want to believe is true, and then just ignore all the contradictory evidence. The Confirmation Bias is what drives and fuels conspiracy theories or things like the Da Vinci Code… anything. So if you want to believe that the dead are on the “other side” and that people can talk to them, you’ll go to a psychic and remember the hits and ignore all the misses - the hundreds of misses that they make - and remember the half dozen hits, and think that there’s something to it. So, as a psychological process, it’s not at all a surprise that it operates so well because we’re not designed by evolution to think scientifically, we think anecdotally. We hear anecdotes about this kind of thing and think that there must be something to it.

Q: So you don’t think that superstition is actually increasing or spreading, but rather, it’s a human constant?

MS: I think if anything, in the long-run, it’s getting better. If you compare our age to the Middle Ages, I think that things are much better than they were in terms of percentages of the population that believes in a lot of destructive superstition.

I think there will always be a sizable number of people that believes weird things. The Weird Things themselves, however, change. I mean, this whole business of talking to the dead - it cycles in and out of popularity. It’s popular now, but it wasn’t popular for a while. It was hugely popular back in the 1920s when Houdini was de-bunking it. These things kind of come and go.

Q: Is there actually no evidence of psychic ability in man or animal?

MS: None at all. No. And they’ve been testing this for a hundred years now - good, rigorous, controlled experiments, and they still really have nothing to speak of.

Q: Well, the sham psychic readings seem to have the feel of an ad hoc psychotherapy session, so one might argue that there is some good that comes of indulging in such things.

MS: Well, right - but that’s sort of like saying, what’s the harm in alcohol? It leads to other things that are destructive in life. Bad ideas are just as poisonous as alcohol. In many ways, worse. People go to war over bad ideas. They kill people. They blow up abortion clinics and fly planes into buildings, purely on bad ideas. It can be very dangerous.

Q: Could you briefly describe how cold-readings are done?

MS: Well, the readings are done - it’s actually cold-reading, warm-reading, and hot-reading - cold-reading is when you literally read someone cold whom you’ve never met, and there you throw out lots and lots of comments, ask a lot of questions, and look for feed-back, and start honing in on things that you’re getting feed-back on.

With the warm-reading technique, you say things that are true for everybody - enough that you are bound to get quite a few hits. So, if it’s a talking-to-the-dead sort of thing - if it’s a guy whose father or grandfather passed over, you talk about his watch. “There’s something about the watch… what does that mean, please?” Most guys keep their Dad’s or Grandfather’s watch when they pass over. If it’s a woman who’s lost a mother, grandmother - women usually keep a piece of jewelry; a necklace, a bracelet, something like that. Everybody keeps a keepsake - photographs, articles of clothing, whatever, of their lost loved ones. You throw those kinds of things out, you’re bound to get hits. Those are warm-readings, they’re true for most people.

Now, in hot-reading, you actually just cheat. You actually get information on people. I don’t think most psychics do that because you don’t really need to do it. The first two cold and warm-readings will get you the information you need - enough to convince people that you’re for real. Again, you don’t have to be very accurate at all. You only need to have about a five to ten percent hit-rate. If you ask a hundred questions or make a hundred comments - if you only get five or ten of them right - that’s good enough. People will come out shocked at how good you are. They’ll cry. They’ll boast about your incredible psychic powers. They’ll ask, “How do you explain that he got the name of my uncle Bob?” Well, how do explain that he rattled off 27 other names that meant nothing to you? See, people remember the meaningful names and forget the non-meaningful ones.

Q: Do think that some of these people actually believe that they’re psychic?

MS: Yes, I do. I think that some of them are just scam artists that know they’re faking. But, I think others have come to believe they can do it by their own positive feedback that they get from their clients. I think that they themselves improve at it - it is a skill, it’s like acting - you get better with practice. I think it’s a skill they develop and as they get better, they get more positive feedback, which gives them more confidence. Exuding confidence makes them more effective as “psychics” and it’s a positive feedback loop that gets set up there.

Q: Why can’t science conclusively dis-prove psychic ability?

MS: Well, the burden of proof is on them to show us that it does exist, not us to prove it doesn’t - and they have yet to do that. However, we can attempt to test whether people can read the minds of other people and when the tests fail, we can conclude there is no effect.

Michael Shermer has performed successful cold-readings that convinced his clients that he is a gifted psychic. He writes about his cold-reading experiments in his book, Science Friction.

“Hey!” I said. “Where are you at?” I was fishing for clues. This confused her.

“I’m really sorry to be calling so late…” she apologised. She explained that she works for a production company¹ that I had contacted by email several weeks earlier in regards to an upcoming film. The film, “Expelled” - a documentary that claims to “[blow] the horn on suppression” and give voice to “the silenced majority” of American creationists - promises to be controversial, and I had designed to write an advance feature article for a major daily exploring the issues it will present.

According to the film’s website, “Big Science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom. What they forgot is that every generation has its Rebel…” Of course, the “smart new ideas” are merely archaic, counter-reality creationist concepts re-labeled as “Intelligent Design”, and this generation’s “Rebel” - it turns out - is the aged, crusty, monotoned Ben Stein, a former speech writer for Richard Nixon, mostly unknown for his bit roles in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the television show The Wonder Years.

This call represented a break-through. After having been treated with high suspicion by the media company for weeks, the girl on the phone was prepared to set a specific time and date whereupon I could finally interview the producers responsible for the film. Happily, I made arrangements for the following week. Ultimately, the interviews would never take place. After several cancellations, re-schedulings, and further erratically timed phone calls (all on the producers’ ends), Expelled’s people finally stopped responding to my inquiries altogether, for reasons not entirely clear.²

This wasn’t the first call I’d received from Expelled, though it was the least formal up to that point. Since I had sent my initial query, the apparently suspicious production company had called and emailed me numerous times with dozens of mostly redundant questions contrived to measure my “angle”, and, I presume, my level of sympathy toward Intelligent Design.

The first call had come during regular business hours from a chatty clone who initially sounded professionally scripted, with the air of a salon-tanned prick perfectly willing to take business calls on his Blue-Tooth while out to dinner with his wife. He was “excited” about the film. He spoke rapidly, and at length, regarding the film and its predicted impact, with little or no prompting from me. “It’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen,” he declared confidently. Abruptly, his tone changed, reflecting sudden insecurity. He admitted that it was the only documentary he had seen. I said as little as possible. I didn’t want his making a fool of himself to leave him with a negative impression regarding my intentions. Fumbling for a recovery, he added, “It’s just a great film. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or not, it has nothing to do with that. This is for anybody; anybody concerned with Free Speech and science.”

Of course, I’d not mentioned religion at all.

Had I known that this inane conversation would be the closest I’d come to an actual interview with a representative for the film, I may have taken better notes. He babbled on in what seemed complete confidence that I was “all right”. He promised me an advanced screening and a meeting with a traveling Expelled propaganda crew. At the time, I merely waited for an opportune break in his wild oratory to ask if and when I could schedule an interview with the producers. “I’m not sure,” he told me, leaving me utterly confused as to why he had called me at all, “I’ll check and get back to you.”

He called back later that day sounding far more sober and subdued. He began a subtle interrogation cheaply disguised as passing small talk. What are you in school for…? Oh, good for you… Who do you write for…? Oh, that’s great… What kind of research do you do…? Interesting…! So, who do you write for…? Ah! That’s right… What’s your area of study…? Eventually, he promised to send me an email scheduling an interview. Later that day, I received an email that reminded me that I would get an email scheduling an interview, but in the meantime, could I send an email reminding him who it was that I was writing for? Also, could I assure them, in writing, that it was actually me who was writing the article and conducting the interview? Strictly a formality, you understand.

I found this level of screening ironic, being that the filmmakers themselves have been accused - by those who participated in it as interviewees - of misrepresenting their motives in order to gain the confidence of some of the top minds in academia; it’s a charge that the film’s spokespeople seem to dismiss as sour grapes from the “Big Science establishment.”

In a New York Times article about the film, physical anthropologist and head the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie C. Scott - who was interviewed for Expelled - is quoted as saying, “I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine. I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.”

I, on the other hand, was quite honest with the people representing Expelled about the type if article I intended to write - though I certainly never revealed my personal opinions on the topic to them. Mine was to be an “objective” treatment of the subject, which may seem laughable given my anything-but-neutral position in the evolution-creation debate. Of course I “believe” in evolution. Evolution is an established fact. My feelings toward the creationists oscillate between indignant disgust, and detached sociological interest… but not equally. More often than not, I feel indignant disgust at their willful ignorance, and strive to reclaim the detached sociological interest. I would argue that this doesn’t preclude me from writing objectively on the topic, as I see no reason for which “objectivity” requires me to suspend disbelief in the patently absurd. “Objectivity” need not imply a willingness on my part to indulge in the crude fantasies of the defiantly ignorant - rather, “objectivity” in this case would require that I suspend judgment, making no assumptions regarding the motives, intelligence, or sanity of the fabulists in question… At least in writing.

My model for this type of objectivity is Pulitzer Prize winning author Professor Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, whose social history of evolutionary theory and acclaimed account of the original Scope’s “Monkey Trial”³ have established him as the authoritative historian of the evolution-creation debate. In an email exchange, he agreed to speak with me about Expelled: “Sure, I’d be happy to help… I’ve been following this movie. Interesting stuff. For once, a new twist in the creationism wars…”

In a phone conversation, I had Professor Larson delineate the difference between Evolution by natural selection, and the political theory of Social Darwinism. Expelled intentionally treats the two interchangeably, viewing genocidal holocausts as a natural result of society’s general acceptance of Evolution. According to The New York Times: “If it were up to him, [Stein] said, the film would be called ‘From Darwin to Hitler.’”

Interestingly, Professor Larson had been approached by Expelled, and he was asked to be interviewed for the film. “They were very unclear as to what the film was actually about, and I couldn’t see any reason why I’d want to be involved,” Larson told me. This surprised me, as I see the good professor as a neutral historian. Presumably, the creationists do not.

Another main argument that Expelled promises to present is the idea that the banishment of the Intelligent Design hypothesis from public schools is a violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees Free Speech⁴ . For the counter-point here I spoke with Daniel Mach, the Director of Litigation in the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief for the ACLU, who described the invocation of the First Amendment as a tactic “related to the Teach-the-Controversy spin.”

“I don’t see this as a Free Speech issue at all,” he explained, “teachers shouldn’t be given a carte blanche to ignore curricular requirements or to convey educationally unsound information to public school students…” Further, to call upon the First Amendment “…misinterprets Free Speech while ignoring the Establishment Clause.”

Indeed, where would it end if teachers were allowed to teach whatever they wished in the name of Free Speech?

Playing the role of Jehovah’s Advocate while speaking with Mr. Mach and Professor Larson was difficult. Expelled’s arguments are easily flayed by the learned and rational. Unfortunately, a good number of the film’s viewers are sure to be neither, nor will rational arguments distract them from their cause. This dogged devotion to supernaturalism can be seen in the propagation of all of the so-called scientific criticisms against Evolution. These erroneous criticisms are debunked again and again, only to be presented by creationists to credulous Christians again and again, with no acknowledgment of their refutation.

Just as my feelings toward the creationists oscillate between disgust and sociological interest, so too do my feelings regarding their uprisings oscillate between fear and scornful amusement. It’s easy to feel that there is nothing to fear from the creationists, because their arguments are so clearly flawed and religiously motivated that one finds it difficult to imagine that they should ever win a significant court battle in their struggle to strangle science from public schools one school district at a time. On the other hand, there is reason to fear for the future, as supernaturalism seems to spread ever more malignantly, threatening a new Dark Age of unreason.

The impact of the film remains to be seen…

1. The same production company responsible for the Narnia fiasco, as well as Mel Gibson’s disturbing sado-masochistic blood-porn The Passion of The Christ. Motive Marketing, they are called. I think that the motive here is quite obvious.
2. Lest one adjudge me a fool, and see fit to point out that a mere Google search will probably reveal “Doug Mesner” as an enemy of Intelligent Design, allow me to confess that I don’t hold strictly to this name, and indeed I did not in this case.
3. Both books are highly, highly recommended to anybody at all interested in the topic
4. Even this argument - though it may seem somewhat original in the modern creationism war - is as old as the Scopes trial. Though William Jennings Bryan may not have invoked First Amendment privileges for religious concepts in schools (probably having a better grasp of the Establishment Clause than that), he did espouse a “majoritarianism” that maintained that in a democratic society, the majority rules, right or wrong: mobocracy.

If I were to interpret this dream, something which I don’t spend a lot of time doing, I would say that I was projecting my ideal state of mind in the context of the situation. That is to say that if I were dying, it’s kind of the way I’d like to deal with it. The really interesting thing about the dream was that I simply wasn’t afraid. All I wanted to do was finish up what I was working on quietly before I died. Had I been sweeping the floor I would have wanted to simply empty the dust bin first.
This is Mecca for me. It’s what I strive for above all things in my life. To embrace death, rather than to avoid it. As I get older I find that I look at people and try to understand them by knowing what it is that they love, and fear. I generally end up being close to the ones who embrace both. Fear is the proverbial elephant in the room but its ubiquitous nature makes it semi transparent. Just the way most people like it. I think that’s too bad because it is the great leveler. Doesn’t matter how rich, smart, beautiful or strong you are. If I walk into the room holding the thing that you fear the most you will quickly revert to your base self and in most cases be rendered powerless. That’s why it’s the great tool of the oppressor.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you, yes YOU, that you are going to die. Nothing is going to stop it and science, although it may buy you a bit more time, is not going to save you. At least not in the near future. You might drop dead of an aneurysm or die slowly of a really horrible disease (which seems to be one of the major fears people hold) or you might die peacefully in your sleep. Whatever, it’s happening and I would say that there is a very good chance that NOTHING is waiting for you on the other side. Now, if you take this grim news and post it on your fridge, or get it tattooed on the inside of your eyelids where you cannot avoid it well, something interesting might happen. You might, just might slowly come to the realization that you really don’t have anything to lose (in the big picture sense).
That’s pretty liberating and it puts your fears in a different light.
When I was a kid I was scared shitless of amusement park rides. I got over it one day by getting on the Zipper (still a freaky ride) alone. It was one of the great defining moments of my life, lost I’m sure, on the carnie operating the ride. So now when i am cresting the first hill of some ginormous roller coaster (or about to face some big fear in my life) I don’t close my eyes even though I still feel fear. I put my arms up in the air and scream my guts out. I always find that on the other side of that rush of fear is a heightened sense of clarity and confidence.

Her behaviour indicated that she understood this.

One day, She spontaneously broke into tears and tore up a female classmate’s art project: a construction paper jack-o-lantern with tears coming from its eyes.

“You always draw everything with tears in its eyes,” she wailed, collapsing - ironically - in sobs.

The class was a regimented prison camp. Unauthorized communication was forbidden. We were issued ID numbers for head-count, and desks which we were charged with keeping immaculate. When She spoke, we listened - nothing more. Everybody tried to remain anonymous. I often had questions, but this was no environment for my petty hair-splitting. Just the same, when She collected us together at story time to tell us about the Send a Mouse to College programme, I was intensely curious. This programme, we were told, allowed us to sponsor a mouse… in College!

I knew how the educational system broke down back then; Kindergarten was for babies. Elementary School was for growing tots like me. Middle School was for big kids, almost adults… complex concepts would be introduced. High School? The intellectual battlefield that separated the weak from the strong, deciding who would - and who would not - make it to College. College was strictly for dedicated academics… brains, geniuses.

In the first grade, we couldn’t be expected to understand a damned thing in the College curriculum, and yet here we were being told that there mice that had achieved this level of scholarly discipline.

The pamphlet, which we were required to bring home to our parents, bore an artistic rendering of the idealized mouse scholar, all smiles, proudly gripping his rolled parchment.

Could this be?

I had to ask: “Do we get to meet the mice that we sponsor?”

She was exasperated by my ignorance and impudence. “Just give the pamphlet to your parents.”

Later that night, I begged my parents to donate to the programme. They weren’t persuaded.

My older brother disabused me of this particular “innocence”. “The mice aren’t students,” he informed me, “they are test subjects. They are dissected and killed.”

I called him an idiot. Who would want to send a mouse to College for that?

Insane.

Nonetheless, I followed up with my mother. A little hesitantly, she agreed with my brother. These were lab rats.

I felt betrayed. I’d been had. But I got over it soon enough. My attention didn’t hold to anything too terribly long at that age.

Years later, I would recall the Send a Mouse to College programme in disbelief. “Can you believe they pulled that stunt on us?” I asked friends of mine. They were perplexed. None of them remembered any such programme. Was I sure? Not really, the more I thought about it. So I searched for information. There wasn’t much, but I imagined there had to have been some outcry about this at some point. I found that the programme had been contrived by the American Cancer Society (ACS), so I called them to ask about it. I told them that I was thinking about writing an article about the programme, so they put me in touch with one of their PR flacks in Massachusetts.

Her name was Karen Rouse, and despite her annoying tendency to continually mention the ACS’s financial contributions to the University I am in attendance of, I found her to be amiable and helpful. Of course, that’s her job, but I’ll take it at face value.”It does seem a bit weird by today’s standards,” Rouse admitted, “It’s antiquated. But, at the time, we were trying to educate children. We wanted to get them thinking about cancer and about research.”

Rouse, who has been with the ACS for 34 years, and remembered Send a Mouse to College from personal experience, acknowledged that the campaign upset a few children and parents who found the usage of pamphlets and literature depicting the happy mouse, holding a diploma, deceptive. “We did start to get letters; very heart-felt letters. I remember one in particular from a boy, probably about 12 years old, in the mid-seventies. He said that he wanted to help in the fight against cancer, but he wanted to know if there was something else he could do that didn’t entail sending a rodent to its death.” According to her, the quantity of negative letters was significant, but not copious. “I wouldn’t say that there was a ground-swell of these letters, but it did run its course.”

Turns out, no organized objection to the campaign - which ran, according to Rouse’s recollection, from the mid-sixties to the early eighties - ever surfaced.

She explained that during the eighties, the ACS began to focus more on teaching children about cancer prevention, focusing primarily on tobacco and the usage of sunscreen. “We [the ACS] moved away from programmes like Send a Mouse to College, because it had run its course.”

“Today,” says Rouse, “childhood cancer is considered 99% Treatable.” Also, the ACS today is able to raise $425 million annually in nationwide research funding. She credits this in part to awareness campaigns like Send a Mouse to College. As for the efficacy of the Send a Mouse to College campaign itself: “I have no idea how extensive the campaign was. I know it was nationwide, but I have no record of how many schools were involved or how much money was ultimately raised.”

Clearly, Rouse’s answers were contrived and scripted - which is merely to say that she was cautious, not dishonest. At points, I felt as though she were actually reading to me. She seemed to sense trouble from a journalist exploring such territory. She tried to get a feel for my angle. Where was I coming from? What did I want? Was I outraged?

No, not really. I was, but not anymore. I still think it was stupid campaign, but nothing worth exacting bitter revenge over.

Ultimately, I never wrote the intended article for publication.

People are just too touchy about these kinds of things…

Many known belief systems in the world feature the idea of a ’soul’ — a sentient component of an entire human being; in most of these systems, the existence of this soul continues beyond the corporeal existence of the human being, maintaining some carry over from its time spent in the host body (depending on belief system, ranging from actual memories and feelings, to more hand-waving-vagaries like ‘psychic energy’). I won’t address the varying theories about where these souls are supposed to come from, what their state of existence is prior to the physical existence of the host form, which is an article unto its own; i will, instead, focus on what the continual march of scientific discovery brings to light on dark age notions of the soul.

Let me define what a ’state machine’ is; it’s a bit of a nerdy term which might detract a bit from what you may have anticipated just reading the title. (If so, i say, ‘you’ve already bought the horse, so you might as well give it a ride.’)
The ’state’ of an object can be thought of as a description of all of the meaningful attributes of that object at any specific instant in time. For example, the state of my car this morning could be described (incompletely) like, ‘the gas tank was 5/8 full; the FL, FR, RL, and RR tires were measured to have 33, 33, 31, and 31 PSI; there were 8 CDs in the changer with the following titles: …; etc etc etc’.
A ‘State Machine’ is a name that is given to an object that has some number of finite states and performs transitions from one state to another state due to some condition. Without straying too far from strict definitions, the human body — as well as the brain¹ — can be considered to be state machines, like the automobile.
In more complex state machines (like cars and humans), damage can be taken which doesn’t end the functioning of the machine but instead just prevents some of its states from being reached while in the damaged state:

• if a tire has gone flat, my car will not be able to reach the state in which it is moving 85 mph under its own propulsion
• if i fracture all of the fingers on my right hand, i won’t be able to play the piano with my right hand

The implied part of that sentence is that there is, of course, damage which is not mendable:

• that obliterated BMW in Florida
• significant brain damage in which large amounts of matter becomes unusable through either a wasting disease (like Alzheimer’s) or physical damage (like Phineas Gage and the rail spike)

Now that we’ve gotten through that, for those that believe in a soul what the exact role that the soul plays in the human host tends to be varied, nebulous, and a bit fluffy; given this, i’ll avoid trying to corner that slippery pig and instead suggest that we look at two types of functions which the brain has been recognized to provide:
Event (and personal history) memory
      The evidence that the formation, re-writing, and storage of the memory is performed in the brain is outstandingly documented — if in doubt, i’d invite the reader to start by listening to an episode devoted to this topic by the world’s best public radio program - Radio Lab.² It could be argued that ‘object preference’ is largely related to the memory function³ since the repeated positive exposures to an object that would increase preference are likely instigated due to memory of previous positive exposure. (An analogue argument would be that an Alzheimer’s patient who forgets what their favourite food is, is unlikely to seek it out and will thereby cease manifestation of that preference.)
      In both cases of a wasting disease, and of changed memories due to re-writes, there is not the slightest evidence to suggest that there is a secondary storehouse of the original information.
The amorphously defined ‘personality’
      While object preference plays a large role in defining the personality of a person, there are other factors which are brain based. Likelihood of aggressivity (which one might nudge gently into the larger group of ‘value system’), for example, has been shown to be related to brain architecture, and as well could be both apparently seen in the post-explosion version of Phineas, and is an all too frequent occurrence in Alzheimer’s patients.

What’s common in these is that the biological brain matter is the storehouse for these things, for were it some other object (such as a soul), it would be expected that the functions would still exist despite the destruction of the grey and white matter. I suppose one could argue that a soul is a one way device while its host is living — in other words, that it is acting as purely a container of state — and after death could become transformed into an emitter of state as well. The poison misstep in that argument, though, is that it also argues that the soul has no contribution to a living human’s personality and value choices, which seems contrary to the described role of a soul in at least one or two major belief systems.

To boil that all down a bit, we have fairly compelling evidence that the biological lump we refer to as the brain is the actual container of the state descriptors which make up that person which we, and others, recognize us as. Since those qualities are manifestations of the underlying biological matter, after the physical cessation of a human host an attached hypothetical soul would have no semantic relation to that human host (or so little recognizable semantic commonality that two souls from hosts A and B would be unable to be ascribed to A or B in any of the ways that we, as living humans, identify unique individuals).
Due to that, one has to ask what it means, what value it provides, to describe the human form as having an ethereal component when that ethereal component is forcibly divorced from nearly all of the qualities which make us, as humans, unique individuals.

1. … as reasonably posited by Alan Turing
2. Andrei Codrescu’s [awful] spoken piece in this episode is thankfully an uncharacteristic addition to Radio Lab episodes.
3. Though the identical twin studies of Turecki and Rathus strongly suggest that there is a genetic component as well.

I felt that I had to come clean. 

I composed an e-mail to avant industrial artist Otto Von Schirach, an innocent man who had fallen victim to the spiraling dysfunctional buffoonery of both The Drunken Murphy and myself:

To: Otto Von Schirach

Subject: Fluids of Strangers

Body:

I have a dark and hideous confession to make, and, as it concerns you, I thought
you may as well be the first to know. First, let me inform you that I know who
threw a cup-full of piss on you in Detroit when you were opening for Skinny
Puppy during the Greater Wrong of the Right tour. It was this guy:

http://www.myspace.com/72MURPHY

He was drunk and enjoying your performance when he turned to me and said, “Too
bad I already took a piss, or I’d piss on this guy.” Trying to be helpful,
without thinking through the horrible consequences, I emptied my own cup on the
floor, and refilled it with piss, much to the surprise of the crowd around me.
The die was cast. The Drunken Murphy staggered forward through the crowd like
some defective, inebriated Moses while the sea of bodies parted miraculously
before him. The rest is history.
It may please you to know: I had no communicable diseases and maintain a healthy
diet. Some dermatologists maintain that urine holds topical benefits. In several
cultures, we are now legally married. I hope this lifts a burden from you the
way it has for me.

Hugs & kisses, Doug

Naturally, I forwarded the above message to The Drunken Murphy as well.  Now we could both rest a bit easier, I thought.

Not so.

Drunken, it turned out, was somewhat outraged.  He felt that there were some flagrant errors in my description of events.

He went on to compose an e-mail of his own to the doubtlessly puzzled Otto:

Dearest Otto,

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Murphy; known formally as The Drunken
Murphy in discriminating circles of professional inebriates. I am aware that
there have been recent accusations incriminating me as the man who doused you
with piss during your pre-Skinny Puppy performance at the State Theatre in
Detroit. Having read the message sent to you by my colleague-in-arms, Doug, I
deem necessary that my own version of the story be recorded - for what it’s
worth - for the benefit of fairness and accuracy.
As he says, there was indeed drinking taking place during (and well before) your
performance. This in itself seems unworthy of mention, and it hardly suggests
that anything was in the slightest amiss. Quite the contrary.
Doug rather irresponsibly reports that I suddenly declared - unprovoked - my
desire to piss on you, and lamented my recently emptied bladder. While this did
happen, it omits an important preliminary detail: somewhere between songs you
saw fit to declare something to the effect of, “I have diarrhea for you
Detroit!!” and I felt my regional pride affronted by another outsider coming to
Detroit and apparently seeing only the burnt-out decay, ravaged waste, and
horror-stricken brutish locals. I felt that you had no understanding of the
true, warm, yellow, inner-wetness of Detroit.
Uncultured savage that he is, Doug didn’t trouble himself to move from his place
in the crowd before emptying his drink on the floor, publicly exposing his
prick, and re-filling his cup.
Obviously now, you can see the bind I was in. While I may have been spouting
idle disapproval at your previous remark, Doug now escalated the situation into
an event wherein I would appear the hypocrite to the surrounding crowd were I
not to put the urine to use. At that point, it was either you or me.
Sorry, mate.
As Doug reported, the sea of bodies miraculously parted making way for your
unholy baptism of filth.
I would like to make mention that Doug manages (usually with no help at all) to
get his piss all over everything; peeing in unlikely places, on unwitting
people, into open car windows, off high roof-tops, onto adversaries and sexual
companions alike. The man has a problem.
Though he feigns relative innocence in his email to you, it was later pointed
out to me that you could, in fact, have meant that you had diarrhea for Detroit
in an entirely positive manner. I considered this in remorse. “Fuck it,” Doug
said, “guy probably loved it. Next time, I’ll take a shit on him.”
All I can say is, if that’s what he wants to do, I won’t be there to throw it
for him.

Love, The Drunken Murphy

I contested many of the above comments, and still do.

Oddly, Otto never replied…

#1. The concept of infinity
It’s got a drop-dead sexy symbol, but at the end of the day people have a hard time wrapping their mind around the concept of infinity; i’ve found, surprisingly, that it’s often the case that people just don’t ponder it. So what does that mean for eternity?
In historical eras in which life was rough and short, philosophical and mathematical developments of the concept of infinity were generally non-existent except in small enclaves. So to someone who expected to live to 40 with a bit of luck, who had no mature development on the idea of infinity, and no real knowledge of human history (and certainly no idea of geological nor cosmological record), “eternity” sounded like a fine idea: ‘a really really long time in which all of this truly harsh living is replaced by no worries in idyllic settings.’
As they say: that was then, this is now. Today we have:

• average life spans in first and second world countries edging towards 90 years
• a pretty cushy existence (even just think electricity, heating, refrigeration, supermarkets, and indoor plumbing)
• more than a century of concrete mathematical and philosophical development on the varying types of infinity
• an idea about the age of the universe, galaxy, solar system, and earth

In other words: life is long and not very rough, and eternity is quite a beefy thing.
If you haven’t thought much about infinity, consider for a moment that were the height of the ‘Q’ key on your keyboard to represent your entire life span until this moment, you would need to build a stack of keys that would reach the moon; you’d then need to do that same thing so that a stack covered every piece of land on earth. That resulting representation of time, with each ‘Q’ key being your entire life span, would still not be even one-trillionth of the time you’re looking at in the afterlife.¹
The deal sealer part of eternity is that it’s immune to scaling — so were some enterprising heaven-aspiring lad or lass to come along, hear that Q example, and say, “Aha - but what if the afterlife was set up so that what we experience while living as 1 second is actually like 100 billion years in the afterlife.”, then the response to that is, “Even so, because we are talking about infinity, that Q example is still completely true.”

#2 Repetitiveness of close relationships
A frequent part of the various afterlife scenarios involves being around at least loved ones, and in some versions: other stranger do-gooders as well. The idea that this is an enticing fact fits well with people dying at 35 or 40; people dying at 80 or 90: not so well. Do we really want to hear Aunt Tildie’s repetitive annoying story about that childhood summer trip to Lake Erie — that one that’s been like torture for just the last 20 years we been forced to listen to it — for all of eternity? Even people you have really adored for 40 years — how do you think you’ll tolerate him scraping the fork across his teeth in 2500 years? Perhaps this afterlife is more likely to be filled with random shouts of, “For god’s sake - won’t you ever stop doing that?!”.
And what happens, if after 18,000 years of teeth raking you’ve had enough and want to move to a different afterlife neighbourhood, but he doesn’t want it to end? Well, that brings us to #3…

#3 The problem with anti-symmetric relationships
Bob and Jim are on a flight during a business trip; Jim’s a lonely person who has basically Bob to count as his only friend, whereas Bob is quite popular and honestly finds Jim kind of annoying. Suddenly both engines fall from the wings and the plane plunges into the ground killing both of them. What happens here?

• Jim and Bob end up in the same afterlife neighbourhood. This is clearly Jim’s idea of the afterlife, though not really Bob’s.
• Bob gets to go to one afterlife neighbourhood where all his friends and family are, and Jim is placed into some neighbourhood featuring a grandfather which took care of him growing up. This is clearly Bob’s idea of the afterlife, though Jim’s pretty lonely.
• Bob gets to go to his own neighbourhood and, unbeknownst to him, he is also placed in Jim’s neighbourhood. It turns out that none the people around the deceased in the afterlife are actually the authentic entity, but are instead some sort of manifestation of what the deceased would project them to be — which seems not only like a bad episode of Star Trek, but also quite lonely, and so probably not what people are signing up for when they board the afterlife express.

These are not quite the picture postcards of the afterlife.

#4 The numbing to enjoyment
I don’t know about you - but i get bored with everything (or from the half glass full perspective: i have an insatiable desire to ‘learn new stuff’ — though unfortunately i can get bored of the insatiable desire). Let’s say you’re not me; try the following:
Think about the absolutely best, most stimulating, most rewarding experience of your entire life; maybe it was some event with a bunch of friends; maybe it was a drug experience; maybe it was a sex occasion; maybe it was a vacation; maybe your super-best friend who had been thought lost in a plane crash emerged from the woods six months later just fine.
Whatever it was, think about the enjoyment pattern it followed. It was great, it was amazing… and then at some point it’s likely that it wasn’t so great and you were glad it came to a close. It’s also likely that if you opened up your date book the next day and saw that [only] the following two months were repeats of that event, that it probably wouldn’t look so savory. Maybe this isn’t you, you say; that you could have taken another eight months of it and loved it all equally. Maybe, i’d say, but eternity will break you - for this is how processing information inevitably goes… watercolour paints aren’t nearly as magical as they were when you were five, and every fantastic experience will likely be truly blasé 12,000 years from now (let alone one hundred million billion years from now). Even worse, at some point of realizing that things ‘just aren’t as great as they used to be’, you’ll soon then realize that ‘this will never end and never get better.’
(You could also change the title of this section to “#4 The numbing to suffering” and use this as an argument against the penalty of an idea like Hell. At some point, suffering becomes adapted to; it might take a really long time, but the occupant of Hell has eternity - and so at some point, Hell would have a large population of occupants immune to the suffering (except the suffering of realizing that conscious existence will never cease).)

Again, it’s understandable where the basis for these afterlife mythologies might have stemmed when viewed in the light of an average life span during the eras in which they were originally ‘explained’. For an average life span of 35 and an average birthing age of 15, you’re looking at an average length of roughly 12 years of adult inter-generational relationship time before the parent dies (assuming that a person of 8 years old could be considered mature enough to appreciate their parent(s) in an adult manner). It’s entirely likely that someone in that situation will have a strong desire for a cosmology which involves seeing their relative again.
I realize that one of the foundations of faith is to simply not question that in which you have faith, but to not see these inconsistencies for what they are — damning — is purely delusional.

1. Spare the comments: i know i’m trying to quantify the unquantifiable — it’s just illustration.

Though Mother’s Day is still many months away, I felt I would share the piece with all of you now, as Loki’s previous blog brought the topic to the fore of my mind.

May it nourish your souls the way it has so many others…

The Celebration of Motherhood

Today we celebrate motherhood. Today we honour the care-givers, and the breeders. We give thanks to the thoughtful conceivers, and the broken condoms; the magnanimous matrons, as well as the fatuous fertile; the responsible guardians, and the dissolute town-pumps. Today we smile benevolently and express our heartfelt gratitude to all of those who have put their maternal impulses to work, blessing the world with the greatest gift of all: The Miracle of Life.

This is not to be denigrated. But conception isn’t really a “miracle”, is it? Circumstances vary, but we all know how it happened. “Miracle” would imply some type of supernatural intervention; an unpredictable and unstoppable act of God. This is hardly an informed or responsible view of motherhood. Nor, unfortunately, are many mothers to be considered responsible or informed.

In fact, it has become plain to see that the least responsible and least informed are ever the most likely to become mothers…. again, and again.

Nonetheless, today we celebrate motherhood - all of motherhood - for motherhood’s sake, because motherhood is the most demanding, and potentially the most rewarding job in the whole world.

And yet, nobody applies for the job of motherhood, and no qualifications are asked of a would-be mother. One needs to demonstrate proper cognizance to scrub toilets or pick produce, but nobody is too simple to have a child. Motherhood may be the most important job a person could take, and yet nobody is too incompetent to be denied the task. And it’s a good thing, too - for who would decide who is fit to breed and who is not? Selective breeding of any kind is eugenics all over again, and anybody who even mutters that foul word must be ridiculed from discourse as neo-Nazi swine.

Only a fascist could be so vile as to suggest that the laws of heredity could be employed toward the betterment of the gene-pool or - disregarding any such lofty notions of “improvement” - cessation of the propagation of severe dysfunctions from retardations to psychopathy.

Anybody who would recommend that parents who are unable to afford housing, food, or clothing - or is otherwise incapable of caring for a child - should thus abstain from having children is nothing more than a megalomaniacal totalitarian. You have merely to point at her and say aloud, “Hitler!” and your argument is won.

Breeding restrictions are a slippery slope, and it is absolutely inevitable that if the rapist is sterilized, so too will be all non-Aryans. Consensus means nothing here, because in a democracy “all men are created equal” - except when applying for jobs, or being accepting into schools, or looking for a loan….

But breeding is different. You can’t stratify there. An alcoholic inbred could possibly produce the next Einstein, (Though, I suppose, the alcoholic would be unlikely to be an actual inbred. There are laws against inbreeding. Inbreeding is known to propagate genetic defects, but that’s where we need to draw the line, or it’s head first down that slippery slope.) and infertile couples should care nothing of the background details of their sperm donor.

(Some things mustn’t ever be regulated. When you think about it, it’s scary how one is forced into testing before one can acquire a driver’s license. Even after being administered a driver’s license, “the government” is at liberty to take it away if “they” deem us “unfit” to drive by their subjective standards. Soon we’ll require licenses to walk, and only blond-haired blue-eyed Aryans will have the privilege of unrestricted ambulation.)

It is disgraceful form to suggest that Evolution isn’t necessarily equal to improvement, or that the death of natural selection in the civilized world may have brought with it the side-effect of dysgenics, a deterioration of beneficial traits. Such thinking may lead us to believe that the gene pool has become stagnant and putrid, and the dregs have over-flowed to the surface. The argument would surely shift from whether or not abortion should or shouldn’t be legal, to whether it should - at times - be mandatory.

We must gallantly play intellectual blame games designed to avoid the question of stupidity. We must hold that educational standards have declined, while sociolinguists declare simplified, un-nuanced, catch-phrase-laden slang speech as no less legitimate than actual English. We must litter the world with signs warning of every possible danger to coddle the irresponsible.

Today we celebrate mothers while every other day we’re told we must “do it for the children”, because we know that they’ve been born with every disadvantage.