Earthman's Notebook

Say you’ve picked out a private kindergarten for your little girl, and you’ve gone down to take a look at the place to check on a last few details.

During the hourlong tour and consultation, you ask “What are the classroom rules here at Bronfield Academy? What will be expected of my daughter while she’s actually in class?”

“Ah,” says the director. “Glad you asked, because we’ve got a list of the rules we send home for each new student before the term begins. Let me get you a copy of that. Yes, here we are.”

Read the rest…

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.

Read the rest…

[ 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.

Read the rest…

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?

Read the rest…

I somehow got onto a right-wing Christian mailing list. Without fail, EVERY email they send me is both amusing and disturbing. That they’re so wrong, but so earnest, is funny. That they’re enticing others to be so wrong and earnest, that’s disturbing.

The latest was an Action Alert! from the stick-up-the-backside “American Family Association”:

“Pepsi Produces Another TV Ad Promoting the Gay Lifestyle”

Yes, the “gay lifestyle.” The lifestyle that people choose, and then recruit others into, so they can all be evil and debauched together, and get people to hate them. All done deliberately, you understand, and in opposition to good traditional American Christian values.

And yes, Pepsi is saying “Be Gay!! Everybody drink Pepsi and engage in homosexual activity!! Don’t be like all those heterosexuals who drink Coke!” What better publicity campaign could you get?

I had to respond to the part that said “Sign the Boycott Pepsi Pledge.”

Read the rest…

What follows is from a site called the “Hal Turner Show“. I kid you not.

After we kill them: what to do?

After the pending Second American Revolution results in killing the people who have wrecked this country — yes, you KNOW who I’m talking about — what are we going to do as a nation to move forward?

Read the rest…

[ Argh. My newer version of WordPress has controls for placing an image, but they DON'T SEEM TO WORK. Until I figure them out, we'll have to live with the non-existence of text wrap. I say again: Argh. ]

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Comment-volleying on a blog with one of those people I refer to as a “nice Christian” – the people who project kindness and understanding as their motivation, all the while ripping your metaphorical guts out (“There’s no such thing as atheism! It just doesn’t make SENSE!”) – I stepped away from the subject of the debate for a moment, for the benefit of the other rationalist commenters, and addressed the interaction itself.

Read the rest…

I got one of those Nigerian email scams. I’d guess it was about number 50, or maybe it was 75.

I’ve been thinking for several days about two very different views of atheism. One is from the godder side, where atheists are consciously evil, and want to hurt people and destroy things. The other …

Well, read the email first.

DEAR BELOVED IN CHRIST,

Yeah, the whole thing is in capital letters. I’ll spare you by translating it into something less shouty. I’m leaving in the typographical errors and misspellings, but I’m fixing the weird line breaks and large number of extra spaces sprinkled throughout.

Read the rest…

I’m chuckling, but in a grim way.

I get these emails from something called Worldview Weekend, a Christianist organization that sees a plot to murder God – and white people – in every shadow. I signed up in  a weak moment a year or so back, just to keep tabs on what they’re selling.

Some of the lines from this week’s plate of steaming neo-con Jesus (I confess I added all the exclamation marks, just because it seems funnier that way):

Liberals to Spend $1 Trillion And Can Not Say it Will Produce One Job!!!

Uh, hello? How many net jobs were created by the several trillion that Bush spent?

Distracting and Destroying the Middle Class, by Brannon Howse

Read the rest…

Way back in October, No More Mr. Nice Guy tagged me with a list of questions about atheism. I was busy at the time, and eventually forgot it. I just came across the link today, though, and with apologies to my fellow blogger, I reply today:

Can you remember the day that you officially became an atheist? Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Nope. It happened gradually. As early as 13, I wrote that I didn’t believe in God. My stepfather found it and gave me hell about it. But I must have had doubts about it even before then. I just didn’t see any evidence for the god hypothesis, and worse, everybody said different things about it. No matter how certain they seemed, nobody knew anything for sure.

Read the rest…