Having gotten onto Teh Smooch so much of late about theology, here's a glimpse into modern theological views of God that are quite different from what you hear fundamentalists going on about (I certainly rather doubt you'd hear anything like that coming from the LCMS, btlzu2's former church).

Interestingly, the author posits that atheists and believers need not be that far apart at all on the existence of God, based on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Certainly food for thought, anyway.

Iamthefallen inspired the following by pointing out the following regarding the relative precision of metric and English drill bits:

Ah, but part of the trick is knowing what level of increment is the appropriate one! Is an increase from 1/2" to 9/16" more or less than a mm? How about 1/2" to 17/32"? Of course it is a trick question, the answer is to use the 1/2" bit again, but this time tilt and swivel the drill around the hole :)

Or, depending on the task at hand, there are other possible solutions.

Take, for example, wiring. You see, BoE's parents have two houses on their property -- the one they live in (which they built when they got married) and the one BoE's great-grandparents built. When I say "built", I mean "they built it themselves" with help from the neighbors. Quite often they made it up as they went along (the rather...ah...interesting floorplan is ample evidence of this).

So a couple years ago, when BoE's grandmother died, leaving the older house unoccupied, BoE's family began to renovate the place. It needed a new roof, new windows, new wiring, central heating, you name it. (About the only modern convenience it had was indoor plumbing, and even that was a bit on the iffy side.) In the process, they made some interesting discoveries, like how the stone double outer walls (this thing was built by the method of "make your best guess as to how much material you need, then double it") were filled not with what you'd call standard insulation, but with interesting things like old newspapers, mouse skeletons, old clothing, and so on. (No word of any dead bodies, aside from the mice.)

BoE's grandfather was also something of an inventor, and he came up with a hand-cranked gadget to spray concrete. (He loved concrete. No, you don't understand. He did everything with concrete. Like repair BoEs's headless Barbie dolls with it.) So the outer walls are coated not in stucco, but in solid concrete. Unfortunately, for some reason the concrete doesn't hold paint too well, so the house is a drab dark grey.

(As an aside, BoE's grandfather sounds like he was really something else -- a true eccentric, in an endearing rather un-German sort of way. Very different from her for-God's-sake-don't-stick-out parents. I regret that I never got to meet him. But anyway.)

So anyway, when the electrician was redoing the wiring, he made some interesting discoveries. Like the fact that they apparently had exactly one (1) drill bit, given that all the holes were nearly exactly the same size (duh). This is interesting because the wiring they chose to use was a bit too thick. Their solution was not to go out and get a new bit, or jiggle the drill around to make the hole bigger, but to strip all the insulation off the wiring.

This was back in the mid-1930s, when they first put in electric wiring into the house (the house itself was built around 1900). How that house is still standing, I don't know.

Aside from the fact that the walls are strong enough to withstand a direct hit from an ICBM, that is.

This article on the front page (I actually ventured out into them thar wilds for the first time in ages) says:

"Astronomers have come up with an improved method of looking for extraterrestrial life with an Earth-like civilization. Theorist Avi Loeb proposes to use instruments like the Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), an Australian facility for radio astronomy currently under construction. The array could (theoretically) detect civilizations broadcasting in the same frequencies as our own society. From the article: 'Loeb and Zaldarriaga calculate that by staring at the sky for a month, the MWA-LFD could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars. More powerful broadcasts could be detected to even greater distances. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10 times farther away, which would encompass 100 million stars. ' The original paper describes the details."

I don't like this at all. See, if they detect a civilization that is Earth-like 300 light-years away, that means that that civilization is actually, like, 300 years more advanced than we are (because it takes that long for their radio signals to get to us). So then, like, they see us poking around under their curtains and watching all their reruns of "I Love Zygort", and get pissed off, and their super-advanced civilization comes and kicks our asses and takes all our Earth women.

And that would really really suck.

This bit of silliness brought to you by an Ethelred who is coming off a major bit of stress and is now giddy from lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of caffeine, lack of sunlight, lack of tender-loving care and a strange reaction to being exposed to the dim glow of a TFT monitor and light bulb for roughly 624 hours straight.

In response to StB's slanderous attack on my mother's home state:

See my comment to baby_head_rush. Basically, it was more the comment than the place.

Ya, I know. ;-)

But I'm obliged by my mother to vehemently defend the honor of Roundontheendsandhighinthemiddleland.

I sort of half grew up there, since my mom's family is from Logan County and we visited a lot when I was growing up in Virginia. Some years ago I was visiting my brother and my parents joined us in Virginia, and we drove from there to Ohio, taking much the same route we'd taken when I was little (before the nearby stretch I-64 was finished, so we had to take back roads through much of West Virginia to get to the WV Turnpike further north). It was pretty strange, in a way, going along the same roads we had when I was a kid and seeing how things had changed -- and how in many ways things hadn't changed at all.

I noted that they finally had new rest areas. See, Ohio was the first state in America to have paved roads and highways, back in the late 1800s. (Matter of fact the county seat of Logan County is the site of the very first paved road in America.) When I was a kid in the 1970s, most of the rest areas literally hadn't changed since then. Just open wooden pit toilets (I remember the unbelievable stench in the summer and being terrified that the sludge would splash up and hit me when I took a dump) and an old rusty hand water pump. When we drove through Ohio on my last visit, they finally seemed to have gotten into the 20th century -- new buildings with flush toilets and drinking fountains.

And you know what? I found myself missing the wooden toilets. Go figure.

So there you have it. Ohio, to me, is an open toilet, and I defend it anyway.

The House of Unraed was pleased to accept a package containing tribute from an anonymous supplicant craving mercy from our realm.

That is, a kind soul sent a present (Madden 07 for PS2) anonymously as a present. I thankee very much! Amusingly, the sender misspelled my Slashdot nick in a certain way that only a couple people do, so I think I know who it was, but I'll respect their anonymity and thank them this way.

Meanwhile, the following dialogue took place at the lunch table today. I swear I'm not making this up.

THE SCENE
We're eating lunch. The Confessor, as usual, is sitting in his high chair next to me. In front of him is a carton of apple juice, which as it happens has an Austrian flag on it. The Confessor points at it.

CONFESSOR
Flag!

ETHELRED
That's right. That's a flag. It's the Austrian flag.

CONFESSOR
Wants a flag, too!

ETHELRED
You want a flag?

CONFESSOR
Yeah!

ETHELRED
You want your own flag?

CONFESSOR
Yeah. Wants a red flag!

ETHELRED
A red flag? Are you a Commie?

[BoE chortles.]

CONFESSOR
Yeah.

ETHELRED
Hmmm...don't you want an American flag?

[We have a couple American flags I got during the World Cup and for the Fourth of July that he plays with sometimes. We also have a German and an English flag that we also got during the World Cup. The Confessor can already identify them.]

CONFESSOR
Wants America.

ETHELRED
You want a red flag and you want America? What do you want that for?

CONFESSOR
Confessor is a Commie. That's goofy. *giggles*

ETHELRED
What do you want America for?

CONFESSOR
Toys.*

...

So there you have it. The Confessor plans to impose Communism on America and use Americans as his playthings. You have been warned.

* - I presume this is because Grandma and Grampa send him stuff, so America is the place where toys come from.

PS: A belated Happy Birthday to tuxette!

In my previous JE, I sulked that I didn't get a fully-functional Starship Enterprise.

artifex began to reminisce about 70s and 80s sci-fi, which reminded me of something.

This is like so me in 2491 AD.

Buck Rogers will kick all your sorry asses. Except Erin Gray's Spandex-clad one, of course, which we all will lick.

UPDATE OK, so I got the year wrong. Blarg!

The bastards showed Dinner for One this year...

COLORIZED!

Well, here it is the way God intended.

Meanwhile, oddly enough for a future global dictator, the Confessor was (like last year) unnerved by the fireworks and wanted nothing to do with the sparklers Daddy got. Gloriana, meanwhile, was agog about it all. Hmmmm...

Happy 2007 anyway, y'all.

...not to make any resolutions.

Except to wish everyone a Happy 2007.

So there.

I'm just sulking because I didn't get the fully-functional life-sized Starship Enterprise I wanted for Christmas.

Pursuant to SolemnDragon's mentioning of my in-laws, Ethelred will now commence to whining about them. It's what I do so well.

If you slog your way through all this, there's some non-whining stuff further down. Will I actually make it easier to find for you? Hah! Of course not.

So! On with the whining: The elder portions of the House of Unraed, as you may recall, were forced to withdraw from Ye Olde Country to...uh...Ye Newe Country because of the complaints of the elder branch of the House of Unraed (namely, my brother and niece). You may also recall I was coming down with some stomach problem.

Mercifully I didn't get as sick as I had feared -- more like I just felt poorly, but had no diarrhea or vomiting, just constant nausea. BoE got it, too, with similar results; the kids seem to have been spared.

So a couple days before Christmas Eve, BoE got a guilty conscience and invited her family over for the gift-giving on Christmas Eve (the traditional time in most of Germany). For my part I was a bit surprised that she hadn't (yet) invited them, and was assuming all along they were coming. I more or less reminded BoE to ask them by asking when they were arriving. Stupid me.

It was also partly a quid pro quo, because it turns out BoE's original idea (which she had told me, but in all the stress of my work I'd gotten it garbled in my head) was we'd celebrate Christmas Eve alone, then go to her parents for a day on the 25th or 26th...except our car suddenly starting acting strangely, so I was leery of driving anywhere outside of Hannover. So no drive to her parents' place. Thus BoE gets a guilty conscience and invites them over. Oh well.

(Side note: If a car stutters a lot and is *extremely* sluggish, with a very low idle, and it doesn't seem to want to get going in first gear, but once it's warmed up after about 10 minutes it acts more or less normally -- any guesses what it is? My dad suspected dampness in the ignition, but it seems to do it when it's dry but also doesn't always do it when it's very damp out...lately it's acting normally again, but I'm still nervous about it.)

Anyway, we had asked them in advance to not go crazy with presents like they did the previous two years. In fact BoE extracted an agreement from them that the kids would just get a play kitchen (the Confessor likes to cook) and various add-ons for it, for which my parents and the in-laws would share the cost. My parents (who also went a bit off the deep end last year, but not too badly) generally stuck to that. Not only that, but my mom suggested taking (and took) BoE along to shop so BoE could approve whatever she bought.

Needless to say, the in-laws showed up with a big case full of presents for the kids. They probably would have brought more, except they drive a little two-door Opel and couldn't fit more in there. :-P

They also showed up with some odd presents for BoE and myself. BoE got one present from them: some cheap underwear. (Worse, the stuff isn't even cotton, and BoE has skin problems with synthetics.) I got a bottle of German champagne ("Sekt"), which...er...I really don't like at all, and after knowing me for 13 years I'd think they'd know that by now, but OK, they tried. Not sure what they're trying to say, except it's odd that they apparently regard BoE even lower than they do me.

They were their usual thoroughly unhelpful selves while here, such as laughing at our expense whenever we had to discipline the kids (which of course just eggs the kids on), openly contradicting us in front of them, etc. etc. etc. Not surprisingly, the kids have been a handful since.

I will give SIL credit: She gave me a nice calendar with pictures of stained-glass windows, and she gave the kids some books (they love to read). BoE was pleased with the candle glasses she got from SIL. So at least SIL did well, even if her parents are royal PITAs, and she generally behaved herself.

The tons of presents the in-laws got for the kids turned out to be loads and loads of cheap junk. Some of the toys (mostly toy trucks, cars and construction equipment) literally disintegrated. The Confessor brought me one of the trucks, asking me to fix it; as I tried to snap a piece of the container back into place, the wheels came off and the support for the container also fell off. The boxes also all clearly said "starting at 6 years", while the Confessor isn't even 3 and Gloriana (who, as you may recall, already was at the hospital once after choking on something) is a year and a half. So much for buying appropriate toys and keeping the presents in check.

Wouldn't it have made more sense to spend the same money on fewer, but nicer and more appropriate, presents -- let alone respecting our wishes not to have so many presents? Or am I just being an ungrateful dick?

I've considered donating the toys to charity, but in all seriousness I've thought that might not be a good idea, because then some other kid will get the pieces down their throat. We may still do it that way, but I don't have a good feeling about it at all.

And the kids unsurprisingly got bored during the gift-giving, just like last year. In the end they didn't finish opening presents until the next day. And -- I have to admit I felt a bit of Schadenfreude at this -- they were rather more interested in the kitchen than in the toys the in-laws brought along, which isn't surprising because that's what the Confessor asked for. (I tried to encourage him to wish for a thermonuclear warhead, but unfortunately he's not able to pronounce "thermonuclear" just yet.)

Thus BoE afterwards muttered that next year we are 1) doing the presents on Christmas morning, not Christmas Eve (seems to be better for the kids), and 2) the in-laws are staying home.

One "awwwww" moment: I got myself a new Washington Nationals ballcap and at the same time ordered a kid-sized one for the Confessor, which I hid away and BoE wrapped for me. He unwrapped it and was delighted to have a cap like Daddy's new one, and proudly wore it all evening. The next day he wanted to dress just like Daddy for church, too, and so we did, more or less (we have similar sweaters and shirts). Moments like that really make it worth being a dad, that's for sure.

The Confessor also cracked us up by warbling his own renditions of Christmas carols, including such previously unknown hits as "Rude off the red-hosed ranger" and "Jingabel". And he really enjoyed watching The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with us (last year he was still too young and didn't really get it), and also watched A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott with us -- a bit long for him, but he sat through nearly all of it.

Meanwhile, Gloriana began the Christmas season by threatening to overtake her brother in the potty-training sweepstakes. Remember she's 18 months younger, but she already went pee in the potty. The Confessor, meanwhile, actually seems to enjoy that warm feeling between the legs. *sigh*

Gloriana also made Daddy a little Christmas present just by rattling off a few new clearly English words, and by snuggling with him at every opportunity. (Warning to future potential suitors of Gloriana: Your future father-in-law will demand castration as the price of marriage, assuming you even get that far, though you may freeze some sperm in advance to produce grandchildren, after which you are expected to clear off.)

The Christmas Eve service at church was also lovely -- I ended up being thurifer, so I got a healthy blast of incense. In fact BoE gave me a small tabletop censer for Christmas, with some incense to go with it.

The Christmas Day service ended up being unintentionally funny: We have a (remarkably realistic-sounding) digital organ that also has a remote control and can be set up with MIDI files for playback. (It sounds lame, but trust me, aside from the pauses between verses, it sounds very real.) Anyway, some of the kids got a bit rowdy during the service, so the priest's wife took them (including their kids) into the priest's office so they could play without distracting the others. Sometime later, the priest was giving his sermon, and all of a sudden the organ launches into a song full-blast. Everyone turned around and looked at the organist, who had a priceless look of utter panic, saying "I didn't do anything! I didn't do anything!" as he frantically shut down the organ. Turns out the priest's young son (a couple months older than Gloriana) had gotten his hands on the remote and was happily pushing buttons. Later on the priest teased the organist by saying he thought the organist was trying to tell him to get on with the sermon. :-)

What's additionally funny is that this sort of thing is kinda normal at our church. No one seems to mind -- in fact people seem to find it charming how this little high church bunch has everything go slightly awry. :-)

So Merry Christmas thus far (as pointed out in Sol's JE, it ain't over yet!) and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to the following persons:

• gmhowell (hope you got some time with Joe over Christmas, preferably lawyerless)
• SolemnDragon, who shall be my viceroy in less than two years (incinerate in '08!)
• Em Emalb (get back here, you clod!)
• the foolish mortals at Digital Medics (who read my journal but who are too cowardly to log in)
• Teh Smooch, who I swear we shall convert to Eckankar by the end of 2007
• Some Woman, who I swear will beg to bear my children by...uh...how high do years go?
• SiliconJesus, whom I just remembered I owe an e-mail and some thanks
• All of these people and especially these people

Imperially yours,

ETHELRED DEI GRATIA IMPERATOR AETERNUS (IPSO FACTO)

bettiwettiwoo writes that Santa may be too fat.

Ethelred has (is?) the solution.

You see, a couple weeks ago for St. Nicholas' Day (which is still celebrated with the "original" St. Nick in much of Germany on 6 December) I got drafted into playing said bishop.

Go ahead and laugh at my expense. Our priest certainly did.

Anyway, some nifty background: St. Nicholas of Myra was a much-loved bishop in the early Church, who became known for his kindness and generosity. To give you an idea of how loved and respected he was, take a look at this icon of St. Nicholas. Notice the pose? This is called the "teacher" pose. Only one other guy is portrayed that way. You got it, this guy.

So St. Nicholas' feast day on 6 December became a day of celebration and gifts, while Christmas itself generally was not an occasion of gift-giving. (This is still the situation in the Netherlands, where St. Nicholas -- or "Sinterklaas" in Dutch -- is still recognizably a bishop and there is no gift-giving on Christmas.) The Dutch took Sinterklaas with them to a colony called Nieuw Amsterdam, which we know today as New York. As New York came under the influence of Protestant New England (along with more radical Protestants from the Netherlands), and Protestants generally take a dim view of hagiography, Sinterklaas was moved from 6 December to 25 December, was mixed up with Father Christmas, and became a Christmas figure instead. Over time the name got mangled from "Sinterklaas" to "Santa Claus".

Meanwhile in 1823, a certain beloved poem came out, which laid down the basics of the modern Santa Claus legend. (Interesting to note he's still called "St. Nicholas" or "St. Nick" in the poem, not "Santa Claus".)

To add to the oddity, Santa Claus later (thanks at least in part to Hollywood) got re-exported back to Ye Olde Country in Germany, where the gift-giving person in Protestant areas was the Christ child ("das Christkind"). So nowadays in Germany there's a guy called, somewhat daftly, der Weihnachtsmann (literally "the Christmas man"), who will look quite familiar to Americans. So in some parts of Germany, you have the original St. Nicholas on 6 December, followed by the mashed-up re-imported version on 25 December (or 24 December, since many -- most? -- Germans exchange presents on the evening of Christmas Eve).

Some of you may recall last year's nearly-disastrous Christmas in the House of Unraed.

This year's starting to shape up to be the same way.

First problem: Money. As in, out of it. As in, maxed out credit to nearly the limit, in spite of saving money where possible and not having bought more than a couple token presents for the kids, and having to pay a tax bill that's already overdue.

The reason: A few months ago (as you may recall) I had pretty much no work at all; for a month I had virtually no income to speak of. That hurt badly enough, being the lone breadwinner at the moment. So I hit the pavement and, thanks in part to networking (muchly the kindness of friends and strangers), plus dumb luck, I managed to scare up a number of new clients. All is peachy...except that I got too many new clients, and now have so many projects I don't know how I'm going to get them all done. Because each client is screaming "where's my project" and the phone's constantly ringing with irate or impatient clients, I've got lots of work and in theory lots of money coming in, except I can only get paid when the work is done...which of course none of it is, because I have too much to do.

So for a couple months we've only had a trickle of money coming in, and no big paychecks in sight until (as it looks now) January. BoE and I have joked we're going to have an Orthodox Christmas (as in, celebrate on January 6th).

My parents are in town, as they were last year, and they did offer to buy some stuff for the kids, but believe me, it's a shit feeling not being able to buy a Christmas present for your kid.

And because my brother and niece were pissed off because my parents were here two Christmases in a row, they're leaving early on the 21st. I could point out the 11 years in a row that my parents were there before that, but that would no doubt be unfair and partisan.

While they've been here over a week, and even though they're sleeping here, I've hardly seen them because I'm constantly working 12- to 18-hour days. While they have helped out BoE with the kids a lot and have bought groceries, they've not done any sightseeing or much else except chat with BoE and the kids. Some trip they're having. At least the grandkids are happy to see them.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is our parish's second annual Nine Lessons and Carols service. That is something of a special project of mine -- I suggested it last year and the parish agreed to do it, and I did most of the planning along with getting the food (English Christmas puddings and tea). As it happens, the Nine Lessons and Carols service last year was also where I got infected with that virus that damned near killed me and also really did a number on Gloriana.

This year I again planned the service, did all the promotion, managed to get a blurb in the paper about it, designed the program and had it printed, will sing bass in the choir. Our parish normally never has enough people for a choir -- but this year at the priest's insistence we managed a quartet. Then the bass singer got a slipped disc, so I jumped in to pinch hit (pinch sing?) -- but the existence of the choir shows how the parish is pulling out all the stops on top of what I'm doing.

So today I finally -- FINALLY -- got to go to the Christmas market in Hannover with my family. (The others all went once without me so I could work in quiet.) We ate some bratwurst and fries and I rode the carrousel with the kids, who were delighted to have Daddy with them, and we ate some Schmalzkuchen and enjoyed the evening.

On the way home, BoE mentions feeling funny. Must be the Schmalzkuchen. No worries.

Then I remember the headline in the paper about "Virulent stomach flu making the rounds".

Then once home, BoE starts puking her guts out.

Meanwhile Gloriana and the Confessor both have bronchitis and we had to take Gloriana to the ER with a 40-degree fever (that's 104 in real units); they gave us antibiotics and ibuprofen syrup, so she'll be OK, but still...the whole family's getting sick, just like last year.

And I feel rather queasy right now myself. So much for going to the service tomorrow, I guess.

Déjà vu all over again. *sigh*

I think the appropriate phrase is, "well, shit".

Of course, there are some hidden blessings in all of this. Seeing the Confessor get excited about Christmas is a great thrill -- he loves it when I sing Christmas carols to him, and he keeps surprising me with how much he remembers of Christmas from last year (in past weeks he's mentioned Santa, Christmas trees, wreaths and so on without prompting from me or BoE -- and no one else talks to them in English, so it's stunning to me that he remembers the words). Gloriana for the first time brought a book to me to read her, and it was 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, which my parents had dug out.

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, and in spite of all the troubles, I'm extremely glad to have them. If there's one thing on this Earth that I love, aside from BoE of course, it's my kids.

So enjoy your Christmases, everyone. (Really.) And remember what really counts.

Blame Short Circuit.

1. What is your occupation?
Future Über-Imperator. But until then, self-employed web, print and icon designer.

2. What color are your socks right now?
Grey.

3. What are you listening to right now?
The slight hum of my computer and the occasional car going by outside.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?
A large slab of dead cow, grilled, with stuffed potato pockets.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Our car is a stick shift (automatics aren't as widespread in Europe anyway), and yes, I do fine. Oddly I'm so used to it that I had trouble with the last automatic I drove (a rental Ford Focus in the States two years ago).

6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Imperial purple. (You saw this coming, didn't you?)

7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
A client.

8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
I have a special place reserved for him in my dungeons.

9. How old are you today?
35.

10. Favorite drinks?
Coke, Earl Grey tea, PG Tips tea, water.

11. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Football of the American variety.

12. Have you ever dyed your hair?
Yes. Went horribly awry, too. Ended up with intense red hair (using that Sun-In stuff).

13. Pets?
All of humanity.
Oh, uh, Cleo-Kitty.

14. Favorite food?
It varies, but I'd say tandoori chicken with plain basmati rice. Or just steak.

15. What was the last movie you watched?
The Sci-Fi Channel's pilot of Battlestar Galactica. The last one I saw in the cinema was (gasp) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Been a while...

16. Favorite holiday?
Christmas. (Yippee! Coming soon!)

17. What do you do to vent anger?
Rhetorically beat up on poor unsuspecting people on Slashdot. (Hi Smooch! ;-) )
Pull wings off flies, assault grannies, drink tea, that sort of thing.

18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?
Lego. (Or Legos. What-the-fsck-ever.)

19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?
Spring.

20. Hugs or kisses?
Kisses with loads of tongue. ("She has a tongue like an electric eel and has a taste for a man's tonsils!")

21. Cherry or blueberry?
Neither. Don't like berries much.

22. Do you want your friends to send this back?
They have no choice. It is my will.

23. Who is the most likely to respond?
Teh Smooch.

24. Who is least likely to respond?
Queen Victoria.

25. Living arrangements?
Four-room 105 sq.m. rented flat close to downtown of a medium-sized German city, shared with wife, two kids and a cat.

26. When was the last time you cried?
Hah! I never cry!
Er, not often anyway.
Well, actually only sometimes.
What was the question?

27. What is on the floor of your closet?
Stacks of jeans and old sweaters.

28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?
Hah! I have no friends. I have subjects.

29. What did you do last night?
Worked on a project, read a book (The Two Georges, if anyone's curious), plotted the overthrow of all governments, went to bed.

1 1/2 cheers for Richard Dawkins

There's so much to applaud in Richard Dawkins, says Stephen Tomkins. Such as his rage against bad religion. But he's out of his depth in his new book, The God Delusion, when he attacks all forms of faith.

RICHARD DAWKINS IS RIGHT. His deicidal bestseller The God Delusion attacks the absurdities and cruelties, the contradictions and superstitions, the rip offs and fantasies of religion across the world and throughout history. I couldn't agree more. It's enough to make you wish Abraham hadn't been in when God called round.

The problem is, like other fundamentalists, Dawkins won't stop talking when he's finished talking sense. Rather than surveying the countless varieties of religion, weighing up their mixed record, and arguing that on balance we'd be better off without it, he is only willing to see the dark side, and writes off the whole thing, dismissing evidence that makes a monochrome worldview uncomfortable.

He sees the moral failures, but not the moral breakthroughs. He lists the atrocities and ignores the triumphs. He cuts through the supposed proofs of God's existence like a particularly moist sponge cake, but shows no conception at all of why people actually believe - other than that they're a bunch of morons who don't know any better.

Not unlike our own Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam, in fact. The Pope's argument in his celebrated lecture last month was that the Christian God is subject to reason, and therefore never allows religious violence; whereas Islam does not have this safeguard. Hence - according to the emperor he quoted - all the "evil and inhuman" things of Islam, such as Muhammad's command to "spread by the sword the faith he preached". Ah yes, so very unlike Christianity.

This quotation was the logical conclusion of the Pope's argument, and nothing in his lecture suggested he disagreed. Neither did his "apology" for "the reactions in some countries" to what he said, which of course was not an apology at all. He pointed out that the emperor's opinions were not his own, but until he says what his are, these words have to stand as an approximation.

This has all the marks of a fanatical worldview: they're all bad and wrong, we're totally right and good - and blind to the centuries of violence on our side and all that's good on theirs.

That a top believer such as the Pope should take such an extreme and indefensible stance is all grist to Dawkins's mill, of course. Except that his own fanaticism is just the same: an impassioned one-sidedness and ideologically-driven selective blindness.

...

HAVING MADE SUCH A FUSS about one-sidedness (and I'm still warming up) let's be clear about how much Dawkins' writing has going for it. His science writing is not only fascinating, but a revelation, if that doesn't sound distastefully supernatural. He has taught a whole generation - even those of us who never learned which end of a test tube is up - not only how evolution works, but how that one simple principle explains countless things about our world.

What's more, his anti-God diatribes can be superb - articulate, intelligent, passionate and devastating. For a spiritual type, they're like a bracing walk down the prom on a windy day. If you're going to entrust your life to a religion, these are the sorts of test it needs to pass.

And there's so much in it to agree with - to applaud, in fact. His rage against the mindset that leads to sacred mass murder. His contempt for the bottomless pit of deliberate stupidity that is creationism. His scorn for high level theology that sees all evil in the world as good in disguise. His antipathy for scriptures that commend genocide, homophobia and misogyny. His ridicule of the idea that a practice or belief deserves respect because it can be labelled "religious", however ludicrous it might otherwise appear.

Bravo, in fact. At least one and a half cheers for Richard Dawkins.

But already we're running into problems. On that last point, for example, Dawkins tells us that "nearly everybody in our society accepts... that religious faith... should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect". Really? I don't, and I've got one. And I should think the audiences of The Life of Brian and Jerry Springer: the Opera would be surprised to hear that they are in such a tiny minority.

This is a forgivable exaggeration, except that such generalisations run through his polemic like nuts through a Snickers Bar / Christian Voice picket line. He quotes an appalling letter from a Christian to Einstein recommending intellectual dishonesty for the sake of faith, saying that it "damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind". No, it damningly exposes the weakness of a religious mind.

He says that religion must be fought because of its attitudes to homosexuality, of which he offers a survey: the Taliban, the 1950s British justice system (not strictly speaking a religious group), Jerry Falwell, Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, Gary Potter and, you guessed, Fred Phelps. "This," we are told, "is the sort of morality that is inspired by religious faith." A slightly skewed sample, perhaps? You might as well list CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and GP Taylor and say that Christians tend to write bestselling fantasy novels. We who are many may be one body, but we sure as hell aren't of one mind.

"Faith is evil," Dawkins tells us, "precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." Whose faith? Not many I know. There are 12,000 members of the Ship of Fools discussion boards, where Christians are constantly probing the bases of their faith and revelling in, let alone brooking, argument. Is there evidence for Dawkins's statement, or are we just expected to take it on you-know-what?

He tells us that "theology - unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship - has not moved on in eighteen centuries" - which invites scepticism from anyone who has heard of, for example, Protestantism.

His dealings with the Christian Bible are equally sweeping. He debunks the Christmas story, the single most obviously legendary part of the four Gospels, and tells us that "the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world."

...

BEYOND ALL THESE UNREASONABLE generalisations about religion, however, the greatest failure of Dawkins's case is his refusal to recognise any good that any religion has done. He talks about the crusades, but not medieval hospitals. He tells the story of Oral Roberts getting $8 million out of his flock to stop God killing him, but not of William Wilberforce (along with a lot of other Christians) devoting his life to fighting the slave trade. He details Catholic opposition to science, but not the work of monasteries - and Islamic scholars - who rescued Greek philosophical writings from oblivion.

Christian Voice is here, but not Christian Aid. Neither are the 19th-century reformers and philanthropists: Shaftsbury, Fry, Müller, Barnardo. Religious conflict in Northern Ireland, yes. Christian peace-building organisations, no. Etc., etc.

The most outrageous example is Martin Luther King. He does get a brief mention - but not as someone driven by faith to fight for justice and equality; not as someone inspired by his religion to achieve change without violence; not as someone who was sustained through fear for his life and for his family by an encounter with Jesus. Instead, King was one of those leaders "whose religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil obedience directly from Gandhi, who was not." And that's it.

This massive distortion is presumably accidental, and therefore symptomatic of being out of one's depth writing a 400-page treatise on religion. For one rather obvious thing, Gandhi was quite religious himself, so even Dawkins's version of events hardly leaves God out of it. What's more, Ghandi's non-violence was inspired by both Tolstoy (a Christian) and Jesus (also arguably a Christian), and specifically by the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy's non-violence was also inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. King's non-violence was inspired by study of all three - Ghandi, Tolstoy, Jesus. It's very hard to look at this family tree of non-violence in a way that makes the religion incidental.

"It was the Sermon on the Mount," said King himself, "that originally inspired the negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action." But the fact that religion can be - amid all the trash - an irresistible force for social justice seems to be something that Dawkins's theory simply can't cope with.

I started off by likening him to the Pope. In fact, this ability to ignore or invert any evidence that doesn't fit with one's worldview reminds me more than anything of the way fundamentalists read the Bible, and creationists do science.

Could the world do with a bit less religion? Quite possibly. But what we really need is fewer fanatics.

Well said, I say.

In a previous JE, bechtros writes:

cold day in hell when apple gets one dollar of my money, ever.

I'm tens of thousands of dollars past that. ;-)

Oof. Scary though, actually, how much His Steveness and cohorts have gotten out of me...

First, a Macintosh IIsi, 14" Apple monitor, Personal LaserWriter NTR -- that right there was over $4,000 at the time (1991).

My current setup (Dual G5 2x2 GHz, two 17" Apple Studio Display TFTs, iSight) cost almost €4,000 IIRC, not counting non-Apple products, and then there's the €1,000 I spent on the iBook G4 I have, and €450 on a Mac mini G4.

Then in the meantime I've had a dual G4 2x450 MHz (which BoE now uses), a Pismo G3 laptop, a beige G3/266, and a Performa 6200, all bought new...plus a PowerMac 9600, a 21" Apple CRT monitor and an LC II that I got used...and BoE's original LC II and Performa 630...Jesus, that's a lot of money. *gulp*

And nearly all of it is still sitting here in my workroom, with various old modems, Apple mice and keyboards, and what-all else. (I finally tossed the LaserWriter NTR and the two 14" Apple monitors last year before we moved to the new apartment. The NTR still worked, but was extremely flaky and slow; the monitors "worked" but were badly distorted, and one had gotten to be rather dim.)

I have a mini-museum here!

The truly sad part? The IIsi was bought on a student loan. My parents just paid off that loan last year. :-/

Troll.