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

Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally

 

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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.

Then this follows in the post:

Conservatives’ vision for this country is dark, dystopian, and deeply pessimistic.

Sounds about right.

The something new is that I have decided to record some of these mots, bon or not.