Earthman's Notebook

To tell you the truth, I’m not really in favor of it.

I’m reading a piece over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where Ed Brayton focuses on the “hypocrisy of opponents of the Manhattan mosque, particularly the American Center for Law and Justice …”

And I understand that a religious freedom broad enough to allow equal rights of belief to all is, in some undeniable ways, in all our interests.

But it seems to me that it’s turning into a black-and-white knee-jerk issue of equal rights with too many of us unbelievers, when there’s a few shades in between that we should be pointing out.

I left a reply:

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I’ve been writing a book: Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist.

And I’ve been really busy with Life, and all that entails, so I haven’t been posting much.

But I went to see PZ Myers last night, in a talk at Syracuse University, and I see he mentioned me in his blog post, Early Morning on the Road, so I figured I’d better respond, just so people who click over to here know I’m not dead.

I can say from this experience that if PZ ever comes within a 3-hour drive of where you live, you should make a point of going to see him. He gives a great talk, there was a stimulating Q&A after, and afterward we went to a nearby pub and quaffed (according to Terry Pratchett, quaffing is like drinking, only with more spillage) beers until late.

Just FYI, I’m getting some last-stage feedback on the book from a few people, and I’d like to do the formal roll-out in early summer. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

To the organizers of this talk, the great people at Syracuse U’s atheist group — great event, guys! Really nice meeting you, and I look forward to being on the other side of the podium when my fabulously successful book comes out.

Below: PZ Quaffing with friends (Carl Buell just to the left) — and yes, that’s a pic of Noah’s Ark behind him.

This is a reaction to a post by my friend Chris Clarke, a notoriously bright and creative guy whom I admire very much. Among many other things, he writes the blog Coyote Crossing.

His original post is about depression, but it also touches on his own life accomplishments. Both subjects strike a chord in me, and I had to comment. As often happens, the things I write elsewhere I echo here, just to keep a record:

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Here’s something I’ll bet you never considered before:

We have a lot of words in common usage, and I mean a LOT of them, a whole specialized vocabulary, that refers to things that don’t actually exist.

So there’s a word for the thing, but no thing for the word.

Fairy. Werewolf. Ghost. Bigfoot. Vampire. Channeling. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Clairvoyance. Goblin. Teleportation. Afterlife. Leprechaun. Zombie. Valhalla. Hell. God.

There are multi-word terms in the same vein: Spirit guide. Trance medium. Guardian angel. Mutant powers.

Knowing this, and knowing that there was a time when I DIDN’T know it, I think that’s a fairly profound problem.

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Leaf One

Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else.

Like the movie teen backing through a darkened doorway in the serial killer’s lair, we focus intently on one thing while something more important takes place just outside the sphere of our focus.

I’ll give you a real-life example that has bugged me for a long time.

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I’m caught up in a back-and-forth argument with a guy online. He maintains that all news media are in the business of entertainment, and that there’s no difference between them. The far right, the far left, they’re the same. Fox News equals CNN equals MSNBC equals Jon Stewart, yada-yada-yada.

This was my final shot at explaining how wrong I think that view is:

Shane: The news media are entertainers, yes. I’m glad you see that. I worked in the news media for a number of years, and yeah, news pieces are put together as “stories.” Each item is framed in a narrative the viewer will find interesting and digestible. This is known — from the first days a budding journalist is  learning to write news, you’re taught to do this. And yes, sometimes the story can overpower the facts.

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Howdy!

Hope things are going well for you all down there.

I’m self-employed just now, and struggling with it. I think things are about to turn around, but argh, I’m in a bind right at the moment. It’s not the economy so much as a few of my own bad choices, but the economy is definitely playing into it.

Other than having no money, life’s going good. It’s spring here. The place I live, I wake up most mornings to the sounds of wild turkeys in the yard. So far this spring we’ve had whitetail deer, raccoons,four kinds of squirrels (gray, red, chipmunks and flying squirrels), blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches and crows (plus a lot of other birds passing through) as daily visitors. Some nights we see red foxes, and there have even been a few coyotes strolling through in the moonlight.

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[ Another long one. Sorry. ]

Sanity has a horizon.

Meaning: Everything you and I do seems sensible to us. Everything other people do seems sensible to them. But not everything you and I do seems sensible to others, and not everything others do seems sensible to you and I.

Everything you and I do seems sensible, of course, because it’s US, and we’re caught up in the subjective immediacy of our lives. We’re inside our own horizon, and everything inside it with us is visible, understandable and comfortable. We naturally find it hard to think of ourselves as wrong or villainous or insane. Everything we do, however weird it might seem to others, seems sane and reasonable to us. Even if we don’t know the reasons, we’re prone to automatically assume SOMEONE knows, and those reasons must be good ones.

On the other hand, other people, out past our own personal horizons of sanity, often do things that seem crazy.

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Robins look … well, silly. They stand on the grassy verge with heads upraised, stock still for indefinite periods like little feathered statues, than drop down and make lightning-fast dashes to some other part of the lawn. Where they again stand still for an unpredictable while.

And despite all the press they get in songs and stories, they’re not even all that pretty. An unattractive dull gray body, ugly yellowish bill. Okay, they do have that red breast thing going for them, but it’s not even really red, is it? More of a reddish brown. And when you live in a place where brilliant scarlet cardinals regularly visit your back deck – not to mention equally colorful blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches, and several kinds of red-accented woodpeckers – robins are pretty tame fare.

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Suppose there was a way to make other people think like you?

Imagine a drug you could hand out that, with regular doses over a period of time, would cause other people to agree with you in every way. A drug that would cause them to be UNABLE, mostly, to disagree with you.

1) Would you give it to your kids?

2) Would you give it to your friends?

3) Would you give it to friends without telling them what it was but saying it would be good for them?

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