Rules for miracles

In today's News of the Surreal, we have: the Vatican is tightening the rules on what it's willing to call divine supernatural phenomena.

It's tricky business, isn't it?  In science, there's a well-established protocol for evaluating the strength of a claim, involving stuff like evidence and logic (and, if possible, a statistical analysis of the data).  But how do you do that in religion, where the only real rule is God does whatever the hell he wants?  Most of the claims of miracles are, by definition, one-offs; after all, if the same sort of thing kept happening over and over, it wouldn't be a miracle.  It's not like when Moses saw the Burning Bush, he was able to say, "Okay, let's compare this to other times we've had booming voices speak out of a flaming shrubbery, and see if this is a real phenomenon or if maybe I shouldn't have eaten those suspicious-looking mushrooms at dinner." 

So now, according to the new rules, bishops are being given the unenviable task of deciding whether a given apparition or miraculous healing or whatnot is real.  The first hurdle, apparently, is to determine if it is an outright lie to make money -- and the problem is these sorts of claims are ridiculously lucrative, so such scams abound.  The apparition of the Virgin Mary in the little village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, wherein six adults were supposedly blessed for their faith and told such surprising revelations as "don't have an abortion" and "same-sex marriage is naughty in God's sight," led to it becoming the third most popular pilgrimage site in Europe (after Fátima in Portugal and Lourdes in France).  Over a million people visit the shrine every year, bringing in huge amounts of revenue; in 2019, sixty thousand young Catholics from all over the world descended on the village, accompanied by fourteen archbishops and bishops and over seven hundred priests -- despite the Vatican making the rather equivocal statement that such pilgrimages were okay "as long as there is no assumption the [apparitions of Mary] are confirmed to have a supernatural origin."

One of the many gift shops in Medjugorje [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sean MacEntee, Virgin Mary Statues (5778409684), CC BY 2.0]

Don't try to tell me that religion isn't big business.

Once the bishops determine that any given claim isn't simply fraudulent, they issue a nihil obstat ("there is no obstacle") decree, which is the religious version of "Whatever floats your boat, dude."  Nihil obstat effectively says, "Okay, fine, we can't stop you from worshiping this thing, but we're not saying it's real, either."  In the new guidelines, bishops are warned against going from there to stating outright that the phenomenon is divine in origin; issued prematurely, the Vatican says, jumping from nihil obstat to "this is a message from God" can lead to "damage to the unity of the Church" and could "cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church."

Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?  There is no good evidence-based litmus test for differentiating between a "real" supernatural event (whatever that means) and a mere delusion; if there was, the event wouldn't be supernatural, it would simply be natural.  So we're still down to the sketchy grounds of having a bishop say, "I prayed to God and God said it was so," which then hinges on whether the bishop himself is telling the truth.

Because I can't think of any times bishops have been involved in hinky stuff, can you?

So the new rules don't really solve anything, just kick the can down the road to give the impression that there are now hard-and-fast rules for determining the veracity of something that by definition doesn't obey the laws of nature.  The BBC article where I learned about this story (linked above) ends with what has to be my favorite line I've read in a news source in months, to wit: "And so the Vatican, an institution peppered with mysticism, and which still communicates via smoke signals when electing a new pope, will be hoping its new rules can regulate claims of the supernatural."

Heh.  Yeah.  The Catholic Church, of course, is kind of in an awkward position, because they do more or less accept science most of the time, as long as the science doesn't fly in the face of the status quo.  The Big Bang Model was actually the brainchild of an astronomer who was also an ordained priest (Monseigneur Georges Lemaître) and the Vatican stated outright that the Big Bang was completely compatible with Catholic theology in 1951.  They officially pardoned Galileo in 1992 (better late than never), and have at least refused to condemn biological evolution.  But the fact remains that -- as the writer for the BBC News stated -- the entire institution is rooted in mysticism, which is a deeply unscientific approach to understanding the world.  I suppose I'd prefer this sort of waffling to (say) the views of the fundamentalists, who pretty well reject science in toto, but it still strikes me that trying to play it both ways is not gonna turn out to be a winning strategy.  Once you accept any kind of evidence-based criteria for establishing the truth, you're solidly in science's wheelhouse, and -- despite the "non-overlapping magisteria" stance of people like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould -- the result for religious claims has almost always been a solid thumbs-down.

In any case, there you have it.  New rules for miracles.  I guess it's a step up from the bumper sticker I saw a while back that said, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it," but given the other options, I'm still going with the laws of scientific induction any day of the week.

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The trove

If you ever think we've discovered just about everything there is out there to discover, consider the story I found out about from my eagle-eyed writer friend Gil Miller, about an excavation on the Isle of Man that has turned up over 120,000 medieval artifacts.

The Isle of Man, located in the middle of the Irish Sea between Scotland and Ireland, has such a strategic location that it has been contested for as long as we have records.  Not only did the Irish and the Scottish have settlements there, but so did the Norman English and the Norse; all of them have left their mark on the land and the people.  It's one of the places where the natives have tried like mad to hold onto their original language, a relative of Irish and Scottish Gaelic (although not mutually intelligible to either) called Manx, currently spoken as a first language by only twenty-three people (a bit over two thousand speak it as their second language, and there's currently a campaign on the island to teach it to Manx youngsters before it dies out completely).

The archaeological site Gil told me about is Rushen Abbey, a Cistercian monastery on the southeast coast of the island.  It has a very long history -- it was founded in  by Óláfr Guðrøðarson, the Norse (obviously) king of Man in the first half of the twelfth century.  By this time the erstwhile Vikings had become thoroughly Christianized, but this didn't mean peaceful; Óláfr's forty-year reign came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated by three of his nephews.  This started a war of succession, and eventually Óláfr's son Guðrøðr Óláfsson (whatever else you can say about them, they weren't very creative in the name-choosing department) triumphed, the three evil nephews got chopped into dog food, and Guðrøðr went on to rule the place (and a good chunk of the east coast of Ireland) for the next twenty years.

In any case, Óláfr and two of his sons are buried on the abbey grounds, and the place was considered a holy site from its founding until it was shut down in 1540 as part of English King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. This savage campaign ostensibly occurred because Henry didn't like the Catholics' theology (he'd appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534), but honestly had more to do with the fact that the abbeys and monasteries were filthy rich and Henry wanted to get his hands on their wealth.  At least Rushen wasn't completely demolished, as many were; it was repurposed several times, and in fact was purchased by the Manx government in 1853 with the intent of converting it to an insane asylum (the plans, fortunately, were never carried out).  Eventually its historical value was recognized and it became a Manx National Heritage Site, allowing for careful renovation -- and excavation of the grounds.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dan Karran, Rushen Abbey, CC BY-SA 2.5]

The archaeological studies at Rushen have uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts, including medieval coins, metalware, glass, and ceramic -- the last-mentioned including some long-distance imports, indicating the wealth of the place at its heyday.  Some pieces long predate the founding of the abbey, including a pewter cross dating from the fifth century C. E., indicating that the Isle of Man had at least some permanent religious settlements at a time when neighboring England was still a chaotic mess recovering from the withdrawal of the Romans and girding its loins for the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.

What the excavation of Rushen makes me wonder, though, is how much still is out there to find in other places -- what might be beneath our feet, unseen, as we walk over familiar ground each day.  It's staggering that 120,000 previously unknown artifacts could be turned up at a site that has been in continuous occupation (and a significant pilgrimage/tourist destination) for almost a thousand years, and indicates that we still have a great deal more to discover about our own past.  

I think we still have a bit more to learn, don't you?

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Well, actually...

American economist Thomas Sowell famously said, "Endless repetition does not make something true."

I used to run into examples of this principle all the time when I was a teacher -- widely-accepted, and rarely-questioned, incorrect statements that still somehow classified as "stuff everyone knows."  One that immediately pops to mind, and that I had to debunk just about every year, was that daddy-longlegs (also called "harvestmen"), those familiar arachnids in just about everyone's cellars and attics, are "actually deadly poisonous but their fangs are too small to pierce human skin."  There's no truth to this whatsoever; they don't even have poison glands, and their chelicerae ("fangs") aren't hollow like a spider's.  They are, in fact, entirely harmless.

In the interest of making at least a minuscule inroad into ridding the public consciousness of some of the most egregious of these, today I present to you an extremely incomplete list of commonly-accepted falsehoods that have spread by word-of-mouth and now become ubiquitous.

The Latest Gossip by François Brunery (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

How many of these have you heard -- and how many did you believe?

1. Turkey meat is not high in the amino acid tryptophan -- or at least, no higher than any other protein source.  Tryptophan isn't why you're sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner; it's much more likely to be overeating, consumption of wine, and the general energetic letdown we all experience after a big event.
2. The pronunciation of words with an s, c, or z in Castilian Spanish, where the usual sibilant is sometimes replaced by a coronal fricative /θ/ (usually written in English as "th"), did not occur because there was a king who lisped and all of his fawning courtiers wanted to make him feel better by imitating him.  In fact, the phonetic shift seems to have been gradual, spreading across the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and may have been driven by the need to differentiate words (like siento "I feel" and ciento "one hundred") that otherwise would have been pronounced identically.
3. The seasons are not caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in summer; in fact, during the Northern Hemisphere's summer the Earth is actually farther away from the Sun than it is in winter.  The seasonal changes in temperature are almost all due to the twenty-three degree axial tilt of the Earth.  Nor is it true, as I've seen claimed in some hyper-religious posts, that "if the Earth was only a few feet closer or farther away from the Sun than it is, it would be boiled or frozen" -- so, goes the claim, God placed the Earth in exactly the right spot, and can I get a hallelujah?  In fact, the Earth's orbit is elliptical enough that it's about five million kilometers closer to the Sun at perihelion than it is at aphelion, and we neither roast at one nor are flash-frozen at the other.  So you may well think that God directs the universe, but if that's your proof, you might want to reconsider.
4. Despite what you may have learned from such historical documents as Hagar the Horrible, Vikings did not go into battle wearing horned helmets.  Horns (or antlers) on headgear would have been a serious hindrance to fighting, and the Vikings were way smarter than to do anything that slowed down the highly lucrative plunder and pillage.  Extant horned or antlered headgear seems to have been mostly ceremonial in use, probably by shamans to invoke animal spirits.
5. Lemmings don't engage in mass suicide by diving off cliffs or swimming out into lakes and drowning when they get overcrowded.  This complete fabrication became a popular belief because of a 1958 Disney movie called White Wilderness which depicted it happening; it turns out that the scene was filmed using lemmings that had been purchased from Inuit children for a quarter a piece, and the unfortunate rodents were shoved off a cliff repeatedly to get enough footage for the film.
6. Albert Einstein did not fail high school mathematics; in fact, by fifteen he had mastered both differential and integral calculus.  He did fail his first entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, but this was probably because he was two years younger than most of the rest of the students who attempted it.  (He did really well on the science and math portions.)  He did, however, as an adult say to a frustrated physics student, "Do not worry about your difficulties with mathematics; I can assure you that mine are far worse," but this was more overly modest of the great man than it was accurate.
7. Apologies to Pink Floyd, but there is no permanently dark side of the Moon.  Because the Moon is tidally locked, the same side faces the Earth all the time; put another way, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same.  Any given spot on the Moon is (like the Earth) in sunlight at some times and in darkness at others, and what length of time it spends in each depends on latitude and where the Moon is in its orbit.
8. There is absolutely no mention that Mary Magdalene in the Bible was a prostitute (reformed or otherwise), nor that she was the same person as the unnamed woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke chapter 7, or the adulterer whom Jesus saved from being stoned in John chapter 8.
9. People don't "use only ten percent of their brain."  There's no way evolution would have favored the production of a huge, complex organ like the brain, and then we only ever get to use ten percent of it.  In fact, over the course of your life you use pretty much the whole thing, even if at any given time only a fraction of the neurons are firing.  If you could get your whole brain to fire at once, the result wouldn't be superpowers, it'd be a body-wide and probably fatal seizure.
10. Sharks can, in fact, get cancer.  The mistaken belief that they never do was popularized in a book by William Lane and Linda Comac with the creative title Sharks Don't Get Cancer, and was used as part of a campaign to sell shark cartilage capsules as a cure-all.
11. Speaking of fish, three South American fish with scary reputations are pretty close to harmless.  Piranhas rarely attack humans, and while they'll bite, there are no recorded incidents of people (or other large animals) being "skeletonized" by them, Vashta Nerada-style.  The strong-jawed pacu fish do not wait for male skinnydippers and bite off their testicles; that claim started as a joke when a biologist commented that the pacu has grinding teeth capable of chewing (tree) nuts.  Last, the infamous candiru catfish of the Amazon does not swim up people's urethras and get lodged there.  They parasitize other fish, hooking onto the gills, but (like most parasites) are very host-specific.  The likelihood of having a candiru go up your urethra, even if you were urinating while submerged in a stream where candiru live, is (according to American marine biologist Stephen Spotte) "about the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark."
12. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the eighteenth century, did not die while attempting to have sex with a horse.  Admittedly, she was apparently very fond of sex, but with people.  She died at age 67 of what was clearly a stroke.  The rumor started because of some attempts to discredit her (and Russians in general) published in Germany, and there's no truth to it whatsoever.
13. Cracking your knuckles doesn't cause arthritis.  Like any repetitive motion, it can cause inflammation if you do it compulsively, but done occasionally, it's completely harmless.
14. The word crap did not originate as back-formation from the name of nineteenth-century businessman Thomas Crapper, who improved the design of (but did not invent) the flush toilet.  Crap traces its origins to medieval Latin; and Crapper's name is actually an altered version of cropper, meaning farmer.
15. Somewhat along the same lines: fuck is not an acronym for either "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" or "Fornication Under Consent of the King."  The former is supposedly what was written above the heads of adulterers confined to the stocks; the latter, what was allegedly stamped on marriage documents, giving a couple the right to lawfully do the deed.  Neither is even close to true.  Nor does "fuck you" originate as a corruption of "pluck yew," supposedly an expression meaning to draw a longbow made of yew-wood.  And while we're at it, the middle finger as a sign of contempt has nothing to do with archery, either, despite the story that Welsh bowmen captured by the English supposedly had their index fingers cut off so they couldn't draw, but showed those Silly English Types-uh by drawing their bows using only their middle fingers.  In fact, "fuck" is a good old Indo-European root with a very long history (from the reconstructed word *peuk, meaning "to prick" or "to jab", and therefore a cognate to words like "poke," "point," "punch," and "pugnacious").  The middle finger has been used as a rude gesture at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, where it meant -- as it still does today -- "fuck you" or "stick it up your ass."

So there you have it.  Only a drop in the bucket, I'm quite sure -- as James Randi put it, the reason we need debunkers is because there's so much bunk out there.  But perhaps this cleared up a few things?

One can only hope.

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Non-trivial donuts

In the New Research That Sounds Crazy But Isn't department, we have: an inquiry into whether the universe is actually shaped like a donut.

[Image credit: J. Law, ESO]

The overall shape of spacetime is something that is nowhere near as obvious as it might seem to a layperson.  From the look of it, we seem to live in a completely Euclidean universe; perpendicular lines meet at a perfect ninety degree angle, parallel ones never intersect, and all of the other happy stuff you learned in high school geometry class.  But as mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Nikolai Lobachevsky showed, this isn't the only possibility.  The fabric of space could have an overall spherical shape, where there are no parallel lines (a 2-D example of a spherical geometry is the surface of the Earth).  On the other hand, in a hyperbolic space, given a line and a point not on that line, there is an infinite number of parallel lines passing through that point.  (It's harder to picture, for me at least, but a 2-D analog to a hyperbolic space is the surface of a saddle -- or a Pringle's potato chip.)

To our best measurements thus far, however, it looks like the simple solution -- that spacetime is flat and Euclidean -- is correct.  (That's on the largest scales; on small scales, anything with mass warps the geometry of spacetime.  However, it appears that those local divots and dimples are in a spacetime which is, overall, flat.)  

But according to a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, there might be other possibilities we haven't considered -- ones even more mindblowing than a spherical or hyperbolic universe.

Theoretical physicist Glenn Starkman, of Case Western Reserve University, has proposed that the universe's geometry might have a nontrivial topology.  Euclidean spaces -- and also spheres and saddles -- have what topologists call a trivial topology; the simplest way to think about this is to consider what happens if you draw a closed loop anywhere on one of those surfaces, and then make it shrink.  On a surface with a trivial topology, no matter where you draw it, you can continue to shrink the loop all the way down to a single point.  On one with nontrivial topology, there are at least some loops that you can't do that to without deforming the shape of the surface.

Consider, for example, a donut.  A loop that goes around the donut longitudinally (i.e. through the hole and back around again) can't be shrunk indefinitely; neither can one that runs all the way around the hole.  Shapes with a single hole all the way through are called genus one tori.  A donut is a genus one torus, as is a mug with a single handle.  (Giving rise to the old joke that topologists are so smart that at breakfast, they can't tell their coffee cups from their donuts.)

This may seem like nothing more than intellectual noodling about, but if the universe has a weird non-trivial topology, it could explain ongoing mysteries like the asymmetries (and unexpected symmetries) in the cosmic microwave background radiation.  One possibility is that the geometry of the universe is some kind of multiply-connected hypertorus -- a bit like a three-dimensional version of the old game PacMan, where if you exit the screen on one side, you reappear on the opposite side.  This would mean when you look out into space in one direction, your sight line comes back at you from the other direction.  This could potentially explain another long-standing and vexing problem in physics, the horizon problem -- which is the question of why space is so homogeneous, despite the fact that there are regions of space that, if space has a trivial topology, have been causally disconnected since the time of the Big Bang.  If when you peer one direction into the night sky, your visual line travels in a gigantic loop, the horizon problem kind of goes away; you're seeing the same stuff out at the edges of the universe no matter which way you look.

Of course, even that is not as complicated as it can get.  Starkman and his colleagues have proposed a total of seventeen different possible geometries that aren't ruled out by the observational evidence.  In some, the universe twists as it loops around, so that (using our PacMan analogy) when you exit the screen and reappear on the other side, you're now upside-down.  They are currently proposing looking for similar patterns in regions of space on opposite sides of the universe, but also have to consider that the pattern on one side may be inverted with respect to the other.

As you might imagine, doing this kind of comparison work is way beyond the scope of human analysts; it's going to require some heavy-duty computational firepower.  They're planning on turning over new survey data from the JWST and ESO to rapid machine-learning software for analysis, and we might actually have some preliminary answers by the end of the year.

If they get positive results, it'll be an incredible coup -- not only proposing a whole bunch of new physics, but simultaneously making inroads into solving the long-standing flatness and horizon problems.  I'm not holding my breath -- it's all too often these odd ideas fail the test of empirical evidence -- but wouldn't it be wonderful if it holds up?

I know I'd celebrate by eating a donut.

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The poisoned chalice

One of the most brilliant and startlingly original composers who ever lived was Ludwig van Beethoven.

He was capable of deep, stirring pathos, like the second movement of the Piano Sonata #8 ("Pathetique"), which I swear could make a stone cry.

Then there's the wild, joyous gallop of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony:

And if you haven't seen it, a must-watch is this Spanish flash mob performing the "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony.  When the voices come in, it makes me sob every damn time.

*brief pause to stop blubbering*

What blows me away about the Ninth Symphony -- beyond its staggering beauty -- is that when Beethoven wrote it, he was almost completely deaf.  The story goes that at the first performance, he conducted the orchestra -- and when it was over, the first violinist rose to gently turn around the great composer to see that the entire audience was on their feet, applauding wildly, many of them in tears.

Beethoven died in 1827 at the age of only 56 years, after decades of chronic ill health.  It's long been a question amongst music historians what ailment claimed his hearing, and finally his life; we know from his journals that he was plagued with stomach problems as well.  But was his hearing loss connected to his other health issues?

Apparently the answer is yes.  According to a study I was alerted to by my wonderful writer friend K. D. McCrite, a study that came out last week in the journal Clinical Chemistry indicates the likely cause of Beethoven's illness, deafness, and early death was lead poisoning.

The researchers analyzed two authenticated locks of Beethoven's hair that had been preserved in a museum, and found something astonishing -- the two samples contained 258 and 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair.

For reference, the average person has about four micrograms of lead per gram of hair.

While not absolutely conclusive -- the researchers are showing caution about making assumptions regarding possible sources of contamination -- this seems like pretty strong evidence.  Lead poisoning is known to cause stomach and intestinal problems and also neurological damage, so it could account both for his digestive issues and his hearing loss (as well as his early death).  As far as where the lead could have come from, the researchers speculate it might have been from his known fondness for wine.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, lead acetate was added as a sweetener and de-clouding agent to cheap wine; corks were often soaked in solutions of lead salts before being used to stopper bottles.  Additionally, pewter wine vessels were common in Germany during the nineteenth century -- and pewter contains lead.

Whatever the source of the lead, it seems like the great composer's illness, deafness, and untimely demise might finally have an explanation.  Sad that such a genius suffered so greatly, but you have to wonder how much his pain and grief inspired the heart-wrenching beauty of his music.  No one would wish that suffering on anyone, but if it had to happen, at least Beethoven was able to distill it into something that still strikes our souls to this day.

"This man created some of the most beautiful music humanity was able to produce," said Nader Rifai, of Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the study.  "It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created."

But how fortunate for us all that we still can do so, almost two hundred years after his death.

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Drowsing toward fascism

In John Neufeld's novel Sleep, Two, Three, Four!, the United States has become a fascist dictatorship, run by President Wagenson, who had at first been elected legitimately but then refused to step down at the end of his term.  A complicit Congress confirmed him as president-for-life, with the argument that rampant crime, lawlessness, and illegal immigration rendered it dangerous to switch administrations.  Wagenson and his cronies made sure that the justification never went away by engineering unrest, including raids on people's houses where anything, short of rape or murder, was permitted.

Keep people afraid, and you retain the support for those who claim to know how to fix it.

Along the way, fundamental rights were suspended one by one.  The press went first; news media fell under state control, so that the government had a stranglehold on what the public learned.  Any media outlets that objected (or refused to comply) were labeled as enemies of the people, and were closed down.  Other types of media had to have state approval as well; books, movies, and music that were "degenerate" were banned, their creators blacklisted or even sent to "re-education camps."  Schools were the next thing to be clamped down on -- students received approved curricula, history rewritten to sing the praises of the straight White Christian supporters of the president, and to denigrate (or ignore entirely) the contributions from other parts of society.  Immigrants, especially, were reviled, rounded up and sent back to their place of origin even if they'd immigrated legally.

Many simply "disappeared."

Dissenters were jailed, student protestors at colleges arrested and sent to detention centers, children removed from the homes of "unfit parents" (i.e. those who opposed the president).  But during the lead-up to all this, surprisingly few people had objected; no one seemed to believe where it all was headed, that a dictatorship could happen here in the United States.  Here's how the character of Raph explains it:

"[B]y that time, what was left [of the country] was pretty drowsy itself.  What was left could hardly keep awake long enough to do anything." 

"Exit and entry passes," Gar supplied.  "Special Forces Units, neighborhood guards, curfews, censorship."

"Right," Raph said.  "It's just like being put to sleep...  At some point, it's too late.  You're nearly there, and there's nothing you can do to keep yourself awake.  You just stop struggling, give up, and drift off."

"Marching to sleep," Gar said wonderingly.  "Left, right, left, right, hup two three four."

"There's one thing else, boy," Raph said.  "It couldn't have happened if the people hadn't let it happen.  When the Government asked them to give up something like freedom of the press, for instance, because of an emergency or some national security problem, why, people just good-naturedly gave it up.  They figured the Government must know what it was doing.  If the Government said it was okay, why, since it didn't seem to affect them any, it was okay by them, too...  Wagenson said, 'Let's build a wall to keep the bad people out.'  And people said, 'Well, we don't want bad people here, after all.  Sure, go ahead.'  And when Wagenson said, 'Listen, folks, you don't mind if we come in and search your homes and offices, just in case we find something illegal, because there's so much illegal around' -- why, the people just nodded and smiled and said, 'Sure, if you really think it's necessary, you must know what you're doing, go ahead.  As long as it doesn't seem to bother us none, why you just go right ahead.'  And when Wagenson said he couldn't control crime and violence and the students who were protesting unless he had special powers, like putting people away just because they looked suspicious or because once before maybe they'd fallen into trouble and might get into it again, why everyone nodded and said, 'Why not, if that's what'll get the job done?'"

The story centers around six teenagers who -- for varying reasons -- join a nascent resistance movement.  They are declared enemies of the state and forced to go on the run, pursued by pro-Wagenson armed units increasingly desperate to capture them, or to silence them in any way they can.

It's a gripping story, and surely by now you must be seeing all the dozens of parallels to the current situation in the United States.  But there's one thing I haven't told you.

Sleep, Two, Three, Four! was published in 1971.

John Neufeld was frighteningly prescient.  We have a multiply-indicted wannabe dictator running for president, who already once refused to accept having lost an election and who will certainly do so again if he loses this one.  One state after another are passing laws banning books, removing them not only from schools but from public library shelves, often for no other reason than featuring racially diverse or LGBTQ+ viewpoints, or casting the history of the United States in a light critical of the straight White Christian hegemony.  College protestors are being rounded up and jailed, some evicted from their dorm rooms indefinitely for participating in their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to assemble and state their views publicly.  And we have a party whose platform hinges on keeping people afraid, painting The Other as something fearful, whether it's immigrants, people of other religions or races, queer people, trans people, the disabled, atheists, freethinkers, or dissenters.

If Neufeld wrote his book today, it would be considered a heavy-handed and obvious parody of the people currently in elected office (or running for it).  As it stands, it's a fifty-year-old warning; a terrifying vision of where we could all too easily end up.

Let us hope that enough of us are not, in Raph's words, "too drowsy to do anything."  Oscar Wilde famously said, "Life imitates art more than art imitates life;" but I pray that in this case, the great man's words prove wrong.

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Faith of our fathers

One of the things we noticed on our tour of southern Europe -- not that it was any kind of surprise -- was the omnipresence of churches.

They often are built on hills, and overlook the landscape; many are beautiful, and a few -- like the Duomo in Florence -- are architectural wonders.

It's an interesting experience for a non-religious person like myself to walk into some of these buildings.  One of the first places we visited was the fifteenth-century Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli et dei Martiri in Rome, which is unprepossessing from the outside, but the inside is nothing short of stunning.

The churches of Europe are renowned for housing works of art, and one in the Basilica that struck me as beautiful (if somber) is The Head of St. John the Baptist by the modern Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj:

On the façade of the same church was another haunting sculpture:

This sort of painstaking artistry was evident in churches wherever we went.  There was the Church of St. Spiridion on the isle of Corfu:

And the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence:

But nowhere blew me away quite as much as the Church of La Sagrada Familia (the Holy Family) in Barcelona.  It was begun in 1882 by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who is a fine example illustrating the quote from Aristotle, "There never was a genius without a tincture of madness."  Gaudí knew it was such an extravagant plan that he'd never live to see it completed; in fact, it's still under construction today, and the locals call it "The church that will never be finished."  Like many of Gaudí's creations, from a distance the exterior looks like something out of Dr. Seuss:

Only when you get closer to you begin to see the intricate details of the sculptures in every recess:

All of this is suitably amazing... but then you step inside, and it takes your breath away.

Gaudí was a master of using light as part of his vision for the place, and the stained glass of La Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

According to the guide, Gaudí was intent not only on creating a monument to his religion, but creating a place that celebrated the natural world -- somewhere that all people, of every religion (or no religion at all) could wonder at and be uplifted by.

But still, I couldn't help remembering that places like this are built because of beliefs I don't share any longer.  In a very real way, I feel like an outsider when I enter these sacred spaces.  When I was a kid, growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, every Sunday we sang the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers:"

Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death.

As a child I sang those words with tremendous gusto, but it didn't really work out that way, did it?  I left the church at age 21 and after a period of searching, I kind of gave it all up and for the most part, never looked back.

But there's a part of me that still resonates to the desire embodied in places like La Sagrada Familia.  I don't think I'll ever go back to the beliefs I tried like mad to hold onto in my youth, but there's a mystery and grandeur in these buildings that plucks my heart like a guitar string.  It goes beyond just desiring the sense of community you find in a church; there's a part of me, perhaps, that craves ritual as a sign of belonging, that needs beautiful symbols to help explain this strange and often chaotic universe.

There's no doubt that religion has much to answer for.  Not just big ticket items like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Islamic jihadist movement(s), but suppression of dissent, institutionalized bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, homophobia, abuse of power, and simple self-righteousness.

But religion has also been the impetus for the creation of great beauty.  It's doubtful Gaudí would have envisioned a masterwork like La Sagrada Familia had he not been religious, and the same can be said of works like Michelangelo's Pietà and Bach's Mass in B Minor, to name only two of hundreds.  It's obvious I'm of divided mind on this topic, and it's beyond me to figure out how to square that circle and resolve the seeming paradox.  I rejected religion's fundamental claims forty years ago, yet its draw for me has never really gone away.

A long-ago friend once said about me that I was a failed mystic -- if I'd had the balls, I'd have been a monk.  The comment stuck with me all these years because it hits so close to the mark.  To paraphrase the poster on Fox Mulder's wall, I Wish I Could Believe.

But until that unlikely event occurs, I can still appreciate the profundity and depth of what the religious impulse has created.  And nowhere has that been realized more beautifully than in Gaudí's Church That Will Never Be Finished, in the city of Barcelona.

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The rain of fire

On the morning of October 24, 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic events in recorded history.

The nearby towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis had warnings.  There was a series of earthquakes during the lead-up to the eruption, which got a few people to leave the area -- everyone remembered that there'd been a powerful earthquake in February of 62 that had destroyed a number of buildings, and the skittish thought that something similar might be about to happen again -- but by and large, the residents just shrugged their shoulders.  Pliny the Younger, who wrote the only extant eyewitness account of the eruption (he was safely in Misenum, thirty kilometers away across the Bay of Naples, when it happened), said that the earthquakes that preceded the eruption "were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania," and thus the majority of people in the area ignored them and stayed home.

This turned out to be a mistake.

The morning of October 24 dawned clear and bright, but there was already a plume of steam coming from the summit of the mountain that loomed over the four cities.  This, too, was nothing unusual; it's doubtful many people even noticed.  But at around midday, there was a sudden jolt, and the entire peak exploded, sending a column of ash, rock, and superheated steam an estimated thirty kilometers high, blasting out material at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second.  Rocks and ash rained down on the cities, but worse was to come; by evening, the pressure forcing the column upward dropped suddenly and the entire column collapsed, causing a pyroclastic surge with an estimated temperature of six hundred degrees Celsius pouring downhill at about a hundred kilometers an hour.  Anything or anyone left that hadn't been killed by asphyxiation or roofs collapsing died instantly, and the ash flow blanketed the region.  The greatest quantity of ash landed in Herculaneum, which was buried under a layer twenty meters thick.

But all four cities were completely obliterated, to the point that within a hundred years, most people forgot that they'd ever existed.  References to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis, four prosperous towns that had been wiped out by the wrath of the gods, were considered fanciful legends -- a little like Plato's mention of the mythical land of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves.

Then, in 1709, a farmer was plowing his field, and the plow hit the edge of a buried wall.  It turned out to be a surviving piece of masonry from Herculaneum.  Something similar happened in Pompeii in 1748.  Archaeologists were called in, and gradually, the work started that is still ongoing -- clearing away meters-thick layers of welded ash to uncover what is left of the four cities.

Today it's a strange, somber place.  Wandering around its cobblestone streets, and looking at the snaggletoothed silhouette of Vesuvius in the distance -- the mountain lost almost half of its original height in the eruption -- was chilling despite the bright warmth of the sun.  We looked at remnants of homes, shops, temples, baths, the central forum, and even a brothel (each room decorated with highly explicit paintings of what services you could expect within).

We got to see some of the casts of the people who died during the eruption, their names long forgotten, their bodies entombed in fused hot ash, then burned and decayed away to leave a cavity that archaeologists filled with plaster to reveal their ghostly forms.

Many of the 1,044 molds of human victims were found with their hands over their faces, futilely trying to shield themselves from the choking, scalding ash.

Today, around three million people live in the shadow of Vesuvius, most of them in the city of Naples and the nearby towns of Pozzuoli, Bagnoli, San Giorgio a Cremano, and Portici.  Our guide said there were two reasons for this, and for the number of people living in other volcanic areas, such as Indonesia, Japan, Costa Rica, Cameroon, and Ecuador -- (1) volcanic soil is wonderfully fertile for agriculture, and (2) people have short memories.  But now that we have a better understanding of plate tectonics and geology, you have to wonder why people are willing to accept the risk.  A man we talked to in Rome had an explanation for that, too.  "Those people down in Naples," he said, shaking his head, "they're crazy."

Today Pompeii is seemingly at peace, its ruins as quiet as the cemetery it in fact is.  Flowers grow in profusion in every grassy spot.

But not far beneath the surface, the magma is still moving.  The processes that destroyed the region in the first century C.E. are haven't stopped, and the tranquil scene up above is very much an illusion.  After seeing the city, we hiked up to the summit of Vesuvius and looked down into the crater, the hole blasted out of the center of the mountain.

The whole thing was enough to make me feel very small and very powerless.  We flatter ourselves to think we can control the forces of nature, but in reality, we're still at their mercy -- no different from the residents of Pompeii on October 23, who knew the mountain was rumbling but figured there was nothing to worry about.  The rain of fire that was to come only twenty-four hours later was unstoppable.  Although now we can predict volcanic eruptions better than the first-century Romans, we still are at the mercy of a natural world that cares little for our lives.

But there's nothing wrong with being reminded of this periodically.  A bit of humility is good for the mind.

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