Please pardon my delay in responding to you.  I have been busy, and I suppose you have been also.  I hope this finds you in good health.

One of the acknowledged problems with twitter is the 140 character limit, which makes meaningful communication difficult.  I will use this as a way to better answer your questions and respond to your tweets.

We arrived here by my comments with regard to the use of the word ‘sexist’.  I wrote a longer piece about it and sent you a link and you responded with the tweets below.  I didn’t respond to your tweets as they happened, so allow me now.

With regard to your assertion that ‘as a man, you don’t get to be the final arbiter on what is sexist or not”.  My initial reaction to this was going to be, “What are you, a chick?”, but I didn’t post that.  But seriously, you should go down to the store and buy some balls, because someone has ripped yours off.  There is no way that I will agree to your axiomatic statement that being of the male gender abrogates my use of the word.  It is my right to use whatever word I want in my search for communication.  It is my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my ability, that the signifiers I use approximate the signified of the recipient.  (I don’t know if you have read anything in the area of semiotics or ethics, but there are some code words there that you would recognize if you had.)

Somehow, the point was lost that the word being used as a cudgel was ‘sexist’, not ‘lady’.  This persisted after you read my explanation of it in a post titled “On using the word ‘sexist’”.

Your point about humor is well taken.  Context is everything.  Many is the comedian who has made a bad joke soon after some event and had to follow it up with “Oh, too soon?”

Which brings us to your comments with regard to your religion.  You seem to have conflated my responsibility to respect your rights with regard to religious preference with a respect for the religion itself.  Respect for your rights to practice a religion does not equate to respect for the religion you happen to practice.  Lest you think that I am in the habit of mocking religion, let me reassure you that I am not.  Unlike belief or faith in other things not seen or testable, I have seen religion help people live better lives.  Some of these people credit a religion for allowing them to break the hold of addiction, so to me it doesn’t matter if there are thousands of self-righteous hypocrites who are deserving of whatever scorn is heaped on them.  That one who needs religion to not slide into a hell of addiction is reason enough to put down the shovel and walk away from the scorn pile.

But if you want to talk about your religion, I am happy to oblige.  You gave up a Protestant religion to adopt the religion that conforms to a desert patriarchy?  This doesn’t seem to square with your observed tendency  (if I am not mistaken) to support women.  You gave up the New Testament to adopt Old Testamentish doctrine?  There is too much to the New Testament that I can not give up.  Just this week, I encountered a situation that tried me in ways that I did not anticipate.  The words from John 8 comforted me.  ”For he that is among you that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”  I haven’t read extensively in your holy books, but from what I have seen by those who try to be strict adherents of those texts, stoning is the first option.

Perhaps, like comedy, religion is context oriented.  I note from your brief biography that you live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City.  I have never visited there.  I have been to the city on business, but have not had to opportunity to explore.  I subscribe to the New York Times and it affords me a window into the region.  I did read “The Color of Water” and I have wondered why it has not been made into a major motion picture.  I picked it up in the airport at Las Vegas on a business trip.  It kind of stood out among the literary detritus and soft porn in the book store.

From what I understand, the Red Hook neighborhood is not part of Bedford-Stuyvesant and my reference to that very good book is not an example of “they all look alike”.  Since I don’t live in your city, my understanding of it is discrete, not continuous. (yeah, that’s an engineering reference).   But it is also a point in the continuum of trying to understand religion.  I don’t know if you have read the book, but the title is part of an answer to a question by the author.  He had asked his mother, “What color is God?” and she responded, “God is the color of water.”  The story of this woman’s search for love and meaning in life touched me, as did the story of the author who also tried to find that love and meaning in life.

The reference I made earlier, to ethics, was to my use of the words, “rights” and “responsibility”.  Those are the two sides of the ethics balance and we need to evaluate them as we make our way in life.  There are those who seem to think that by merely examining rights can situations be resolved.  Politicians are at the forefront of this method.  They find an appeal to rights wins more attention than an appeal to responsibilities.  One of the weaknesses of our Constitution is that it has a Bill of Rights, but not a countervailing Bill of Responsibilities.  It should be noted that there is one class of citizens that seems to think that things can be settled by examination of rights only.  Toddlers.  Anyone who has parented a toddler is well acquainted with the Toddler Rules of Ownership.  This is one version.

1. If I like it, it’s mine.
2. If it’s in my hand, it’s mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it’s mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
5. If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
8. If I saw it first, it’s mine.
9. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If it’s broken, it’s yours.
11. If it’s broken, but you are having fun playing with the pieces, it’s mine again.
12. If there is ANY doubt, it’s mine.

I bring this up, because our concept of human rights, in the Western world, does not spring directly from any religion.  To the best of my knowledge, the concept of human rights is not addressed in the Bible.  Being a Muslim, you can answer better for your religion.  It is my position that our concept of human rights derives from the idea of property rights.  In the Western tradition, that is anchored by the Magna Carta which secured property rights and limited the rights of the king.  The line of derivation continues through the Reformation, which broke the power of the Catholic theocracy and led to Locke and “consent of the governed”.  In my readings of commentary on Islam, I don’t see any such parallel.  From my perspective, Islam offers no path to any continuation of our moral betterment.

I do see we pitiful humans as being on a path of moral betterment.  In the world of things that can be measured, that should be our goal.  I have used the word “measure” several times, and I am using in the context of my epistemological journey.  I have started a taxonomy of truth and have identified the two major types of truth: things that are defined to be true and things that are determined to be true.  In the latter, there are things that are determined to be true by measurement.  Religion lives within the realm of things defined to be true.  But in the world of things that are true by measurement, religion can help us toward a goal of moral betterment.

Moral betterment is only possible through a belief in free will.  Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler write in this paper(PDF) that encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.  I have never been comfortable with the expression, “everything happens for a reason”.  That belief precludes random events in the universe and I will not accept that axiomatically.  Accepting that assertion precludes reason.

And that is where I part with religion.  If you rejected being a Baptist as being part of a White culture, I can understand that.  If you note that John Newton was converted and still served on slaving ships, yeah, there seems to be some hypocrisy there.  For my part, if I were to ever return to Christianity, it would be as a Mennonite, if only because of their pacifism.  Baptists gave up pacifism and sided with Oliver Cromwell, but you probably knew that.

I have written before about religion and ethnic divide.  In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, there were extended families in Reformed and Christian Reformed churches.  For those families without two Dutch parents, there were other churches.  The point is this: in a town that was homogeneously white, there were still divisions along clan and family lines.  A cursory look at Islam shows that much of Islam is divided on ethnic lines.  The major division between Sunni and Shia was along ethnic lines.

The story of America is the story of its underclasses.  America has had rich and powerful men, but the dream of America is the dream of betterment, and that dream is most alive in its underclasses.  And the biggest underclass in America are those people of African heritage who have been brought to our shores.   The language that we have adopted accepts this as a characteristic.  The norm is to use the expression, “light skinned Black”, for someone who is nearly as white as the side of my house yet bearing however noticeable Negroid features.  We should weep with joy that there are people of African heritage who would say “I am American” because it is the triumph of an idea over all too observable circumstance.

I was thinking of two guys I knew in the Army in 1973.  Sp4 (later Sgt.) Terry and Sgt. Willie Broadnax.  Sgt. Terry was drafted, served in Vietnam, got out, and came back in.  Sgt. Terry talked about hating the Army and various things that had gone on in Vietnam.  He left he Army and travelled to Africa.  He said that people there told him he smelled funny.  And to my nose, the Black soldiers I knew in the Army did smell different.  I have no doubt that pheromone production, along with appearance, is a matter of genetic expression.  Sgt. Terry went to Africa because he wanted to be African.  But he came back and was wont to say, “Fuck that shit.  I’m an American.”  Sgt. Broadnax liked to say that “Uncle Sam tried to kill my Black ass.  He sent me to Vietnam to get killed, but I fooled him.  He couldn’t kill me, can’t kill me.”  I think Sgt. Broadnax had a lot of issues, probably well founded issues, to work through.  His wife seemed like a gracious woman and his kids seemed well balanced.

And the kids are what it is about.  I was raised to see color of skin.  I have tried to not raise my kids that way.  I remember being in the video store one time in Seattle  and another guy was with his kid.  Bookzilla noted how he and I were a lot alike, not how we were different.  I hope our kids can continue to strive toward that goal of moral betterment.

I remember being on Rainer Avenue, near MLK Way some years ago.  I lived about a mile from there and went down to get gas.  As I was fueling, a guy rode up on his motorcycle.  It was an impressive machine.  It was a Harley, white and turquoise with chrome and gold accents.  I have never been a Harley person, but that was a nice looking bike.  The rider was a Black guy, about my size, 6’4″, 230.  The way he rode up was like out of a movie and he could have been out of Central Casting.  Jeans, boots, vest, beanie helmet; he looked like he was ready for a print advert shoot.  He put his bike on the side stand, got off  and turned around in time to see the Chinese guy following him pop the clutch on his sedan, lurch forward and bump into the prized motorcycle.  And it dumped.  Bang.  The Chinese guy was about 5’4″, 120 lbs.  The rider was pissed.  He could have snapped the Chinese guy in half.  After a bit, the Chinese guy got out to help the owner pick the bike up  by lifting on the rear wheel.  But all he managed to do is unleverage the pivot point and slide the motorcycle along the ground.  The rider motioned for the driver (who didn’t seem to speak much English) to back off and he got the bike up and onto its side stand, and started collecting insurance information.

I tell this story because at no point did the bike rider go ethnic on the car driver.  I drove away thinking that the bike rider was a better man than me.  I would have at least made some comments about the driver’s poor driving skills, probably while staring him down.  I also thought that maybe we were becoming better, bit by bit.

I close with an apology for making a reference to your testicles and going shopping.  That was out of line.  If you have read this far, really, I’m sorry.  But I won’t apologize for looking at two things in your bio: “Astrologer. Thinker.” and saying “Really?  Doesn’t one preclude the other?”  Rationality should preclude belief in things like astrology.  Or vice versa.  You should read the paper I linked to above with regard to believing in Fate.

With warmest regards,

Dan

I broke the carafe twice.  The first time was when I moved into this house.  A previous owner had installed tile on the kitchen floor, which means that anything glass turns to shards when it touches the floor.  I lost my first carafe just after moving into this house, ten years ago.  I lost the second carafe about six months ago.  I was washing it and bumped the pouring lip into the faucet in the sink.  The lip snapped off and I couldn’t pour from it without spilling.

I purchase the first replacement at a local drug store.  I was surprised to find a replacement there.  When I went back the second time, they no longer carried replacement carafes.  I visited several stores and looked around on line.  I couldn’t find the right carafe.

I used this large Pyrex measuring cup for a while, but there was a problem.  The Braun Aromat has a valve at the bottom of the coffee filter basket.  If the valve isn’t open, it makes a rather unholy mess.  The original carafe was engineered to open the valve was inserted, and close it when the carafe was removed.  This allowed the user to get a cup of coffee before the entire brewing process was complete.  With the large Pyrex cup, I need to carefully place something, I often used a knife underneath the filter basket to prop the valve open.

This was fraught with error.  On more then one occasion, I would come back to the kitchen to find a puddle of coffee on the countertop and floor because the knife had slipped.  I decided to get a new coffeemaker.

I shopped around before Christmas and settled on a sleek beast of a machine.  Caphalon brand, it was.  Brushed stainless steel everywhere.  It had an alarm function, so I could set the machine up to make coffee at 5 am, and the coffe would be waiting for me when I got up.  It had some glitches, but I was mostly okay with the coffee it made.  It wasn’t hot enough, but I could settle.

I almost took the Braun apart to see how it was made.  I had been impressed with the engineering that went into it.  Still functioning properly after 25 years, it was a masterpiece of engineering.  But I didn’t.  Which was a good tin.

I had been thinking about how we put microprocessors in everything because they give us cheap and  rich feature sets.  For $1.5o in chips, you can implement a truck load of features.

And then the new machine stopped working.  I smelled something that was close to burned plastic, so I guess something happened to let the smoke out of one of the capacitors or perhaps a resistor was overloaded.  I don’t know.

I took that machine back, gor a refund, came home and removed the valve from the bottom of the coffee filter basket.

And the Pyrex cup works just fine as a carafe.

We were in the church basement and the soundproofing curtains had been pulled to the sides so that it was one large room.  The guest speaker talked and started to list numbers: stars in the galaxy, galaxies in the universe, etc.  This was 1971, and the Big Bang theory was not well known, at least not in Holland.  The numbers he threw out were supposed to dazzle the audience, numb them with a graphic depiction of the smallness of human existence, and attach that smallness to any ideas Man might have.  But it had the opposite effect on me.

I started to do math with the numbers.  I have always been a person to do math in my head, particularly when I am bored.  I used to do geometry proofs in my head when the sermons got boring.  I was studying probability in class, and I started to work out scale of the numbers he was talking about.  It was such that for life to have spontaneously happened here on Earth, it would be a single event lost in many orders of magnitude.  I started comparing that to the size of the universe, and suddenly it didn’t seem so improbable.  The numbers were not of the same scale, but they were not unreasonable.  Suddenly, his conjecture, that it was not reasonable to conclude that random events could have produced mankind, seemed itself to be unreasonable.

I was scared.  The frame of reference for my existence was in question, and I had nothing to say to refute it.  Over the next couple of weeks, this was not far from my consciousness.  I tried to apply the arguments in which I had been trained, but they didn’t work.  I began to see my religious beliefs as an overlapping set of ideas, where they supported each other but for which there was not an independent basis.  There was a lot of circular logic going on and it was untethered.  I decided to resolve it in a rational fashion.

It seemed clear to me that the proposition that there was a God and its antithesis, that there wasn’t a God were mutually exclusive.  If I assumed the antithesis to be true, and followed it to its logical conclusion, and it proved itself to be false, I would have proved the initial proposition to be true by exclusion.

And it didn’t happen.  One by one, the precepts that I had previously held became undone and I found myself adrift in a new ocean of ideas, all of which needed to be tested.  The milieu for this investigation was my home, my school and my church.  My parents were born again believers.  My father was a man saved by grace.  I think that when he looked at his birth family, he credited being a Christian with changing his life.  I think my mother also saw being a born again Christian with giving her a life different from her family.  I think she probably got satisfaction from the fact that some of my father’s siblings and other relations turned to Christianity to help change their lives.

But an overly religious household is a hard place to hide one’s questioning of everything holy.  Church was not a place to question things either.  Holland, Michigan, is the birthplace of the Christian Reformed denomination.  There is a large enclave of Dutch people in Western Michigan.  But there were towns settled by other ethnic groups.  Reflecting on my time in Holland, I came to the conclusion that religion is a reflection of ethnic and racial underpinnings.  My grand thesis is that people adopt religion as an ethnic identifier, and that racism is extension of instinctive clan based associativity.  In my Sunday School class, the family names were Lorence, Barber, Pittman, Endean, Robinson and Dunlap.  Each of these boys had one Dutch parent and one non-Dutch parent.  When I try to remember the families in that church, I don’t remember many families where both parents were Dutch.  Immanuel Church, despite its liturgical doctrine, was a refuge for families that were ethnically separate from the community.  Most of the churches in town were Reformed or Christian Reformed.  There were a few Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and Episcopalian. I have yet to test my thesis with regard to those populations.

School at Hamilton High was steeped in religion.  Most kids went to church and teachers were overtly religious.  I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was thinking there.  And so I kept it to myself.  I told a few friends, but the result was that they wanted to convert me back.  That was unpleasant.  At some point, I decided not to try to convert other people to my way of thinking.  I had been active in church, proselytizing for fundamental Christianity.  My new way of thinking was so individual, so wrenching, that I could not induce other people to follow my path.  It was up to them to find it for themselves.  I have not tried to get other people to believe as I do.

When I could leave, I joined the Army, so I wouldn’t keep taking from my parents while being opposed to just about everything they believed.  I was alone, on my own, and it was hard to take.  Being alone in the world, cut off from family and friends is not anything I would suggest for anyone.  But that is the way I felt.

Over the years, I continued to read, consider and modify my ideas.  I discovered the field of Bible authenticity study and it resonates with me.  Reading Genesis with this in mind is such a clarifying activity.  I evaluated whether or not to call myself an ‘atheist’.  According to the definitions of atheist as someone who denies the possibility for the existence of a deity, and deities being defined as infinite beings, it seems impractical for a finite being such as myself to declare the existence or non-existence of any infinite being.  So I’m not comfortable with the label of atheist.

My daughter, while in pre-school or kindergarten, complained to me about reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase ‘under God’.  I thought she was fishing for a definitive statement from me about it.  She was precocious, highly verbal and probing.  I asked her what she thought about it.  She said that she didn’t believe in the ‘angry old man in the sky’.  I said that it was okay for her not to believe in that because some of those ideas came from a time when there was a lot about the natural world that people didn’t understand and that it was easier to put a name and face on things like lightning.  Science hadn’t happened yet.  People credited to God those things that they couldn’t explain.  She nodded in agreement.  Then I asked her where love comes from.  She was stumped.  I asked her if she felt love, felt loved.  She did.  I said that there were some people who believed that God was where love comes from.  I transitioned the discussion into our need to allow people to find their own understanding for God.

I credit monotheism with setting the stage for the scientific method.  In monotheism, there is an unstated axiom that the world has order, and that the order is knowable.  I think that was crucial to the development of the scientific method.

There are many things that I do not know in this world.  It seems that the more I know, the more the things I don’t know grows.  It seems the latter grows at a rate that is exponential relative to the former.  During my years alone, I evolved the idea of a operational truth.  There are certain things that we define to be true, e.g., 1 + 1 = 2, but there are other things that we treat at true because they are the best understandings we have at the time.  There are two kinds of truth: things we define to be true, and things we determine to be true.  Operational truths are examples of the latter.  One of the smartest people I know, a guy who passed his qualification exams for a doctorate in high energy physics, but decided to write software instead, surprised me when I asked him if he believed in God.  “Of course!  You don’t think all of this just happened, do you?”  I don’t know.  There is insufficient evidence to close the case for happenstance.  My operational truth is that we may not know our origins, but that does not relieve of us of of the responsibility to live moral lives, treat each other with respect and work together to solve world problems.

Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate

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I could say that this is irony made manifest, that a show on Comedy Central is bringing light to issues of governance, while cable television shows avoid it. Howard’s point is that once a law becomes part of the canon, it becomes almost impossible to change. The legal code is filled with detritus that benefits few. Howard gave two examples, one each from both sides of the political aisle. One was a juvenile facility in New York state that could not be closed because of a law in New York that any facility that employed union workers needed a year’s advance warning before closing. There were no juveniles for it, and it was costing $50 million to run. But the hands of the state were tied. Howard also mentioned subsidies to cotton farmers that have been on the books since the Depression. Cotton farmers were small farmers, going out of business then. Now, not so much. Most cotton is farmed by large corporations. And they pull down a subsidy of $3.2 billion a year. And cotton is selling at an all time high. Howard has an organization at Common Good. Check it out.

 Here is the video from Jon Stewart.

Howard was at TED in 2010, and here is the video from that.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seth Meyers rocks it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I realized that I had used the email address about 5 years ago while setting up an account so that I could apply for work at Microsoft.  I never completed the application because the web based application running on IIS kept crashing and I couldn’t complete it.  Then I couldn’t log in and recover my work, so I created another login and the same thing happened.  I gave up on the process.

I reset the password today and signed up for the free Xbox Live account.  This is the one that lets you do things like create and avatar.  You know, things that are part of the Nintendo Wii straight out of the box.  That’s right.  In order to do things on the Xbox that one can do on a Nintendo Wii, you need to sign up for an account at Microsoft and make sure you don’t take the standard options, both of which will generate more marketing emails (as if you needed more of those).

Then I got the first sign-in window and I saw this:

You can change your gamertag once (this is one that was automatically created for me, without my option of input).  And I can change it once.  After that, I will need to upgrade to the ‘Gold’ account of around $5 per month (at the annual rate).

Dealing with Microsoft is like dealing with someone I don’t trust.  Dealing with them is like living in a third world country where everyone is working to separate you from your money and once the money leaves your hand, you are on your own.

Back to the poll.  Among responders, Mac users are more educated, more urban, younger, more verbal.  PC users prefer impressionist art to modern art and are better in math.  I’ve highlighted the among those options the things that relate to me.  I can live and breathe Fourier transforms, but I also like to read Montaigne.  PC people snack on sweets, Mac users on salty.  Yes, both.  PC users drink white wine and rose.  Gack.  Mac users drink reds.  Amen to that.  Give me a red wine that takes no prisoners.  Costco has some private label (Kirkland)  Côtes du Rhône at around $7 that is an absolute steal.  PC people would ride a Harley over a Vespa.  For Mac people, it is the opposite.  Okay, I’ll take the Vespa only if I can have a hot Italian chick on the back.  I would rather have a Ducati Multistrada 1200 or Moto Guzzi Griso 1100 with a hot Italian chick on the back.  Mac people prefer The Daily Show and Colbert Nation.  Amen to that.

Check out the differences.