Interesting times

A few days ago, I started reading Michio Kaku's wonderful book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.  The book is fascinating, buoyed up by Kaku's ebullient writing style and endless optimism about our future, touching on the possibilities of artificial intelligence, planet-wide information systems with unfettered access for all, medical advances that could extend (healthy) life span to perhaps twice what it is now, and the ability to harness clean energy sources that are for all intents and purposes inexhaustible.  He suggests that our species, in a time that on the grand scale is a snap of the fingers, will be heading for the stars.

At the same time, here on Earth things are looking pretty awful, as if we'd finally succumbed to the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."  Only a few hours ago, we here in the United States had yet another senseless mass shooting, this time an attack on a center for the developmentally disabled in San Bernardino, California.  The attack left fourteen confirmed dead and an equal number injured; the suspects are, at the time of this writing, still at large, and their motives for attacking the center are unknown.  Just a few days ago, an ultrareligious right-winger killed three people and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.  Many have linked the attack to vitriolic rhetoric from so-called Pro-Lifers like Joshua Feuerstein, who has suggested that doctors who perform abortions deserve to be murdered.  We have one presidential candidate who has openly praised noted conspiracy theorist loon Alex Jones; another claimed yesterday that "the majority of violent criminals are Democrats."  Further afield, the UK Parliament has given the go-ahead for bombing Syria, ISIS has murdered a Russian captive in retaliation for air strikes against ISIS-held areas, our "allies" in Saudi Arabia are very likely in the next few days to behead Ali Al-Nimr, a protestor who was arrested when he was only 17, and in general the world just seems to be a fucked-up morass of misery, hatred, horror, and death.

I'm an optimistic guy, for the most part.  I have always been firmly convinced that most people, most of the time, are doing their level best to act morally and responsibly.  I've also been a strong believer in the idea that you don't have to agree with someone in order to get along with them.  I've had more than one cheerful pint of beer with a friend whose political views are (to say the least) opposite to mine.  I'm a staunch atheist, but have dear friends who are Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Wiccans. (I'm not leaving out Muslims deliberately; I just don't happen to be close pals with any.)

But in the current atmosphere, when the tenor of the news seems to be paralleling the diminishment of the light as we approach the winter solstice, it's hard to keep those ideals in mind.  It becomes increasingly easy to give in to despair, to decide that humanity isn't really worth saving, that any good we do is outweighed by the tremendous evils that we visit on each other for reasons of religion, race, belief, and sometimes for no reason at all.

Still, we do some beautiful things sometimes.  Billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged 99% of his share revenues to charities connected with personalized learning, curing diseases, connecting people and community building.  The Planned Parenthood clinic that was attacked has been the focus of two separate fundraising drives, one through GoFundMe and the other through YouCaring.

But I keep coming back to the heartache of why we, here in the 21st century, are still having to face people being murdered for wanting control of their own bodies, for wanting to be able to speak freely and criticize their governments, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It's so far from Kaku's idyllic space-age wonderland that I find myself wondering if the human race will survive long enough to meet even one of his high-flown predictions.

I think the solution lies with the like-minded sticking together, and telling each other that there are still good people in the world, that we will make it through these dark times.  That the days will lengthen, winter will warm into spring, and (perhaps even!) the news will one day be dominated by positive stories.  We have to remain optimistic; if we don't, if the good people of the world give up and succumb to despair, then the evil really will have won.

[image courtesy of NASA]

I will leave you with a poem that I first discovered when I was 13 years old.  I still can't read it without choking up; not too long ago I tried to read it out loud to my son when he was going through a rough patch, and we both ended up bawling.  I think it's more relevant now than when it was written by Max Ehrmann, almost a hundred years ago.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings;
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

I was a stranger, and you took me in

In troubled times, people forget that one of our core values is compassion.

Despite what you might have heard, it's not unique to Western society, nor to Christianity.  Christianity has its version, yes, but it shows up over and over, in every culture, every religion:

• From the Gospel According to Matthew: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
• From Confucius's Doctrine of the Mean:  Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?'  Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity.  Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
• From Islam's Forty Hadiths:  None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
• From Shayast-Na-Shayast, one of the holy books of Zoroastrianism:  Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.
• From the Tao te Ching: To those who are good to me, I am good; to those who are not good to me, I am also good. Thus I act rightly, and all receive good.
• From the Talmud: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.  This is the law: all the rest is commentary.
• From the Mahabharata: This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you.

You will notice that nowhere does it say, "This above all: make sure that you keep your own ass safe, warm, and well-fed, and to hell with everyone else, especially if they don't look like you."

A child in a Syrian refugee camp [image courtesy of photographer Mstyslav Chernov and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's why I find myself reluctant to go on social media in the last few days.  The posture that I see taken by some people I consider friends, and by many of our elected leaders, is so profoundly repulsive that I leave every single time feeling nauseated.  Contrast the above lines with some of the things I've seen posted lately:

• Taking in Syrian refugees is welcoming terrorist attacks into the heartland of the USA.
• Any government leader who lets these people into our country is guilty of treason.  Send the fucking politicians to Syria, along with the refugees!
• We put French flags all over Facebook, then turn around and invite the terrorists in.  I don't know what the hell is wrong with this country.
• Until every homeless veteran and hungry child is housed and fed, we should not allow one Syrian refugee into the US.  Not ONE.

I think it's this last one that makes me the most angry, because the person who posted this is a staunch Republican, and has more than once screamed bloody murder about the "welfare state" and "government giveaways," and supports a party that has in the past five years been responsible for killing five separate bills that would have provided aid to veterans.  What's the logic?  "We need to help veterans, before we help anyone else!  So let's not help anyone!"

So we sit here, smug in our comfortable houses and eating three meals a day, and turn away thousands of people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  People who are fleeing ISIS, the extremist sect we ourselves are fighting against.  People who have nowhere to go home to.

These are not terrorists.  These are the victims of terrorists.

Governor Chris Christie said that he wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into New Jersey, "not even orphans under the age of five."  Apparently his conservative family values include the idea that a human being's rights begin at conception and end at birth.

And if you're not swayed by compassion, there's a purely pragmatic reason to take in the refugees.  The way to combat extremism is to put a human face on the target.  The terrorists who are responsible for the Paris and Beirut attacks and other atrocities have their followers brainwashed to think of their victims as evil, barely human, deserving of death.  It's far harder for that message to sell if those same people welcomed you into their homes, fed you and clothed you when you had nothing.  If we send these people back, the ones who are lucky enough to survive the ordeal will have every reason to hate us.

Our actions might just as well be a recruitment drive for ISIS.

Some of you might be saying, "But it's not safe!"   No, it's not.  It's possible that there might be ISIS members embedded in the ranks of the refugees.  Welcoming in the refugees might result in danger to ourselves; it certainly would result in inconvenience, difficulty, hard work.  But wherever did you come up with the idea that the prime goal of life is to be safe?  We just celebrated a federal holiday -- Veteran's Day -- wherein we laud the people who put themselves in harm's way to help others.  I would think that the hypocrisy of following that up with an outcry against putting ourselves in harm's way to help others would be obvious, but apparently it isn't.

And speaking of holidays, we've got two others coming up, remember?  One celebrates a legend in which the natives of a land welcomed settlers in and fed them, even though they looked different, had a different language, and practiced a different religion.  The other is about an event in which a poor Middle Eastern couple was turned away from shelter over and over again, until the woman was forced to give birth in a stable for animals.

Even the parallels there seem to escape people.

We have an opportunity.  We can give into fear, nationalism, and hatred, or we can show the world that the values we brag about and claim are so powerful actually mean something, and are not just a lot of empty, self-congratulatory talk.

It's been a temptation to unfriend or unfollow the people I'm connected to who post repugnant things. If I haven't, it's because that tendency turns social media into even more of an echo chamber, where we're surrounded only by people who shout the same empty slogans as we do, and never are challenged to think differently.  So as much as I would like to disconnect myself from the fear and rage talk I'm seeing, I won't do that.  

If I can get one person to reconsider the duty of compassion that comes along with the privileges we enjoy, it will be worth it.

Paris attacks redux

There's a fundamental rule I follow: if I make a statement, and people I trust take exception to it, I try to listen.

That happened today.  My earlier post (which I will take down as soon as this is posted) resulted in so many people whose opinions I respect taking exception that I have spent most of the day re-analyzing my thoughts regarding the terrorist attacks on Paris, who is responsible, and what our attitude should be toward Islam, ISIS, and the Middle East.

First:  I was beyond angry this morning.  I don't get that way often.  This is not meant as an excuse, merely a statement of fact.  In the grip of high emotion, it's all too easy to let yourself be carried away, to let logic, rationality, and compassion be swept off in a red haze of rage against people who could perpetrate such acts.

But on reading what people have written, both as comments on my blog, on Facebook, and in personal emails, here are a few things I have gleaned.

1. Blaming an ideology for the actions of a few is lazy thinking to the point where it is indistinguishable from being wrong.  No adherent to a religion, or any other belief system, follows it 100%.  If there are immoral commands in the ideology, and a person follows them, it is the person who is making the immoral choice, and theirs is the responsibility.
2. The situation in the Middle East is far too complex to place root causes for ISIS (or anything else) on one thing.  I should know better; I teach the Single-Cause Fallacy in my Critical Thinking classes.  The Middle East wouldn't be the miasma of poverty and oppression it currently is if it weren't for multiple causes -- not only fundamentalist Islam, but western colonialism, greed for oil, greed on the parts of the rich people in the Middle East itself who are desperate to quell dissent and stay in power (yes, I'm referring to the Saudi royal family here).  To lay it all at the feet of Islam is simplistic.  Once again, i.e., wrong.
3. It is probably impossible to do what I set out to do -- to tease apart the belief system from its adherents.  In leveling blame against Islam, I was coming dangerously close to aiming blame at all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, law-abiding and lawless alike.  I object like hell when someone does that sort of thing to me -- "all liberals believe X, aren't they stupid?" -- and here I was doing it myself.  What's the biblical quote about casting the beam out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from someone else's?
4. Shutting down the rights of Muslims who are already peaceful residents (and/or citizens) of the United States, or any other secular democracy, is the road to becoming the same kind of oppressive dictatorship we rail against.  
5. I really shouldn't write blog posts when I'm furious.

I'm left with questions.  How do we stop the transmission of the ideology of hatred?  How can we eradicate such blind, senseless violence from the world, without becoming blindly violent ourselves? How can we criticize beliefs and ideas without it sliding into denying the freedom of speech and religious observance to the believers?

I wish I knew the answers.  Hell, if I did, I'd run for president.

In any case: thank you to all who took the time to respond thoughtfully, even those who were angered by what I said.  To be a true skeptic means to be willing to admit when you're wrong -- or at least, when you have cause for serious uncertainty.  And about the Paris attacks, at the moment I have no answers, just a deep sense of grief that such things could happen in the world.

Moral sleight of hand

Magicians excel at misdirection and sleight of hand.  They can seemingly do the impossible, when in fact their shtick is simply a combination of manual dexterity and the ability to get you to look somewhere else besides the place where the actual trickery is happening.  No criticism intended; to be an excellent magician takes years of practice.  But the whole thing boils down to drawing your attention away from where you should be looking.

There are a lot of religious leaders who excel at the same thing.

We're seeing it in bucket loads at the moment, due to the Ashley Madison hack, wherein a site dedicated to finding married people partners to cheat with was broken into, and thousands of names and addresses made public.  The ones who hit the news were, of course, the public figures, but the hypocrisy factor made the religious ones stand out even more.  To no one's particular surprise, alleged pedophile and general lowlife Josh Duggar had an Ashley Madison account, and he and his family are now scrambling to do damage control despite his having a reputation by this point that is probably past salvaging.  

But no sidestepping was quite as comical as the dance done by British Islamist leader Hamza Tzortzis, whose name was also released in the leak.  Confronted by his having a paid subscription to the infidelity site despite his constantly preaching about the evils of sexual immorality, Tzortzis had what may be the weakest defense I've ever seen.

Tzortzis was lambasted by a follower on his Facebook page who wrote, "So Hamza, you are claiming that some guy knew all of your private information and wanted to screw with you so he created a fake account on Ashley Madison.  This guy then paid hundreds of dollars to maintain the account for 9 months.  This account was then used to make transactions at locations where you were also present at the time.  Then the ultimate plan was to hack the Ashley Madison database and release 40 million users so you could be exposed.  Am I getting this right?"

And Tzortzis replied, in toto, "You’re an idiot. Read the post before you write.  The amount was 15 pounds a month, not hundreds."

So okay, maybe not all of 'em are skilled at misdirection.

But not all of the sleight of hand has to do with infidelity.  Recently Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Diyanet (the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs), called on Islamic religious authorities throughout the Middle East to unite to fight ISIS.

Such a move, of course, would be deeply controversial in a region where sect loyalty and arguments about the interpretation of religious texts routinely lead to violence.  So in response to Görmez's statement, Bilal Yorulmaz, professor of religion at Marmara University, said that what the Islamic world really needs to be worried about is...

... the Jedi.

"Jediism … is spreading today in Christian societies," Yorulmaz said.  "Around 70,000 people in Australia and 390,000 people in England currently define themselves as Jedis."

He then went on to describe how Hollywood is the real problem, presumably because the movie industry so frequently blows up priceless archeological sites and beheads researchers who are trying to protect them.

Okay, I know confronting your personal failings isn't easy, and it must be even more devastating to own up to the evils committed in the name of your deeply-held ideology.  But setting up straw men as a way of deflecting blame only makes your own culpability in things that much clearer.

You have to wonder, however, how long people will go on defending a position that is, at its basis, indefensible.  Are they hoping that sooner or later, the short attention span of their followers will kick in, and all will be forgiven and/or forgotten?  Hell, it worked for Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard --  both of whom were caught in ongoing infidelity despite their continual harping on sexual purity.  Haggard, in fact, was not only caught cheating, but caught cheating with a male prostitute.  And both are now back to preaching the gospel to standing-room-only crowds, and making money hand over fist doing it.

Funny what time and pious misdirection can do.

I've always felt that honesty and integrity were about the most important character traits out there, so the whole thing is pretty repulsive.  To be able to stand up in front of a crowd and make utterances that are deliberately designed to steer people away from your own failings, indiscretions, and immorality is as dishonest as simply lying about it.

The sad thing is that for some reason, it works.  Just like with stage magic, people get fooled, again and again.  But far from entertaining, this sleight of hand just leaves me feeling a little sick.

The demolition of Palmyra

Something that conquerors have understood throughout history is that if you want to destroy a culture, you don't have to kill all of its people; all you need to do is to destroy its languages and its artifacts.  Time and the limitations of human memory will do the rest.

When the Spanish conquered Peru in the 16th century, they did exactly that.  Kill the leaders; wipe out the traces of the existing culture; mandate the use of Spanish and the conversion of the natives to Christianity.  By the time the last Inca king, Túpac Amaru, was beheaded by Francisco de Toledo's men in Cuzco, the downfall of the culture was already a done deal.  There are still traces left -- the Spanish never were able to completely eradicate the Quechua language, for example, and there are still about nine million speakers today, mostly in Peru and Bolivia.  But their actions broke the back of the rich culture that had existed, and the destruction of priceless artifacts -- such as almost all of the quipus, or "talking knots," a computational or archival system that no one now can decipher -- was so thorough we really know relatively little about the day-to-day life of the people who lived there only five hundred years ago.

So it goes.  The suppression of the Bretons by the French, the Basques by the Spanish, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots by the English, and damn near all the minority groups in mainland eastern Asia by the Han Chinese, have all been followed by eradication of native languages and artifacts, and the subsequent cultural amnesia that follows.

I find the whole thing horribly tragic.  Our cultural history is what makes us who we are; language and symbol define us as a people.  And conquerors understand that.  To bring a people to its knees, you destroy those pieces of the culture that are most representative of the conquered group, then let time do away with the rest.

Which brings me to ISIS.

As the members of the "Islamic State" sweep across the Middle East, they are doing precisely what the Spanish conquistadores did; they are killing the leaders and destroying the culture.  And now, they have taken the Syrian city of Palmyra -- a treasure-house of ancient relics, some dating back to the second century B.C.E., declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1958 -- and are systematically destroying its artifacts.

The Roman-era Grand Colonnade of Palmyra [image courtesy of photographer Jerzy Strzelecki and the Wikimedia Commons]

They have already publicly demolished statues and temples, declaring such things "unholy." The razing of the land has not spared pieces just because they're unique, beautiful or irreplaceable.  In fact, they seem to be targeting these relics first.  For example, they announced this week that they have shattered the "Allat Statue," which was a huge and nearly intact statue of a Roman-era god, shown with a lion and a deer between his feet.

"ISIS terrorists have destroyed one of the most important unearthed statues in Syria in terms of quality and weight," Ma'moun Abdul-Karim, Syrian Director of Museums and Anquities, said.  "It was discovered in 1977 and dates back to the second century A.D."

While these acts have been characterized as the wanton acts of ignorant savages, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, got it right.  "Violent extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage," she said.  "They target systematically monuments and sites to strike societies at their core."

I know that the loss of things, however beautiful, cannot be compared to the loss of human life.  The depredations that the vicious evil of ISIS is visiting on the people they conquer -- the beheadings, rapes, beatings, and selling of women and children into slavery -- outweigh the destruction of stone and ceramic relics.  But still, just reading about the destruction of Palmyra, and before it the destruction of priceless artifacts in every city ISIS has sacked, makes my heart ache.

And the worst part is that it's not over.  ISIS is still pulling in new recruits, making headway, taking over village after village.  Here we sit, in the 21st century, watching a group of people who take their directives from a book written in the 7th century sweep across the Middle East, and we are largely powerless to stop it.  We are watching a huge geographical area that has, in less than a decade, been been plunged back into the Dark Ages by the adherents of a violent and disgusting interpretation of a medieval religious text.

I'm no expert in geopolitics.  I have no idea what, if anything, the West should do to intervene, to try to stem this tide of religious extremism.  All I can do is sit here, helpless, as irreplaceable archeological history that had survived for two thousand years is demolished.

And hope against hope that reason and sanity will eventually prevail against the horrible ideology of conquest and destruction that these people represent.

Naked tectonics

Sometimes I think I don't understand my fellow humans very well.

I try my hardest -- in fact, you might think of this blog as a five-year experiment in parsing how people think.  And sometimes, I think I've got it, that I have Homo sapiens pretty much figured out,

But then, something will happen, and I'm back to wondering if I might not be some kind of changeling.  Because a lot of the stuff people do is just flat-out weird.

Let's start with an incident that happened on May 30 in the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Some tourists, who appear to have been from Canada and various European countries, had climbed with a guide to the top of Mount Kinabalu.  And once they got to the top, they decided to take off all their clothes for a naked group-shot.

Now, so far, I have nothing particular to criticize here.  When the weather gets hot, I tend to wear the legally-prescribed minimum amount of clothing, and back in my reckless 20s I would have been an odds-on contender for the Olympic Co-ed Skinnydipping Team.  That said, it bears reminding that we're talking Malaysia here, a country known for its conservative attitudes toward showing skin.  When I was in Malaysia two summers ago, I noticed some scantily-clad tourists in Taman Negara National Park getting the stink-eye from the locals, so I decided to keep my shirt on -- despite the fact that it was 95 F and so humid that you could just about drink the air.  I probably would have gotten away with it, but I figured that I had no special need to offend local custom, so I did what the natives did and kept all my clothes on.

But Mount Kinabalu is remote, and the only ones up there at the time were the guides and the tourists, so the ten tourists stripped down to the skin.  One of the guides objected, and he was told to "go to hell."

That would have been that, except for the fact that five days later there was an earthquake near Mount Kinabalu that killed eleven people.  And you guessed it -- a local government official has said that the earthquake was due to the naked tourists having offended the mountain.

The Deputy Chief Minister of Sabah, Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, said, "To me, when something like this happens, it is a clear connection of the incident to the earthquake that has brought about so much damage and loss of lives...  There is almost certainly a connection.  We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected...  It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly."

Right.  Because earthquakes have nothing to do with plate tectonics, or anything.  They are caused by naked people.  Which makes you wonder how the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America, the Anchorage earthquake of March 1964, happened, because I find it highly unlikely that there were many naked people outside in Alaska in March.  

But anyway, Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan said he vowed to have the tourists brought to justice, and was trying to find ways to prevent them from leaving Sabah.  And to further illustrate how serious he was, he mentioned that he'd known something bad was going to happen that day, because he and his wife saw a flock of swallows that morning.  

"At first I didn’t think anything of it, but after it went on for more than half an hour I knew something was not well," Kitingan said.  "I brought it up with my wife and we both agreed that something bad was going to happen."

So we have the beginnings of a scientific formula here, something like "swallows + naked people = bad."

But the story's not over yet.  Because in another weird filigree, one of the tourists, Canadian Emil Kaminski, decided to post one of the photos on his Facebook page.  Here's a screengrab, with the naughty bits blurred out in case (1) Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan reads this blog, or (2) the upstate New York hill gods are considering having an earthquake, or (3) there are any suspicious-looking flocks of swallows near my house:

Kaminski added, "It is not based in logic, but superstition.  I utterly do not care for superstition.  If local religion prohibits certain actions, then local believers of that religion should not engage in it, but they cannot expect everyone to obey their archaic and idiotic rules."

When someone responded that Kaminski and the others should respect local culture, he responded, "Fuck your culture."

Which is an attitude I can't really get behind.  I mean, I like being naked as much as the next guy, but if you go to another country, deliberately setting out to give offense seems like bad policy. 

On the other hand, I have to agree with Kaminski that the Deputy Chief Minister's statement is patently ridiculous.  When I read what Kitingan had to say, I said, "What century are we in, again?"  But then I remembered what Glenn Beck said last week -- that the torrential downpours in Texas were due to Governor Rick Perry's request that the devout pray that god end the devastating drought that the state had been suffering through.  And really, how is that any more sensible than what Kitingan said?

If the Texas storms were god's will, though, you have to wonder what kind of twisted sense of humor the guy has.  Because the rains and subsequent flooding have caused millions of dollars in damage, and killed at least 23 people.  "You want the drought to end?" god seems to have said, grinning in a nasty sort of way.  "I'll end your drought for you."

Be that as it may, I don't see the difference between Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan's claim that a bunch of tourists taking off their clothes on a mountain top caused an earthquake, and Glenn Beck's claim that a bunch of people praying caused a catastrophic flood.  What's next?  Major world figures deciding that thunder is caused by Zeus and Hera having a bowling tournament?

Oh, and in unrelated developments: senior Islamic clerics working with ISIS in Syria and Iraq have outlawed pigeon breeding as a hobby because "the sight of the birds' genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam."  Violators of the ban will be fined and publicly flogged.

All of which returns me to my initial point, which is that I don't really understand people at all.  Because if the members of my species really think it's logical to think that naked people cause earthquakes, and naked birds are offensive, then I'm back to wondering if I might be some sort of changeling.

The fire of the mind

In Umberto Eco's masterful medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, we meet a villain who is willing to kill, over and over, to stop his fellow monks...

... from reading a book.

The following is a spoiler, so you can skip the next few paragraphs (scroll down to where it says [end spoiler alert]) if you haven't read Eco's novel.  Which I hope you all will, because it's brilliant.  But the punchline makes a point that needs to be made now, seven centuries after the time in which the novel is set, as strongly as it did then.

Europe of the early 14th century was a grim place, and life was, in Thomas Hobbes's words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Religion had an iron grip over people's lives, and the learned men of the time taught that the fear of god was paramount.  This fear was translated downwards into fear of the "hierarchy of heaven," as represented here on Earth by the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, and the monastic system.  And within that system, questioning and freedom of thought was considered heresy, punishable by death.

In this system we find two opposing characters: the brilliant and curious scholar Brother William of Baskerville, and the stern and unyielding Brother Jorge of Burgos.  William is called in to solve a series of murders that have occurred in an unnamed abbey in the mountains of Italy.  The murders revolve around the abbey's magnificent library, the secrets of which are only accessible to the librarian and his assistants.  And one by one, the monks connected with the library are being picked off by someone who is bound and determined to keep some of its knowledge out of the hands of the monks (or anyone else).

The knowledge in question turns out to be a book by Aristotle that was thought lost; the second volume of his Poetics, in which he describes the proper use of comedy, and argues that laughter is freeing, proper, and purifying for the soul.  When Brother William solves the mystery, and discovers that Brother Jorge is behind the murders and has hidden the book, he confronts the old man, and asks him why it was so important to keep such a seemingly innocent volume out of people's hands.  Brother Jorge responds:

(L)aughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh... (H)ere, the function of laughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned are opened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy, and of perfidious theology...  You saw yesterday how the simple can conceive and carry out the most lurid heresies, disavowing the laws of God and the laws of nature.  But the church can deal with the heresy of the simple, who condemn themselves on their own, destroyed by their own ignorance...  Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable.  But this book could teach that freeing oneself from the fear of the Devil is wisdom.  When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he had overturned his position with respect to his lord; but this book could teach learned men the clever, and from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimize the reversal.  

To Brother Jorge, it is worth killing, and dying, for his desperate necessity to keep others from knowing the justification of laughter, mirth, and irreverence.  And in the end, he destroys the book and burns down the library to keep that knowledge from the world.

[end spoiler alert]

Which brings us to what has happened in the Middle East in the last few days.

The depredations of ISIS have been all over the news lately, but none have seemed more bizarre and pointless to the western world as two that have occurred recently.  The Islamic State's arm in Libya four days ago burned a pile of musical instruments, saying that such things are "un-Islamic."  Then, just two days ago, ISIS members in Iraq burned the hundred-year-old library in the city of Mosul, destroying 8,000 rare books that were a treasure-trove of cultural information and history.  "900 years ago, the books of the Arab philosopher Averroes were collected before his eyes...and burned," wrote activist and blogger Rayan al-Hadidi.  "One of his students started crying while witnessing the burning.  Averroes told him... the ideas have wings...but I cry today over our situation."

[image courtesy of photographer Alan Levine and the Wikimedia Commons]

Why, in a situation where ISIS members are fighting daily to maintain ground and to keep control of the people they've conquered, would they stop what they're doing to burn musical instruments and ancient manuscripts?  It seems pointless.  Wouldn't they have better things to do with their time and energy?

No.  What ISIS is doing has its own pervasive, evil logic.

It has to do with exactly the same thing that Venerable Jorge hated the idea of: reading, laughter, and music free people from fear.  If you are going to control people, you must control their thoughts.  The first thing you do, therefore, is to destroy any opportunity for them to experience something outside of that control.

Music lifts our emotions into heights that cannot be measured.  When we read, our spirits are free to think any thought, put ourselves in other people's minds, other places, other times.  Dancing does the same thing, which probably explains why Saudi Arabia's "morality police" arrested some young men four days ago for dancing at a birthday party.

Can't have people experiencing anything outside of the narrowly prescribed range of thoughts, feelings, and actions.  If people go outside that range, anything could happen.  And would.

And then, the sword-bearing horrors who are now running much of the Middle East would not be in control any more.  People would learn that there's more to life than fear and obedience, more than living in terror of a grim, humorless cadre of thugs who are so afraid themselves of intellectual and emotional freedom that they will stop at nothing to prevent it from spreading to others.

I live in hope that in our world of interconnectedness and free flow of information via the internet, such control cannot be maintained for long.  We have seen the difficulty the Saudis are having in keeping the holes in the dam from leaking; bloggers and activists who openly criticize the regime are growing in numbers.  Some, such as Raif Badawi, have paid a horrible price for exercising that freedom.

But the truth that ISIS doesn't want their victims to realize is that the spirit of free thought burns hotter than the flames of destruction.  Even if you set fire to books and musical instruments, you can't really control thoughts, even through threats and terror.  The human mind is stronger and more resilient than that.  So even though I weep for the treasures that were lost in the burning of the Mosul Library, I remain optimistic that the desperate and amoral men of ISIS will one day be trod underfoot and forgotten to all but historians, just as their brothers-in-spirit -- the Inquisition of the 14th century -- have been.

Crusader mentality

When I hear people make ridiculous and deliberately inflammatory statements, sometimes I have to resist the temptation to grab them by the shoulders and yell, "Will you listen to what you're saying?"

Not, of course, that it would be likely to do any good.  Although it may sound cynical, I think a lot of these people aren't reacting thoughtlessly and out of anger, which although it may not excuse rage-filled diatribes, certainly would make them understandable.  I think that a lot of these folks are saying and writing these things in a cold, calculated fashion, in order to make others angry, so as to incite their followers toward some political end.

Take, for example, the piece that ran yesterday in Top Right News, entitled "OUTRAGE: Obama Equates Christianity with ISIS at Prayer Breakfast."  Now, before we get to the commentary, let's see what the president said that got these people so stirred up:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place.  Remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  And our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often were justified in the name of Christ.

Harmless enough statement, you'd think.  "Don't use your religion to justify atrocities; it's been done before.  It was wrong then when they did it, and it's wrong now when ISIS does it."  Hard to see how anyone would argue with that.

But Obama made two mistakes: (1) he mentioned Christians, and (2) he's Obama.  So naturally, the backlash was instantaneous and vitriolic.  Here's a bit of the response from Top Right News:

Muslims began the slave trade in Africa — and still enslave people today.  ISIS is enslaving Yazidi Christians in Iraq and Syria.  Slavery ended here in 1865, and it was a devout Christian, William Wilberforce who began the abolitionist movement that ended slavery in the UK and US.

So, what you're saying is, the evil Muslims forced the Americans own slaves?  The nice Christian Americans struggled against it, only keeping slaves because they had no choice (and probably treating them as members of the family the whole time)?  Until finally good ol' Wilberforce threw off that evil Islamic menace and got Lincoln to free the slaves?

How ignorant of history are you? To take only one example, read what was written by James Henry Thornwell, the leader of the South Carolina Presbyterian Churches, in 1861:

Is slavery, then, a sin?...  Now, we venture to assert that if men had drawn their conclusions upon this subject only from the Bible, it would no more have entered into any human head to denounce slavery as a sin than to denounce monarchy, aristocracy, or poverty.  The truth is, men have listened to what they falsely considered as primitive intuitions, or as necessary deductions from primitive cognitions, and then have gone to the Bible to confirm their crotchets of their vain philosophy.  They have gone there determined to find a particular result, and the consequence is that they leave with having made, instead of having interpreted, Scripture.  Slavery is no new thing.  It has not only existed for aged in the world but it has existed, under every dispensation of the covenant of grace, in the Church of God.

Slavery is condoned over and over in the bible -- even going so far as to say that slaves should obey their masters "in fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5).

But Top Right News isn't done yet; they claim that the Crusades were also the fault of the Muslims, that "the Crusades were a direct response to Islamic jihad," with the clear implication that the Crusaders were pure of heart and soul, only doing what was right to "free the Holy Land" from the Muslims.

Funny thing, then, that the Crusaders spent a good bit of time on the way to Jerusalem hacking at Christians who were less than orthodox, and also the Jews, who seemed to have a way of getting the short end of the stick from everyone.  Godfrey de Bouillon, one of the exemplars of the Crusader mentality, famously vowed that he "would not set out for the Crusade until he had avenged the crucifixion by spilling the blood of the Jews, declaring that he could not tolerate that even one man calling himself a Jew should continue to live."  All through what is now Germany the Crusaders slaughtered every heretic and Jew they could find, sometimes with the complicity of local bishops, and sometimes against their orders (the bishops of Cologne and Mainz paid de Bouillon 500 pieces of silver to persuade him to leave their towns alone, which de Bouillon did).

Murder of Jews during the First Crusade, from Bible Moralisée [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Look, I'm not saying that the Muslim caliphate that was ruling Jerusalem at the time was a bunch of nice guys.  But the Crusaders were, by and large, narrow-minded, violent, hyper-pious, obsessive, bigoted assholes.  Painting the Crusades as a justified "response to Islamic jihad" is idiotic.

Of course, the uncredited writer for Top Right News who wrote the piece about Obama's speech probably doesn't care about silly little things like "facts."  All (s)he cares about is turning the Rage Parade against Obama by whatever means necessary.  And as we've seen more than once, this is manifesting as a manufactured and imaginary persecution of Christians in the United States, despite the fact that 3/4 of Americans are self-professed Christians (including the president!), and Christians enjoy an unchallenged hegemony in every political office in the land.

The whole issue here really boils down to "not lying."  Whatever you believe politically, you gain nothing by (1) twisting the words of your opponent to mean something that they obviously didn't mean, and (2) inventing history to support your contention.  It may inflame your supporters, but to the rest of us, it looks more like you have no justification for your stance other than screed, ad hominem, and outright falsehoods.

James Foley, and the moral bankruptcy of the conspiracy theorists

Every time I think the conspiracy theorists can sink no lower, they outdo themselves.

Not that it's easy.  These are the people who think that everything from the Sandy Hook massacre to the Boston Marathon bombing were "false flags" to distract us from what the Evil Government is doing, or else outright hoaxes staged by "crisis actors."  They've dogged the footsteps of bereaved parents who have lost children to school shooters, desperate to prove that their child never existed, thereby ranking even lower on the Great Chain of Being than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who fall somewhere below slime molds themselves).  They spread their fear messages amongst the gullible, turning jet contrails into toxic "chemtrails," fluoridation of water into a campaign by the government to convert us all into mindless drones, and vaccination programs into a plan by "Big Pharma" to give our children autism, ALS, and lord alone knows what else.

And now they have latched onto the brutal beheading of James Foley by the butchers of ISIS as the latest target of their poisonous nonsense.

The flag of jihad [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

We have the conversation over at the r/conspiracy subreddit claiming that ISIS is an arm of the CIA.  Worse still, from the site Epoch Times comes a claim that the execution video itself is a fake, and that the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually an Israeli Jew named Elliott Shimon who is on the payroll of Mossad.  Other claims are floating around various social media, suggesting that Obama operatives staged the execution (or possibly carried it out for real) to distract us from the riots in Ferguson or the illegal alien crisis or the ongoing non-scandal surrounding Benghazi.

(And just for the record: though I provided links to the r/conspiracy thread and the Epoch Times article, I am actively recommending that you don't click them, unless you really enjoy experiencing outrage at near-aneurysm levels.)

But to the people promoting these ridiculous claims, I have only the following to say:

Have you no shame at all?

A man died, for fuck's sake, slaughtered in the desert with less dignity than we accord cattle in an abattoir.  His executioner's blank eyes are the face of true human evil, and the cause he belongs to is representative of the worst human nature can do.  I am by nature and philosophy a pacifist, but reading about Foley's horrifying last moments (I refuse to watch the video, and so should you) makes me roundly in favor of tactical strikes to wipe every last member of ISIS off the face of the earth.  These subhumans deserve no better.

And you dare to bend this story to fit your twisted little view of humanity?  You have only proven your own moral bankruptcy, if there was any doubt of that left.  Your lies are nearly as sickening as the brutal jihadist message of ISIS itself, because you, like they, have no apparent regard for the life and dignity of a human being who (by all accounts) was a kind, courageous, intelligent man whose death should be mourned in peace by his family and friends, not used as a means for bolstering a warped worldview.

It shouldn't surprise me by now.  You people are willing to lie about damn near everything else, why wouldn't I expect you to lie about this?

But it always does, somehow.  I always think, "This, at least, is beneath even the conspiracy theorists."

And I'm always wrong.