Atheist Christmas

I have posted here about my atheism before. It's a topic I tend to think about a lot at this time of year when various religions celebrate their solstice-based holidays. I am fully comfortable with my own atheism, but not everyone else always is. What can be puzzling to some are my reasons for celebrating Christmas wholeheartedly while dismissing Christmas.

My answer is simple: Christmas is not a Christian holiday. It is just a renamed pagan festival.

Before I go any further, I will give my usual disclaimers when it comes to religion. I am not some sort of atheist proselytizer. I have a very live-and-let-live approach to personal beliefs. I believe what I believe, and you can believe whatever you like, as long as you do me the same courtesy in return. But I will explain my own beliefs and conclusions about the nature of reality and how I came to them.

Christmas comes on December 25 each year. This date has nothing to do with the birth of Christ. It is not Jesus's birthday. The early church made an active attempt to replace pre-Christian holidays with Christian ones by overlaying a Christian meaning on a pre-existing festival. That's how we ended up with holiday traditions that are decidedly not related to Christianity - Christmas trees at Christmas, for instance, or the Easter Bunny (or even the name "Easter" which comes from the name of a pre-Christian goddess).

In my family growing up, which was nominally Catholic but quite lax about it, we never really talked about Christ on Christmas. It was all about decorations and food and presents (especially presents). It was always a fun day for me and I have many great memories of Christmas. My own kids enjoy it as much as I did, though I have never made any attempt to associate the day with Christianity. It is simply a fun day to get gifts from Santa.

Ah yes, Santa. Let me step aside to address that for a moment. Do you sense a sort of hypocrisy in my telling my kids there's a Santa Claus while not telling them there is a God? Why does Santa seem so much more benign to me? It's a fair question, but one that is not difficult to answer (at least to my own satisfaction).

Santa Claus is not a belief system. There is no set of dogma associated with him, and his existence or non-existence affects little about one's understanding of the nature of reality. He is not some end-all-be-all source of wisdom. He's just a guy who gives gifts. I don't mind allowing my kids to believe in myths. I enjoy cultivating their imaginations, and it is fun for them. But I do not feel comfortable telling them that there is some sort of God who is the explanation behind everything everywhere. I feel like that stunts their inquisitiveness. The explanation "because God made it that way" cuts off further digging, and I want them to dig further. I want them to seek knowledge and not stop at the first potential answer they get.

Anyway, back on the topic of Christmas, it is a holiday for me that is more of a cultural tradition than a religious one. I roll my eyes when I hear people talk about "the real meaning of Christmas". The real meaning of Christmas is, in our modern world, increased revenue for retail outlets. Whatever meaning the Catholics and their offshoots have grafted onto the holiday, that is not the "real meaning". It's just an imposed one.

I suppose any meaning is an imposed one, really. That's what we do - we impose meanings on days and objects and events that help us divide and differentiate the continuum of our lives so we can try to make sense of it all.

Environmental Concerns

When I hear environmentalists say that we need to treat the Earth well and be good to the environment, I can't help but think that they're going about it all wrong. Their message is one of altruism and genuine concern for the well-being of the planet, but the people who need to hear it most are those for whom altruism and concern for anything outside of their own backyards are something akin to alien concepts.

The argument needs to be reframed, with emphasis shifted from what can be viewed as tree-hugging hippie naivete to something more personal. Never mind all the millions of insect species that go extinct as we bulldoze the jungles. Really, most people don't empathize much with mosquitoes and their cousins. All the talk about the majesty of ancient trees or beautiful landscapes or spotted owls really doesn't do much to convince anyone who needs convincing.

No, probably the best thing to do is concentrate on how they will be hurt personally by not tending to the needs of the environment. I think George Carlin said it best.Of course, this was just part of his stand-up act, but as with many of his rants, there's a lot of truth in it. The planet is going to be around for a while. It's the people who are in danger (and the other life forms).

If you want people to do something about the environment, don't tell them about polluted air or even some poor endangered animals or something that makes them shrug. It has to be personal if it's going to make an impact.

I also think that it's important to understand the concerns of those who are not in favor of environmental regulation. There aren't many people out there who actively want to destroy the environment. Bad guys are for action movies. No, most of the people who are against regulations just think environmentalists are wrong, that the economic cost of dealing with regulations is higher than the cost of not dealing with them, and that we will only fall behind other countries more willing to put aside environmental concerns (e.g., China).

Personally, from what I have heard and read, there is overwhelming evidence that we can affect the environment's stability to a degree that it can be good or bad for us, and the cost of making it worse is higher than the cost of dealing with it. I'd also like the world to be something other than a burnt out husk for my kids when they're older. It would be in our enlightened self-interest to manage the environment better than we have. We've gotten better about it, but we're still creating oceans of plastic refuse and such, with no clear solution for how to reconcile our desire for modern luxuries with our desire for a livable planet.

Life, non-life, and the space between

For some reason, I've been reading a lot about abortion lately. It's not a topic that has any real personal importance to me, nor does it impact my life at all. However, I do find the arguments made by either side to be fascinating, mostly because they deal with the murky problem of defining life.

Life is a word with no precise definition. There have been numerous attempts to come up with one. Look in the dictionary, and you'll find one there. But no one definition is both sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently specific. The border between life and non-life is rather arbitrary, like most borders between concepts. Our need to categorize everything falls short of describing the continuous reality.

Regarding abortion, those who wholly oppose it state that life begins at conception. For these "pro-lifers", killing an embryo is the moral equivalent of killing a child (or an adult, for that matter). It is murder. Even some forms of contraception, by this definition, are murder. From this standpoint, it is not hard to see how people can be so up in arms about the issue. Effectively, as they see it, doctors charged with guarding the well-being of people are unceremoniously and gruesomely killing people, and it is legal. It is even easy to see how some extremists would go to great lengths, like shooting abortion doctors. For them, it is the moral equivalent of shooting a serial killer.

On the other side, "pro-choicers" believe that life begins at birth. Until then, the embryo/fetus is effectively part of the woman's body. It acts as a parasite, taking nutrients and oxygen from the mother and generally ravaging her body until it is large enough to come out. And then it does, and it is a separate being. Until then, however, it is a parasite. It is the woman's choice as to whether she wants to allow this parasite to use her body for nine months or not.

So what we have at stake here, are some of the core values of the United States: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is abortion the taking of a life? Does not allowing it strip a woman of her liberty and ability to pursue happiness?

The Life Argument

The argument that life begins at conception is a sound one. It is at conception that the novel set of chromosomes that define the person to be made comes together. In most cases, barring interference from external forces, the embryo grows into a recognizable human being. There is no other point in fetal development (including birth) where such a clear distinction can be made between one state and another.

However, the argument is not without problems. Yes, we can say that a distinct life comes into being at conception. But is it human life? After all, that is what is at stake here, isn't it? The people who are arguing against abortion aren't generally trying to stop us from eating eggs or slaughtering cows. It's humans that concern them.

The newly formed embryo does indeed have human DNA. However, DNA does not define a being. It is a blueprint. An embryo does not think or feel. It doesn't do anything except grow, and it can't do that on its own. Without the mother's cooperation, it will die a quick death, and it will never know it because it is incapable of acquiring knowledge. Is it human? If so, that opens the door to many other things potentially being called human. Any living cell of a person must then be considered fully human. If it is not human, what is it, and at what point do we consider it human?

These are not small or easily answered questions. It involves the very quiddity of humanity. No answer is without problems.

Viability

The next stopping point for those who argue against abortion, and one that is often considered the middle ground of the argument, is fetal viability. That is, a fetus becomes a person when it is capable of surviving without the mother's help. The most obvious problem with this argument is that there is no clear point at which a fetus becomes viable. It happens gradually over the course of the pregnancy, and there is some degree of variation between fetuses. Some are born premature naturally and need an incubator to survive. Are they not people yet? Is it okay to kill them? Is it okay to kill a fetus at the same stage of growth that is still in the mother?

A very costly and impractical but morally sound route, given fetal viability as a cutoff point, would be to induce delivery rather than abort once a fetus reaches a stage at which it would have a chance at survival (with medical assistance) outside of the mother. So instead of an abortion, the doctor intentionally delivers the baby prematurely, and if it can survive on its own, it does, and it's a person. If it can't, well, it doesn't (and I suppose that means it was never a person to begin with, right?).


Birth

Currently, the legal definition of human life includes having been born. Once the baby pops out, it changes into a person. It's not difficult to see the many problems with this, the most prominent of which is that there really isn't a difference between a baby that has just been born and a fetus that is about to be born. There is no sudden transformation. We have Caesarian sections for babies that are, by our clocks, overdue. Does something magical occur when the doctor cuts open the mother's belly and pulls out the child? No.

Beyond Birth

After birth, a baby still relies heavily on his or her parents to survive. Left to fend for himself, the newborn child will not last long. Unable to really do much of anything, he just cries and cries, and if no one feeds him, he doesn't eat, and he will die. This doesn't sound much more viable than a fetus, does it? So maybe a newborn baby still isn't a person, right? Should we legalize the killing of any child that can't get her own food or keep herself alive without assistance? Not many people would support this, I think.

Brain Function

Backing up a bit, one of the more sound cutoffs for considering a fetus to be a human being is when the brain is formed fully enough to process signals, including pain. I would consider this to be an argument from a different set of goals, though. Rather than determining whether human life exists or not, in this case, we are trying to determine whether it has some level of awareness that it is being aborted. From this perspective, we say that we cannot determine presence of human life (or that it is not part of the equation), but we can say that if we terminate a pregnancy earlier than a certain point, we are causing no pain to the fetus.

This sounds reasonable, but again, the point at which signals can be processed is not easy to determine. The fact that a signal is being processed does not mean that there is an awareness of it. What does it mean to feel pain, if one is not aware of the pain one is feeling? Does that even make sense?

Pragmatism

Sometimes, when it is difficult to determine the morality of something, the best thing to do is to fall back on the consequences of it, direct and indirect, and determine the practicality of allowing or disallowing it. In the case of abortion, this viewpoint clearly favors the pro-choice group.

For one, fewer births means fewer people - specifically, abortion means fewer unwanted people, and probably fewer inept parents (though that is debatable). If every child aborted is unwanted (which, discounting medical emergencies, is pretty much always the case), allowing them to be born would result in an abundance of children who are either not well cared for by their parents or who become a public burden by entering into foster care or some other publicly funded child-rearing scenario. Some may find homes with adoptive parents, but many will lead very difficult lives.

For another, women with unwanted pregnancies will find ways to abort even if it is illegal. They will just do it in ways that are much more dangerous and unsanitary, which can create an economic burden for society as a whole, since many of them will end up in public assistance programs.

Verdict?

So what is my conclusion, after thinking this through? There are other considerations I haven't listed, such as other potential cutoff points in fetal development, but I've written about what I consider to be the most reasonable ones.

My primary conclusion is that I am very glad that I am not the one who has to decide such things. If I were, no solution would leave me feeling at ease with myself. There is a genuine conflict of interest between the unwanted fetus/baby and the mother who does not want it. The fetus is unable to state its own case, but I think the assumption that it would want to avoid pain and suffering and death is a sound one.

Beyond that, though, I think the argument with the fewest flaws in it is the one for brain function. Consciousness is central to what we think of as the human experience. I find it hard to think of something without it as a living human being. It also addresses the freedom of the woman. The point at which brain function is achieved is sufficiently far into the pregnancy that the woman would have known for some time that she is pregnant, so the opportunity to abort would have been there. But it is not so far in that anyone is physically hurt by the abortion. No pain is involved for the fetus.

I think abortion is a sad thing. It's not something to be celebrated. But I also think that women need to have some level of freedom regarding their own bodies. If a woman truly feels that she cannot go through with a pregnancy, perhaps the best option for her, sadly, is to abort. Adoption is something that should be considered in most cases, though adoption does nothing about the rigors of pregnancy on the body. Ultimately, if a woman does not want to give birth, she shouldn't have to, as long as she is causing no pain to someone else. If that someone else has not yet developed a capacity for feeling pain, she is not.

So that is my take on it. Like I said, there's no easy answer, but I suppose an answer has to be given.

Occupy Everything

When I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived with my grandmother on the downstairs floor of our two-family home, would occasionally cook crabs. I remember him saying that you start them out in cold water and bring it very gradually to a boil while the crabs are still alive. If you drop crabs in water that is already boiling, he said, they jump around and splash the water, but if you bring it up gradually, they remain relatively calm until the water grows so hot that they die, and they are cooked.

I have no idea if this is really the best way to cook crabs. Frankly, it sounds horrifying to me. But it also makes a pretty good metaphor for what has gone on in the United States since the late 1970s or so.

From the end of the Great Depression until the late 70s and early 80s, there was relative economic stability in the United States. We enjoyed steady but not explosive growth. Taxes on those making the most money were astronomical compared to what they are today, but it didn't stop rich people from continuing to try to get more rich.

Then came deregulation. Mostly under Reagan, regulations put in place after the Great Depression were gradually removed. The theory was that by doing away with constraining regulations, we could encourage growth, allowing people to get richer, and then the money would trickle down to the less fortunate people through new jobs and such. The magical Invisible Hand would do its work, driving the economy forward.

It seemed like a reasonable idea, I guess. And the economy looked to be on a radical upswing. But it had some flaws. The whole point of regulation is to keep things in line, to stop people from cheating the system and making illegal maneuvers. Removing regulation opened the door for cheats and swindlers, and in they came.

Also beginning under Reagan, we began to see an enormous decline in tax rates on the wealthy, which was in line with the idea of trickle-down economics.

Unfortunately, very little trickled down. The wealthiest people became more wealthy, while most others plateaued. The 90s were a booming time, so people felt pretty good, but the seeds of our undoing were being planted as deregulation continued under Bush I and Clinton.

The workings of the economy changed. Whereas we had seen a stable rise before, it became more of a cycle of booms and busts. The 90s were mostly a boom, but the boom was falsely built. It was bought with credit cards and other forms of debt. It was only a matter of time before it all collapsed, and in the aughts, it did.

Everything had come so gradually, most of us never saw it happening. A little deregulation here, an upper class tax break there, and over time, we were in boiling water. Most of us were, anyway. Some were standing at the stove, turning up the heat and preparing to feast.

We have turned over the reins of power in this country to a wealthy elite who use their money and influence to control everything. And it might just be too late to stop them. How can we pass laws to change things when they own the politicians? When corporations have been granted personhood by the Supreme Court?

Some of the memes that found their way into popular consciousness during the era of deregulation have made change more difficult as well. Calling "socialism" at any idea that involves the use of public funds to help disadvantaged people seems ridiculous after we just bailed out the richest corporations in the land with far more than we've spent on all the mythical "welfare queens". But still, people do. The fact is that we have socialized risk while privatizing benefits for those with money. There is a massive safety net weaved from public funds ready to catch those with enough power and influence to convince people that they are too big to fail.

No one should be too big to fail. Being too big to fail allows one to become a bully and suffer no consequences for poor decisions one makes.

But is it really too late? Have we reached the boiling point? Can we jump out of the pot before we become crabmeat? I don't know.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought much of this into the public consciousness, but you can bet that the forces that made things how they are will do their best to shove it back out. As we showed after 9/11, Americans are really good at falling back into complacency, as long as we're comfortable enough.

We need major change. We need to re-examine our traditions and old ideas, keep what is good, and discard what no longer works. Ideas must stand based upon merit and evidence, not tradition and habit. We need to rethink the system, because it's failing. We can't say that something should work a certain way because Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton said so. We should use the 200 years of acquired knowledge since their time to determine if they were right. And we should proceed with an appropriate mix of caution and resolve.

Those in power now do not want this, and since they are in power, they will act to keep things as they are, to the detriment of the rest of us. Is this a call for revolution? Not in the sense of armed uprising, no, but we need a massive paradigm shift. Are the American people up for this, or are we doomed to suffer the fate of all previous empires, becoming so mired in outdated ideas that the upstarts become the conquerors?

Are we crabmeat?

The War on Festivus

Every year it comes from somewhere. As the stress of my needing to buy gifts on a budget builds and the last of the leaves are blown from the trees, as I dig through the closet for the gloves and scarves and heavy coats, someone brings it up. Usually it's Fox News, but I don't watch Fox News, so I hear it from someone who inexplicably does. Christmas is under attack, they say. We're not allowed to say "Merry Christmas" or put Christmas trees up or have nativity scenes in the town square. Instead it's Happy Holidays and holiday trees and no one's allowed to bring up Christmas, they say.

The whole argument grates on my nerves. It is founded in a sort of xenophobic right-wing paranoia that I've never fully understood. What I see as acceptance of a diversifying culture, these others see as an attack on their culture and traditions. But there is no attack. No one is on the offense.

Yes, it's true that there have been efforts to stop the use of public space and public funds to support celebrations and displays of a religious nature, and it's certainly true that some people have taken that to ridiculous extremes that rely on highly questionable interpretations of the First Amendment. But the switch to saying "Happy Holidays" and the broadening of Christmas themes to "Holiday" themes in general is not part of some nefarious plan hatched by grinches intent on destroying Christmas. It is not part of a war.

Quite the opposite, actually.

We have made this shift, as a society, because we are becoming more diverse in our constituency. It has never been easy to pigeonhole Americans because we are not a single people, and this fact has grown more true over time. For most of the nation's history, the WASP culture dominated all media and set all agendas. The portrait it painted of the ideal American family was one that excluded and ignored huge swaths of the population due to race, creed, and ethnicity.

But the various marginalized groups have grown in both number and strength in proportion to the shrinking WASPs. When one says "Merry Christmas" now, it is much more likely than it has ever been (and growing more so) that one is saying it to someone who does not celebrate Christmas. It makes more sense to use a general term. Since this time of year is a celebratory one for most of the population, including those who do not celebrate Christmas, "Happy Holidays" makes sense.

One argument I hear is that those who come from elsewhere should assimilate. What are we, the Borg? No, it doesn't work that way. People continue with their own traditions when they come here, and those traditions sometimes bleed over into our culture and become part of the mainstream. How do you think we got jazz and rock music? There is a give-and-take, and this strengthens us all. The emracing of diversity begets adaptability, which allows us to build the tools for moving forward. Nothing weakens a society like rigid adherence to outdated traditions.

We all have our comfort zones, and many people fear nothing more than being removed from theirs. I suppose that's where the xenophobia comes from. But by staying within our zones, we calcify and grow less relevant. Instead, it would be wiser to embrace new ideas and push our own boundaries outward. You keep a culture alive by moving its best elements forward and discarding those aspects of it that are no longer necessary. It's a process of evolution, like anything else. There is no One Right Way, only the way that works best for the current situation.

The one part of this whole trend toward generalization that does bother me is the homogenization of the culture. It seems that, all too often, people believe that being blind to differences between us (or ignoring them entirely) is the same as acceptance. We make a taboo out of anything that is culturally specific. I think this is most disturbing in public school settings, where topics such as religion and race, if addressed at all, are treated with an oversensitivity (necessitated by threat of legal action) that distorts them. It creates a room full of 800-pound gorillas, which I'd imagine is an extremely constrained place to be.

Blindness does not equal acceptance. Acceptance is being fully cognizant of cultural differences but not letting those differences bother you. Saying "Merry Christmas" to someone who celebrates Hanukkah or Yule or Festivus or Kwanzaa is kind of ridiculous. Do you say "enjoy the movie" to someone when you're going to see a movie and they aren't? Do you say "have a nice vacation" to someone who isn't going on one?

I could go on and on with this, but I think I've made my point. Have a safe and happy Festivus, dear reader.

An Inconsistent Truth

I was asked in conversation not long ago what bothers me most about religious thinking. First, I have to say that I am not truly bothered by religious thinking. I believe it to be a part of the human experience in many ways. While it is not a part of my own experience as I live my life, it does not bother me that others have it in theirs. But I am bothered by some versions or aspects of it.

First and foremost, I am bothered by the use of religion as science. Religion should not be used, in my opinion, to make factual statements about the world or universe. Religion involves the acceptance of certain things as fact without regard for evidence. This is what is called faith. We all have faith in things, whether religious or not. We wouldn't get very far without faith. However, it is important to recognize that faith in something is not sufficient to regard that thing as some kind of universal truth.

For that reason, I am bothered by, for example, faith healers, who believe that praying for someone's recovery from a physical ailment will bring it about without the intercession of medicine. There is no evidence for this, but there is evidence for medicine. Foregoing medicine for faith healing is erroneous and wrong-headed. I have no problem with someone praying in addition to medicine, but you cannot replace medicine with faith.

Another thing that truly bothers me is when people use religious reasoning in public policy debates. Saying that homosexuality is a sin in God's eyes is not sufficient reason for denying gays the right to marry. You have to be able to demonstrate what harm would be caused to others by allowing gays to marry.

I recently read an article in the New York Times that gave a good, detailed explanation of the reasoning of evangelicals in regards to the governance of the United States, and it just killed me. The idea that there are enough people in the country willing to vote for someone because he or she will help usher in the glorious end of the world is a little funny but very scary. It is the same sort of thinking that grips those in the Arab world who believe they will attain glory by blowing people (including themselves) up.

The very worst aspect of religious thinking, though, is that it can be co-opted by anyone with sufficient charisma and steered towards destructive ends. The fact that it requires no evidence, only faith, means that nothing more is needed than the words of a person who claims to know the Truth. The most egregious example of this sort of thing would have to be the Catholic Church. Millions of people across the world believe that a single man is the primary conduit for God's word. He lives in splendor and riches provided to him by the (often very poor) faithful, preaching about a need to help the poor and about the virtue of poverty. The friction between the stated belief of Christianity and the gaudy glamour of Catholic churches and cathedrals and such doesn't stop this from happening. For many Catholics, the thought process is something like, "Sure, these things seem to be at odds, but the Pope is the word of God on Earth, so the flaw must be in my understanding." This is the "mysterious ways" defense of religion that can be used to gloss over any set of inconsistencies.

Obviously there are plenty of other examples of this. Cults of personality are not confined to religious institutions either. Hitler's rise had little to do with religion, for instance, though the Nazis had the same sort of religious thinking - belief in a concept regardless of evidence.

People can be made to feel that just about anything is true. That is the very reason that science exists. It is a confession that we are flawed in this way and need some external means for estimating the truth of things. I say "estimating" because a core aspect of science is that even its most seemingly sacred tenets can be challenged using the same methods that brought them to their exaulted status. Recently, scientists observed a particle traveling at speeds that seemed to refute one of Einstein's core theories upon which much of the physics of the past hundred years has been based. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in religious circles. Science admits that we can never be completely certain about anything, but we can develop better estimations of the truth by manipulating the world around us and seeing what happens.

And this is something that rings very true to me. I don't believe it regardless of evidence. I believe it because of evidence. Thousands of years of praying to God for a cure never had nearly the effect of the development penicillin.

Maybe there is a God up there somewhere. Maybe he's playing with us like dolls, or we're in some kind of video game like The Sims, in which we are just pawns at the mercy of some occasionally sadistic player. He certainly can't be the omniscient, omnipotent, ominbenevolent, omnipresent being I grew up being told about, as such a being would not have created this cruel and unfair universe (though I'm sure I'd be told that I see it as an inconsistency only because the human mind lacks the ability to see God's glorious grand plan for the wonderful thing that it is). I don't see any good reason to lob prayers at him, but others can go do that if they want. It doesn't seem to hurt.

I guess you could call me an apatheist - I don't really care if there is a God or not. It's not an interesting question to me because it's completely unknowable, untestable, and without impact upon anything in my life. If he wants me to shower him with praise, well, he's never told me so. As far as I can see, those orders came from people, and they didn't have much backing them up. If he wants me to behave a certain way, he hasn't told me or given me any good motivators to do so. There are various groups of people all over the world who are absolutely certain that they know what God wants, spouting off a variety of wildly inconsistent truths.

So I just live my life as if there is no God, and I think I'm happier for that.

The Memory of Telling

There are certain recollections which, when recounted enough times, come to occupy a more significant place in the recollector's mind than the recalled events themselves. The telling and retelling of a tale can change how we remember that tale, which can change the tale itself - sometimes in small ways, such as through a shift of emphasis, and other times in larger ones, such as through the addition or subtraction of perceived facts. This is not an intentional distortion. It is simply how our minds work. Memory is not precise by nature. We may truly believe we remember things that never happened or remember things quite differently than the historical record shows.

The recent ten year anniversary of 9/11 has me thinking about this, as that day contains a number of such memories for me. I can no longer separate the factual events of that day from the innumerable recountations I have made of them. My own experiences of that day have now become scrambled in my mind with not only my own retellings of them, but with the news reports and media images. I can no longer confidently state exactly which things I saw with my own eyes and which things I saw later on a screen.

Therefore, I cannot vouch for the objective truth of what follows, but I will say that it is as true as my memory is.

I do know that I was there, at the World Trade Center. I can remember my thoughts and impressions. I sat at my desk on the concourse level, and there was a loud boom. I thought it was the escalator just over my head breaking down yet again. It happened often enough, and it always shook my desk. But something was a little off. I must have felt it, because I looked at Marina, who sat at the desk next to me, and she looked at me.

Within a minute or so, there were people running, pouring into the lower level of the store from the concourse. They looked terrified. We thought maybe it was a fire in the subway, which had forced us from our desks once before, but I heard someone say something about gunfire and figured it would be best not to stay put. I followed the crowd up the (non-broken) escalator, leaving behind a backpack filled with personal affects (including my wallet) and the various photos and items I had around my desk. I was oblivious to the fact that I would never see any of them again.

When we got out the door above and stepped onto the sidewalk at the corner of Church and Vesey Streets, I could see that everyone was turned around, facing the building, and looking up. In my memory, I turned around in slow motion. That literal physical pivot was one of the biggest turning points in my life as well. My mind could not immediately make sense of what it saw when I saw the north tower. A gaping, black hole. Thick smoke pouring from it, and paper raining down everywhere. It was absurd, impossible. My first thought was that it looked so much like a specia effect from some Hollywood confection. I had a moment of admiration for Industrial Light & Magic and other such masters of the craft. My second thought, as I remember it, was that it was going to take a very long time to fix that hole.

Of course I immediately assumed it was a bomb. Someone had obviously gotten up to the upper levels with a bomb strapped to them and detonated it there. The World Trade Center had been the target of attacks before, and we all knew somewhere in our minds that it was likely to happen again at some point.

It was then that I saw something up in that hole that brought the reality of the situation more to my mind: movement. A desperate person appareed to be trying to climb out of the hole to somehow get down the side of the building. Only then did I realize the horror of the situation. And when that desperate person lost his grip and fell hundreds of feet, behind the shorter buildings and out of sight, the crowd let out a groan of desperate hopelessness that shook me at least as deeply as anything else that day. I was watching someone die. And then came another.

Still stunned, I can remember asking a policeman making a valiant attempt at organizing things if I could go back inside to get my things. He told me I couldn't. Looking up again, I remember seeing a pane of glass fall, and I thought to myself that I should move away from the site in order to avoid falling debris.

At Park Row, by J&R, I turned back and just stared at the billowing smoke. A street vendor or store clerk told me it was a plane. He said he could read "American Airlines" on it. This brought me some relief. It was more comforting to think that this was a terrible tragedy than a deliberate attack.

I was looking right at the north tower when, suddenly, a ball of flame burst from the south tower. That changed everything. I ran. I had to get back to Astoria, where I lived with two friends. It occurred to me that the N train, which I would normally take, was probably not running because it went under the WTC, so I ran for the 6 train. There was a payphone there. I thought about using it to call someone, but the train pulled in. I think it was the 6 train, but I really don't remember. At 59th and Lexington I got off and transferred. A Queensbound R train rolled in, so I took it. It wasn't really my train, but it would at least get me out of Manhattan.

I got out at Queens Plaza and walked up to my place just of 36th Ave. I tried the phone, but it was dead. I hadn't seen anyone I knew since Marina, and I didn't even know what had happened to her. I desperately wanted to talk to somebody.

I packed a bag with some clothes and left. I had a girlfriend in Brooklyn, and I determined that I'd get there via the G train - the only train that completely avoided Manhattan. I could see the black smoke in the otherwise clear blue sky. It seemed even thicker now. I did not know that at least one of the towers had fallen by that time.

I found a working payphone near the train station. I called my girlfriend, who was thrilled to know I was alive. I tried to call my mother, but she wasn't there so I left a message.

I did make it to the G train, but when it got to Greenpoint, subway service stopped. I tried the bus, but it wasn't long before it stopped as well.

What followed was one of the most surreal walks of my life. I was exhausted at dehydrated at the beginning of it. I walked from wherever I was - somewhere near Greenpoint - through Bedford-Stuyvesant, to my girlfriend's apartment in Brownsville. These were pretty rough neighborhoods, but it didn't matter that day. I wasn't even thinking about it. I was just focused on getting there. When I arrived, I collapsed onto the futon there and she gave me something to drink. Eventually we caught a LIRR train out to my parents' place on Long Island and stayed there for a few days. Even from way out near the border of Suffolk County you could see the plume of smoke.

The events of that day set my life on a completely different path from where it had been headed. I can't imagine where I'd be now if 9/11 hadn't happened. Yet, I have to admit that I don't know how accurate my memories of the event itself are anymore. It seems like some nightmare I had a long time ago now.

An observation

I really seem to have nailed the title of this blog, given how little readership there is for it. Not that I'm actually putting effort into trying to get people to read it. This is more for me to vent my views in a potentially public forum. Knowing that there's a chance someone might happen upon this makes me more conscientious about how I write what I write.

Maybe not so much the "audient" part. But I'm certainly speaking to the Void.

Godless Morality

I am somewhat bored of the question of whether there is a God or not. It's something that concerned me when I was younger and growing up Catholic, but nowadays I find it to be an irrelevant question. Whether there is a God or not does not mean anything to me.

I once had someone put the argument to me that without God, there is no source of morality, which leads to chaos and lawlessness. To me this is entirely backwards. For one, the laws of man and the punishments for breaking them are enough to keep most of us in line without some sort of otherworldly intervention. For another, the choice of whether to commit any act has nothing to do with God and everything to do with individual choice and perception.

Let's say a particular man is a deeply devout Christian. One day an angel appears to this man and tells him to kill his family (this is similar to what God supposedly did with Abraham, so, while unusual, this is not something entirely out of character for the Christian God). The man must now weigh his choices and decide which is more moral - following God's will or keeping his family safe. His action at that point dictates morality, not God. The fact that he can come to the conclusion that only an evil god would make such a request shows that morality cannot lie with God. It is, rather, something that exists within the individual.

I generally try to be as good as I can to people, and I think most people who know me think I'm a nice guy. Why am I nice, when sometimes it's not necessarily to my advantage, if there is no threat of punishment or promise of reward? Because there are punishments and rewards; they just aren't handed down by any God. If I'm cruel to someone, that makes me feel terrible. I can't help it. This is part of how I am. When I am nice to someone, it makes me feel good. Sometimes being nice is inconvenient, but I will do it anyway because I want to feel like I am a nice person. And why do I want that? Because it feels good (ascribe this to the various chemical reactions in the body if you wish). This is the same line of thinking people use to argue that true altruism does not exist, since everything we do is to reap some reward or avoid some punishment (my views on that are not quite so straightforward, but that's for another post).

A religious person makes a personal choice to follow a particular religion. In most cases, this is simply following in the footsteps of his or her parents or social circle. But it is a choice, and it is a moral choice. Any religion can be followed or not followed. Any rule can be obeyed or broken. We ultimately judge the moral systems presented to us against our own inner morality and find them worthy or unworthy. That in itself is a moral judgment that trumps any god's moral code.

The Shared Mind

In a recent post discussing the nature of individuality, I mentioned the paucity of examples of combined nervous systems or brains. Single brains that have been divided exist, but as I said, there are no good medical reasons to combine brains.

Well, I sometimes forget that nature runs little experiments of its own sometimes. Case in point: Krista and Tatiana Hogan. These two four-year-old girls, joined at the head, seem to have neural pathways connecting their brains, and while they have not been rigorously tested (due mostly to their age), they appear to be able to share some level of sensation, and occasionally they refer to themselves as if they are one. Their brain structure is unique, probably in all of human history.

So here we have a case, produced by nature, of two people who may be one person, or may be somewhere in between.

Epigrams

I love epigrams. Most of the time, I tend to express myself in an exceedingly verbose manner, as you can probably tell if you have read any of my posts here. I ramble. So I love trying to come up with a way to express big ideas more efficiently, with minimal words.

As such, I've come up with a number of epigrams over the years, most of which are forgotten to me because I've never had the good sense to write them down. That changes now!

I will make occasional posts here of epigrams I've come up with as I think of them. Some may lead to other discussions, but I'll post epigrams occasionally as collections (i.e. not a new post every time I think I've come up with something witty). Sometimes they may not precisely meet the definition of an epigram, which I guess doesn't have a very precise definition anyway, and some may not be as witty as I think they are. Very often they will be riffs on or reversals of known sayings, which I like to do, but they will always be my own concoctions, not quotes. Not intentionally anyway. (I have on occasion unintentionally plagiarized others, saying something I'd thought was my own when I'd clearly heard it elsewhere and forgotten. I'll try to avoid that.)

So, without further ado, some epigrams of mine. Some of these are kind of old...

• Conventional wisdom usually involves more convention than wisdom.
• It is better to be thought of as the first of something than the next of something.
• A rose by another name may smell as sweet, but would you take a whiff if I told you it was feet?
• The two birds in the bush are worth the one in your hand.
•  There is much more freedom in accepting your insignificance than there is in trying to prove your significance.
• Slow and steady wins the race only if no one fast and steady is running.
• The early worm gets eaten by the bird.
• Those seeking perfection will find only flaws.
• You can drown in a one inch puddle of water, and you can survive hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the sea. It's not so much about the quantity of the water as it is about how you approach it.
• We are the sum of our actions. Not our thoughts or intents, but our deeds. We will not be remembered for our potential, but for how well we fulfill it.
• Are you really against all those things you're against, or are you just envious of those who get to do them?
• Those who stop to smell the roses will be left behind in the dark, to be eaten by the wolves of progress, while those who stand in righteous poses are elected gods of the world. 

Humility

Some days back, I was reading a book by Bill James called Solid Fools Gold. James is a baseball writer and thinker who is considered a pioneer of the more evidence-based, mathematical analysis of the game. It's the sort of very nerdy stuff I'm really into. What struck me was that one of the chapters was on the importance of humility to the scientific method.

This is something I have rarely heard stated but that I've found, working as I do within the scientific community, to be very true. In order to be successful as a scientist (and by successful, I mean successful at science, not successful at making money with science), one must be willing to recognize and accept when one is wrong. Being incorrect is a very important part of the scientific process. If we knew our hypotheses were true, they wouldn't be hypotheses. Just because something is fathomable or makes sense in theory doesn't mean it is true.

While it is true that scientific consensus can be wrong on occasion, and in such cases, a dissenter who insists on the truth of an idea others find implausible is a true asset, more often the consensus is correct. The beauty of science is that the truth is always a moving target. A real scientist knows that the ultimate truth is unknowable and does not claim to have all the answers. She is only making her best guess given the severe limitations imposed by the human condition.

Real science does not deal in certitude. It deals in likelihood. We can never say, "This is true." We use confidence intervals and define something as "true" if we have determined that there is a 95 or 99 percent chance of it being true. But we acknowledge the existence of those other few percentage points.

Someone is always coming along with a better idea. Sometimes it is a refinement of an old idea, and sometimes it is a complete paradigm shift. A good scientist needs to be able to recognize when a new idea is better and scrap old preconceptions, even if it means giving up one's own ideas in favor of those of another.

With that in mind, nothing that I say in this blog is set in stone as fact. Nothing is intractible. I am not afraid to say, "Oops, I was wrong about that." Of course, that won't stop me from posting my half-baked ideas.

Indivisibility and Inmultiplicability

I've spent a fair amount of time in my life thinking about numbers. Granted, I am not a mathematician, nor can I claim any understanding of the highest levels of mathematical thinking, but I'm pretty good with numbers, and I like them.

Unfortunately, numbers are not real. They are, like everything else, abstractions that help us better understand reality. There is no such thing as a one or a two. That's clear enough. But what we often don't appreciate are concepts some of the less obvious number-related truths: you can't really have more than one of anything, and you can't really divide anything into parts.

I say that as I have in front of my two apparently identical cups. I know that they are not identical, however. Aside from all the miniscule flaws in design that may make one different from another, the mere fact that I can identify them as distinct objects implies that they are not identical. One is on the left, and the other is on the right. In order for two objects to be identical, they must have no features that distinguish them from one another. In other words, they must occupy the same space at the same time while exhibiting the same traits. That is, they must be the same object.

We categorize, as I have mentioned previously, in order for our limited minds to make sense of what is around us. We find patterns and we make inferences about one pattern based on what we know of another similar pattern. As I have said before, this is good and useful for us, but we too often fall in love with the abstractions and forget that they merely describe an underlying reality. They are not the reality itself, which is continuous and essentially indivisible.

So, with this in mind, I turn my attention to human beings. In daily life, we usually feel pretty comfortable thinking of ourselves as distinct from other people. I am not you, and you are not me. However, like all other separations, even this seemingly obvious one falls apart upon more careful inspection. What makes me not you? Religious people will make claims about souls or some dualistic ideas that don't so much add to the conversation as block further discussion. I'm going to throw out the notion of a soul as an idea constructed egocentrically as a mechanism for making sense of the limitations of our consciousness. In other words, I don't buy it. I'm a scientific thinker, for the most part, and I don't like conclusions that rely on making stuff up to explain what is difficult to explain.

So what is it that separates us? Information. We recognize ourselves as distinct from other people (and other objects, for that matter) due to the lack of information flowing between us and others. Specifically, our nervous system does not extend beyond what we recognize as the bounds of our bodies. We cannot send or receive information beyond the extents of our nervous system without indirect methods. Information can be received through our senses and transmitted through our motions, but there is no neural connection, no direct, two-way flow of information like there is within the nervous system.

So what happens when you cut up a nervous system? If you lose your arm, is it a part of you anymore? Beyond a sort of sentimental attachment, I don't think most people would feel that their detached arm is still part of them. Once something is removed from the nervous system's central controls, it becomes something else.

So then, what happens if you split up the central controls themselves (for the most part, the brain)? Well, that's complicated, but it has happened. There are plenty of studies out there on the effects of brain damage and, perhaps more to the point, split-brain studies. A split-brain person is a relatively recent sort of medical creation. For the most part, fiddling with the brain is a bad idea. In cases of extreme epilepsy, though, doctors may sever the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Naturally, the results are rather interesting. The two halves of the brain, lacking the direct communication they had, effectively become different people sharing a body, each with control of one side. There's a lot to read about this, most of which can be googled. Here is a particularly good, succinct summary.

So if you can split someone into two people, can you combine two into one? Theoretically, sure, but the mechanisms for doing so don't yet exist. You would need to be able to fuse two nervous systems, at least, and find a way to make their brains work together with a direct connection. I am not anything close to a neurologist, so I won't begin to theorize about the difficulties involved. Compatibility issues, I would think, could complicate things. But lacking any real medical reason to fuse people together, it will likely not be happening anytime soon.

The point, though, is that what we define as ourselves is not some kind of actual, separate thing from everything else. It is only a sort of sensory limitation. On an atomic level, in fact, objects are constantly moving around and switching places. There is likely not one particle of you that was in you when you were born. The continuity of self comes from the continuity of information flow. It is, therefore, as much an illusion and a simplification as anything else.

I realize this negates many of the world religions, particularly Abrahamic ones that depend on ideas like individuality and personal salvation. I'm not out to negate religions. I don't really care much about religion beyond examining its role within society and such. I'm an atheist, but I don't care if you are. I'm just out to make sense of the world based upon my observation of it.

I'll get into ideas like ethics and morals in a later post.

Osama's End

News came a couple of days ago that the US had finally, after more than nine years, found and killed Osama bin Laden. I first heard it while watching a baseball game on television, during which the broadcasters announced it. I was completely caught off guard by the news, and the full impact of it did not immediately strike me. It was only when I watch President Obama talk about it in his address to the nation a few minutes later that I realized that this was indeed something pretty big.

My feelings about the matter are not simple. I am never one to celebrate the death of another person, even when that death benefits the world or is necessary. It is not a happy thing that a man needed to be killed. Being killed is never the most preferable end to any life, even when there is no other palatable choice. Death prevents redemption. It prevents any potential good from coming from that person. It prevents anything more positive than itself from happening. Ultimately, the best thing would have been for bin Laden to renounce violence and help others to lead a better life. It is unfortunate that he chose to continue the violence instead.

This is not to say that the man didn't have it coming. His actions killed many innocent people. He is, by proxy, a mass murderer. I saw the destruction of the Twin Towers up close. I was near enough when the second plane hit that I could feel a wave of heat from the explosion. I watched helpless, desperate people jump to their deaths in order to avoid burning to death. This was all on bin Laden, ultimately. It is good that, given his lack of redemption and the harm he has caused, he has been removed from the world. It is good, but it is also sad that it had to come to that.

I hope that those who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in other attacks worldwide can feel some kind of peace with bin Laden's death. I hope this serves to remind us here in the US that all our recent political bickering disguises some degree of solidarity. I hope that the best can come as a result of this sad thing.

Language and Categories

I mentioned in the previous post that we are pattern recognition machines rather than logic machines. Although we can teach ourselves to structure our thoughts logically, it is something of an imposition on our normal way of thinking. Human cognition works mostly like a neural network. We have particular meanings assigned to particular patterns that form something like nodes within our minds, and each node has a collection of other nodes with which it is strongly or weakly connected. The connections can be altered through training ourselves, consciously or not.

For instance, my son enjoys eating apples. He eats them a lot. When I see an apple (which is a node), I now think of my son (another node). Of course, when I think of him, I think of my other son (and another, etc.). And when I think of my other son, I think of the fact that I am taking him to a baseball game (weather permitting) on Sunday, which has nothing at all to do with an apple in any logical sense. However, within my neural network, the apple and the baseball game are only a few nodes apart.

Our minds are set up in an ideal way for keeping ourselves alive in a hostile world. If some ancient man saw tiger tracks or fire, he could relate that to danger. This is not as important for us as it used to be, since we have invented things that do the danger watching for us and we have organized our society in such a way that there are individuals (cops, the army) who theoretically keep us safe in various ways.

In our modern world, this neural network-based way of thinking can sometimes cause problems for us. See, in logic, if we discover that something is wrong, we can simply mark it as such and continue, knowing that. With a neural network, it takes time to unlearn connections that may not be correct. For instance, let's say that as a child I hated going to the doctor, and the doctor's office was painted blue. I have developed a strong association between blue rooms and the misery of the doctor's office. Now in college, I attend a class on a subject in which I am very interested, but it is in a room that is painted blue. Suddenly, for reasons I can't explain and of which I may not be aware, I find it hard to sit in class. When I'm in there, I just want to get out. I stop going to the lectures, and even though the subject is important to me, I do poorly in the class.

This is a rather simplistic example and probably not the best one, but it's the best I can do off the top of my head (the bottom of my head is currently unavailable as it is thinking about chocolate). The point, though, is that in our lives, we develop associations between nodes that are inefficient and potentially harmful to us. We all have a vast collection of such associations, and we're probably only aware of a small number of them.

One aspect of this way of thinking is that it forces us to categorize our experiences. We find patterns and make associations between patterns. We categorize things as good, bad, pleasant, harmful, and so on. Language itself is a means of categorizing the world around us. A particular pattern may be known to us as a tree, while another may be known to us as a chair or a computer or a platypus or a shoggoth. This is not limited to objects. We categorize actions as walking or running or jumping, etc. We understand the world in these terms.

Most people probably consider categorization to be something logical. After all, some of the most famous ones, such as the biological taxonomic ranking system or the Dewey decimal system, appear quite orderly and rational. However, they function more as an attempt to categorize and rationalize systems with no inherent classification or division by minds unable to process continuous data meaningfully. We've all come across books that don't fit the classifications well, and there have been new branches added to various levels of the taxonomic ranking system in order to cope with specimens that fall between the cracks since its invention.

Categorization is an abstraction and simplification of reality. It is an attempt to take something that is continuous and complex - which we have trouble with - and make it into something with clear divisions. That is, something with nodes. We have a tendency to think of the categories we have made to help us understand reality as part of the underlying reality itself, and much error and misunderstanding has resulted from this.

Don't get me wrong. Categorical thinking is important to us. We can't really go without it. We need abstraction and simplification in order to make sense of the world. However, we should not make the mistake of confusing the reality with the categories into which we have shoehorned it. There are no chairs. There are no tables. These are categories we have constructed for certain patterns we encounter. Taken to its logical extreme, one could say that there are no people, either. Indeed, if we try to understand reality continuously rather than categorically, it seems to go against some of our most strongly held ideas and beliefs.

But conclusions reached via categorical thinking are not inherently incorrect. Not at all. Like I said, we are able to detect patterns very well due to our thinking style. We can detect a tendency for the trees to sway when we hear wind. We can detect a tendency for tones to sound when we vibrate a string. These have fed our inventiveness and allowed us to accomplish all sorts of things. We simply have to understand that we created these categories - they do not actually exist.

The Politics of Left and Right

The current political climate in the United States could probably best be described as caustic. In my life, which accounts for only about 15% of the country's history (less than half that if you count only politically conscious years), I have never seen things so polarized.

It's more than polarization, though. There seems to be a "Go, team go!" attitude usually associated with athletic teams when it comes to political parties or persuasions. That is, people seem more concerned with winning the argument than with being correct. With athletic teams, obviously, there is no "correct". Athletic teams are artificial constructs, not based on any ideology. Our decision to support a particular team is rather arbitrary, based on such factors as geographical location and our parents. I'm not a Mets fan because I support the idea of the Mets or because they represent anything more than themselves. I suppose one could say that it's because I am a masochist. But really, it's because my father is one, and I'm from New York, and there's little else to it.

With a political party or group however, the basis of the group is usually a common ideology. Republicans aren't just a team. They are meant to be a group that has come together based on similar ideas about how the country should operate. Ditto for Democrats, Greens, and the vast number of other parties that make up our country. Ideally, a party attracts a person who has similar ideas - ideas he or she has come to independently. Ideally, we don't so much think of ourselves as belonging to a party but as affiliating with one. This doesn't just apply to political parties, either, but to all kinds of groups.

Needless to say, this idea world is not the one in which we live.

Right now, if I were to declare myself a "liberal" or a "conservative", I would immediately bias you, dear reader, to either agree or disagree with me. If you think otherwise, you should probably do some self-reflection. We are all guilty of this. When we agree with someone about one thing, we are more likely to agree with them in other areas, even unrelated ones. If I say, "I think trickle-down economics is a good idea," and then I tell you that I support the invasion of Libya, your support for the invasion of Libya will increase or decrease, at least momentarily, based upon your feelings about trickle-down economics. This is just how humans work. We form patterns, and those patterns can be highly irrational. Rationalization comes after the fact. We can support our positions with reason, but our conclusions tend to come first, before the reasoning.

We can work against this nature if we try, but it takes a lot of effort, even for seemingly rational people. We all have our biases, likes, and dislikes, that have irrational effects on our acceptance of ideas. By examining what we believe and trying to determine why we believe it, we can, in fact, convince ourselves to shed or accept some ideas based upon individual merits of the ideas rather than our associations of those ideas with particular groups or people.

However, what I've seen happening in the United States in recent years is the increased use of what I would call irrational methods to spread ideas based on agendas. Various groups have become quite adept at using memes to spread ideas of questionable rational merit in order to further their own interests. The biggest culprit in this regard - and my saying this will likely bias you one way or the other about everything else I say here - is Fox News. Let me explain...

There is a basic formula for getting people to join your cause, regardless of its merit and regardless of their own values and needs:

• You begin by presenting yourself as being part of the same group, sharing the same values and customs as your targets. You must especially sympathize with their common plight - all groups see themselves as having some common plight. You must feel the oppression that they feel, even if no real oppression exists.
• Next, you must cultivate the myth of the other. It helps to have a particular group or groups upon which you can pin all or some of the ills of society, as Hitler most famously did with the Jews. However, you can create phantom groups if no obvious ones exist. It only matters that the targets are able to see them as existing. Welfare moms would be an example of this, and there are probably numerous better ones.
• The next step is crucial and must be done carefully. You need to associate your own goals with the goals of the targets. Let's say, for instance, you want to create a government program that directly benefits you in some way, and you need the support of people who would have no vested interest in it - or maybe even a vested interest in not seeing it come to fruition - in order to make it work. You can appeal to your common struggle in some way, where appropriate. Put it in a bill called "American Pride" so that anyone voting against it is voting against American pride. Also, it helps if you can somehow convince people that it does benefit them in some way, perhaps by doing something about that "other" group you previously worked on, or perhaps through some indirect mechanism that sounds rational.

There are plenty of variations and complexities that can be layered on top of this, but that's the basic idea. You have to win people over from within their group, not by convincing them that your group is better than theirs. I mean, you can do that, but it's less effective in most cases.

Fox News has made an art form of this. A huge segment of the population believes in a left-wing media with a liberal agenda in which Fox News is the beacon of centrist truth, that Fox News is more patriotic, that they are "fair and balanced" and so forth. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true. It matters that they have managed to convince so many people that it is, not through some rational means, but in ingenious ways such as with the "War on Christmas" they use to keep their Christian targets in the fold and other irrational emotional appeals.

I say this about Fox not because I am a liberal, though, in fairness, I think most people would say I at least lean that way (I don't like to self-identify for reasons closely related to those being discussed in this post). I say it because it's what I've observed about them. Don't get me wrong - CNN and especially MSNBC try the same thing. They're just not nearly as good at it.

So, getting back to my main point a bit, we're now stuck with teams fighting for control of the ball. They care about winning the game. This has always been true of the players, but now the crowd has become just as partisan. Republican fans and Democratic fans care more about seeing their respective teams win than they do about making the country work right. But this is not an athletic competition.

Is there any way out of this situation?

Audient Void?

So I feel compelled to explain, briefly, the title of the blog. It is taken from an H.P. Lovecraft story snippet, "Nyarlathotep". I am a fan of his work, and for some reason, this term has always stood out to me. The idea of a vast yet listening nothingness intrigues me. I have long thought that some of the themes of Lovecraft's work were ahead of their time, and I can see how one might call the internet an audient void.

Justifying my existence (or my blog's, anyway)

This is not my first stab at blogging. I've done others before, but I've always strayed from the intended topic and eventually let them kind of wither away. So why start a new blog? Simple: I intend this one to cover areas into which I have strayed in previous ones. I am also giving myself a wider set of constraints. Rather than trying to create a blog about, say, music composition, I intend this one to cover a broad range of topics, the common thread being an examination of the human condition. Beyond all else, this has always been my central interest, expressed in music, writing, or other forms.

I intend to write about any and all aspects of life, the universe, and everything, as ideas shoot their way through my cortex. I hope to gain some insight into my own existence in the process. I do not intend this to be some sort of personal diary or confessional. While I will naturally gravitate toward topics close to my heart, and surely I will use examples from my life and draw from its events, this blog will be neither a biography nor some sort of myopic rant about my own life. I've done those before, and they are deeply unsatisfying. I like to mix intellectual depth with humor, which I believe to be a key ingredient to successful existence, and I do not shy away from disturbing or controversial subjects. I make no bones about my preference for heady, cerebral topics, but I am never intentionally condescending.

Ideally, there will be conversation. I welcome comments (including dissenting views) - I only ask that commenters maintain a respect for the content of the blog and the other people here. If you don't like me or my writing, don't read it. Please just don't be a jerk here.

I am writing all this as if there is someone out there reading it, when I know that I have not yet even told anyone about this blog yet. But hopefully someone out there will eventually read this. If that's you, welcome. I hope something here moves you and that you join the conversation if you are so compelled.

First!

Welcome to my house. Please, take a seat. The sofa is quite comfortable. Would you like something to drink? A bite to eat? There you go.

Now that you're settled in, let me tell you a story.

---

Our tale begins with a boy. It is 1983 and he is in third grade, sitting at his school desk, wearing the blue shirt and clip-on tie mandated by the school, which is Catholic and headed by an obese nun with piercing eyes. On his desk before him lies an open book - a religion book, large and thin and floppy, with reproduced watercolor depictions of various Bible scenes. He is learning about the saints, looking at an artist's rendering of St. Stephen.

At that precise moment, a thought worms its way out from the recesses of his developing mind and into his consciousness. It is a thought he does not know how to acknowledge right away, and it comes in the form of a simple yet crucial question: "How do they know all of this?" He does not know the answer

And so, for the first time in his young life, the seed of doubt has been planted. Although his family is not particularly religious, he has been raised to believe in God and Jesus and all the dogma of the Catholic Church as fully as be believes in the sun and the moon. He is aware that his Jewish friends have different beliefs and that there are many religions, but being eight years old, he has never given much thought to such things. Until now.

One day he asks his teacher how we know the stories of the Bible are true. She responds with a level of agitation disproportionate to the question that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. He is too shy and too intimidated to continue with the next obvious question: "How do you know that?" He simply thinks it to himself.

Over the years, he asks the question again and again, bringing it to a variety of authority figures. None of their answers set his mind at ease until he asks a Jesuit priest in his high school. The priest explains that we do not know any of it. We believe it; we have faith. However, the priest points out, we do not know anything. Everything we know is based, to some degree or other, on belief.

This opens the boy's eyes in ways likely unintended by the priest. The boy begins to develop a personal philosophy with the intent of determining which things should be believed or disbelieved. He wants to come up with some kind of set of criteria for himself. Why believe in the Catholic God and not the Greek gods? Why Jesus and not Muhammad or the Buddha? Each question leads to a plethora of new questions.

He leaves religion behind, no longer able to justify believing in one or another faith. He constantly challenges his own thoughts and comes to new conclusions, many of which he will later reject based upon further consideration.

In adulthood, he finally reaches a level of comfort with his own beliefs and viewpoints. He achieves a sense of clarity previously unknown to him. While he acknowledges that he does not and cannot ever have all the answers, and that nothing is truly knowable, he comes to the conclusion that he now knows how to ask the questions in more meaningful ways.

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This is my (rather abridged) personal story of how I began my intellectual journey to where I am today. There is much more to it, of course, but I think the essential epistemological questions that came to me as a confused child opened the path to a sort of enlightenment for me down the line. I would say that most of my growth comes from learning to accept the unanswerability of some questions rather than in finding the answers to them. I believe that however strongly you may believe in something, it is best to always keep in mind that you may be wrong. Much of the pain in the world today seems to be caused not by a particular religion or belief system, but by  rigid adherence to a system. We should keep in mind that all ultimate truths are unknowable, and we all simply have opinions about how best to live.