Today's sermon: justifying genocide

I find it simultaneously amazing and appalling the lengths to which fundamentalist Christians will go to defend the bible.  And I’m not even talking here about my usual subject for ranting, the astonishing, evidence-defying circular reasoning that it takes to accept the creation myth over the theory of evolution.

I’m thinking about other parts of the bible, the exhortations to violence by “the god of love” – from execution by stoning for minor offenses (such as collecting firewood on the sabbath), to treatment of women (if a woman was raped, and would not marry the man who had violated her, she was stoned to death), up to and including genocide (as only one of many examples, consider the lovely passage from 1 Samuel 15:3 which reads, "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them.  But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.").

Then there’s Psalm 137, which includes the charming lines, "O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed, happy the one who repays you as you have served us!  Happy the one who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock!"

Initially, I thought that most fundamentalists must be unaware of these lines.  After all, how many people, even devout Christians, read the bible that thoroughly?  I grew up in a traditional Catholic parish, and when (as a teenager) I started to actually read the whole bible rather than just the selected passages we got in mass on Sunday, I was astonished at how much there was in the bible that the priest wasn’t telling us.  His sermons revolved around only a handful of Old Testament stories, some of the nicer psalms and more edifying bits of history, and of course vignettes from Jesus’ life and various bits and pieces of Paul’s letters.  But there was a lot in there I hadn't realized, including some seriously weird stuff.  Who knew that it was a sin to wear cloth made of two different kinds of thread woven together?  I didn’t, until I read Leviticus.  Then there is the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation (the evangelicals love that book, but the Catholics seem to be mostly embarrassed by it.)  But it wasn't the goofy or trippy passages that bugged me; being Catholic, no one was asking me to accept the bible as literal, factual truth.  Out of it all, it was the violence that appalled me the most.  "Does the priest even know about all of this stuff?" I remember asking myself.  If he did, he certainly didn’t talk about it much.

Tragically, it appears that I was giving the Christians far too much credit.  It’s not a matter of ignorance over what their own scripture says; they know about it, all right, and what’s worse, they embrace it.  "The Amalekites deserved it," said one person, on an internet discussion group.  "They were evil people.  They sacrificed children, they practiced bestiality.  The bible says so.  That’s why god ordered their destruction."

So, let me get this straight; because they occasionally sacrificed one of their own children, god told the Israelites to go and kill all of them, including the children?  This is supposed to make sense?

What the Israelites did to the people of Canaan, Amalek, and various other Middle Eastern civilizations is the same thing as what Hitler tried to do to the Jews.  So why is one an atrocity and the other the justifiable command of god?  I’m sorry, genocide is genocide, whether it’s committed by a megalomaniac or by someone who was ordered to do so by his Invisible Friend.

You would think that today’s devout Jews would at least get that point right, considering what they went through only seventy years ago.  You, sadly, would be wrong.  I was beyond appalled when I found an article in which a Jewish writer actively defended the actions of the Israelites against Amalek and Canaan (this story is part of the Torah as well as the Christian Old Testament).  The author states, apparently with a straight face, “As opposed to other religions, Judaism never pursued a religious crusade to impose on others its beliefs,” and goes on to describe how the Israelites destroyed all of the neighboring tribes because they were pagans.   The passage ends with the nearly unbelievable line, “Tell me if you find any benevolent parallel in our entire human history!…  Was there ever a war fought with such high standards?”

High standards, my ass.  If you accept the biblical account of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and religious zealotry as high standards, as the basis of our morality, I want to know what the hell we have against Al Qaeda, which seems to operate by much the same principles.  Or does the “god of love” now consider the Americans “his chosen people,” casting the whole rest of the world in the role of the Amalekites and Canaanites?

How far we’ve come in three thousand years.

Psychic vampire attack

Are you feeling run down lately?  Low in energy?  Does the face that greets you in the bathroom mirror in the morning look pale and tired?  Is it hard to make it through the working day?

You might be experiencing stress, or maybe you need more sleep.  You might have some kind of physical condition causing your fatigue, and need a visit to your doctor.

Then again, maybe you're just the victim of an Energy Vampire.

I didn't know about Energy Vampires until I was sent a link by a loyal reader, who said, "Get a load of this."  At first I was expecting more nonsense about people who are way too much into Twilight, but then I was sent to the website of Dr. Bruce Goldberg (here).  The website goes into great detail, not about blood drinking monsters, but about people who extract the energy from people around them.  At first I thought he was speaking metaphorically; we've all known people who are demanding, exhausting, draining of energy.

But no.  Dr. Goldberg thinks that there are people who can literally, honestly suck out your energy.

For those of you who would rather not risk having your energy drained by even reading this stuff, Dr. Goldberg classifies Energy Vampires into five types: the Paranoid Type, the Ethereal Type, the Insecure Type, the Passive-Aggressive Type, and the Robot Type.  Each of them, however, is a "psychic parasite," capable of "initiating a psychic attack" on you, resulting in your "psychic energy" being depleted.  The only option is to avoid any kind of contact, especially physical, with these people.

Then, I found that Dr. Goldberg's stuff is only scratching the surface.  It gets way more ridiculous than that.  The Psychic Vampire Resource and Support Page (here) contains links to literally dozens of sites that go into tremendous detail about Energy Vampires, who, they say, are people "who can't create their own energy" and so need to drain energy from others.  Some Energy Vampires are more benevolent of nature, and simply go around and handle objects that ordinary people have handled, subsisting on traces of used energy left behind, sort of like a psychic version of the folks who feel compelled to frequent garage sales.  But others, apparently, prefer fresh energy straight from the source, and will try to touch you so as to establish a "psychic link," and then they feed on your energy, leaving you listless and depressed.

Then, there's the Vampirism and Energy Work Research Study (here), which has enormous amounts of data, including pie charts and bar graphs, detailing the responses to questions like "Do you consider yourself a sanguinarian, psychic, or hybrid vampire?" and "What blood substitutes do you use when you can't feed on real blood?"  And thousands of people responded to these surveys. 

I don't know about you, but this worries me.  I'm willing to believe that at least some of these people (1) participated because they thought it was funny, or (2) belong to the aforementioned Twilight fan club, but that still leaves at least a few people who really, honestly think they're vampires.

And my general response to that is, "You people are loons."

So once again, we're up against a phenomenon that seems to skirt the line between role playing and insanity.  As I've mentioned before, I don't want to be perceived as ridiculing someone who is mentally ill, so I'll just end by saying: Dear vampires, psychic or otherwise: I don't think you want my energy.  My energy is probably all sour and thin from the fact that I don't get nearly enough sleep, so I'm sure you wouldn't enjoy it much anyway.  If you're really desperate, however, you can come by and touch my mailbox, which probably has traces of my psychic energy on the handle.  That way, you wouldn't need to get out of your car, or actually even come to a complete stop.  Thank you.

Avataricide

In news of people taking revenge in odd ways, a woman in Japan is currently in jail after killing her ex-husband's character in an online role playing game.

That's right.  She didn't kill her actual husband; she got into his virtual reality game, called "Maple Story," and killed his online "avatar" -- the individual in the game who represents the player.

Apparently these sorts of games are extremely popular.  Who knew?  I am, as I have mentioned previously, a techno-Neanderthal, and while I had some vague idea that such games existed, I didn't know how common (nor how elaborate) they are.  In "Maple Story" you can form relationships with other players' avatars -- in fact, you can even get married there.  As with many role-playing games, each player has a career -- teacher, military leader, magician, elf, and so on. 

And I thought, "'Elf' is a career?  Why didn't anyone in the Career Counseling Center at my college tell me this thirty years ago?  Here I am being Bill Nye the Science Guy when I could have been Legolas."

In any case, once you've selected your career, you proceed to interact with other characters, forming alliances and having relationships, all the while battling evil and defending your territory against the onslaught of monsters. 

It did momentarily occur to me that if what you really enjoy is the idea that you are a valiant warrior defending the world from the Evil Monsters from the Outside Lands, it'd be simpler and easier just to join the Republican Party.  Then I realized that being from Japan, perhaps this option did not appeal to him.

But I digress.

So, anyhow, this fellow in Japan was a devoted "Maple Story" player, and he described his online persona as his "beloved avatar."  And when his wife discovered that he was cheating on her (for real, I presume, not just in "Maple Story") his wife got into his game, and killed his character.

If I belonged to law enforcement, and a man came up to me asking me to arrest his wife because he'd cheated on her and she'd responded by killing his online avatar, my exact response would have been: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  I'm just compassionate that way.

But no; in the actual case, police were sent out, and they arrested the woman.  She is currently facing charges of hacking, which in Japan could potentially carry a five-year jail sentence.

Now, let's be clear on this; she has not harmed, nor even threatened to harm, her actual real ex-husband.  She is being jailed for killing a character in a game, despite the fact that the character is not in fact a real live human.

This last point seems to have been lost on Japanese legal officials.  I seriously doubt that laws against hacking were put in place to prevent two overgrown ten-year-olds from "killing" each other's computer-generated imaginary friends.  You would think, in these days of computer piracy, stolen identities, viruses, and the tsunami of spam that clogs all our bandwidth, that the people in charge would have better things to do than to jail a woman who has basically done the equivalent of an elementary school bully stomping on another kid's teddy bear.

Now, I think that as far as most things go, the Japanese seem like a fairly sensible people, and I'll bet this woman is freed with a slap on the wrist ("you go and apologize to him RIGHT now and don't you DARE do that again!") within a few days.  But it still highlights a couple of interesting facts about humanity, to wit: (1) some people take role-playing games WAY too seriously, and (2) you need to be nice on the playground or you can get into some serious trouble, even as an adult.

Allergic to nuts

My loyal readers will no doubt recall that last week, I finally caved in, and decided to see an acupuncturist for my arthritis.

Feeling almost like I was doing something illicit, I called the acupuncturist who was recommended by a couple of friends, and made an appointment.  I had a nice chat over the phone with her assistant, who mentioned that she would be doing some "allergy screening" on me while I was there, just to rule out a dietary cause for my sore joints, and I said that was fine -- briefly wondering how an acupuncturist could test for allergies.  The assistant said she'd send me some literature on their technique, along with a health questionnaire, and I agreed to see them this coming Thursday.

Yesterday, the literature arrived in the mail, and I began to read about NAET -- Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Technique.

The story is that an Indian physician, Deva Nambudripad, had discovered a revolutionary new way to diagnose and treat allergies, because of experiences she'd had regarding her own health problems.  She'd suffered from devastating physical issues since childhood, she said, sometimes hurting so badly she couldn't get out of bed for weeks at a time.  She lived, she said, on "water and broccoli," the only things she could consume without causing a severe reaction.  She took "thirty aspirin tablets a day."  Finally, having somehow become a trained medical professional despite all this, she decided to give herself an acupuncture treatment while holding a carrot, a food she was violently allergic to.  After the acupuncture treatment, she found she was no longer allergic to carrots.

She then found out she could diagnose allergies merely by seeing how people responded while holding particular food items.  If you were allergic to, say, apples, if you had an apple in your hand, your body would sense the "energy blockage" caused by your attempt to "reject the harmful apple," and this would screw up your energy meridians and cause muscle weakness.  So by having a person clasp her hand while holding an apple in the other hand, she could see if they were allergic to apples.

Then it got even weirder.

It was inconvenient to have lots of apples, potatoes, and cheese around, not to mention slabs of fish and hunks of beef, in order to test your patients.  In short order your office would reek of rotting food, which would cause a different kind of reaction, namely, puking.  So Nambudripad decided to take vials of water, and "charge the water with the energy frequency of the food item."  Now, all you have to do is hold a vial of water that is vibrating with, say, the frequency of a chicken, and try to contract your muscles, and the practitioner can tell if you're allergic to chicken.

I'm reading all this stuff, and thinking, "I actually signed up for this?  This person sounds like a nut."  And I'm beginning to have second thoughts.  And third and fourth ones, too.  And then I got to the part where it said that in order to achieve a cure, you have to have an average of fifty visits.  And also that a responsible practitioner will attempt to do "preventative cures" -- to treat you for allergies you don't even have yet.  (If you are curious, or think I'm making all this up, check out NAET's official website.)

At $100 each, and not, I hardly need to add, covered by health insurance.

That's when I called and cancelled my appointment.

I'm willing to try acupuncture, I really am.  But c'mon, people.  Vials of energy-infused water?  That's worse than homeopathy, because at least the homeopaths say you have to consume the water, while here, all you do is hold a glass vial of it in your hand, and somehow the bad energy frequencies cross through the glass and into your hand.  And I just don't buy the whole story of her health problems being cured miraculously.  For one thing, thirty aspirin tablets a day?  At an average per-tablet dosage, that's 9,000 mg of aspirin a day, which is damn near the lethal dose, according to WebMD.com.  The whole thing rings false to me.

So I just can't make myself go through with it.  Not even one appointment.  And it's not just the money.  Several of my coworkers were crowing with delight when I told them about this, and no doubt will be devastated when I tell them that I chickened out.  I think they were enjoying the mental image of me sitting there on the examining table, blindfolded, handling vial after vial of water labeled "quiche" and "bacon cheeseburger" and "refried beans" while the practitioner checks to see if my arm muscles went limp.  If I did exhibit muscle weakness, I suspect it'd be from the mental strain of not making snarky comments.

I'm afraid I can't allow my coworkers that degree of schadenfreude at my expense.  I may try to find a different acupuncturist, but I draw the line at NAET.  For the time being, I'll put up with the stiff joints, which seems like a decent trade-off for keeping my self-respect.

Dear Ann: shut up.

So now Ann Coulter has taken time out from her busy schedule of claiming that everyone who doesn't agree with her has the IQ of library paste, and is weighing in on the idea of biological evolution.

For those of you who would prefer not to kill off massive quantities of brain cells by reading her absurd rant (here), allow me to present the main points in her column, none of which I am making up:

1)  The most detailed defense of evolution in a quarter-century in popular media occurred when a nine-year-old boy stood up at a Rick Perry rally and said "I believe in evolution."

2)  There are no transitional fossils.

3)  Evolutionists believe that bears turned into whales and squirrels turned into bats.

4)  There are no transitional fossils.

5)  During the Cambrian Explosion, the eye materialized, fully formed, presumably in some previously blind animal, who must have been surprised as hell when it happened.

6)  There are no transitional fossils.

7)  Dr. David Raup, geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, believes that evolution is incorrect because the evolutionary tree of horses had to be significantly revised.

8)  Oh, and also: there are no transitional fossils.

Okay, let me address these one at a time.

There have been plenty of cogent arguments for evolution presented in the media in the last 25 years.  Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas, Eugenie Scott, P. Z. Myers, Barbara Forrest, Kenneth Miller -- the list goes on and on.  If Coulter could only find "a nine-year-old boy" as evolution's best exponent, she must not have been looking very hard.

No one, including evolutionists, thinks that bears turned into whales, nor squirrels into bats.  First, all four of those are modern animal groups; this would be like saying you are the great-grandparent of someone your own age.  Second, bears (Order Carnivora) and whales (Order Cetacea) are quite distantly related, as are squirrels (Order Rodentia) and bats (Order Chiroptera).  She basically picked pairs of relatively unrelated mammals, made the (false) statement that evolutionists claimed one was "turning into" the other, and used that to discredit the entire model.  I wonder if she's ever heard of the "Straw Man" fallacy?

The evolution of the eye, far from being a sudden appearance, shows a nice progression between a simple, light-sensing eyespot, to a cup-shaped parabolic light catcher, to a partly-enclosed sphere like a pinhole camera, to a fully-closed eye like our own.  The anti-evolutionists really need to find a new example of something the evolutionists haven't explained, because this one's getting old.

David Raup is a thoroughgoing evolutionist, and has written a number of papers on the subject of vertebrate paleontology and the role of extinctions in evolution.  His comment about the revision of the horse clade was taken out of context, another thing that Coulter seems to excel at.

Oh, and also: there are transitional fossils.  Tens of thousands of them.

The ignorance demonstrated in this article is only exceeded by the general nastiness Coulter exhibits.  I always come away from reading her columns feeling like I need to take a shower.  To wit, the last paragraph:

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence. These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God.

I find it astonishing that there is any news outlet that is willing to print her obnoxious, fact-free screeds, much less why anyone would want to read them.  Of course, if she was turned down for publication, it wouldn't be because she'd written vitriolic garbage; it would be because the liberal media was trying to squelch her views.

So, a brief, personal note: Ann, do shut up.  You're out of your element, and frankly, you're embarrassing yourself.  Go back to subjects you're more comfortable with, such as how all liberals hate America, and leave the factual stuff to people who actually understand it.

The psychology of drink-holding

I've spent a lot of time on this blog pointing fingers at the media for their inept, sensationalized portrayal of science, and at the general public for their appallingly low understanding of how science works.  In the interest of honesty, however, I have to admit that sometimes the fault lies with the scientists themselves.

Take the recently-released study by Dr. Glenn Wilson, of King's College, London, which ties your personality to how you hold your drink in a bar.

Wilson, who apparently has done some reasonably good research in the psychology of personality, has now written a paper classifying people into eight basic personality types, based on observing them holding drinks (and then following it up with a short debriefing to determine their personality).  After observing people in a London pub, he came up with the following basic personality types: The Flirt, The Gossip, The Ice Queen, The Browbeater, Jack-the-Lad, The Funlover, The Wallflower, and The Playboy.  (For information on how each of them holds a drink, see a more complete description of the types here.)

My response: even the freakin' astrologers divide all of humanity up into twelve types (thirteen, if you count the new zodiac sign of Ophiucus).  You're saying there's only eight basic types of human?

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that some psychological researcher or another has dramatically oversimplified human personality.  But there are two further problems with this "study;" it was written after observing only 500 people, without any sort of thought given to controls, even simple things like age, cultural background, and socioeconomic status.  And...

... Wilson was sponsored to do it by Walkabout Bars.

Yup.  We now have corporate sponsorship for writing science.  Next thing you know, Walt Disney is going to be demanding that we include a mention of "magic" in elementary science textbooks.

And despite all this, Wilson's "study" made the "science section" of a variety of news outlets, because it was Done By A Scientist.  Never mind that the whole "study" is methodologically flawed, and honestly, just kind of ridiculous.  And, because it was in the science section, people will probably believe it.  Folks will now be looking around them at bars, and thinking, "Wow, that woman is drinking wine with the glass held in front of her.  She is an Ice Queen, and will be Ready With A Castrating Put-Down.  I'd better not talk to her."  Which is still one step worse than astrology, because in order to find out what someone's sign is, at least you actually have to speak to them.

Of course, despite all this, I had to look at the "archetypes" and figure out what I am.  So I looked through the descriptions.  There was some mention in the media of people who do odd stuff -- one article I looked at specifically mentioned Hilary Clinton, who is right-handed but sometimes picks up her glass with her left hand, and this means she's "insincere."  And I thought: I do that all the time.  I mostly use my right hand, but I always put my drink on the left.  I just thought it was because I liked to be able to hold my beer and a slice of pizza at the same time, but no, apparently it means I can't be trusted.

As far as pub-drinking style, I clearly fall into the "Jack-the-Lad" category.  I often lean way back, but keep my hand on my beer bottle, unless I'm on a bar stool with no back, because then I'd fall over backwards, which would clearly classify me as "Jack-the-Dork."  Let's see the description of "Jack-the-Lad:"

The Jack the Lad: This "peacock" is conscious of his image and will drink a bottled beer, or cider. Inclined to be confident and arrogant, he can be territorial in his gestures, spreading himself over as much space as possible, for example, pushing the glass well away from himself and leaning back in his chair. If he's drinking with his mates, he would be unlikely to welcome approaches from outside the group, unless sycophantic and ego-enhancing.

Oh, yeah, that's me, all right.  If you're going to come up to a peacock like myself, you damn well better be sycophantic and ego-enhancing.  Hell yeah.  So you can just take your Wallflower self and go over there and talk to the Playboy over there.  Maybe he'll be more receptive to having you in his Territory.

UFO Phil, performance art, and insanity

Most people my age remember Andy Kaufman, the comedian and performance artist whose most famous role was the deadpan, heavily-accented foreigner Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi.  Kaufman was famous for publicity stunts that left people uncertain as to whether he was (1) the most brilliant comedian ever, (2) doing outrageous things just to prove that he could, or (3) insane.  An example is when, during a performance at Carnegie Hall,  he invited the entire audience out for milk and cookies - and called out for twenty buses, which duly arrived, bringing as many people as wished to a local bakery.  Afterwards, he said he was done for the evening, but would continue the performance the next morning on the Staten Island Ferry -- which he did.  On another occasion, he told an audience that he wasn't going to do any standup that night, he was going to read to them from The Great Gatsby.  After twenty minutes of reading, when people started to leave, he asked the audience if they'd prefer to hear a record -- when someone shouted "yes," he put on a record.  Which was a recording of him reading The Great Gatsby.

His blurring of the line between performance and reality was so complete that some of his fans believe he faked his own death (of a rare form of cancer, in 1984 at the age of 35), even claiming that he lost weight in order to make his illness look real.  And while I don't actually think this is true, it's not that far out of the realm of possibility, considering some of the other stuff he did.

In writing this blog, I often have to try to discern whether people are "for real" -- if they really, honestly, think that they have evidence for whatever damnfool thing they're claiming, or whether they're just trying to get attention... or if they're just insane.  Because, honestly, I'm only interested in the first one.  I don't want to play into something that's just a premeditated publicity stunt, nor put myself in the position of ridiculing someone who actually needs psychiatric help.  But just as in Kaufman's case, it's hard to tell, sometimes.

Enter "UFO Phil."

UFO Phil has spent the last fifteen years organizing events designed to create awareness about the aliens who, he claims, are visiting us all the time.  He is planning a "Live Concert for Extraterrestrials" on July 21, 2012, the day that the aliens will arrive "as predicted by the Mayans."  These will be the "good aliens" -- they're blue, he says, and bad aliens are red.  And far from heralding the end of the world, the blue aliens will bring "the secrets of advanced medicine, new technology, and a new calendar."

Thank heaven for the latter.  Because I hate it when your old calendar runs out and you don't have a replacement.

UFO Phil's latest stunt is that he wants to build a pyramid on Alcatraz Island as a refueling station for aliens.  Pyramids, he says, generate beams of energy, especially ones built using the "secret blueprints and schematics" he has, which were given to him by incredibly advanced beings from another galaxy.  He says that the pyramid has to be 755 feet across at the base, which will cause him to run into problems right from the get-go because Alcatraz Island is only 600 feet across.  No problem, says Phil; he's going to support the base of the pyramid with underwater pylons until he can "make the island bigger."

And given that you never know when you're gonna run out of gas, he wants to build another, smaller pyramid near the "Hollywood" sign in the hills above Los Angeles.

Government land management agencies who maintain the land around the sign say they know nothing about any such plans.  And the National Park Service, which oversees Alcatraz, didn't even bother to comment when contacted by reporters.

So, which is it?  Is UFO Phil a publicity hound, a nut who needs some psychiatric evaluation, or a true believer?  See what I mean about it being hard to tell?  It's especially hard with the latter two -- at what point does a belief in something bizarre cross the line into an actual psychological condition?

The cynical part of me tends to think that Phil is just a guy who likes to be in the spotlight, and has found a way to get notoriety by proposing ridiculous stuff.  But there's something about him that seems awfully... earnest.  Take a look at his website (here) -- although you might want to wear noise-cancelling headphones, because his homepage now has an automatically launched song of his called "Gravity," which might well rival Rebecca Black's "Friday" as being the most annoying song ever recorded.  Check out his various pages and links, and let me know what you think.  Is he a brilliant performance artist, or a nut?  Or like Andy Kaufman, someone for whom the lines are so blurred that it's impossible to tell?