Adam and Steve to Get Married in New York

Tonight, the New York State Senate passed the marriage equality bill.  With that achieved, all that remains is for Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign the bill into law.  This is a big victory for same-sex couples, because (1) marriage equality was achieved by a majority vote in the legislature, and (2) New York is one of the more populous states in the country with a larger gay population that can benefit from the law.  A high school classmate of mine who is gay and has been in a longtime relationship with another man expressed on Facebook a short while ago how happy he was that the possibility of marriage for him and his partner had become real.

I believe 30 years from now, when marriage equality will likely have been achieved nationwide, a lot of people will probably wonder why some opponents of same-sex marriage were so hysterical over the prospect of two people of the same gender being able to tie the knot.  Our civilization will not have been destroyed because Adam was able to marry Steve instead of Eve.

However, we also need to acknowledge that the picture will not be a completely rosy one.  Gay marriage will inevitably lead to gay divorce.  In some instances, child custody issues will arise, either because of adoption or because one of the partners in the marriage had a biological child from a previous heterosexual marriage or relationship.   As with some heterosexual marriages, some same-sex marriages will be fraudulent.  For example, gays who are American citizens will be able to bring in immigrant spouses so that the latter can obtain permanent residency and citizenship in the United States.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that some of these marriages will be merely marriages of convenience to enable an immigrant to acquire American citizenship.  That being said, these are no more reasons for barring same-sex marriage than they are for banning heterosexual marriage.  It is simply a recognition that equality before the law is meant to provide equality of opportunity without guaranteeing perfect outcomes.

Failure to Launch

"Momentum Builds In Iowa."  That was the title of an e-mail I received this past May 20, 2011, from Newt Gingrich's campaign manager Rob Johnson.

Johnson went on to declare:

"One thing is clear: Americans are ready to put our country back on the right track. Newt visited seventeen cities across Iowa this week. At each and every stop people packed into overflowing halls to hear what we can do to put the right policies in place so we can get the right results for our country."

"We’re ready. We launched our campaign just over a week ago, and we are already seeing an outpouring of support. Volunteers have signed up in all 50 states. Next week Newt will campaign in both New Hampshire and South Carolina."

Fast forward three weeks later to today, June 10, 2011.

From Politico:

"[C]ampaign manager Rob Johnson, strategists Sam Dawson and Dave Carney, spokesman Rick Tyler and consultants Katon Dawson in South Carolina and Craig Schoenfeld in Iowa quit to protest what one called a “different vision” for the campaign."

“To be successful in Iowa, you need to be here, [and] taking a look at the way the schedule was, he’s not scheduled to be here in June at all, and he’s got very few appearances in July,” said Schoenfeld. “You want to make sure that you give yourself a chance to be successful.”

So, what went wrong?

"One official said the last straw came when Gingrich went ahead last week with a long-planned cruise in the Greek isles with his wife."

I couldn't help but get a chuckle about the "trip to the Greek Islands" thing.  It's right up there with "santorum."

About a month or so ago, several Republican leaning people I interacted with, when discussing possible GOP candidates, mentioned Gingrich as a good candidate, with one of them even saying what a "bright" guy Gingrich is. 

I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing that.  What I see when I look at Newt Gingrich is a narcissistic, hypocritical and undisciplined man with pretensions of being an intellectual.  I suspect that a lot of evangelical Christian voters are also not impressed with Gingrich and see him for the shallow opportunist that he is.

To the other person I had an exchange with, I replied that Gingrich was merely pretending to run for president just so that people would pay attention to him.  Newt's presidential campaign will probably limp along for a few more weeks before he admits the inevitable and bows out.  Over a decade ago, Long Island Republican Congressman Peter King called Newt "political roadkill."  I don't see that anything has changed for Newt since then.

Can I Talk To Dead People on My Cell Phone?

The other day I was looking at the events calendar in the Plainview-Old Bethpage Herald and saw an announcement that a local psychic medium named Robert E. Hansen would be conducting a session of his Love Never Dies program at the Plainview Jewish Center on Monday, June 13 for $35 per person.

My first thought, me being the skeptical guy that I am, was to wonder, "Has the Plainview Jewish Center conducted some kind of test to determine if this Robert Hansen can actually do what he claims to do, that is, to be able to communicate with the spirits of dead people?"  After all, if you are hosting and charging admission for such an event, if the person is not the real deal, aren't you essentially facilitating an act of fraud on gullible people?

I'm not going to get into the subject of whether or not I believe that part of us survives the death of our physical body here.  However, I find it interesting that nobody ever seems to be able to communicate directly with their own deceased relatives and friends, and yet somehow complete strangers can supposedly accomplish such a feat on our behalf because they have a special gift the rest of us lack.

How does that work anyway?  Do the souls of the departed swarm around the privileged few who can hear them, whispering their names into the medium's ear, with only the first letter being clear?  "I'm hearing 'Dave?'  'Dan?', or is that 'Donald?'"  Or is it more like tuning into a radio station with constant static in the background, preventing the words from being heard clearly?  On his website, Hansen compares it to "lying on the bottom of a 6' deep swimming pool and someone was trying to yell down to you."

Back to the testing part, one possible way of going about it would be if a number of people who were terminally ill (but still functional) were to bury boxes with a messages in secret locations, tell their family members that they buried something for them somewhere, but that they would have to visit a medium after they died to find out the where the boxes were buried.  If the medium was legitimate, he would tell them the secret location of the box.  If the medium could provide the location of the box, then it would be solid evidence that the dead can communicate with the living, and that the particular medium who provided the location was in fact the real deal. 

It would probably not be easy to coordinate such an experiment with a sufficient number of terminally ill people to form a large enough group in a fixed geographical area so that the family members of the different deceased participants could consult the same mediums.   If one medium succeeded in providing accurate locations for multiple boxes, while other mediums could not locate any, it could provide a benchmark for determining which mediums were true and which ones were bullshit artists.

Pet Peeve of the Day - June 6, 2011

Wow, it's been over two years since I did one of these.

As a daily commuter on the Long Island Rail Road to and from work in Manhattan, I see a lot of things that annoy me. 

One of my greatest sources of irritation are people who I have dubbed "Aisle Seat Assholes."  If you ride the rails like I do, you might know the kind of people I am describing.  They are the ones who as soon as they enter the train, plop themselves down onto the nearest aisle seat, even if the middle and/or window seat next to them is empty.  But they are not just assholes for their choice of seat.  It's what they do no next that really puts them in the asshole category.

Many of them, immediately after their posteriors have settled onto the seats, whip out their laptop computers, portable dvd players or other mobile devices and plug in their ear buds to drown out the world while people are still boarding the train.  And then when you tap them on their shoulder or otherwise get their attention so you can get to the empty two seats to the right of them, they give you this look of annoyance like "How dare you bother me!"

What makes it worse is that if there are a dozen people trying to board the train through one door and the first person tries to get a seat in the first row which already is occupied by an Aisle Seat Asshole (hereinafter "ASA"), everyone has to wait while the ASA gets up, steps out into the aisle, lets the passenger by to occupy the middle or window seat, and then sit down again.  Mutiply that four or five times, and sometimes you can find yourself being blocked from getting to a seat for a minute or more.

Maybe it's a quirk of my personality, but to me it seems to make more sense if the first people to enter a train car were to move to the middle of the car and occupy the window seat and the last people get the seats closer to the doors.  That way, everyone would get a seat virtually immediately, even if it is not necessarily the exact seat they wanted to get. 

I suppose it is too much to expect the bulk of the riders on the Long Island Rail Road to think that way.

What A Weiner!

As anyone who has been following the story probably knows by now, Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has fessed up and admitted that he sent pictures of his bulging underpants and such to women who were not his wife.  After initially denying sending the pictures, while strangely not denying they might be pictures of him, the liberal firebrand from Brooklyn has tarnished his credibility and possibly destroyed his career in politics.

Disappointingly, several commenters (see the excerpts below) in the Crooks & Liars article I linked to appear to be more upset with right-wing operative Andrew Breitbart, the man who released the photo and claimed to have others, than with Representative Weiner. 

I believe these anonymous women (if you believe they are women) were paid handsomely for their involvement in this BREIBART set-up, otherwise ask yourself, why take it to Breibart and not the attorney General.

I believe Briebart deliberately, with malice and fore-thought, entrapped Weiner.

Breitbart is a dirt bag. Doesn't that fucktard have anything better to do with his time? I'm more embarrassed for him than Weiner.

Liberals can gripe about Breitbart all they want, but no matter how you cut and slice it, Weiner put himself in the situation he is in and the responsibility lies 100% with him.

To put things in perspective though, what Weiner did was hardly the worst thing a politician has ever done.  Just about all of us have said and done things that would be tremendously embarrasing if it became a matter of public record.  We're only human, and so are our elected officials.  That being said, when you run for and get elected to public office, you should know that the public will hold you to a higher standard of behavior.

When you make yourself a lightning rod, as Representative Weiner did by being a brash, outspoken Democratic politician, you have to be aware that there is a well funded right wing apparatus dedicated to examining your life under a microscope and sifting through your activities with a fine toothed comb.   President Clinton should have been a cautionary example in this regard.   Knowing full well that conservatives were looking for anything they could find to take him down, Clinton foolishly fooled around with Monica Lewinsky, leading his impeachment.  And like Weiner, Clinton initially denied what he had been accused of, only to have to come clean when damning evidence surfaced.  Then again, maybe these guys just can't help themselves.  Perhaps their egos delude them into thinking that they won't get caught, or if they do get caught, that they can somehow weasel their way out of it.

While Weiner is from New York, he is not my representative, as his district covers Brooklyn and Queens.  I did have an exchange with him years ago during a meet the candidates event in Queens when he first ran for the office he holds today and I was sharing an apartment in Queens with my wife before we married.  At the time, I was quite active in the immigration restrictionist movement (and I hope to one day write a post about how I came to be involved in the movement and why I ultimately left it) and I remember asking Weiner if he would support legislation to deny citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants.  He snapped at me and made some remark about how did my parents get here or something to that effect. 

I have since moved on with my life and gotten over that exchange.  As my political views shifted from conservative to liberal over the years, I did admire Weiner's gutsiness and appreciated his vocal support for womens' reproductive rights.  That being said, I am not going to reflexively defend him for engaging in behavior that I would condemn had it been done by a conservative politician.

As to whether he should resign, I think it depends on whether he did anything illegal.  If not, then it is up to his constituents to decide come Election Day in 2012.  After all, if Republican Senator David "Diaper" Vitter of Louisiana can be re-elected by the people of his state, then who am I to complain if the people of Brooklyn and Queens want to give Anthony another chance?  Whether his wife will remains to be seen.

An Open Letter to Gideon

Dude, why do you keep coming back here and leaving comments that I will never publish because you have been banned? Why the obsession on your part with my blog, which, you yourself have described as "a rather bland and ignominious blog"? What do you hope to accomplish? Is your time of so little value that you spend it by stalking a D-list atheist blogger who hardly anyone reads? You really should raise your ambitions higher and visit the popular atheist bloggers, because, to borrow from Willie Sutton, that's where the atheists are. Some of them are in my sidebar, including Atheist Revolution, Daylight Atheism and Pharyngula. So, go have at em'! Or keep wasting your time trying to post comments here that will never see the light of day because they amount to nothing more than the unhinged rantings of a raving lunatic.

Saturday Night Trance

Kirsty Hawkshaw's "Just Be" as mixed by DJ Tiesto.

Judgment Day - The Aftermath

Here's the quote of the day from Robert Fitzpatrick, the poor, deluded fool who blew $140,000 of his savings plastering the subway trains and buses of New York with his ads about May 21, 2011 being Judgment Day:

"I can't tell you what I feel right now," he said, surrounded by tourists. "I don't understand it. I don't know. I don't understand what happened.

"Obviously, I haven't understood it correctly because we're still here," he said.

Let me explain it to you Bob.  You didn't understand it correctly because you turned off your critical thinking skills.  A million people could have tried to dissuade you, implore you, to not buy into Harold Camping's bullshit and piss away your retirement savings.  It would not have made a difference, because you were so dead set on believing what you wanted to believe.

Here is the plain, simple truth.  The Bible tells us absolutely nothing about our future.  Zilch.  Nada.  Rien.  Zip.  It doesn't tell us when the world will end or how.  So, anyone who tells you that the world will end because of how he or she interprets the Bible is automatically wrong.  Take it from me.  It's financially sound advice.  And the best part?  It's free.

Update on the Alleged Rapture

Well, it's a few minutes past 6 p.m., and as I expected, no earthquake here in New York.  It did start raining about a half hour ago, but it's been raining off and on every day this past week.

Move along now.  Nothing to see here.

May 21, 2011 - It's A Beautiful Day

In honor of the Rapture that did not happen, here's "It's A Beautiful Day" by Sarah Brightman.




Apparently, there was supposed to be a rolling earthquake commencing in New Zealand at 6 pm local time. Well, it's been five hours and no such earthquakes were reported. There was that earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand on February 22, 2011 (I guess having the name Christchurch didn't magically protect them!), so maybe Harold Camping was off by about 3 months. Nor have "all the dead that have ever died" risen up from their graves.

I checked the Family Radio web site but thus far it gives no acknowledgment that Camping's long touted prediction has not come to pass.

Sadly, this whole affair has proven rather costly for some people.

This fellow Long Islander has been refusing to pay his bills, so convinced is he that he will be raptured. Unfortunately for him, not only will he not be raptured, neither will the collection agents for the phone and electric companies!

A former MTA employee spent $140,000 of his own money plastering MTA subways and buses with his ads proclaiming May 21 as Judgment Day. That's $140,000 less that he will have to see him through his retirement.

According to this article, Camping's Family Radio spent "millions of dollars on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the doomsday message. In 2009, the nonprofit reported in IRS filings that it received $18.3 million in donations, and had assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities."

Our old friend Marie Exley, "said the money helped the nonprofit save as many souls as possible. She said she and her husband, mother and brother planned to stay glued to the television Friday night in Bozeman, Montana for news of an earthquake in New Zealand."

I don't know how many "souls" were saved by these clowns, but a lot of fools were certainly parted from their money. It remains to be seen now what the fall out will be in the coming days when so may of the true believers realized they have been duped. Will they double down and insist that the prophecy is true but that Camping must have been off a little in his dates, or will some of them start to question their beliefs and develop some critical thinking skills?

Barack Obama Sends Armed Thugs to Murder Devout Middle-Aged Muslim Man in his Home in Pakistan

Osama bin Laden willingly allowed himself to be killed by US Special Forces in order to enable Barack Obama's secret plan to impose sharia law on the United States. Well, that's probably what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are going to say tomorrow.

Updated: The Age of Discovery

Those of use who are history buffs tend to have a particular interest in certain specific time periods or places. For example, especially here in the United States, there are Civil War buffs. Others are fascinated by Tudor England, the Italian Renaissance, World War Two, the Roman Empire, ancient Greece, and so forth.

While I enjoy reading about the history of just about any place and any time period, of late I have focused my attentions on an era that is both very broad and yet still can be put into a specific framework that ties the disparate events and locations into an interconnected whole. That era encompasses the entire 16th century, beginning with the voyages of exploration of the 4th quarter of the 15th century and ending in the early years of the 17th century. Thanks to the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, the written accounts of explorers, novels, plays, religious tracts, and philosophical works, among others, could be disseminated widely and rapidly. François Rabelais makes note of this in his popular book Pantagruel (1534) in this passage:

"Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek - without which it is a disgrace that any man should call himself a scholar - Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin: elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil. The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold it was not as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now." (Underlined and bolded for emphasis).

The 16th century period was a time not only of expanding physical frontiers, but of mental frontiers as well, with the former often stimulating the latter. It was an era that saw, from at least a European perspective, the discovery of two vast continents and the peoples who inhabited them, and the first circumnavigation of the globe. Though other continents and geographical regions remained to be found by European navigators, such as Australia, Antarctica, and the Polynesian Islands, the circumference of the Earth had at last become truly known.

As I wrote above, the discovery of hitherto unknown lands and peoples challenged previously held assumptions about the world held by European societies whose understanding of it was based on the Bible. How come the Bible did not account for the Americas and the people and creatures that lived there? One hint of this can be found in a report by Amerigo Vespucci:

“What should I tell of the multitude of wild animals, the abundance of pumas, of panthers, of wild cats, not like those of Spain, but of the antipodes; of so many wolves, red deer, monkeys, and felines, marmosets of many kinds, and many large snakes? We saw so many other animals that I believe so many species could not have entered Noah’s ark.” (Underlined for emphasis)

Though the voyages of discovery were initiated by Europeans, the process of discovery was itself a two way street. The natives of the Americas were discovered by the Europeans, but at the same time the Native Americans, as well as other indigenous peoples, discovered that they too were part of a world that was greater than they had realized.

For the most part, the written accounts we have are from the perspective of the European explorers. Many of my upcoming posts will based on my reading of these works. While they are of course of immense value to us, we also need to be mindful that what they tell us influenced by their own biases and misunderstandings. Fortunately, we are not entirely without written records of the people visited and impacted by the Europeans. From the Kongo Kingdom of Africa, for example, we have a letter by the King of Kongo complaining to the Portuguese king about the activities of Portuguese slave traders in his kingdom. In Japan, the introduction of firearms by two shipwrecked Portuguese men is remembered in a written account of a Japanese witness some sixty years after the event.

In another example of the opening of mental horizons, the 16th century was also the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Western Christendom would no longer be synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church, an event that would reverberate beyond the confines of Europe. It was also the time of the Moguls in India and the Ottoman Turks under Suleyman the Magnificent, to name but a few.

It must also be noted that while this period, which saw the birth of today’s global economy, was a period of great discovery, it was also a period of tremendous violence and destruction, especially for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I’m reminded of a line by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the movie Jurassic Park, “What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.” We are certainly still living with the scars of that period today.

What's the Difference Between Religious Filipinos and Crazy People?

Yes, it's Good Friday, and that means it's the time of year in that most Catholic country of the Philippines when a few dozen of the deeply devout and deluded reenact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by literally having themselves nailed to a cross. However, they must be doing it wrong, because the picture above shows the nail being driven through the man's hand rather than by the wrist.

But interviews with some of the participants in this ghastly ritual suggests that there is more to it than mere religious devotion.

"I hope the Lord will grant my wish to make me win big in 'jueteng' this year," Alex Laranang, a 55-year-old food vendor who said he can't read or write, told Reuters before two 5-inch nails were driven into his hands on a scorching hot day.

Laranang, a father of five, said he had won 3 thousand pesos ($70) twice in the five years he had himself crucified on a cross.

Okay, so Mr. Laranang has had a 40% success rate in winning the lottery in the past five years. However, we do not have any statistics for the success rate of his non-crucified (is that even a word?) friends and neighbors who also may have won the lottery in the last five years. And three thousand Philippine pesos? Shit, I have 1,820 pesos in my filing cabinet left over from my last trip to the Philippines. I would have been happy to have given it to Mr. Laranang if it would have kept him from having himself nailed to a cross.

But maybe there's more to this crucifixion thing than winning the lottery. Health benefits, perhaps?

Roli Pantoja, a construction worker, said he felt much better after getting down from a wooden cross. This was his sixth crucifixion.

"I feel very fresh, like a new-born baby. I can't feel any pain," he said.

Damn! But if it feels so good, why only do it once a year? How about once a week? That way Mr. Pantoja can feel like a new-born baby all the time.

The Catholic Church in the Philippines officially condemns these crucifixion reenactments. After all, wasn't the whole point of the Crucifixion was that Jesus supposedly did it for us? I thought the message of Christianity was to take up the cross, not to be nailed to one.

Then again, the Catholic Church in the Philippines has more pressing issues, like opposing the Reproductive Health Bill.

A Catholic priest has set off a rumpus when he urged churchgoers during his homily to leave if they were supporters of the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill.

ABS-CBN in a report on its website quoted the priest as saying in a mix of Filipino and English: “If there is anyone in the Mass here who are pro-RH bill…please, go out. It’s useless.”

“What is this Mass for if you are pro-RH bill? What is going to Church for if you’re pro-RH bill?” Ilano was also quoted as saying.

I would be willing to pet my 1,820 pesos that at least some of the congregants who were in attendance at that mass were having adulterous affairs or engaged in other activities considered by the Church to be sinful. But the priest didn't say to his congregation, "If you are engaging in acts of adultery, thievery or corruption, please go out." No, instead he attacks those who support a piece of legislation which "promotes information on and access to both natural and modern family planning methods, which are medically safe and legally permissible."

Which leads me to my next question, why does an institution controlled by celibate men get to have so much say over matters involving the sex lives of other people?

Denialism and Shoddy Historical References

The book I'm currently reading during my commute back and forth to work on the Long Island Rail Road is Denialism by Michael Specter. The subtitle of the book is "How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives."

One of the laudatory blurbs on the back cover of Denialism is from David Baltimore, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, who praises Specter for describing "the increasing public willingness to deny the hard-won facts of science in favor of myths and shoddy investigation."

Earlier today, while reading the chapter in Denialism about the anti-vaccination movement, which for the most part was pretty good, I winced when Specter writes the following:

"In 1421, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in sophistication, in learning, and particularly in scientific knowledge. It was the least ignorant society on earth. Then the newly completed Forbidden City was struck by a lightning bolt just as it opened, and the emperor reacted with horror. He interpreted the lightning as a sign from the gods that the people of the Middle Kingdom had become too dependent on technology - and were not paying enough attention to tradition or to the deities." (Bold emphasis mine).

Specter then references 1421: The Year China Discovered America by the crackpot Gavin Menzies and states that "the Chinese burned every library, dismantled their fleets, stopped exploring the globe, and essentially shut themselves off from the outside world." While Specter might have seen it as a convenient historical reference to bolster he point he was trying to make, if he were to dig a little bit deeper, he would have seen that most of the claims peddled by Menzies are a load of nonsense, as per the website 1421exposed.com. Talk about "shoddy investigation."

Specter baldly states that early 15th century China, as I highlighted above, "was the least ignorant society on earth." But what does he base this on? By virtue of its population, which included a large imperial bureaucracy drawn from men who passed civil service examinations, Ming China certainly did not suffer from a shortage of literate, educated people. Quantitatively though, I don't know how one can say that a Ming scholar or civil servant knew more about geography or the natural wold than a contemporary educated man in Europe or the Middle East.

While it is true that the Forbidden City was struck by a fire in 1421, the last of the great Ming Dynasty treasure fleets set out ten years later in 1431. The voyages came to an end not because of a palace fire, but for reasons that seemed entirely pragmatic to those who favored their termination.

For one thing, the treasure fleets were enormously expensive and offered little in return except for generating tribute missions from the kingdoms they visited. Second, and more important, the greatest threat to Ming China's security was a land based threat, the Mongols north of the Great Wall. In 1449, the Mongols even managed to capture a Ming emperor in battle. By way of comparison, 15th century Portugal, which had a more or less stable border with Spain on the Iberian Peninsula, and having no other alternatives for expansion, had the incentive and the means to devote its energies to exploration and overseas conquest.

The decline of the Chinese navy also had its roots in the conflict between the court eunuchs and the Confucian bureaucracy. Louise Levathes writes in When China Ruled the Seas, "Seafaring and overseas trade were the traditional domains of the eunuchs, and in striking down those enterprises the Confucians were eliminating a primary source of their rivals' power and income."

Levathes adds, "With the opening of the Grand Canal in 1415, there was no longer a need for oceangoing junks to carry southern grain supplies northward to feed the capital." Besides, while the Europeans wanted to sail to China and the Indies beause those places had things the Europeans badly wanted, Europe did not have anything that the Chinese wanted, or at the very least China evidently did not know enough about Europe to even consider whether it had anything to offer China.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that one of the factors that contributed to China falling behind may have been because it was one large state covering a territory that was greater in size than Western Europe and which was vastly more poweful than its immediate neighbors. If Chinese government policy shifted towards hostility to overseas trade and exploration, there was no alternative power base to turn to for patronage and support. Western Europe, on the other hand, consisted of numerous smaller kingdoms in competition with one another. So, in late 15th century Europe, a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus believes that he can reach China, Japan and the East Indies by sailing westward into the Atlantic. He can travel from one kingdom to another, pitching his idea to their respective monarchs, until at last Ferdinand and Isabela of Spain decide to support his venture. Then once it becomes apparent that vast, previously unknown lands have been found, just about every other European country with the means to build oceangoing ships wants to get in on the action.

Part of the problem in criticizing the Ming for turning inward in the 15th century is that it presupposes that the Ming should have had the foresight to see what is so clear to us today with the benefit of nearly 600 years of hindsight. Yes, they allowed their naval technology to decay at precisely the time when the seafaring kingdoms of Europe were beginning a series of voyages that would culminate in the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. But it would not be until the Opium War in 1839, a little over four hundred years after the last treasure fleet returned home, that the reality of their backwardness became apparent to the Chinese. You have to know you're in a race before you can realize that you've fallen behind.

But to circle back to the main point of this post, if Specter is going to rightly criticize people who base their beliefs on incorrect information or forgetting the past, then he shouldn't rely on the work of pseudo historians and lazy generalizations to make his point. It only serves to undermine his own credibility.

Miura Baien and The Disinterested Study of Nature

One of the criteria I use to determine if religious claims are a product of human invention rather than a divine revelation is my human egocentrism test. What I mean by that is that the religion elevates humanity to a position of central importance in the affairs of the divine being credited with creating our universe.

For example, the Abrahamic God, having created a universe filled with billions of galaxies each filled with billions of planets and stars, takes an inordinate interest in the affairs of the species homo sapiens on the planet Earth. What we eat, what we drink, what clothes we wear, and who we have sex with, to list a few behaviors, are all supposedly done under the eye of a ceaselessly vigilant being who wants us to obey its rules and love it with all of our hearts.

From my perspective as an atheist, I view our species and the world we inhabit as part of a larger universe rather than being the reason for the universe. I don't rule out the possibility that our universe is the creation of some higher intelligence, but even if it is, all I can know about such a creator is that it is very powerful and very intelligent.

I was pleasantly surprised recently to see my view echoed in an unlikely place. Like a lot of college graduates, I still have some of the text books I purchased when I was in college. One of them was a book I had to purchase for a class on Chinese and Japanese history. The book, titled Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 1, contains excerpts of mostly original documents from Japanese history from ancient times up to the latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. For most of the past couple of decades, the book sat largely undisturbed on the shelf amidst my collection of history books.

A couple of weeks or so ago I found myself perusing it, and looking at the table of contents under a chapter titled 18th Century Rationalism, I saw something called "The Disinterested Study of Nature." Turning to the page, it turned out to be an excerpt of a letter written by a Japanese philosopher of the late Tokugawa era named Miura Baien. A fair chunk of the letter, or at least the portion of the letter printed in Sources, addresses the issue of human egocentrism with regard to the study of nature and the universe.

"Now the universe shelters all things in it, and man is just one of those things.... All beings exist together with us, and we are just one of them. Realization that Heaven (nature) is universal, while man is individual, must be the starting point for all discussion of humanity. This is what I call opening the window of the human sphere. The reason men have remained in the dark about the universe is that, remaining fixed in the human sphere, they have considered their own position to be of the highest dignity and their own intellect to be the most exalted. To view Heaven-and-earth in this way, or to study creation and its manifold objects with this attitude, is exactly the same as brewers of sake, su, moro, and amasake who consider rice only in terms of taste and flavor. In the comprehension of the universe, knowledge is most important. But as long as students approach creation without opening the windows of the human sphere, and persist in keeping a smug sense of their own importance and intelligence, their approach is certain to give rise to delusions, as a mote in the eye casts a shadow on what one sees.

Concern for the world and compassion for the masses is benevolent in motive, but the study of creation in human terms is not conducive to true knowledge. Those whom the world acclaims as leaders in thought and action take humanity and human motives as the basis of their thinking and speculation in order to set up standards for what is to be believed and done. But human minds are like human faces; their preferences differ from one another. Each considers what he has arrived at to be right, a revelation from Heaven or a deposit of truth from antiquity, and thinks those who do not accept his standards should be exterminated. It is my conviction, therefore, that there is no systematic truth or logic except that which enables man to comprehend the universe without setting up standards conceived in terms of humanity or human motives...."

I don't know if Miura Baien had ever read the Bible, though he likely did not.* Based on what he wrote above, if he did read the creation account of Genesis, he would object to it on account of it being expressed in terms of human needs, with the stars being created to provide us with light at night, and with God creating the fish and the animals so that man could exercise dominion over them. It would be like the flora in our intestines telling each other that humans only exist so that microbes could live in our digestive tracts.

*In 1637-38, there was an uprising of Christians in Shimabara that was brutally put down at the cost of some 37,000 Japanese Christians. Japan was closed off to the outside world except for the presence of a small Dutch presence near Nagasaki. Japanese Christians after that conducted their worship mostly in secret and proselytization by foreigners was no longer possible.

Tominaga Nakamoto, in his "Testament of An Old Man" (1738) wrote "In the world today there are three religions: Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto." None of the other excerpts of Japanese philosophers or historians in Sources during the 18th century period make reference to Christianity and focus primarily on Confucianism. It suggests that the ban on foreign contacts and the suppression of Christianity was such that most educated Japanese in the 18th century knew little or nothing about it, or if they did, that they lived in a climate where even discussion of Christianity could engender the risk of punishment.

Collecting More of the Wisdom of the Ancients

Recently, the Borders bookstore in Westbury announced its closure and in its final weeks sold off its stock of books at discounts that rose as the supply of books shrank.

In the course of several trips there prior to its final closing, I purchased a number of Penguin Classics and other translated works of ancient historians and philosophers. As I wrote in a post I did on reading the works of Saint Augustine, when you read the writings of educated people from the past, it is a fascinating opportunity to see the world through their eyes. Often times, what you get is a combination of profound ignorance mixed with tremendous wisdom and keen insight, and the occasional surprise when you see that a person living some two millennia ago knew of something that you did not expect them to.

For example, one of the books I purchased was a Penguin Classics collection of some of the writings of Cicero, a Roman orator and statesman, called On The Good Life. One of the selections is from Discussions At Tusculum, which is written in the format of a dialogue between two persons, though one of the speakers, presumably meant to represent Cicero himself, tends to monopolize the discussion. At one point, the Cicero character talks about the experience of physical pain and of people who willingly embrace pain even to the point of death.

In one of his examples, Cicero describes the Indian practice of sati, "And Indian women too, when the husband of one of them dies, compete with one another to decide which of their number he loved the best (because each man usually has more than one wife). Whereupon the woman who is proclaimed the winner, escorted by her relations, joyfully joins her husband on the funeral pyre, and the loser goes sadly away."

Since the Discussions At Tusculum were written sometime in 44BCE, Cicero's description of sati is evidence that the tradition of Hindu widows joining their deceased husbands on the funeral pyre dates back at least to the 1st century BCE, if not longer. Given the tremendous distance that separates Italy and India, it is also indicative of how trade networks connected disparate places and served not only as conduits for the exchange of goods, but for information about far away places and peoples where the trade goods originated.

Another ancient classic I am currently in the middle of readings is The Modern Classic Library's edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. More a collection of random jottings of whatever came into the second century Roman emperor's mind than a coherent work, the Meditations is a mixed bag of wisdom, melancholy, and occasional morbidity, such as when Marcus writes "The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag. Look at it clearly. If you can."

Nevertheless, there are quite a few nuggets of practical wisdom and observations that resonate just as well today as they did when Marcus wrote them. When it comes to the topic of confronting injustice and oppression in the world, it is not uncommon for someone to quote Edmund Burke's famous line "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The emperor Marcus Aurelius was ahead of Burke by some 1,600 years when he wrote a simpler version of the same thing, "And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing."

Since I'm not quite finished reading the Meditations, I can't say yet what my favorite passage is, but among the ones I have underlined*, the following is probably a leading candidate:

"Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human - however imperfectly - and fully embrace the pursuit that you have embarked upon."

*Yes, I have not yet made the leap to buying a Kindle, Nook or other kind of e-reader. Eventually I will probably get around to it, but I still like to hold a physical book in my hand and underline or circle passages that interest me. Since many of the books I read are history books containing maps and pictures, I don't know how well they fare in e-book format. If anyone knows, please feel free to share in the comments section. Lastly, one thing you can't do with an e-book that you can do with a physical book is to get it signed by the author.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

I recently finished reading the Penguin Classics edition of The Later Roman Empire, which covers the third quarter of the 4th century as written by Ammianus Marcellinus, who was alive during the period of time he describes.

While Ammianus focuses mostly on the military and political affairs of the time, he digresses on matters such as the origin of pearls, eclipses and comets, most of which have been omitted from the Penguin Classics translation, there is one passage included that caught my attention.

The central character of Ammianus' history is the last pagan emperor, known as Julian the Apostate. Ammianus describes how one night Julian "thought he saw a blazing light like a falling star, which clove its way through part of the air and vanished."

But the unintentionally funny part is when Ammianus goes on to write "In fact this fiery object was what the Greeks call a shooting star, which never falls or touches the earth. Anyone who thinks that bodies can fall from the sky must be set down as an ignoramus or a fool."

In fairness to Ammianus, he does offer some rather interesting and perceptive insights, such as when he notes that "according to the unanimous opinion of scholars, the circumference of the whole earth, which seems to us so immense, is no more than a tiny point in comparison with the vastness of the universe." Not long ago, my son brought home from school a work sheet about Christopher Columbus that repeated the canard that in the time of Columbus people still believed that the world was flat. Educated people have known for millennia that the Earth is round and this passage from a 4th century Roman historian is testament to this fact.

In another passage, Ammianus offers a nugget of wisdom that is very close to a line from the Buddhist Dhammapadda which tells us that "the greatest of victories is the victory over oneself." Ammianus writes "the truest glory is won when a man in power totally subdues his cruel and savage and angry impulses and erects in the citadel of his soul a splendid memorial of his victory over himself."

But my favorite passage from the book is from a section where Ammianus discusses the numbers of people wrongly imprisoned and executed during the reign of Valens on false or trumped up charges that reminded me of the climate of terror described in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

"How much might have been put right in those dark days if Valens had been taught by wisdom the lesson of the philosophers that sovereign power is nothing if it does not care for the welfare of others, and that it is the task of a good ruler to keep his power in check, to resist the passions of unbridled desire and implacable rage, and to realize that, as the dictator Caesar use to say, the recollections of past cruelty is a wretched provision for old age. If a ruler is going to pass judgment on the life and existence of a man, who is part of the world and makes up the number of living beings, he ought to reflect long and earnestly, and not be carried away by passion to commit an act that cannot be undone."

For anyone interested in the history of the Roman Empire, I highly recommend reading The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived during a critical time when the frontiers of the Empire were coming under increasing pressure from barbarian tribes in Europe and from the Sassanid Persians in the Middle East.

Why Pray?

"If people pray for rain and it rains, how is that? I would say: Nothing in particular. Just as when people do not pray for rain, it also rains. When people try to save the sun or moon from being swallowed up [in eclipse], or when they pray for rain in a drought, or when they decide an important affair only after divination - this is not because they think in this way they will get what they seek, but only to add a touch of ritual to it. Hence the gentleman takes it as a matter of ritual, whereas the common man thinks it is supernatural. He who takes it as a matter of ritual will suffer no harm; he who thinks it is supernatural will suffer harm...."

from the Confucian philosopher Hsün Tzu.

Vjack at Atheist Revolution has a post up titled Japan Doesn't Need Your Prayers, wherein he writes "If you are praying for the Japanese people, please recognize that you are doing this only to comfort or distract yourself. It is for you, not for them. It does not do them any good."

I agree with Vjack that if a person prays to God to help the people of Japan with the expectation that God's divine power will prevent any of the nuclear reactors from having a meltdown or causing trapped survivors to be magically kept alive until they can be rescued, then that person is deluded and is not helping in any way. A post I wrote earlier this evening, May God Protect Those Who Haven't Already Been Hurt Or Killed, was inspired by a comment I saw from someone on a Facebook post who falls into this category.

That being said, I don't think prayer and doing meaningful things to help are mutually exclusive. I'm sure there are plenty of believers in a personal god, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim, who will engage in prayer and then write out a check to a disaster relief organization or, if they are able to, volunteer in some meaningful way such as picking up or delivering supplies to be sent to the disaster zone to aid the relief effort.

For a religious believer, the act of prayer can serve as a ritual that can help to focus the believer's mind on a matter of personal concern, such as helping those who have been affected by a terrible calamity, and empower that person to take action. If the act of prayer really does have such an effect on a religious believer, then I certainly won't begrudge the believer's decision to do so, even if I don't personally think it is necessary.

May God Protect Those Who Haven't Already Been Hurt or Killed

While reading a post on Facebook yesterday about the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, the following comments from someone named Eduardo caught my eye:

"May God protect all the people effected by this tragic event. In God we trust."

If Eduardo was expecting God to actually protect people from being injured or killed, I would have to say that Eduardo's trust is greatly misplaced.

Considering that the death toll alone is projected to top 10,000 people, what do people like Eduardo actually expect God to do now? It reminds me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when the narcissistic and fraudulent wizard Gilderoy Lockhart declares that if only he had arrived sooner he could have helped a Hogwarts student who got petrified because he knew just the right counter curse.

Well, the Gilderoy Lockhart in the sky didn't protect the people of Japan from the tsunami. And all the work being done now to aid the people of Japan is being carried out by mere mortal human beings, the way it has always been done in the past.

Huckabee Hits The Trifecta

Lately, former Arkansas governor and aspiring Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee can't seem to stop shooting himself in the foot.

At a roundtable lunch with reporters last month, Huckabee criticized the Obama Administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA"). In his remarks, the Huckster referred to ballot initiatives in numerous states that affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Fine, but as I pointed out in this post in response to an appeal I received from former Senator Rick Santorum:

"In 1996, I thought the idea of same-sex marriage was taking things too far, as much as I considered myself pro-gay rights at the time. But you know what, Ricky? People change their minds over time on some issues. Sometimes it takes decades. Other times it is just a matter of a few years. It's what Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion calls the changing moral zeitgeist. So, you can keep looking back on the passage of DOMA with fond nostalgia all you want, but it is not 1996 anymore."

While my comments were directed at DOMA itself, the same thing applies to the ballot initiatives referred to by Huckabee.

But where Huckabee really goes off the rails when he said "There is a quantified impact of broken families," Huckabee said. "[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year...that's the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties."

As a happily married man myself, I am constantly baffled when same-sex marriage opponents claim that the health of my heterosexual marriage hangs in the balance. Really? How? I thought the "dad deficit" was a product of straight men impregnating women and not taking responsibility for the children they fathered. It never occurred to me that gays were to blame for this.

Then on a radio appearance last week, Huckabee fired another round at his foot when he claimed that President Barack Obama grew up in Kenya. When it was pointed out that Obama did not grow up in Kenya and only visited the country when in he was in his twenties, Huckabee tried to backtrack by claiming he meant Indonesia. But he only ended up demonstrating the degree to which he was willing to engage in dishonesty, because the references Huckabee made in the interview cited Kenyan history.

Being an ordained pastor, and therefore, presumably a fine, upstanding Christian, Huckabee could have taken the high road and said, "In my remarks about Barack Obama the other day, I failed to live up to the standards of truth and honesty that Christians aspire to. Instead, I subordinated my convictions to the need to make cheap political points, and for that I apologize and ask you all for your forgiveness." Atheist that I am, I would have been mightily impressed if Huckabee had said something like that. But alas, the former Arkansas governor blamed the "liberal media" and showed that he was nothing more than a Republican Party hack.

Reeling from his self inflicted wounds, Huckabee still managed to fire another round, when during an appearance on conservative film critic Michael Medved's radio show, he responded to Medved's potshot at actress (and Long Island girl!) Natalie Portman for her acceptance speech at the Academy Awards for winning the Best Actress award. You see, the pregnant but as of yet unmarried actress thanked her fiancé for "having given me my most important role of my life." Shame! Shame! An unmarried pregnant woman appearing in public acknowledging the fact that she is pregnant but unmarried, though engaged to be married.

To be fair to Huckabee, I think Michael Medved was the bigger douchebag in the exchange with his "[Millepied] didn't give her a wedding ring" line. But Huckabee was way off base in suggesting that Portman was glamorizing out of wedlock pregnancy. While Huckabee cited the problems of poor, mostly minority women who have children out of wedlock, which is a problem, I seriously doubt African-American and Latina teenage girls decide pregnancy is a good idea because they saw Natalie Portman's acceptance speech.