God Is Pro-Choice

Well, that's the conclusion I draw considering that yesterday in New York City the rain was absolutely pouring around 1 P.M., and yet today, for the rally I attended in support of Planned Parenthood in downtown Manhattan, the weather was about as nice as one could hope for in February. Because you know if it had rained during the rally like we experienced yesterday, some Bible Thumpers would be saying "You see, God's showing you how much he disapproves of what you're doing."

The rally itself was in response to the recent vote by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to strip federal funding to Planned Parenthood for the terrible sin of providing abortions in addition to the majority of their work, which is health care and birth control. I myself utilized Planned Parenthood's services during a time of crisis in my life, so I know first hand the valuable work that they perform. It's not often that I feel motivated to get off my duff to stand up for a cause, but the actions by the Republicans not only in Congress, but increasingly in state legislatures across the country, have made me realize that when it comes to defending what I believe is a woman's fundamental reproductive rights, I can't just be a passive supporter.

Below are some pictures I took at the rally this afternoon. The first one, which is partly obscured, is of a sign carried by one attendee that reads "Keep Your Boehner Away From My Planned Parenthood," referring to the Speaker of the House John Boehner, who is apparently more concerned with making a woman's uterus a public domain rather than focusing on job growth. A couple of other amusing signs follow.

Of course, the rally featured more than just some catchy signs. There was also some important politicians and celebrity figures. Below is New York Senator Charles Schumer.

Next up, the fiery Anthony Weiner, who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens in the House of Representatives. I believe Weiner's district is the one that Schumer formerly represented in the House before Schumer was elected to the Senate.

In the celebrity department, we have actress Kathleen Turner, her voice huskier than ever. I kept hoping she would say "Pussywillows, Dotty." Apologies for the grainy shot. She was far from me and I had the lens on near maximum zoom.

Another amusing sign. It's the one in the middle that reads "Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries."

Another well known personality, at least in the blogging community, is the feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. Again, apologies for the grainy picture.

Last in batch, I couldn't leave out my own representative in the New York State Assembly, Charles Lavine. It's starting to become something of a running gag with us that we keep crossing paths with one another. Last autumn, we met at an open house at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury. Then on Election Day I was eating lunch at my local Cosi when he stopped in to eat with a couple of other people. He recognized me from the Islamic Center and we spoke briefly. So, as I was leaving the rally shortly after he spoke, I passed by him and when we made eye contact I greeted him again and was like "Hey, remember me?"

There were numerous other elected officials and feminist activists who spoke to the crowd, but I decided to focus only on the ones that I knew. Sadly, to me at least, all of the elected officials at the rally were Democrats. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate their support on reproductive rights, and since 2004 I have voted mostly for Democratic candidates either on the Democratic line or if they appear on other party lines, such as the Working Families Party. But it was not all that long ago that you could still find a few Republican politicians in New York who supported abortion rights. Regrettably, the Republican Party is increasingly solidifying itself as a party that opposes abortion rights even here in New York. For me as a voter, I find it difficult to pull the lever for a candidate that opposes abortion rights, but sometimes it puts me in the position of having to vote for a pro-choice candidate who is lackluster or who I do not otherwise care for. I would like to see the pendulum shift in the other direction so that opposition to abortion does not become a litmus test for Republican candidates for elected office.

And that leads me to another observation I want to make. Reproductive rights in this country are under a sustained and increasing assault by the anti-choice movement, and what I have noticed is that supporters of abortion rights are constantly on the defensive. What I would like to see from those of us who support abortion rights, access to contraception, and comprehensive sex education, is a counteroffensive to force our opponents to spend their money and resources responding to us rather than forcing us to always play defense. I would be eager to hook up with anyone in the New York area who would be interested in bouncing ideas off of each other and coming up with strategies to make this happen.

Change In The Arab World

I had been intending recently to do a post about Pakistan, but the news lately has been dominated by the revolts taking place in many of the Arab countries. I will get to Pakistan very soon, though.

I do have to say that the wave of uprisings, particularly in the North African countries, is one of the most exciting events in the news since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The world is changing before our eyes and all we can really do is watch it happen and hope for the best.

Inevitably, what is happening in places like Egypt and Tunisia has been compared to the uprisings against the Communist countries of Eastern Europe more than two decades ago. One of the differences between what is happening today versus Eastern Europe is that the governments overthrown in 1989 were all more or less client states of the Soviet Union. Sure, Mubarak's government in Egypt could be described as a client state of the United States to some degree, but one cannot say the same thing with regard to Moammar Gaddafi's Libya.

With Gaddafi in particular, his regime is is certainly the one thus far that has shown the willingness to shed the most blood to defend itself. If the Arab revolts are to be compared to Eastern Europe in 1989, then Gaddafi is turning out to be the Arab Nicolae Ceasescu. Whether Gaddafi will end up sharing the same fate as the Romanian dictator remains to be seen, though he certainly seems to be heading in that direction.

Sarah Palin's Trademark Blues

It's not often that I write about a topic related to the field in which I work, which is trademark law. So, I couldn't help but be amused when I read this story on Crooks and Liars regarding Half-Term Sarah's difficulties in registering her name SARAH PALIN as a service mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (hereinafter "USPTO").

Palin's application was filed with the USPTO on November 5, 2010 and was assigned serial number 85170226. If you're curious enough, you can look up the application yourself on the USPTO'S TESS database. Just click on the link and type in SARAH PALIN in the search term field and click on Submit Query. Then click on the first hit, SARAH PALIN (the search will turn up a second application for the mark SARAH PALIN'S GOING ROGUE ROUGE which was filed by another person, but more on that later). You can then view all of the documents available to the public for the application by clicking on the blue button labeled TDR.

The application was examined rather quickly, in less than a month, probably because the filing attorney filed using the TEAS Plus form. The Office Action (which is what a USPTO Examining Attorney issues to a trademark applicant informing the applicant of the Examining Attorney's objections to the application) sets forth two objections to the application.

The first objection is just a mere technicality, but it indicates that the attorney who filed the application does not know a heck of a lot about trademarks. You see, when a trademark application is filed that contains the name of a living individual, you need to provide the signed consent of that person if that person is not the one who is signing the application. This objection can be easily overcome by having Sarah Palin sign a simple form that states that she consents to the application. In fact, the TDR record indicates that the law firm representing Palin has already been in communication with the Examining Attorney regarding the requirements for overcoming this objection.

The second objection is more serious. But first some background information. Most domestic trademark applicants will commonly file the application based on one of two filing bases. A Section 1(a) application is an application wherein the applicant is using the mark in commerce in the United States a the time of the filing of the application. The applicant has to submit a specimen evidencing use of the mark and provide the date when the mark was first used. The second common filing basis is the Section 1(b) application, in which the mark is not in use at the time of the filing of the application, but the applicant intends to make use of the mark at a later date. An application filed under 1(b) cannot pass on to registration until a Statement of Use is filed with the specimen and first use date.

Furthermore, when an applicant submits a trademark application with the USPTO, the applicant is declaring, under penalty of perjury, that he or she believes that all of the information provided in the application is, to the best of the applicant's knowledge, true. Palin's application alleges that she used her name in connection with the services "Information about political elections; Providing a website featuring information about political issues" in Class 35 at least as early as January 1, 1996. However the specimens provided in support of her use claim is a page from the Fox News website from January 11, 2010 announcing that Palin was joining Fox as a political contributor (which of course as we all know is the real reason why she resigned her position as governor of Alaska. She gets paid much more money to spout bullshit about things she doesn't really know compared to governing one of the least populated states in the country) and postings from her Facbook page.

The problem for Palin's application is that being mentioned by Fox News on its web site is not evidence that she herself is providing information about elections and having a Facebook page does not constitute providing a website featuring information about political issues. Again, this strongly supports my belief that the attorney retained by Palin to file her application is not familiar with trademark law. Even more egregious is the first use date, January 1, 1996. While just about anyone who had a computer in 1996 had online access, it was not common for most people to have their own websites. For example, the well-known wingnut personality Michelle Malkin did not register her domain name until February 9, 1999, according to a Whois search of michellemalkin.com. I seriously doubt that Sarah Palin, who was unknown outside of Alaska at the time, had a website where she provided information about political issues as a private citizen. In early 1996, Palin was serving on the Wasilla City Council. I suppose it is possible the Wasilla City Council had its own website in 1996, though any information or remarks provided by Palin on the site would have been in her capacity as an elected official.

While Sarah Palin today has a website, sarah-palin.com, a Whois search indicates that this domain was created on August 29, 2008. There is also a domain name sarahpalin.com that was created on April 26, 2004, though the webpage is blank. A Whois search of foxnews.com indicates that the Fox News domain was created on June 21, 1995. I'm hazarding a guess that Palin's attorney (or Palin herself) believed that since Fox News was around since 1996, Palin could somehow piggyback on that. Or alternatively, as I wrote in the paragraph above, maybe she thought that anything she provided on a local government website back when she served on the Wasilla City Council counted as use of SARAH PALIN. Either way, an attorney knowledgeable about trademark law would have done a better job in providing a valid specimen and first use date.

It should not be too hard for Palin to submit a valid specimen, though I wonder if the Examining Attorney will also take her to task for the January 1, 1996 first use date, which I am quite certain is erroneous and possibly dishonest. The deadline for Palin to respond to all of the objections raised by the Examining Attorney is May 29, 2011, so she has a little over three months left to straighten this out. I wonder, by the way, if this story gets picked up by the conservative blogosphere if any of Palin's wingnut fans will call or send the Examining Attorney angry messages to stop picking on poor Sarah by bothering her with such pesky rules.

And to get back to what I alluded to earlier, an Alaskan individual named James Weeks has filed an application to register SARAH PALIN'S GOING ROGUE ROUGE for adhesive labels and printed novelty wine labels. Just like Sarah Palin herself, Weeks has to provide Palin's consent to register Sarah Palin's name as a trademark. However, I doubt that Weeks is going to get his former governor to consent to his application.

One other thing. Bristol Palin also has an application pending to register her name, filed by the same attorney who is handling her mother's application. Just like with her mom's application, Bristol's application has been rejected because Bristol did not sign the application, so she also has to submit her written consent. Also, like her mom, Bristol is facing an objection to the specimen submitted in support of her 1(a) application, which as the Examining Attorney has pointed out, is just a white sheet with her name typed on it.

I suggest that the next time the Palins want to file more trademark applications that they hire an experienced IP attorney.

Long Island and the Fact of Global Warming

With all of the snow we've been getting here on Long Island since late December, as well as the big snow storm that barrelled across the United States last week, the last thing on anyone's mind is global warming, except maybe as a punchline. But the big picture gets lost when people focus on the weather while ignoring the long-term climatic data.

When the subject of global warming and climate change does get coverage, it is often dominated by the receding and thinning of Arctic sea ice and how it will affect the polar bears. Out of curiosity, I decided to find out if my native Long Island is experiencing warming.

The source of my data is the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. I was able to obtain for free temperature records collected at the NOAA's climate monitoring station in Mineola*. It was rather time consuming though, because I could only obtain one month at a time. I also damn near used up all the black ink in my toner cartridge! What I decided to do was to focus on two months as a representative sample, July and November. And to make sure I collected data for a sufficient span of time, I felt a good year to start was the year of my birth, 1969.

The data appears on what is, even up to the present day, a form with the information written in by hand. It contains the high and low temperature for each day of the month. What I did was to analyze the data in two ways. In one spreadsheet I put in columns for the first, 15th and last day for both July and November and then entered the highest temperature for those days from 1969 up to 2010. In a second spreadsheet, I created columns with temperature ranges, with columns for July for 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90-99 and 100+ degrees, and columns for November for 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, and 70-79 degrees. For each year I counted the number of days in which the highest temperature fell**. For instance, in July of 1969, there were 15 days in which the highest temperature was between 70 and 79 degrees.

After I plugged in the numbers, I created bar graphs to see if trends in temperature change could be discerned. Unfortunately, I don't know how to insert bar graph charts into a blog post, so I can't include them in this post. However, I can describe what they show. And what they do clearly show is that for both July and November, there is a noticeable increase in temperature in the last two decades.

For July, the frequency of days with the temperature highs between 60 to 69 degrees and 70 to 79 degrees shows a decrease. The number of days with temperature highs between 80 to 89 degrees increases only slightly, but this is because the number of days in which the high temperature falls between 90-99 and 100 and over is higher. According to the temperature records for Mineola, there were no days in July that reached 100 degrees between 1969 and 1987. The first year to reach 100 degrees is 1988. While the temperature does not consistently reach 100 or more on a year to year basis, in 2002 and 2010 the number of days in July in which the temperature reached 100 or more degrees was five.

I selected November because I wanted to see if an autumn month would show a similar trend, and I can report that it does. As with July, there is a decline in the number of days with temperatures in the lower temperature ranges, in this case between 30 to 39 degrees and 40 to 49 degrees. Likewise, there is an increase in the number of days in which the high temperature falls between 50 to 59 degrees and 60 to 69 degrees. The one range where November breaks the trend is in the number of days in which the temperature reached 70 or more degrees. The record occurred in 1975, when the temperature exceeded 70 or more degrees on 7 days. The number of 70+ days is slightly higher in the first two decades than the latter two. However, 70 degree days for November were infrequent for the entire 41 year span of temperature data I collected.

Using the temperature data for July and November, the evidence shows that in the last two decades temperatures on Long Island (or at least Mineola in Nassau County!) have increased. Readers of this post who might be of a right wing or libertarian bent, before you engage in a Tourette's outburst, please note that this post does not address whether human activity is causing this warming or whether there is anything we should be doing on a policy level to address the rise in temperature. I am merely reporting the findings from the data I have analyzed. You can look at the data yourself to confirm my findings.

Climate change on Long Island being a fact, the next issue to consider is what impact it might have on those of us who live here. One thing that springs to mind is the potential to affect the Long Island wine industry. The East End of Long Island, particularly on the North Fork, has a microclimate that has been compared to Bordeaux in France. It is possible that a continued rise in temperature could adversely impact the industry. I don't know to what extent, if any, that Long Island's winegrowers have noticed any change in their growing seasons or an increase in pests that favor warmer weather. I intend to contact the Long Island Wine Council to see if they have any information on this and will report what they say in a future post.

A greater potential threat to all Long Islanders are the effects of a rise in sea levels to our underground drinking supply. Long Island gets its drinking water from underground aquifers. This web page from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation contains a brief, useful description of our aquifers. A rise in sea level from the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica in combination with a decrease in our water table could increase salt water intrusion into our aquifers. This paper provides a good overview of the impact of rising temperatures and sea level on the Long Island Sound, estuaries and coast lines and the marine life that inhabit them.

In conclusion, the last two decades have seen a trend in rising temperatures for Long Island that could have potentially adverse consequences for those of use who live here if that trend continues in the coming decades.

* The data was either incomplete or missing for Mineola for November of 1982, 1984, 1988 and 1996. To the extent that it was available, I substituted data collected at the Wantagh station. Wantagh, for those of you not familiar with Long Island, is on the south shore of Nassau County, whereas Mineola is more towards the center of Nassau County.

** For November of 1977, there was no temperature data for the 8th and the 9th. For July of 1982, there was no temperature date for the 21st. For November of 1982, there was no temperature data for the 22nd and 23rd. For July of 1986, there was no temperature data for the 31st. For November of 1988, there is no temperature data for the 21st and 22nd.

Dear Erick Erickson, Please Forgive Me For Existing

Erick "Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a Goat Fucking Child Molester" Erickson of Redstate.com had this to say in response to the Tucson shooting spree that seriously wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, among others, and killed six people, including a Federal judge:

"Through it all though, well meaning people on both sides of the ideological and partisan divide are not talking about the one thing that should be talked about — a saving faith in Jesus Christ."

I guess Rep. Giffords, who is Jewish, should count herself twice lucky. Not only was she not killed, she still has time to be "saved." I am sure that she will no doubt be grateful for Erickson's concern.

"In all the discussions we’re having, let’s not forget that bad things have happened throughout history, but we are seeing more and more a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ and we are seeing the most extreme rhetoric from those who reject the only real truth while embracing every other historic fad and nonsense as variations of truth."

Yeah, he's right. Militant Muslims reject Christ (though if I am not mistaken, they do recognize Jesus as a prophet of God) and they are increasingly resorting to extreme rhetoric and violence. Oh, wait:

"For a taste of what I’m talking about, look at Timothy McVeigh. Raised a Catholic, McVeigh self-admitted that there was a god of some sorts, but that he was agnostic, had no belief in hell, and had drifted far from anything having to do with Jesus Christ."

So much for that militant Muslim thingy.

"The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe."

For me, it's not so much cringeworthy as eyerolling.

"But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis."

Like Dark Matter and Dark Energy? How about solar radio bursts? The magnetic field?

"It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell."

Oh. Boy, was I way off. So, not only are angels, demons, God, Satan, Heaven and Hell real, they are "very" real. So, when bonobos engage in promiscuity, they're just behaving like the animals that they are. But when members of homo sapiens engage in promiscuity, it is because they are possessed by demons and/or are tempted by Satan (sorry, couldn't find the English version!). Acts of altruism by chimpanzees are again just animal behavior, but altruism by humans is special, as long as the person doing the altruistic act has a deep, abiding faith in Jesus Christ. Thus, Agnostic Adam, who volunteers at a food bank a few hours a week, gets killed in a car accident after spending a night with and getting a blow job from Steve, is going straight to the ovens because that blow job and Adam's agnosticism made the Creator of the Universe very upset.

"The back and forth and accusations and lies surrounding Jared Loughner should be a constant reminder to us that there is more at play in our world than what we see. And, frankly, at times like this I am more and more mindful of the great chasm in this world between the saved and damned."

Of course, Erick Erickson has that smug assurance that he is among the elite few who are "saved." However, the great chasm I see in the world is between the haves and the have-nots. The chasm between people who live in safe neighborhoods and those who live in places where the simple act of going to the market or to a well two hours away on foot is to risk being raped or murdered. The chasm between people who have access to basic health care and those who do not. The chasm between people who have shelter and those who do not.

There are good people in the world, both secular and religious, who devote their lives to trying to bridge these chasms. For example, some of my wife's family members, who are devout Catholics, will go back home to the Philippines once a year on medical missions to provide medical care to the poor. Is it my place to tell them "Great work on those medical missions, but you can jettison that Catholic crap, you know"?

"Political rhetoric did not make Jared Loughner do what he did. His embrace of evil led him down a road down which we should be in constant prayer no others dare travel."

Hold on there fella'! While I am not one to jump on the "blame Sarah Palin's target map" bandwagon with regard to this incident, the simple fact is that we won't know for sure what led Loughner to go on his shooting rampage at the supermarket unless and until he tells us. What does seem clear is that Loughner did not exactly have a firm grip on what we call reality. In the coming weeks and months, we may get a clearer picture of what drove him to commit murder. But what certainly did not cause him to do what he did was Satan whispering in his ear "Go on Jared, pull the trigger."

To circle back to Erickson's earlier about "a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ," if he is referring to those of us in America who are atheists, agnostics or members of other religious faiths, what does he base this on? How many vocal atheists have committed murder, rape or theft in this country and are there statistics that show an increase in such violence? Unless Erickson can produce this, I have to assume he just pulled that statement out of his ass. What is a fact though is that Erick Erickson did threaten to shoot U.S. census workers if they came to his house*. Then again, it's okay if Erick does it, because he's like "saved."

* My original version of this post was worded incorrectly in that I had wrote that Erickson threatened "to shoot U.S. census workers who came to his house."

Taking Stock - The Financial Front

If there's one thing theists and nontheists have in common, it's the need to make a living and save enough for retirement.

I'm presently 41 and my wife is 47. We have two children aged 9 and 7. We are at an age where we can measure how far we have come towards reaching our financial goals and how far we still have to go.

While the news over the past year has been dominated by stories about the dismal state of the American economy and the high unemployment rate, I have been fortunate that my family's financial situation significantly improved by the end of 2010.

One development that greatly benefited us was the decline in mortgage rates. Going into the summer, my wife and I had about 11 and a half years left on our 20 year mortgage with a 6.88% rate. We took advantage of the lower rates to refinance to a 10 year mortgage at 4.125%. Thus, in one fell swoop we reduced the balance on our mortgage from about $205,000 to about $180,000. While our monthly payments were only reduced by a little less than eight dollars, we reduced the amount of time left to pay off the mortgage by a year and four months. It was, as the old saying goes, a "no brainer." At the time of the writing of this post, we have nine years and seven months left to go on our mortgage, though I anticipate paying it off a year early.

On the retirement savings front, my decision to boost my 401(k) contribution to 20% of my salary was well-timed to benefit from the gains posted by the major stock indexes. My 401(k) balance increased by roughly $25,000 from the previous year and crossed the psychologically important milestone of $100,000. The gains might have been greater if I had a more aggressive portfolio. But I have no complaints.

The combined balance of all of the retirement funds held by my wife and I increased by nearly $50,000 to approximately a quarter of a million dollars. While I suppose that is not bad for a couple of forty somethings, it is still far short of what we will need to fund our retirement.

To get an idea of how we are doing, I tried out a retirement calculator on the CNN Money web site. Based on the information I provided, if my wife and I continue to earn our current salaries and continue to contribute to our retirements savings as we have been doing, we are on track to amass over a million dollars. Of course, this assumes that the markets don't collapse in the next decade or so.

However, as important as it is to save for retirement, I strongly believe we must also not forget the here and the now. The job situation in this country is still cloudy, and in spite of signs of improvement in our economy in recent months, things can still take a turn for the worse. Furthermore, I don't want to wait until I am 65 before I retire. I want to be able to enjoy life while I am still relatively young and fit. In order to do that, one must also amass a nonretirement savings portfolio.

The financial experts will say that everyone should have a rainy day fund to cover anywhere from 6 to 12 months worth of expenses. I decided to take it even further and make it a goal of having at least $100,000 in nonretirement savings. There was a period of time a few years ago where I had actually achieved this goal, but for a variety of reasons, I ultimately was not able to hold the line. At one point in 2009, our nonretirement savings had declined to about $70,000.

Since late 2009, I have managed to sock away enough to claw our way back to $90,000. The last time I had amassed $100,000, stocks comprised a large portion of the porfolio. On the one hand, when they went up, it made it a lot easier to attain my goal. But the downside was that when the stocks went down, so did the balance. This time my nonretirement portfolio is much more conservative, so that while the gains are small, they are also irreversible in the absence of a need to tap the savings.

There are a number of reasons why it might become necessary to tap our nonretirement savings in the near future. Both my wife and I drive older model cars. While we have not had a lot of repair issues with them, I know that this will not last forever and eventually we will have to buy new vehicles. Our house is also going to require remodeling and repair work, including a problem we have with sagging floors. The money for this will have to come from somewhere. For now, I am deferring on much of this in order to build our savings.

The other dark cloud looming on the horizon is college expenses for my children, which will come rolling in conveniently as the mortgage is winding down. I have to confess that I have not set aside any money in any college savings vehicles, focusing instead on building a general nonretirement savings portfolio. One reason I have not done so is that I am reluctant to have a large portion of my nonretirement savings invested in funds that can only be withdrawn for educational purposes.

In summary, we have made a lot of progress and I suppose for our age, my wife and I are in decent shape, but we still have a long way to go to get to that promised land of financial security.

Desperate Times, Desperate Beliefs

A prophet had appeared among the Paiutes of Nevada. He preached a new religion. It was a religion that offered hope for the Indian race - hope not dependent on promises of the white men. He held forth a vision of paradise in which all Indians would at last be free of the white burden and reside in a blissful land, a land without white people, a land inhabited by all the generations of Indians that had gone before...and it could be simply attained by practicing the tenets of his faith and dancing a prescribed "Ghost Dance."1

The closing years of the 19th and into the early 20th century witnessed the last stand of many indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa and Asia against the invasion of their lands and the destruction of their cultures and way of life by Europeans and Americans. Just as many individual people in the depths of crisis turn to religion to offer them hope and salvation, movements arose in these indigenous societies that were embraced by many as a means of destroying the foreign invaders and ushering in a time of paradise. Tragically, for all of them, the promises offered by these indigenous spiritual movements led to death and disaster.

Many of my fellow Americans are probably familiar with the Ghost Dance movement that spread among the Great Plains Indians in 1890. From Robert Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West, "All over Pine Ridge Reservation, and on others as well, the people abandoned their cabins and pitched their tipis in the cottonwood groves. Hypnotically, in slow shuffling cadence, they danced around sacred prayer trees. As the intensity and the excitement mounted, some fell to the ground, to die and go to heaven and there talk with the Indian Messiah and see the beautiful new world foretold. They came back to describe their experiences and to urge others to dance with a passion that would reveal to them, too, a vision of the promised land."

As the movement grew, some of its proponents began to preach confrontation and sought to bolster the courage of the Ghost Dancers by telling them that the white man's bullets could not harm them if they wore their "Ghost Shirts."

A decade later on the other side of the world, a similar movement arose in China. Ever since its defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War in 1842, the Qing Dynasty that had ruled China since 1644 suffered humiliating defeats and the carving up of its territory into spheres of influence at the hands of foreign, mostly European, powers. In this climate of increasing foreign encroachment, Chinese nationalist fervor increased, leading in some cases to extreme xenophobia.

The Boxers United in Righteousness, as they called themselves, began to emerge as a force in northwest Shandong during 1898. They drew their name and the martial rites they practiced from a variety of secret-society and self-defense units that had spread in southern Shandong during the previous years, mainly in response to the provocations of Western missionaries and their Chinese converts. Some Boxers believed they were invulnerable to swords and bullets in combat, and they drew on an eclectic pantheon of spirits and protectors from folk religion, popular novels, and street plays. Although they lacked a unified leadership, Boxers recruited local farmers and other workers made desperate by the distastrous floods that had been followed by droughts in Shandong; they began to call for the ending of the special privileges enjoyed by Chinese Christian converts and to attack both converts and Christian missionaries.2

In the summer of 1905, in German East Africa, now Tanzania, African villagers who labored in work gangs to pick cotton for export to Europe, began to listen to a spirit medium named Kinjikitle Ngwale, who called on them to unite and drive out the Germans.

The news spread like a fever. All they needed was maji ('water' in Swahili), with some castor oil and millet seeds. This was a 'war medicine' strong enough to turn German bullets into water. The leaders of each clan flocked to Ngarambe to obtain the magic water and the magic seeds... By the summer of 1905 the movement had spread more than a hundred miles west and south. But none of these men had modern rifles, only cap guns, spears and arrows.3

So here we have three completely different cultures in three different parts of the world where indigenous spiritual movements arose in a climate of anger and despair in the face of foreign encroachment. While they had their own unique characteristics, they shared many similiarities. They all promised a world cleansed of the hated foreigners. And they promised their followers that the foreigners bullets could not kill them.

The outcome of the Ghost Dancers is well known to many Americans. At a place called Wounded Knee, on December 29, 1890, the US Seventh Cavalry attempted to disarm the Native Americans encamped there. Utley describes the encounter:

As the search progressed, powerful tensions arose on both sides. A medicine man pranced about inciting men to fight; their Ghost Shirts would protect them, he said. Nervous troopers fingered their carbine triggers. One seized a deaf man and grasped his rifle. It went off. The chanting priest threw a handful of dirt into the air. A knot of Indians dropped their blankets and leveled Winchester repeaters at a rank of soldiers. Both sides fired at once, and the fight that neither side intended or expected burst on them.

When the shooting finally stopped, some 150 Native Americans lay dead or dying. In a spasm of brief violence, the Ghost Dance movement came to an end. Wounded Knee came to symbolize the end of armed resistance to the United States by the Native Americans, just as 1890 is cited as the year that the American frontier in the West vanished.

Ten years later, the Boxers in China had increased their attacks against Chinese Christian converts and foreigners, climaxing with the siege of the foreign diplomatic compounds in Beijing. This event is depicted in the Charlton Heston film 55 Days In Peking. The seige was broken on August 14, 1900 by a multinational expeditionary force of 20,000 soldiers. The Qing Dynasty, which had thrown in its lot with the Boxers after initially wavering, capitulated and signed a peace treaty known as the Boxer Protocol.

From Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China:

In this protocol, the Qing agreed to erect monuments to the memory of the more than two hundred Western dead, to ban all examinations for five years in cities where antiforeign atrocities had taken place, to forbid all imports of arms into China for two years, to allow permanent foreign guards and emplacements of defensive weapons to protect the legation quarter in perpetuity...and to execute the leading Boxer supporters including the Shanxi governor Yuxian.* They also agreed to pay an indemnity for damages to foreign life and property of 450 million taels (around £67 million or $333 million at the then current exchange rates), a staggering sum at a time when the entire annual Qing income was estimated at around 250 million taels. The Chinese were to pay the indemnity in gold, on an ascending scale, with 4 percent interest charges, until the debt was amortized on December 31, 1940.

But by far the worst outcome in terms of human life lost was the Maji Maji revolt in German East Africa in 1905-1906. There, the rebels experienced initial success, as the German military presence in the country was small and the German colonial government was slow to take the rebellion seriously.

The turning point came on August 30, 1905, when the maji attacked the German garrison at Mahenge. Thomas Pakenham quotes a mission worker who witnessed the battle in The Scramble For Africa:

Since they came to make an end of all of us, we had to defend ourselves and take part in the firing, which opened on the attackers at about 1,000 metres. Two machine guns, Europeans, and soldiers, rained death and destruction among the ranks of the advancing enemy. Although we saw the ranks thin, the survivors maintained order for about a quarter of an hour, marching closer amidst a hail of bullets. But then the ranks broke, and the men took cover behind numerous small rocks.... Then suddenly the cry broke out; 'New enemy on the Gambira [eastern] side!' Everybody looked in that direction, and there thick clouds of smoke were rising from our three schools and a second column of at least 1,200 men were advancing towards us... As soon as they [appeared] within range they were met by deafening fire. The first attackers were only three paces from the firing line when they sank to the ground... When no more enemy could be seen, the station commander climbed down from the top of the boma tower... and distributed champagne.

Then the Germans went on the offensive, incorporating forced famine into their strategy. According to Pakenham, historians of the revolt estimate that 250,000 to 300,000 Africans died as a result of the famine, some ten times more than had taken up arms in revolt. Maize and cotton fields in depopulated regions reverted to forest.

Pakenham also notes that African natives who did not join the revolt were skeptical of the claims that the maji water would protect them from the German bullets. He mentions one tribal chief who said he would drink the maji if some of the rebels survived a firing squad. "They did not survive."

As noted in the title of this post, in desperate times, people will believe desperate things. They will listen to the exhortations of priests or shamans to embrace beliefs in things that they should know are untrue, such as magic water or shirts making someone invincible to bullets. When religious beliefs come up against the laws of physics, the latter will win every time. Paying heed to this is not only smart, it could save your life.

1 The Indian Frontier of the American West: 1846-1890 by Robert Utley.

2 The Search For Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence.

3. The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham

* Yuxian promised the missionaries in Shanxi province that he would protect them from the Boxers and then proceeded to have all of forty-four of them, men, women, and children, murdered when they arrived.

The Judgment Day Virus

I swear, this crap is really starting to annoy me.

As I was about to head into Penn Station this evening to catch my train home, I pass by this lady, an African-American woman in her late forties or early fifties, handing out pamphlets. Out of curiosity, I stopped, took one, and glanced at it briefly to confirm my suspicions.

Yes, it was one of those pamphlets proclaiming that Judgment Day will take place on May 21, 2011, barely more than four months from now.

I thrust it back towards her and as she took it back from me, she asked me, "What's the matter?"

"That's not true!" I shot back, pointing at the pamphlet.

She insists that it is and declares "It says so in the Bible!"

"Yeah, so?" I reply.

"Because the Bible is the word of God," she says.

"How do you know?" I ask.

I don't recall her exact words, but it was along the lines of "Because the Bible says so."

I respond that it's just circular reasoning. Then she drops the bomb on me.

"Who made you?"

"Uh, my parents."

"Who made your parents?"

"My grandparents."

"Well, who made them?"

"I don't see what that has to do with your pamphlet."

And so it went like that for a few more seconds, but I had to go because I had a train to catch. In retrospect, I should have asked her "If Judgment Day doesn't happen on May 21, do you promise to come back here holding a big sign that reads 'I was wrong!'"

Charles Darwin and The Perimeter of Ignorance

Neil deGrasse Tyson uses the phrase "The Perimeter of Ignorance" to describe when people "appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance."

Recently, I finally finished reading The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. As most people know, Darwin served as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle during its journey of some five years, most of which was spent in South America and the South Pacific.

It was while he was in northern Chile that Darwin writes of an encounter with people who set the bar really low for invoking their own perimeter of ignorance:

"My geological examination of the country generally created a good deal of surprise amongst the Chilenos: it was long before they could be convinced that I was not hunting for mines. This was sometimes troublesome: I found the most ready way of explaining my employment, was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanos? - why some springs were hot and others cold? - why there were mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata? These bare questions at once satisfied and silenced the greater number; some, however (like a few in England who are a century behindhand), thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious; and that it was quite sufficient that God had thus made the mountains."

Of course, religious belief in and of itself need not act as a barrier to exploration and scientific inquiry. The numbers of religious believers who have participated in such endeavors should leave no doubt about that.

That being said, for a subset of religious believers, it would probably be accurate to say that scientific inquiries really are "useless." After all, if you believe that a collection of texts such as the Bible or the Quran contain God's commandments and that one's primary concern in life is abiding by those commandments, then there really is no point in sending probes to Mars or Saturn's moon Titan, or studying the Earth's ocean floors, to name a few. Anything that doesn't comport with one's literal interpretation of a religious text will either be twisted to fit one's Young Earth Creationist timeline or explained away as a misinterpretation of the data.

It Better Not Ruin My Summer Vacation Plans

Four months ago, I wrote a post about a tract I found at the Hicksville Train Station proclaiming that Judgment Day will arrive on May 21, 2011, with the end of the world to follow six months later on October 21, 2011.

Sadly, it seems quite a few people are taking this nonsense seriously. A few of them are profiled in this Associated Press article. One of them is Marie Exley, 32, a veteran of the war in Iraq.

Exley "is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve."

If Exley wants to believe that the world will end this year, then fine. But it's quite another thing when she and her band of traveling fools waste gasoline spreading their deluded message across the country. We need to reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels, and these religious nuts are only making the problem worse. Then again, I suppose I can't expect them to care since they think the world will end in October anyway.

But for people like Exley, such misguided beliefs sadly have real life consequences.

"...Exley...said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family." And for what, so that she can engage in Rapture Porn?

To any such people who read this, let me make this as clear as I can. I will even use all capital letters.

"THE BIBLE TELLS US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT OUR FUTURE! NADA! ZILCH! GO LIVE YOUR LIVES LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE AND STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE RAPTURE BECAUSE IT IS NEVER, EVER GOING TO HAPPEN!"

Happy 2011!

Atheist Misconceptions About Christianity: Christianity Sunk My Roman Battleship

While those of us who are atheists are inclined to be skeptical of religious claims, I submit that it is also important, for the sake of intellectual honesty, to shine that same light of skepticism on arguments and statements put forth by atheists about religion that themselves are ignorant and wrong.

Over the years, one of the claims I have seen repeatedly parroted by fellow atheists about Christianity is that it caused the Roman Empire to fall and was thus responsible for the Dark Ages. But is this really true?

On the surface it would seem so. The Roman Empire achieved the height of its power and territorial extent under pagan emperors during the better part of the 2nd century CE, when Christians formed a largely insignificant minority. Flash forward to the 4th century, and the increase in the numbers of Christians and the increasingly official status of Christianity as the state religion seems to go hand in hand with the decline of the empire. Important events that mark this decline are the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which the Emperor Valens was killed in battle against the Goths, and the sack of Rome in 410 by the Goths. 66 years later, the Empire came to an end in the West, and as the popular story goes, Western Europe remained mired in ignorance, superstition and backwardness for centuries thereafter.

One popular site among atheists that espouses this view is Jesus Never Existed, which declares that “The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia.” The picture painted by the site is one of a Western Europe in which Christianity turned the populace into a collection of ignorant retards, a sort of Idiocracy for the Middle Ages. Take a closer look though, and we see that this is not the case at all.

Jesus Never Existed undermines its own case by admitting that “[t]he empire had almost collapsed during the 3rd century because of military rebellions” during what is called by historians “The Crisis of the Third Century.” From the Wikpedia entry: “By late 274, the Roman Empire was reunited into a single entity, and the frontier troops were back in place. More than a century passed before Rome again lost military ascendancy over its external enemies. However, dozens of formerly thriving cities, especially in the Western Empire, had been ruined, their populations dispersed, and with the breakdown of the economic system, could not be rebuilt.” In other words, the Empire had suffered a near breakdown that had nothing to do with Christianity.

But if one wants to insist that the end of the Western Roman Empire is the fault of Christianity, then that same person has to explain why the Eastern Roman Empire also did not collapse in the 5th century. The Eastern half of the Empire had a larger Christian population than the Western half and for a longer period of time. While paganism had declined greatly in the West by the early 5th century, its influence must have still been strong enough that Augustine felt compelled to write The City of God in part as a rebuke to pagan claims that the sack of Rome in 410 was a punishment for abandoning the pagan gods.

The Eastern Empire did have two important things in its favor. It had a larger population than the Western Empire and it was also wealthier. During the 4th century, rough population estimates have some 22 million people in the Western Empire and about 34 million in the Eastern Empire. The East also had a greater number of cities with large populations.

The Eastern Empire experienced greater military pressure than the Western Empire during the late Empire period without collapsing, even though the catastrophic defeat at Adrianople in 378 took place in the Eastern Empire and the Gothic invaders for a time formed a state within a state in Eastern territory. In the mid-fifth century, Attila the Hun repeatedly ravaged the Balkans, and at one point camped outside of Constantinople itself, before turning his attention to the West. Furthermore, the Eastern Empire had to face a threat that the West did not, for it shared its frontiers with the Persian Sassanid Empire, which was the only other superpower in the region. The Eastern Empire and the Sassanids sparred frequently throughout the 6th century, culminating into a decades long war that raged from the late 6th into the early decades of the 7th century.

Therefore, at least from a military standpoint, it is absurd to blame the rise of Christianity for the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, unless one wants to seriously argue that the emperor Valens would have defeated the Goths at Adrianople in 378 if he were a pagan. However, numerous pagan Roman emperors had been defeated and/or killed in battle against barbarian invaders and Persian armies prior to Adrianople. Valens lost at Adrianople because of bad decisions that had nothing to do with his or his army’s religious beliefs.

If one wants to blame Christianity for the collapse of the Western Empire, then shouldn’t equal credit be given to Christianity for the success of the Eastern Emperor Justinian’s campaigns to recover significant portions of the former Western Empire? Likewise, do we blame Christianity for the defeats suffered by the Eastern Empire at the hands of the invading Arab Muslim armies a century later?

The spread of Christianity did not cause the Roman Empire to “fall”, contrary to the notion held by many critics of the religion. Rather, the growth of the religion can be seen as a symptom of the empire’s decline as the empire’s inhabitants sought spiritual refuge in a world that had, to them, turned upside down in the wake of civil wars, barbarian invasions and a breakdown of the social order.

Temporary Hiatus

Now that Blogrolling.com has ceased to function, the blog links in my side bar have disappeared. I am gradually restoring and revising my blog rolls and hope to be back in action very soon.

Intolerance In Indonesia

Having blogged about and expressing my support for the proposed Cordoba House near the former World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan, I read with interest the developing story of a similar situation taking place in Indonesia. Only this time, the roles of majority and minority religions have changed.

From this BBC article:

For the last few weeks, a group of Christians have been holding their Sunday prayer services on an empty plot of land - resulting in violent clashes between them and the majority Muslims.

The Christians say the land belongs to them, and they were given permission by the local government to pray here.

Violence has already broken out over this matter.

Rev. Luspida Simandjuntak, and a church elder, Hasian Lumbantoruan Sihombing, were attacked as they, along with HKBP worshippers, were on their way to a Sunday service at the church’s construction site at Ciketing village. Building plans a were halted following protests from residents and hardline groups.

As with the Cordoba House project, also known as Park51, there have been calls for the Christians to move to another location in the hopes of putting a stop to further Muslim attacks.

In response, "[t]he church’s spokesman, Judianto Simandjuntak, said the congregation would continue holding their services at the current location in Ciketing."

“We will remain in Ciketing because we have the constitutional right to perform religious services.”

The already tense situation has the potential to get uglier. The BBC reporter who wrote the article linked to above interviewed "Khairul Fuad, a long-time resident,... a devout Muslim [but of course, right?], and a family man."

The article quotes him as saying, "The land belong to us, and the majority of the people who live around it are Muslims. There was a rumour that to get that land, those Christians didn't tell the people they wanted to build a place of worship." Switch Muslims and Christians and what does that remind you of?

More menacing are the words of Murhali Barda, described as the local leader of the hardline Islamic Defenders' Front.

"There is no problem with praying. But when they are there with a mission to build a place of worship, it is unacceptable," he told me as he showed me around Bekasi's oldest mosque.

"If we start calling for Holy War, it doesn't matter if we live or die," he said, smiling. "If there is violence that results from this, then the Christians only have themselves to blame."

It wouldn't surprise me if this story is starting to make the rounds of the wingnut echo chamber here in the United States. I can almost here them declaring "You see, we're supposed to bend over for a mosque at Ground Zero and the Muslims are attacking Christians for wanting to have a church in a Muslim country!"

If so, I would say they have it backwards. One of the points I raised in my post on the Cordoba House is that letting it be built near the World Trade Center can give us the moral standing to forcefully condemn the lack of reciprocity in Muslim majority countries. Allowing the intolerant to prevail in our own country emboldens the intolerant elsewhere. It also plays into something I have observed among religious believers, which is the zero-sum mentality they have with regard to other religions. Allow members of Religion B to openly worship, and somehow it is seen as a loss by members of Religion A.

Furthermore, for those here in the United States who might try to use the situation in Indonesia as justification for opposing the Cordoba House, they would do well to notice that there are Indonesians of all faiths, including Muslims, who condemn the behavior of the militant Muslims.

From the same BBC article:

The problems in Bekasi have caught the attention of the entire nation.

In Jakarta, Indonesians of different faiths joined forces, raising their voices in unison in support of a more secular Indonesia.

The constitution guarantees the rights of citizens to practise their religion freely.

The protesters say they want their government to take action and uphold the principles of this country.

Nevertheless, the Indonesian government could probably use a little more prodding to give it some backbone in cracking down on the militants. There is always the temptation to give in to the militants in the hope that it will appease them, but as the shopworn argument goes, appeasing them will only embolden them further. Here is the link to the Indonesian Embassy in the United States. Tell them, politely, of course, that the principle of religious freedom should be upheld.

I Desecrated The Book of Mormon

With all the hoopla recently over some kook pastor in Florida with a congregation not much bigger than an overcrowded kindergarten classroom in New York City who threatened to burn a pile of Qurans on September 11, I had forgotten that I had desecrated another religion's holy book.

I recall writing in another post that I have been noticing that the Book of Mormon has been appearing with increasing frequency in hotel and motel rooms across America and throughout the world alongside the Gideon Bibles. I took a copy of the Book of Mormon from a hotel I stayed at in Hong Kong several years ago, which I still haven't gotten around to reading yet.

Last month, my family and I spent four nights at the Marriott on the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls. When we got settled in our room, I noticed the Book of Mormon sitting on top of the night table between our beds. I promptly tossed it into the trash bin, where over the next few days it got buried underneath juice boxes, wrappers and other assorted flotsam and jetsam before the pail was emptied by the cleaning staff. It's probably in a landfill somewhere by now, slowly decaying from the elements and whatever icky stuff from the trash piled above it might be oozing and leaking down onto it.

Warning: The Practice of Islam Is Hazardous To Your Health

While perusing the English language daily The Jakarta Post, I came across this article about the large numbers of vehicular accidents in Indonesia during the Idul Fitri holiday.

National Police deputy chief for operations Insp. Gen. Soenarko said Thursday there had been 743 traffic accidents from Sept. 3 to Sept. 8 nationwide, killing 144 people and wounding 579 others. Most of the victims were holidaymakers riding motorcycles, Soenarko added.

During the Idul Fitri exodus last year there were 1,646 traffic accidents across the country, claiming 702 lives and injuring 2,556 others.

But that is not the only Muslim holiday that has proven consistently fatal to adherents of the Islamic faith. Another is the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of the faith, which all able-bodied Muslims are expected to undertake at least once in their lives. Recent years have witnessed a number of mass casualty events at Islam's holiest site.

In 2004: The stampede, during a peak event of the annual Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, lasted about a half-hour, Saudi officials said. There were 244 dead and hundreds of other worshippers injured, some critically, Hajj Minister Iyad Madani said.

In 2006: Thousands of Muslim pilgrims rushing to complete a symbolic stoning ritual during the hajj tripped over luggage Thursday, causing a crush in which up to 400 people were killed despite Saudi attempts to prevent stampedes that have plagued the annual event.

Saudi officials estimated that 400 people were killed. More than 1,000 people were injured, said Dr. Abbasi with the Saudi Red Crescent.

[That] year's hajj was also marred by the collapse of a Mecca hotel on January 5, where 76 pilgrims were killed. The reason for the hotel collapse remains unknown. The latest disaster is expected to prompt the Saudis to enforce stricter controls, in order to do a better job of ensuring the safety of the millions of the faithful who arrive for the Hajj each year.

Call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing that a particular religion is true when the mere practice of that religion proves to be so deadly to its followers.

Who Are You Calling A Parasite, Rabbi Lapin?

By way of Crooks and Liars, I watched the clip below from a recent episode of Glenn Beck's television program.



What a way to smear an entire segment of the American people, rabbi. Simply by virtue of going to church or synagogue once a week, tens of millions of other Americans are better people than I or any other atheist American?

But if you want to talk about parasites on a society, Rabbi Lapin would perhaps do better to focus on a growing segment of the population of Israel, Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This article from The Jewish Daily Forward gives a good summary of the demographic dilemma faced by Israel.

Under a rule enacted at the time of Israel’s founding, draft-age men are excused from serving if they are engaged in full-time Torah study at a recognized academy through age 40. The rule has the dual effect of removing yeshiva students from both the military and the work force. The more Haredim, experience shows, the fewer potential soldiers, and the fewer taxpayers.

When the exemption was first approved in 1948, it involved barely 400 men. Four decades later, in 1992, the Torah-study exemption was granted to 5% of that year’s conscription-age cohort of 18-year-olds. This year, 2007, the proportion reached 11%. In 2019, the exempted yeshiva students are projected to top 23% of the cohort, which is the proportion of Haredi students among this year’s first graders — the most straightforward predictor.

Nonreligious exemptions have declined in recent years, but Torah exemptions have soared. The main reason is fertility: The Haredi community averages 7.6 children per woman, roughly triple the rate for the population as a whole, according to the Israel government’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

But even peace will not solve the problem of Haredi men removed from the work force by their prolonged yeshiva studies. At present, just 30% of Haredi men participate in the work force. Almost half the Haredi population lives below the official poverty line. As the Haredi share of the population grows, pressure will mount on the tax rolls, the welfare system and inter-communal tolerance and civility.

A prime example of this lack of tolerance and civility happened this past June as per this article from the BBC:

Police said 120,000 Ashkenazi Jews rallied in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv.

They turned out to support parents who refused to let their girls share classrooms with Jewish pupils of Sephardic or Middle Eastern descent.

The Ashkenazi parents, who are of European descent, want segregated classrooms because they say Sephardi families are not religious enough.

"There is a set of rules [in the ultra-Orthodox community]. We don't want televisions in the home, there are rules of modesty, we are against the internet," Mr Litzman was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

"I don't want my daughter to be educated with a girl who has a TV at home."

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a mental disorder.

World To End on October 21, 2011

Well, that's what it says in this tract put out by the eBible Fellowship that I found taped to one of the support pillars underneath the elevated tracks at the Hicksville train station this past Wednesday. How can we be sure that the world will come to an end on October 21, 2011? Because it says so in the Bible! And the author of the tract declares that "The Bible is the Word of God! Everything the Bible declares has the full authority of God Himself."

For openers, I guess this puts a damper on Barack Obama's chances of being re-elected in 2012.

But before the world ends on October 21, 2011, the pamphlet declares that we will first experience Judgment Day on May 21, 2011. This might be what that taxi driver was referring to on that February morning in 2009 when my family and I were being driven to JFK Airport for our vacation in Puerto Rico.

And what will happen on Judgment Day? It will set in motion a five-month period in which a "period of horrible torment will begin for all of the inhabitants of the earth." Gee, I thought the period of torment would start this coming November if the Republicans capture majorities in both houses of Congress.

On May 21, 2011, "God will raise up all of the dead that have ever died from their graves." No mention about people who were cremated or eaten by alligators or sharks. "Earthquakes will ravage the whole world as the earth will no longer conceal its dead." Wow, talk about bringing out your dead!

"People who died as saved individuals will experience the resurrection of their bodies and immediately leave this world to be forever with the Lord." If God abides in a non-physical environment, then why would a resurrection of physical bodies be necessary?

"Those who die unsaved will be raised up as well, but only to have their lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be everywhere." Again, what if I am cremated and my ashes scattered before May 21, 2011?

I have to say, I just love that whoever is putting out this tract is so absolutely confident as to cite specific dates in the near future when these apocalyptic events will supposedly occur. I would love to see what these people will have to say when they wake up on October 22, 2011 and the world will still be here.

The pamphlet contains other amusing and interesting information. Most Young Earth Creationists cite a roughly 6,000 year old Earth. However, the folks at the eBible Fellowship set the Creation in 11,013 B.C., with the demise of the Earth predicted "13,023 years from creation."

And how can we know this to be true? Because "[t]he genealogies of the book of Genesis... can be shown to be a precise calendar of the history of mankind in this world. The Bible 's calendar of history is completely accurate and trustworthy." After all, "[s]ince this Bible calendar is given by God in His Word, it can be trusted wholeheartedly." Gotta love that circular reasoning.

What always cracks me up about these End Times people is their belief that our little speck of a planet in one galaxy in a universe filled with billions of galaxies is some kind of central battlefield in a cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. The human origins of their belief systems is betrayed by the geocentric bias inherent in their theology. A being that creates a universe filled, as previously mentioned, with billions of galaxies that themselves contain untold billions of planets orbiting their own stars operates according to an Earth based calendar system measured in Earth days, Earth months, and Earth years. And of course, nothing preoccupies this immensely powerful and intelligent being more than the mundane affairs of the human inhabitants of this one planet during a tiny sliver of time on a timescale of billions of years.

Anyway, mark your calendar for my blog post on May 22, 2011 when I write about the Judgment Day that never happened.

The Cordoba House Blues

Posting has been light here lately. There's a lot of things I wanted to write about, but either couldn't find the time or just was unable bring myself to sit down and type away at my keyboard.

One of the hot topics in the NYC area right now, and which has gotten a lot of attention nationwide, if not worldwide, is the so called "Ground Zero Mosque." As someone who lives near and works in Manhattan, and who knew people who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, this is a subject that is personal to me.

But before I could write about this in an informed way, I felt it was important that I went to see for myself the World Trade Center site and the location of the proposed Muslim community center and mosque two blocks away on Park Place. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to do so, as I was going to downtown Manhattan to see a showing of an independent film that featured one of my friends from high school. I decided to take the No. 2 subway line down to Chambers Street before heading to the theater.

From Chambers Street, I walked south for five blocks down West Broadway, passing Park Place along the way. The site of the former Twin Towers is still cordoned off with a chain link fence, with most of the fencing covered, making views of the ground difficult. I took the picture below through one of the openings.




I then headed north up Church Street. I took the shot below from the corner of Church and Vesey Street, the latter of which runs from east to west on the north side of the WTC site.

The next shot is on Church Street between Vesey and Barclay Street, with the Federal Office Building to my left.

Below is the intersection of Church Street and Park Place. To reach the section of Park Place that will house the proposed community center, one must turn to the left.

Below is the 51 Park Place building, which is to form part of the Cordoba House. It is located on the north side of Park Place between Church Street and West Broadway. One thing that should be noted is that while the World Trade Center site is very close by, it is not visible from this location. On the south side of Park Place directly opposite is a large building, and the next block down, between Barclay and Vesey is the imposing Federal Office Building.

On one side of the proposed center is this Amish Market, which is on the corner of Park Place and West Broadway.

In order to be able to see the WTC site, one has to stand on the corner of Park and West Broadway looking south.

Now I know some people have put out snarky proposals like opening gay bars or strip joints next to or across the street from the proposed Cordoba House. However, as the (blurry) photo below shows, there already is a bar called the Dakota Roadhouse that stands next to the proposed center. So, if the Cordoba House, or Park51, does eventually come to fruition, pious Muslims coming and going will have to pass by an establishment that serves alcohol.

But it gets even better than that. The next block north after Park Place, on the north side of Murray Street, is a "gentlemen's" club called New York Dolls. If Cordoba House will have a rear entrance on the south side on Murray Street, Muslim men leaving their prayer services will find themselves facing the temptations of the flesh.

Now, onto the matter at hand. What do I think about the proposed community center and mosque? As an atheist and someone who knew or was acquainted with people who died at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, it would be easy to reflexively bash Cordoba House. But while I think all religion is basically superstitious nonsense, as an atheist, I also understand that an important barometer for any nation is how well it treats its minority populations, including religious minorities. I can cynically join with some American Christians in condemning a Muslim center near the World Trade Center while knowing that some of those very same Christians view me as un-American because I am an atheist. I'm sorry, but I just can't do that.

As I wrote in a post recently about proposals in some countries to ban the wearing of the veil, often what we think about certain issues says a lot about us and how we choose to view them. Some opponents of the community center/mosque claim that it is a symbol of Muslim conquest because it is being built close to the site of buildings that were destroyed by Muslim terrorists who believed they were carrying out the will of Allah. But in order for that to be true, one would have to provide evidence that the organizers behind the center provide moral, physical and/or financial support to al-Qaida. Absent that, why choose to frame the issue in this way?

One can certainly ask the developers of the center why they chose the location. Here is what Sharif El-Gamal, a Manhattan developer and owner of the property has to say:

"Prior to purchasing our current facility at 45 Park Place, there were two mosques in lower Manhattan, although Park51 is not affiliated with either of these mosques. One was Masjid Farah, which could fit a maximum of approximately 65 people, and had to hold three or four separate prayer services on Fridays just to fit the crowds.

The second mosque, at Warren Street, accommodated about 1,500 worshippers during Friday prayers - people had been praying on sidewalks because they had no room. They lost their space around May 2009. We made the move to buy 45 Park Place in July 2009 in part to offset the loss of this space. Currently, our space at 45 Park Place, accommodates around 450 people every Friday. We are also easily accessible from many different parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, which was an important consideration."

Warren Street is four blocks north of the World Trade Center site. So, until May of 2009, over a thousand Muslims had been praying at a mosque on Fridays a mere four blocks from "Ground Zero" and apparently nobody noticed or cared. But somehow, the prospect of Muslims gathering to pray two blocks away from the WTC constitutes some kind of national crisis.

Lest anyone forget, some of the people who perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11 were themselves Muslims. You can look them up on any list of the victims. To name a few, there's Shabbir Ahmed, who was a waiter at Windows on the World. Tariq Amanullah was a vice president at Fiduciary Trust International. Mohammed Salahuddin Chowdhury, also a waiter at Windows on the World. Mohamed Jawara, a security guard. Khalid M. Shahid, a systems administrator at Cantor Fitzgerald. Mohammed Shajahan, a computer administrator at Marsh & McLennan. There are others, but I believe I made my point.

Another argument thrown out by opponents of the center is that Saudi Arabia, which contains within its borders the Muslim holy city of Mecca, does not permit churches or synagogues. But as Jon Stewart said on the Daily Show, "Is that going to be our standard now? Saudi Arabia?" To be fair, it is a legitimate issue that Saudi Arabia should permit people of all faiths to worhip freely in that desert kingdom. But by permitting Cordoba House to be built so close to the World Trade Center site, doesn't that give us the moral highground to condemn lack of religious freedom in some Muslim majority countries?

As I wrote above, one measure of a nation's worth is how it treats its religious minorities. Since we find ourselves locked in a conflict with jihadist terrorists, an important part of winning that conflict is to win the hearts and minds, or at the very least, not incur the hostility of, the majority of Muslim people who form the sea in which the terrorists swim. How we treat our own Muslim-American population is an important component of winning this conflict. I fear that when a number of our politicians whip up hysteria over Cordoba House, along with opposition to mosques and Muslim community centers in other parts of the country, it damages our moral authority. Furthermore, if we are to treat Muslim-Americans as part of some vast, mindless Orc horde who just want to kill us, we can create a self-fulfilling prophecy as numbers of them conclude that America will never accept them. Why should Muslim-American citizens and legal residents, a large number of whom are African-Americans who have ancestors in this country going back several centuries, be tarred with the same brush as foreign jihadi terrorists?

One thing I have noticed from my readings of history is that nations that whip up hatred towards their religious minorities do so when they are in decline or suffer a loss of confidence. A society that embraces tolerance and pluralism is a confident and strong society. If we capitulate to the Sarah Palins and the Newt Gingriches and the other fearmongers, I believe it will show that we are weak and fearful.

Would I have preferred that the Cordoba House not be at Park Place? Yeah, I guess so. But if they own the property and they received the approval of the local community board and the zoning authorities, then it doesn't matter what I think. And if Cordoba House finally gets built and opens its doors, I think I'll celebrate the occasion with a beer at the Dakota Roadhouse.