Faithlessness is the new black.

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The fastest growing religion in the US:

None.

From 1990 to 2001, people who have no religion/are atheists/are agnostic grew 6.6 percent, from 8.4 to 15.0 percent of all Americans. The number of these people increased 105.7 percent.

This is according to the American Religious Identification Survey performed by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. For the survey people were asked only: "What is your religion, if any?"

The survey found that "the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001."

Note: This post cites ARIS (despite my desire for more current data) because "statistics on religious adherence are difficult to gather and often contradictory; statistics for the change of religious adherence are even more so, requiring multiple surveys separated by many years using the same data gathering rules. This has only been achieved in rare cases, and then only for a particular country, such as the American Religious Identification Survey in the USA." (Wikipedia)

Which is to say (write): I used ARIS because it's the only reliable source available.
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George Will: un-smart. (Dec 25 edition)

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I've been neglecting George Will for quite a time now, but will give a quick run through his most recent Last Word column in Newsweek: "2008: Rod, Eliot, Yuck."

Will, second para.: If you pay taxes, you'll "probably" have bought a used car company, in effect.

This seems to be putting down the bailout-ish action the government has/will take re the Big Three auto companies. The use of "probably" means what he wrote is at least somewhat unlikely, making it a straw-man argument. Also, if you make what most people do, what you pay in taxes couldn't get you a dealership anyway.

Will: "Cuba being politically primitive..." Primitive as shown by its universal health care system, by a population that has a longer life expectancy than the US's, by having higher literacy rates than in the US, by its surveillance of whoever it wants to watch and/or listen to, by its use of torture (as performed in its US-held Guantanamo Bay), by its government that appoints whoever it wants for political reasons.

That last gets to Will's ill-considered point: Castro ceded power to his brother. Cuba is Communist. The person who will take over H. Clinton's Senate seat will be appointed for political reasons as well. Sarcastically, Will says the latter will happen "because this is a democracy."

The US is a Republic. The Pledge of Allegiance goes something like this "...and to the republic for which it [the flag] stands: One nation, under God..." Fitting that "under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954 because America is not a nation of godless Commies and, seen above, behaves nothing like them.

Then a litany of news items, the likes of which Conservatives love, and which make them angry. Nine out of ten of these items involve small towns, extremely few people, and whatever "wrong" (according to Conservatives) committed, having been either completely fabricated, embellished, or an embellished fabrication. Plus, the "wrongs" committed, nine of ten times, have been rectified by the time a Conservative writes about it. (When this last bit is mentioned to one he/she insists these news items are emblematic of what is happening everywhere.)

What's worst about Will wasting space with non-news in this particular column is that he cares about them, and writes about them at a time when our nation is fighting multiple wars and in its next Great Depression.

Example: In Hayward, California, "a teacher asked her kindergartners to sign cards pledging 'not to use anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered] language or slurs'"

Asked. The kids weren't even forced.

Will gives no context regarding this incident. Readers are obviously supposed to be enraged, no matter the circumstances, that children had been asked to be nice to people who are LGBT.

I bet the teacher (should she actually exist and have done what she did) would even want her kids not to use slurs against an animatronic, homophobic colostomy bag, like Will, that looks human enough on television (though stops seeming so once he speaks).

Near the end of the column, Will mentions a court ruling and, in that context, writes that the slave trade interfered with God's plan.

Which likely means Will is yet another Christian who hasn't read the Bible. Slavery is endorsed by God. God personally, in his own voice, gives his people at least one hundred laws pertaining to slavery. God micromanaged the institution of slavery.

Earlier in this column, Will mentions that Californians (with a push from a biblical flood of cash from Mormons who don't live there) "voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman."

George: Get the Bible on tape. Have an intern read it to you. Get a vague sense for your religion.

Religion is between one man and as many wives as he can afford. California's law is an abomination.
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A Free Credit Report saved my life.

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I apologize, but today's post is going to be a bit personal.

I feel completely off. Something is wrong, and has been for so long I can't remember when something was right.

But I'm getting out of my funk. I was watching TiVo-less TV at a friend's place and, therefore, also watching commercials. Many of the ads were for different services that offered the same thing.

A Free Credit Report.

Yesterday I went to the advertised Web site the biking-rapping-slacker-pirate told me to. I used my Mac -- which very rarely is targeted by viruses and the like because e-malefactors can get a lot more malefaction done by going after Windows, which more than 90 percent of people use.

With my computer encrypting its contents on the fly from behind a firewall and my bank and credit card balances memorized from years of near-daily balance-checks, I entered all my personal data on a site I hadn't heard of until this week.

Soon I'll have a Free Credit Report, which can only be the very thing that has been missing from my life since the importance of getting one was made so clear by the incredible volume of commercials for one.

My life is about to change. And it only cost me $14.95.
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Bailout babble.

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Financial-services firms are getting taxpayers' money to the tune of $700 billion. And then they're going to get more.

Why? Because some people took out mortgages that were designed, by the banks that supplied them, to be, eventually, unaffordable and ended up being unable to afford them. Stupid poor people with their American Dream.

Banks were hemorrhaging money. To get the red ink off their books they, in very basic terms, sold these "bad" or "toxic" mortgages (in the parlance of our times) to financial-services firms. When these firms' books started gushing red like the elevator in "The Shining," they created an entirely new financial instrument that allowed them to sell bits and pieces of mortgages and on into things I won't discuss because I can't understand them.

Everything fell apart. So the Bush Administration and Congress acted with the speed of Hurricane Katrina to pass the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) -- $700 billion for the financial sector.

...And?

We're in Great Depression II. TARP provides the best example yet that for a half-century the US economic system has been subsidized capitalism. Incompetence will be rewarded or punished based on a person or business's wealth. The less-fortunate must rely on governments that pass special laws to make charging 400 percent interest legal (payday loans).

To survive, 99.9 percent of us will have to work a lot harder, longer, and smarter at jobs we'll consider ourselves lucky to have or manage to get. These jobs will pay, adjusting for inflation, less than they did in 1980.

0.1 percent of Americans, their real wages having grown 497 percent in the past decades to an average of $1.7 million, will continue to invent new ways to screw the other 99.9 percent, cheek-to-cheek with a government as immoral and unethical as they are.
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The good news of Judas Iscariot.

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I was watching a program on the Gospel of Judas. In response to whether this noncanonical gospel is important, a priest/reverend responded with this (paraphrase): I can't imagine anyone wanting or needing more than Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. He made it seem preposterous that a noncanonical gospel would have any value or worth.

(Further detail: This priest/reverend -- whatever he's called depending on how his religious hammer hangs -- holds televised Mass or whatever you call it, and has been doing so for what seems like decades. He has full, gray hair, a not-overdone tanning-booth complexion, and great teeth... His native habitat must be a PoliGrip commercial.)

About one hundred gospels and other texts regarding Jesus (that we know of) were created in the second, third and fourth centuries. All were made for the purposes of preserving, in writing, what Jesus taught.

Aside: The stories, teachings, etc. that eventually comprised individual gospels and other texts were taught, spread, and popularized orally before they were committed to papyri. Which is to say that all gospels/other texts included in and excluded from the New Testament were guaranteed to have errors, embellishments and the like.

A game of telephone with twenty people can't pass one sentence intact.

Back to it: The reason we have MML&J in the New Testament instead of or alongside the Gospel of Thomas, Mary Magdelene and/or many others is that the Catholic Council of Hippo circa 390 chose what books, from then on, made up the New Testament. The gospels of MML&J were included, and at least twenty (gospels) were excluded.

In the program I watched a scholar stated that MML&J are the narrative gospels. They are stories: Jesus did this, did that, was crucified and resurrected. As such, the scholar noted (most likely with a British accent -- the possession of which increases one's credibility at least twofold), they are the gospels that are most easily understood.

However, MML&J contradict one another and differ in extremely important ways on extremely important things. Noncanonical texts could, possibly, help explain these contradictions and differences.

(Long example of the canonical gospels differing: Only Matthew and Luke wrote that Mary was a virgin when she conceived and gave birth. And Matt's and Luke's gospels differ in many ways many times regarding Jesus's birth.

Still, Matt and Luke began their gospels with Jesus's birth, so it makes sense that they would discuss the birth's circumstances. Mark and John began their writings with Jesus's baptism, and so don't mention Jesus's birth. Didn't bother to shoehorn in a mention of the only virgin conception and birth that ever occurred. To dedicate even one verse to something that cannot and has not been done, except in the case of Jesus and Mary, not just for humans, but virtually all multicelled organisms.)

Many of the noncanonical gospels deal mostly or wholly only with what Jesus said. The Gospel of Thomas is a perfect example: It's structure is: "Jesus said: yadda yadda yadda. Jesus said: yadda yadda yadda." Again and again, then abrupt end.

Many of these gospels do not mention Jesus's crucifixion. Far more gospels aren't concerned with Jesus's death than are. (Christianity being based largely on MML&J is, in part, why Christians celebrate Jesus the miracle man-god and freely disregard the fact that Jesus only cared about poor people and was a radical pacifist. The US's outgoing president is considered one of the most religious POTUS-es in history. Obviously: Following Jesus's example, W. got the US into a war on pretenses he knew to be false, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, is bailing out financial-services firms with billions of dollars -- and those firms currently are giving employees billions of dollars in Christmas bonuses -- while allowing these firms' victims, the poor, to lose their homes -- and torturing people in violation of US and international law. Et cetera et cetera etc.)

At least one noncanonical text deals with Jesus's "missing years": the time in Jesus's life between his birth and crucifixion. Thirty years.

All of the above makes me wonder how a person like The PoliGrip Preacher possibly be satisfied only with MML&J? These four gospels disagree, contradict one another, don't account for almost all of Jesus's life, and on and on.

A priest/reverend is supposed to be an expert on Jesus's life. If a historian chooses to become an expert on Abraham Lincoln, it seems PoliGrip Preacher would suggest the historian only take into account Abe's birth and the year up to and including his death. Wanting more information would be just just plain silly.
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The Legend of Zelda and the damage done.

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My posting has been sporadic lately, and will continue to be so until I make it through Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Why? Eg: I'm ending this post now to get back to playing it.
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Abortion facts.

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* In 2007, The Center for American Progress reviewed the American public's support of abortion:
-- 49 percent of Americans consider themselves pro-choice, and a plurality or majority (save one tie) has identified as such since 1995, when data began being collected. Forty-five percent consider themselves pro-life.
-- "59 percent of the public either believes abortion laws should remain as they are (36 percent) or be made less strict (23 percent)." ... "Every Gallup poll since 2003 has returned either 59 percent or 60 percent support on this question."
-- 30 percent want to make abortion legal in all circumstances. This position has been held by an average of 26 percent through the last five years.
-- "Just 13 percent said it should be illegal in all circumstances."

* "In medical terms, the word abortion refers to any pregnancy that does not end in a live birth and therefore can refer to a miscarriage or a premature birth of someone that does not result in a live infant. Such events are often called spontaneous abortions if they occur before 20 weeks of gestation." (Wikipedia)

* "[F]etuses likely are incapable of feeling pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy, when they are about 28 weeks old." In fact: "Offering fetal pain relief in the fifth or sixth month, when brains are too immature to feel pain, is misguided and might result in unacceptable health risks to women." (MSNBC.com, from 2005, reporting on an article in the Journal of the American Medial Association) (Italics mine.)

* "Forty states and the District of Columbia already ban third-trimester abortions except when the life or health of the woman is at stake." (Planned Parenthood)

* According to the Centers for Disease Control (2002):
-- 59.3 percent of (non-miscarriage) abortions were carried out when the embryo was eight
weeks or less gestational age. Only after eight weeks is the womb-dweller called a fetus.
-- 18 percent of abortions performed nine to ten weeks GA (gest. age).
-- 9.4 percent 11 to 12 weeks GA.
-- 5.9 percent 13 to 15 weeks.
-- 4 percent 16 to 20.
-- 1.4 percent more than 20 weeks GA. (Handy graph of this on Wikipedia)

* Therefore, in 2002, 86.7 percent of abortions were performed in the first trimester.

* "Labour resulting in live birth before the 37th week of pregnancy is termed 'premature birth,' even if the infant dies shortly afterward. The limit of viability at which 50% of fetus/infants survive longterm is around 24 weeks, with moderate or major neurological disability dropping to 50% only by 26 weeks." The fetus has been carried to term at 37 weeks. (Wikipedia)

* "Nationwide, there are now fewer abortion providers in the U.S. than at any time since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 -- 87 percent of U.S. counties don't have one." (FRONTLINE, "The Last Abortion Clinic")

* "In October 2002, the Bush administration issued final regulations specifically making fetuses—but not pregnant women—eligible for health care coverage under the State Children's Health Insurance Program." (National Organization of Women)
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Incendiary ammunition is legal.

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Incendiary rounds are designed to penetrate things like body armor, then explode. The bullets have explosive charges and are available to the general public.

Why do we need these? (Note: I'm not asking why the bloody hell they're legal.)

I found the best answer from someone calling him-/herself Despoiler, who lives in "The Occupied Territory of California," on a gunandgame.com forum:

"I hunt squirrels with the stuff that way I don't have to bother cooking them later."

USA! USA! USA!
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Such a little thing.

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Often, when I'm driving around a parking lot looking for an open space, I notice people driving vehicles with handicap plates or rear-view-mirror hangers doing the same.

I've driven behind such people at least five times, and watched them pass up spaces as close to the store's entrance as were available. One person passed by a space next to a reserved space. When I saw this particular person leave his car after finding an open, reserved space two rows over, he wasn't in a wheelchair or using a device or devices that would have made a reserved space necessary. He didn't need the extra space between cars reserved spaces provide.

A certain portion of people who are able to park in reserved spaces seem to do so even when closer, non-reserved spaces are available.

Do they do this simply because they can? Are they determined to use reserved spaces because it's one of the very few things our society provides for them -- one tangible benefit, easily obtained on a regular basis?

I wonder if I'll start parking only in reserved spaces when I get my handicap plates.

If I do, I'll update the blog to let you know why.




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Family values.

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[This post was inspired by Lisa Miller's recent Newsweek cover article.]

The Biblical patriarchs had as many wives and concubines as they could afford. In fact, polygamy was (and I daresay is) the ideal for People of the Book (and having multiple wives, technically, is polygyny -- "The More You Know"!). Poor people tended toward monogamy solely because they couldn't afford more bitches. (And I use "bitches" in this post only because the Bible treats women on par with female dogs: as a male's property. Hell, only a handful of women in the entire Bible are even bothered to be named. You get maybe a thousand male names from all the chapters/verses regarding all the begetting and begetting and begetting, but essentially no female names. And the begetting was a lot tougher on them.)

I fervently believe traditional marriage must be restored. Still, I'm a modern guy. I bend with the times. I don't think we have to go back to making women chattel. Also, I don't get money mixed up in my relationships. Especially now that I, personally, don't have any to speak of.

Tacks (brass): I want ten wives (starters) who pay for anything and everything I want to do/to have/need/merely want.

But that's me. A real traditionalist.

But I know a lot of people out there are fighting for traditional marriage as taught by Jesus: a union of one man and one woman.

The problem being that Jesus never said, never gave any indication, that this is what marriage is supposed to be.

Jesus believed the end of the world was at hand. By example, he taught celibacy. He did so, in part, likely because in a nonexistent world a family doesn't need kids to ensure its prosperity. As part of this apocalyptic view, Jesus encouraged people to leave their families to follow him and, generally, not to care about these families because they were earthly things, soon to be rendered unimportant by God's appearance on earth, which he did often say was at hand (as in during his lifetime or shortly thereafter).

So Christians who follow Jesus's actual teaching should desert their families, if they have them, (but not get divorced). And if they don't have families, they shouldn't marry at all.

The family values Christianity currently teaches are the exact opposite of those Jesus taught (in essence: the family has no value whatsoever). Preachers go on and on about the family being the bedrock of civilization.

Such preaching couldn't be more anti-Christian.

If Christian preachers get what they want -- Jesus's family values imposed on America -- the result will be the annihilation of our concept of family.

Personally, I don't need nor want that. I'd be fine, simply, with ten ten wives.

At least for starters.
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Statistics: Pro-McCain states are 'stupid.'

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This post will be a series of factual statements from which the reader can draw his/her own conclusions, because giving my own -- as I did in the headline -- would be inflammatory.

Morgan Quinto Press publishes, yearly, Smartest State Awards. The most recent, free, results are here, and for 2006 to 2007. My statistics come from this page.

Quinto uses 21 factors processed through a formula (details of which can be found here) to assign a numerical value to each state. That value shows how "smart" the state is compared to the national average.

For example: Vermont was the smartest state in '06-'07, with a "Smart Rating" of 18.57. Arizona was the least "smart" state, and rated -17.61.

I printed a map of the US that showed which states' electoral votes were awarded to Obama in the 2008 election, and which states went to McCain. I used the map and Quinto's Smart Rating numbers to make the following calculations:

*The 27 states that went to Obama had a total Smart Rating of 43.45.

*The 23 states that voted for McCain had a total Smart Rating of -65.27.

*States that went to Obama had an average Smart Rating of 1.609.

*States that went to McCain had an average Smart Rating of -2.838.

I also think it's important to note that eight of the ten "smartest" states voted for Obama.
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One mystery of pyramids, explained.

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Pyramids were made by various cultures at various times, despite these cultures having had no contact with or knowledge of one another, simply because when they were built the pyramidal form was the most intelligent way to create a tall, stable structure.

...I mean, it's that or aliens.
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George Will: un-smart. (Edition 2)

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This post discusses Will's column "Free Ride for the Campus Left."

Will, like all good conservatives, hates higher education -- colleges, universities and the like.

And, like the majority of education-loathing conservatives, Will spent a lot of time becoming educated at the places he hates. He also spent a lot of time teaching at such places -- including Harvard, which Will cannot deride enough.

To wit: "Will graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and attended Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A.). He subsequently read PPE at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (B.A., M.A.), and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society.

"Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998."

Will is a damned hypocrite. Like the vast majority of education-hating conservatives.

Also, Will may have daddy-issues, since his father was a professor of philosophy at the university of Illinois. Father Will specialized in epistemology, which "primarily addresses the following questions: 'What is knowledge?', 'How is knowledge acquired?', 'What do people know?', 'How do we know what we know?'" (Wikipedia)

Will's body of work strongly suggests his answers to these questions are: Knowledge is what is espoused in conservative talking points, is acquired through reading them, and that we know what we know through having read these talking points.

On to a few choice cuts of this column:

"Fish's advocacy of a banal proscription -- of explicit political preaching in classrooms -- may have made him anathema to academia's infantile left."

It is infantile to use unsupported ad hominem attacks.

Quoting Fish, Will writes: "'the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches.' Note Fish's obfuscating 'necessarily.'"

Note that Fish is correct. How many university faculty are members of certain religions, agnostics, or atheists? Do they teach their religion (or lack thereof), even in religion classes? Et cetera.

Will writes: "Genuflecting before today's academic altar, [Fish] asserts what no one denies: Race and gender are 'worthy of serious study.'"

Which is odd, because just before writing that sentence, Will wrote of "the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments..."

He went on to assert that "the political nature of such curricula [race and gender studies] is why they often are set apart from established, and more academically rigorous, departments of sociology, history, etc."

Note the use of the loaded term "proliferation." What modern reader can imagine this term without also imagining nuclear non-proliferation efforts? Google "proliferation" and six of the first ten results have to do with keeping dangerous weapons from becoming more widespread.

And Will flat-out states that race and gender studies lack academic rigor.

The sum of these parts equal Will stating: Race and gender studies departments and courses grow and spread like nuclear weapons and are unimportant when compared to other topics.

Having stated the above -- his true feelings -- he feebly semi-disowns them by writing the opposite: that race and gender studies are important. So important that no one would deny the fact that they are.

Even if they just have, I suppose.

Will ends with: "People who tell you they are brave usually are not."

And people who tell you bullshit for a living usually are un-smart.
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Old news, new question.

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Does Fenway (home of the Red Sox) still play, and the stadium sing along with, "Sweet Caroline" (by Neil Diamond) before the bottom of the eighth inning?

If so, I thought they would have stopped doing so when it was revealed, by Diamond, that he wrote the lyrics when he was 26, and that he wrote the lyrics in an hour (such was his fevered inspiration) after seeing a picture of a 10-year-old Caroline Kennedy.

Diamond: "It was a picture of a little girl dressed to her nines in her riding gear next to her pony. It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt a song was there." --Songfacts.com.

Apparently, the picture also made Diamond feel incredibly horny. ...The picture of a 10-year-old made a 26-year-old hot enough to write in a single hour:

Where it began, I can't begin to know when
But then I know it's growing strong
Oh, wasn't the spring, whooo
And spring became the summer
Who'd believe you'd come along

Hands, touching hands, reaching out
Touching me, touching you
Oh, sweet Caroline
Good times never seem so good
I've been inclined to believe it never would

And now I, I look at the night, whooo
And it don't seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two, oh
And when I hurt
Hurting runs off my shoulder
How can I hurt when holding you

Oh, one, touching one, reaching out
Touching me, touching you
Oh, sweet Caroline
Good times never seem so good
Oh I've been inclined to believe it never would

Ohhh, sweet Caroline, good times never seem so good

(Lyrics provided by lyricsdomain.com.)

If the song is still a staple at Fenway, I can't imagine wanting to sing it.

I can't imagine listening to it without massive discomfort.
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Christianity teaches moral relativism.

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The code of moral behavior for women and men is different. Therefore, churches do not teach, nor believe in, an absolute morality.
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