Hallmark, censorship, and the culture of persecution

So apparently, someone over at the Hallmark Channel thought it'd be a good idea to censor out the word "god" in their broadcast of the movie It Could Happen to You.

The backlash was immediate and vitriolic.  The Facebook page for Hallmark Channel USA erupted in comments like the following:

I watch you [sic] channel all the time. WHY DID YOU BLEEP OUT THE WORK [sic] GOD IN THE MOVIE IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.  Same [sic] on you.....Without GOD you would have no network. 

REALLY HALLMARK!!!!  BLEEPING OUT THE WORD GOD!!!!  HAVE WE FORGOTTEN THAT YOU USED TO BE A CHRISTIAN NETWORK!!!  WTH!!!  HOW ABOUT NOT OFFENDING CHRISTIANS!!!! 

We are very disappointed in Hallmark's decision to delete the word GOD from their presentation of "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU"...  We will wait for Hallmark to issue a public apology before resuming our support of the Hallmark Channel etc... 

Why did you bleep out the word God from the movie "It Can Happen To You" broadcast today? I think it is time to block your channel. You make a lot of money off the rising of God's only son who died and rose again day of rising [sic], yet you bleep his Name.  I am beyond disgusted. 

Some freak High on pot says it was ok for them to do this.  I bet he collects a check on our dime.  This is exactly what is wrong.  When you are high~~you think you are god! 

I am so furious and upset. I am sick and tired of "god" offending people.  Hallmark has some explaining to do!  I have written Glenn Beck, Bill O' and Hannity.  This country is so far gone!

Marvelous.  Go ahead and tell Hannity, Beck, et al., and they'll make a capital case out of it, giving the pathological persecution-culture that is becoming more and more common amongst American Christians further fertilizer to grow on.

And fertilizer it is, friends, as in the bovine variety.  Because the reason that Hallmark censored the word "god" in It Could Happen to You wasn't because they were trying to eliminate the mention of a deity from the movie; it was because it occurred in the phrases "oh my god" and "I swear to god," and therefore constituted biblically-forbidden instances of taking the Lord's Name In Vain.  Yup -- that's right; they didn't bleep out "god" because it was holy, but because it wasn't holy enough.

[image courtesy of photographer Kevin Probst and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Back in 2002, a mention of "Jesus" by the co-host of The View (in the context of saying "Thank you, Jesus," for her losing weight) was censored out on similar grounds, leading to a petition by outraged Christians who thought that this constituted suppression of religion.  In 2007, an ABC censor mistakenly bleeped out all mentions of the word "god" in the in-flight version of the movie The Queen, because he thought it contravened the rules against blasphemous use of religious language.

Each time, censors erred not because they were trying to offend, but because they evidently knew that these people have the sensibilities of petulant children.  For all the good it did.  If there's nothing to be angry about, they'll find something.  The phrase "damned if you do, damned if you don't," comes to mind.

Okay, I know that Hollywood is a pretty liberal place, and that much of what's on the air these days is there because of its capacity to shock (Family Guy, I'm looking at you).  But picking on The Hallmark Channel?  Really?  The network that was created from the merger of the American Christian Television System and the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network?  You'd think that someone watching a movie on Hallmark would take for granted that whatever was being done was somehow motivated by an attempt to honor Christian values.  I mean, I can see assuming the worst of Syfy or Comedy Central, but Hallmark?

I found out about this from a Facebook post, where I saw yet another comment by an outraged Christian, to wit: "14% atheists in the US, and 71% Christians, and for some reason we're letting the atheists run the show!"  Which might qualify as the single most moronic statement I've seen in months.  "Run the show?"  Being an atheist in the United States pretty much automatically dumps you into the category of "politically powerless."  If we were running the show, do you seriously think that there would be a bill that looks likely to pass in Louisiana declaring the bible to be "the official state book?"  Would there be a bill still in conference in South Carolina declaring that the mammoth is the official state fossil -- and that it was created on the Sixth Day?  Would the governor of Iowa have just signed a proclamation stating that July 14, 2014, be set aside as a "day of thoughtful prayer and humble repentance according to II Chronicles 7:14?"

Running the show, my ass.

Censor that, Hallmark.

Green ghosts and falling plates

It's been a while since we've had any interesting ghost claims, here at Skeptophilia, so today we'll look at a couple of curious ones from the last few days.

The first one comes from Coventry, England, where a photograph of a talk being given by Irish President Michael Higgins at the city's Medieval Guildhall caught something strange:

Here's a close-up of the odd apparition:

I wonder if you'll notice what I immediately found interesting about these photographs; the fact that it isn't simply a camera flare, or other such optical glitch -- because whatever the green blob is has a clear reflection in the polished floor in the first photograph.  Further (if you'll look at the photograph gallery in the Coventry Telegraph article I linked above) you'll see that the image persists in subsequent photographs, meaning that whatever it was hung around for a while.

The Guildhall is rumored to be haunted; it is the site of a famous photograph from thirty years ago, taken at a meeting of the Coventry Freemans, in which there appeared a monk-like figure who hadn't been there when the picture was taken.  So given its reputation, the paranormal enthusiasts have been having a field day with this.

Now, I still think that there's a rational explanation for the Guildhall Green Ghost; I just don't know what it is.  Anyone who might have expertise in photography, and who might have some ideas -- I'm a-listenin'.

Also curious, but perhaps explainable as a hoax, is last week's claim of a poltergeist in a Gilford, New Hampshire general store.  In a surveillance camera video, which you can view at the link provided, we see a glass plate slide off the counter and shatter on the floor of the Ellacoya General Store.

Employee Heidi Boyd, who heard the plate crash and was the first on the scene afterwards, denies it was rigged.  "We did not make this up, people," she wrote, after skeptics claimed that the whole thing was a setup.  "I was the only one in the store!  Couldn’t slide off and leave everything under it untouched."

Well, maybe.  There have been previous claims that the store was haunted -- store manager Lisa Giles said that when the store first opened, she saw a figure of a man standing in the doorway which vanished when she approached, and other employees have heard the sounds of ghostly whistling when the store was empty.  But even so -- given human ingenuity, and the free publicity that something like the rumors of poltergeist activity could provide, you can't rule out that the falling plate clip could be a fake.  Myself, I'm not ready to throw myself into the "sold" column based upon an odd video.

As I've said before; between the general tendency of the human perceptual apparatus to interpret incorrectly what we're experiencing, and the fact that some people seem to enjoy perpetrating hoaxes, I need more than a few curious images to convince me that there's a dead dude's spirit hanging around a place.  A direct, unequivocal experience of ghosts would go a long way, not some second-hand account.  Of course, given my temperament, I'd appreciate it if any ghosts who are reading this would wait to appear when I'm not alone in a house at night, because besides being curious, but I'm also a big fat coward.  Thank you.

Spinning Jesus's wife

New from the "Tempest In A Teapot" department, we had an announcement on Thursday that the fragment of papyrus that mentions Jesus's wife was not a modern forgery.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, the hue and cry started almost immediately, especially after historian Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who brought the papyrus to light last year, stated, "The main point of the [fragment] is simply to affirm that women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples."

Some were in favor of the whole thing.  Hal Taussig, of Union Divinity School, said that the idea of Jesus not being celibate would be a "huge shift."  "This is where people will take the most offense," he said.  "But for many married people, this might make Jesus feel closer."

Then there were the ones who started claiming immediately that the woman referred to in the scrap of papyrus was Mary Magdalene, and that therefore "Dan Brown was right."  Evidently not recognizing the fact that The Da Vinci Code is still shelved in the "Fiction" section at Barnes & Noble.

Others, however, were not so sanguine, although only marginally more grounded in reality.  Reverend James Martin, a prominent Jesuit writer, said, "It’s incredible that the four Gospel writers wouldn’t have mentioned Jesus’s wife if he had one.  They mentioned everyone else in his family.  There are Gospels that talk about Jesus turning stones into birds...  [F]unnily enough, the people who are quick to accept the veracity of this appear to be liberal Christians who question the veracity of other biblical accounts, including that of the Resurrection."

Reverend Henry Wansbrough, English biblical scholar and Prior of the Cathedral of Norwich, echoed Martin's sentiments.  "It will not have a great deal of importance for the Christian church.  It will show that there was a group who had these beliefs in the second century - Christians or semi-Christians - who perhaps had not reflected enough on the implications of the canonical scriptures - to see that Jesus could not have been married.  It's a historical interest, rather than a faith interest."

Then we have Professor Alberto Camplani, of Sapienza University in Rome, who added that the text "should be read purely symbolically."

Whatever that means.

What I find funny about all of this is that the fragment doesn't date to the 1st century C. E.; it dates to somewhere between the 6th and 9th centuries, and "possibly even earlier," according to the Harvard Theological Review.  So, at best, the fragment was written four hundred years after Jesus's death.  So it's a little like we had a fragmentary account that said only, "King Henry VIII said to his girlfriend..." and forthwith started arguing over whether the phrase was referring to Anne Boleyn, with others commenting that no, it can't mean that, that it wasn't referring to Boleyn but to another woman, who, by the way, had nice legs and spoke with a French accent, and yet others who claimed that the phrase was entirely metaphorical in nature and that "Henry's girlfriend" referred to the country of England.

Given that, it's no wonder that Ben Witherington, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, said that the papyrus was not a "game changer" with respect to belief and biblical understanding.  Of course it isn't.  People have come to the conclusions they have -- whether Jesus likes gays or is pro-welfare or would have been in favor of the Iraq War or thinks that premarital sex is verboten -- by cherry-picking whatever biblical quotes seem to support the point of view they already had.  Because a big, complex, internally inconsistent document like the bible, that has been translated and copied and retranslated and recopied hundreds of times, and which in any case reflected the changing beliefs of a bunch of Middle Eastern mostly-illiterates over a period of perhaps two thousand years, is bound to contain support for damn near any worldview you happen to have, whether you are a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger or a steely-eyed close-the-borders conservative.

So if you come to understanding a different way than science, you can end up wherever you want, really.  The science says that the document isn't a forgery, and dates to somewhere around 1,400 years ago; the linguistic analysis gives us an idea of what the Coptic text said.  And that is all.  After that, if you want more, you have to leave the realm of rational, evidence-based understanding.  But it you do that, you can take the results and spin it whichever direction suits your fancy.

Which is mostly what people do anyhow.  So business as usual, I guess.

Resistance is... imperative.

I should know better by now.  Whenever I post something that has the subtext, "Isn't this ridiculous?  I mean, really.  Can you think of anything more idiotic than this?" -- as I did in yesterday's post, wherein I described an ultrareligious website's claim that the Rapture has actually already happened -- it just acts as an impetus for someone in my readership to send me something even stupider.

So when I got an email from a loyal reader that said, "First the Rapture, and now this," I paused for a moment before clicking the link.

I should have paused for a lot longer.  And gotten myself a glass of scotch.  Because the link was to a story about an evangelical pastor and a talk-radio host...

... who think that the gays are forming an army of super-soldiers.

*brief pause to allow you to go get something to fortify yourself with before reading on*

I wish I was kidding about this, I really do.  But according to an article over at Raw Story, Reverend Jeff Allen of Indiana was interviewed a couple of days ago by TruNews radio host and fundamentalist wingnut Rick Wiles, and they were in total agreement that the gays are trying to create a master race of super soldiers.

Fig. 1: Super Soldier.  Not sure if he's gay, but we should assume the worst.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wiles and Allen ignore, of course, the fact that being gay, the super soldiers will have a little trouble reproducing their Master Race unless they enlist some help.  But as I mentioned yesterday, facts seem to be very much beside the point with this crowd.

"Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers," Wiles said.  "It’s not an exaggeration to say ‘homofascist,’ because the German Nazi Party was homosexual.  Hitler was a homosexual.  The top Nazi leadership, all of them were homosexuals."

Which would have undoubtedly come as a surprise to Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, who had six children; Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife Anna, who had five children; Ernst Kaltenbrunner and his wife Elisabeth, who had three children; etc.  Not to mention the thousands of homosexuals who were rounded up during the Holocaust and sent to concentration camps, where many lost their lives.

Oh, but do go on, Mr. Wiles, don't let me distract you with actual facts.

"They were creating a homosexual special race," Wiles continued.  "That’s what it was all about.  It wasn’t this thing about an Aryan race of white people, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white people, Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers.  If it’s not stopped, it will end up in America just like it was in Germany but it won’t be the Jews that will be slaughtered, it will be the Christians."

Then Reverend Allen chimed in, but not with what any sane person would have said, which would have been, "Are you fucking crazy?"  No, Allen acted as if what Wiles was saying made perfect sense.

"Right," he said, his voice carrying that intensity that you only hear in people who have utterly and completely lost their minds.  "We haven’t gotten, fortunately, to the slaughtering part, but we’re getting to the point of the marginalizing part.  Marginalized, get us to the edge, remove us from any influence in society."

Marginalized even though Christians still account for nearly three-quarters of the population in the United States.  Righty-o.

But never mind that, Allen said.  "Gays are Nazi thought police and they’re going to be the worst kind of tyrants we’ve ever seen.  They’re going to hunt you down and they’re going to persecute you.  That is the spirit that is alive in this country right now and is being embraced by political leaders in both parties, it is the new Nazism."

And if that isn't enough, add it to what appeared on Herman Cain's website a few days ago -- an article written by Dan Calabrese, editor-in-chief of The Best of Cain, who compared gays to the Borg on Star Trek.  "This movement is evil," Calabrese writes, "not because homosexuality is a 'worse sin' than other sins, but because its champions are trying to not only silence but in many cases destroy those who disagree with them.  The gay movement understands something.  They understand that in order for their movement to ultimately succeed, they need to turn the entire culture into a mindless army of obedient adherents like the Borg on Star Trek.  You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile."

You know, the only hopeful thing I can see in all of this is that the lengths to which some people are going to deny LGBT individuals the right to marry -- and, honestly, the right to have a voice, to stand up and be counted, to be who they are without fear of repercussions or violence -- may be an indication that the bigots realize that they're losing.  LGBT individuals and their allies won't be silenced, just as in an earlier generation the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to give up.  Christians themselves are beginning to repudiate people like Allen, Wiles, and Calabrese, recognizing that the teachings of Jesus had way more to do with "do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you" than they did with "make sure that an entire segment of society is discriminated against, even if it means telling blatant lies to do so."  Because the truth is, the bigots have no better arguments; denying LGBT individuals the rights that heterosexuals have always enjoyed cannot be defended logically (can someone please explain to me why allowing two gay men to marry would have any impact on my marriage at all?), so off into the stratosphere they go with ridiculous talk of gay super soldiers and Borg drones.

And, you know, narrow-minded loons like Wiles and Allen and Calabrese will end up on the wrong side of history, just as George Wallace and Eugene "Bull" Connor did a generation ago.  It's only a matter of time.  

So maybe there's something to what Calabrese said, after all, only not the way he meant it.  If your position is ethically right, and the opposition is making a last-ditch crazy stand, maybe it's time to push even harder, and topple the bigots from their positions of power once and for all.

In the case of LGBT people and their allies, resistance isn't futile; resistance may well be a moral imperative.

Apocalypse yesterday

I find it simultaneously amusing and terrifying how steeped in self-delusion some folks are.

Now, it's not that I think I'm always right, or free from biases.  Those of you who read yesterday's post might remember that I had something to say about that, apropos of the accuracy with which our brains function.  But still; one thing the scientific, rationalistic point of view does have is a clear protocol for figuring out when you're wrong.  And when you are...  well, you alter your theory to match the facts, or else scrap it entirely and go back to the drawing board.

But some people evidently don't work that way.  They take things the other way around.  If the facts don't line up with their favorite model about how the world works, then they change the facts.  And their altered facts, miraculously enough, always seem to support their model.  So without any apparent realization that they've just committed circular reasoning, they announce that their claim is vindicated.

You remember the whole nonsense about the Rapture, that came into the news largely because of the late Harold Camping, extremist religious wingnut extraordinaire?  Camping, you might recall, announced a date for the Rapture, and stated his case so vehemently that more than one of his followers sold all of their belongings and gave away the proceeds, or else used the money to purchase billboard space to warn the rest of us that the End Was Near.  The day before the Day, many of them bid tearful farewells to their loved ones, promising to say a good word in Jesus's ear on their behalf after all the dust settled.

Then, the next day, nothing happened.

So Camping revised his prediction to a new date, six months later.  This time he was right, he said, cross his heart and hope to vanish.  But once again, the faithful stayed put on Earth, and worse still, the Antichrist never showed.  So Camping closed up shop, and two years later, died of a stroke at the ripe old age of 92, disappointed to the last that he hadn't lived to see the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.

[The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887).  Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.]

You'd think that sort of failure record (100%) would be a little discouraging to the faithful, wouldn't you?  We keep having predictions of the End Times, and the world refuses to cooperate, and end already.  No Beasts appear, no Antichrist, no Seven Seals; everything just kind of keeps loping along as usual.  Eventually, you'd think people would say, "Hey, you know what?  Maybe we need to reconsider all of this apocalyptic stuff, because so far, it's running a zero batting average."

But no.  They'd never let a little thing like no results change their minds.  In fact, yesterday I came across a site that claims that the Rapture did happen, and if you didn't notice, it was your own damn fault.

I'm not making this up.  According to the website Now the End Begins, the holy did too get Raptured.  Millions are missing, the site says:

Well, we told you it was coming.  Perhaps you were a casual reader of this site, but never got really involved, "too many religious nuts" you said.  Maybe you had a family member who would plead with you night after night to "get right" with Jesus before His return.  "Nah, never happen", you said, "people been saying that for ever.  Nonsense!".  But, it wasn't nonsense, was it?  Turns out the religious nuts were right after all.  The Rapture of the Church actually happened.  Now we are gone, and you remain.  Left behind.  I can only imagine the shock - terror - panic - and questions that must be running through your head right now.  My heart breaks for you, and that's why I made this page, to get you through what the Bible calls the time of Jacob's Trouble, the Great Tribulation, and it's moments away from starting.  Are YOU ready?

I... what?

What do you mean "we are gone?"  If you're gone, who is writing for and maintaining the site?  Are you suggesting that Heaven has WiFi and a fast internet connection?  Is the server hosted by the Lord of Hosts?  What do you do if Christ wants to use the Holy Computer while you're updating the website?  Do you tell him, "I'm sorry, Jesus, but you'll have to surf the web another time?"

But my main objection is, if all of those people really had disappeared, don't you think someone would have noticed by now?  Sure, the website tells us.  We all did notice.  And apparently, we're all pretty puzzled about it:

And that's exactly what just happened, and where we have now gone.  Oh, knowing the media as I do, I am sure that there are many attempts to explain it - UFO's, alien abductions, a harmonic convergence, a government program, FEMA camps, cosmic shift, worm holes, and the list goes on and on.  But none of those explainations really satisfy you, do they?  I mean, it's hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people, right?  Could any one government, no matter how corrupt, really process that many people in the "blink of an eye".  No, they could not.  You know better than that.

I do?  I mean, yes, of course I do.  I'd never fall for the media telling me that hundreds of millions of people were sucked into a wormhole!  That'd just be silly!  I'll believe instead that hundreds of millions of people vanished, and no one has mentioned it in the media at all!

Because, of course, the teensy little problem with all of this is that everyone seems to kind of... still be here.  While I understand that given the circles I travel in, it's understandable that none of my immediate friends and family were Bodily Assumed Into Heaven, you'd think that at least one or two casual acquaintances would be amongst the hundreds of millions who were holy enough to be Raptured.  Strange to say, I haven't noticed anyone in my community vanishing lately.  I really don't think that I'd have missed something like that.  There are even a few I can think of that I'd be happy enough to wave goodbye to, as they floated off into the sky, but no such luck.

The rest of the site consists of suggestions about what to do now that we've been Left Behind (number one piece of advice: don't accept the Mark of the Beast).  But all of that really pales by comparison to the opening bits, wherein they tell us that the Rapture happened while we were otherwise occupied, and we Ungodly Types have yet to notice.

I've said before about the extremely religious that they'll never let a little thing like facts stand in the way of their beliefs, but this may be the best example yet.  The whole thing reminded me of the words of George Aiken, Republican senator from Vermont, who said, when it became obvious that the United States was losing the Vietnam War, "The best policy is to declare victory and leave."  Or in this case, don't let the fact that the Rapture didn't happen interfere with your conviction that the Rapture has actually happened.

Me, I'm just going to do what the world does, namely, keep loping along and not worry about it.  Even if the UltraChristian crowd is right, I'm pretty certain to be Left Behind anyhow, a possibility that doesn't scare me much.  I've read the Book of Revelation more than once, and I have to point out that whatever else you can say about it, the apocalypse sounds interesting.  There's the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Beast with Seven Heads and the Star Wormwood and the Four Horsepersons and various other special offers from the God of Love and Mercy, any one of which would certainly alleviate the boredom around here.  So if the Rapture really has already happened, let's get this apocalyptic ball rolling, okay, people?  The End Times are a-wastin'.

Wine, violins, and trusting your senses

There's still time to put in your guess and enter the 50/50 contest for when Skeptophilia will reach its one-millionth hit!  The cost to enter is $10 (PayPal link on the right, or contact me by email).  Be sure to add a note telling me your guess!

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I guess I know too much about neuroscience to trust my own senses.  It's a point I've made before; we get awfully cocky about our own limited perspective, when rightfully we should have remarkably little faith in what we see or hear (or remember, for that matter).  Oh, our perceptions are enough to get by on; we wouldn't have lasted long as a species if our sight and hearing led us astray more often than not.

But the devil is in the details, they say, and in this case it proves remarkably (and perhaps regrettably) true.  What you think your senses are telling you is probably not accurate.

At all.

And the worst part is, it doesn't matter if you're an expert.  It might even be worse if you are.  Not only does your confidence blind you to your own mistakes, at times your expectations about what you're experiencing seem to predispose you to blundering more than an amateur would in similar circumstances.

I first ran into this rather troubling phenomenon last year, when a study came out that indicated that wine experts couldn't tell the difference between an expensive wine and a cheap one -- if they were deprived of the information on the label:

French academic Frédéric Brochet... presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru. 

The tasters were fooled. 

When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody.  When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.

Then Brochet pissed off the wine snobs even worse with a subsequent experiment in which it became apparent that the tasters couldn't even tell the difference between a red and a white wine:

[Brochet] asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine– one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit. 

The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.

Now lest you think that this phenomenon only applies to wine snobbery, a study has come out from Claudia Fritz at the University of Paris that shows that the same expert-and-expectation bias can occur with our perceptions of sounds -- when she demonstrated that expert violinists couldn't reliably tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a newly-fashioned modern violin:

“During both sessions, soloists wore modified welders’ goggles, which together with much-reduced ambient lighting made it impossible to identify instruments by eye,” the researchers write. In addition, the new violins were sanded down a bit to “eliminate any tactile clues to age, such as unworn corners and edges...” 

In the concert hall, the violinists were given free reign: They could ask for feedback from a designated friend or colleague, and a pianist was on hand so they could play excerpts from sonatas on the various violins. 

Afterwards, they rated each instrument for various qualities, including tone quality, projection, articulation/clarity, “playability,” and overall quality. Finally, they briefly played six to eight of the instruments and guessed whether each was old or new. 

The results: Six of the soloists chose new violins as their hypothetical replacement instruments, while four chose ones made by Stradivari. One particular new violin was chosen four times, and one Stradivarius was chosen three times, suggesting those instruments were the clear favorites.

You can understand how these results might upset classical violinists, perhaps even more than Brochet's experiment ruffled the feathers of the wine tasters.  Stradivarius, after all, is considered the touchstone for sound quality in a string instrument.

[image courtesy of photographer Håkan Svensson and the Wikimedia Commons]

There are 650 known Stradivari instruments, and their market value is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.  Each.  The idea that a new -- albeit excellent -- violin could compete with a Strad in sound quality is profoundly unsettling to a lot of people.

Reasonably speaking, however, I don't know why it should be (other than the monetary aspect, of course).  Wines and music are both rich sensory experiences, and our appreciation of either (or both) is the result of not only the stimulation of millions of sensory neurons, but the release of a complex broth of neurochemicals that creates a feedback loop with our sense organs, emotional centers, and cognitive processes.  We shouldn't expect that experiencing either wine or music would be a predictable thing; if it was, they probably wouldn't have the resonance they do.

So it's not surprising, really, that our expectations about the taste of a wine or the sound of a violin should change our perceptions.  It's just one more kick in the pants to our certainty, however, that what we see and hear and feel is accurate in its details.  The idea doesn't bother me much, honestly.  Nothing that a little Riunite on ice can't fix.

Vissarion vs. autonomy

My younger son came down to visit this weekend, and we got to talking about cults.

I'm not sure what brought the topic up; with the two of us, odd discussions don't take much in the way of impetus.  Our conversations run the gamut, from art to music to quantum physics to politics to how to grow vegetables.  But after a while, he asked, "So, have you heard about the guy who is the Russian answer to Jesus?"

I said that I'd heard of the Australian Jesus, but I must have missed the memo about the Russian one.  In fact, I was rather surprised that there were multiple Jesi out there.  You'd think that there'd only be one at a time, considering who he supposedly is.  But my son said that yes, there was a Russian one, and he was one interesting dude.

So he proceeded to tell me about Vissarion, born Sergey Anatolyevich Torop, who was a soldier in the Soviet army, and later a patrol officer, before having a vision in 1990 and realizing that he was the reincarnation of Jesus (the original one).  He wrote something called The Last Testament of Christ, which seems to combine New Age ideas with Christianity and various stuff from out in left field (his teachings include bits about aliens and spaceships, for example).  Then he went out into the Siberian taiga, near the village of Petropavlovka, and started a settlement called Tiberkul which he set up to run on the principles of his sect.

We watched a Vice.com video, which you should all take a look at (it's about 25 minutes long, but well worth the time).  Both my son and I had the same basic responses to it, which can be boiled down to the following:

• Vissarion has a great eye for natural beauty.  The region around Petropavlovka is gorgeous.  Although it should be mentioned that it was August -- I doubt it'd be that inviting in January.
• The inhabitants of Tiberkul are... interesting.  They seemed intelligent, articulate, and (as far as you could tell) happy enough.  The teenage boy that was interviewed had a kind of stunned look on his face -- the sort of expression you'd expect from someone who had been indoctrinated and was more-or-less petrified that he'd say something wrong and get in trouble.  But everyone else seemed pretty content.
• That said, they seem to embrace whole-heartedly the traditional gender roles.  It's hard for me to imagine any woman hearing the speech from the matronly woman near the beginning of the film, about how women need to be trained to know how to care properly for a man, and not backing away mighty fast.
• Vissarion himself -- who granted an interview at the end, in what is the most interesting part of the film -- definitely needs to work on his quasi-religious doublespeak.  When he was asked, "What is your favorite food?" and answered, "I do not know how to phrase an answer in such a way that you could understand," I thought, "How hard would it be to say, 'I like strawberries?'"  Most of what he said had the consistency of cream-of-wheat.
• The interviewer, Rocco Castoro, has amazing self-control, because after twenty minutes in that place I would have been laughing out loud or else running away in terror, or possibly both.

But what strikes me most is to wonder how people could make the choice to embrace this cult -- for cult it is, however innocuous it may appear at first.  I cannot imagine what catastrophe in my personal life could impel me to abandon what I have and flee into the wilderness to become one of this man's adoring throng.  You may be gaining a community, a sense of purpose, a feeling of connection to a higher spiritual plane; but the cost is your autonomy.  You have to follow Vissarion's rules; amongst them, veganism, abstaining from alcohol, refraining from the use of money and the ownership of goods.  I don't doubt that breaking any of these would result in censure, possibly expulsion from the community.

And then where would you be?  Can you imagine if you were cut loose, after years of belonging, after you had given away all you had, quit your job, severed your personal connections?  The fear alone would keep many obedient -- which is no doubt Vissarion's intent.

So they continue to have their dances and play the recorders and guitars and sing songs of praise to their Messiah.  What choice do they really have?

I don't know what, if anything, should be done about groups like this; ostensibly, they cause no harm. But at its basis, Vissarion is promoting a false doctrine.  Whatever the "Russian Jesus" may be -- huckster, psychopath, guru, or some combination of the three -- he is indoctrinating these people in a counterfactual worldview, with its foolishness about alien guides and the End Times approaching.  And however messy and unpleasant life in the real world can get, I don't understand anyone trading it, along with their autonomy, for a place in Vissarion's holy village.