EV Drivers

One thing that reactionary yahoos have long said about EV drivers is that they are smug. Well, I've been driving an EV for a while now, and, strangely, I AM smug about it. I DO feel superior to the drivers of the noisy, smelly dinosaur-burners all around me, as I dart nearly silently among them. Intellectually superior, morally superior, and definitely sexier! Superior every which way. I am the dog's biscuits. 

I can't open the rear doors yet, but I've googled it, and it's just a matter of settings and interior buttons. It'll come. I'll figure it out. I don't know why that overhead light comes on all the time, even in the brightest parts of the sunniest days, but I'll figure that out too! Just the same that I figured out where the radio's volume knob was! My brother helped with the volume knob. He's literally a rocket scientist and is wicked smart. With his help I'll get the charging situation sorted out. 

And you would not BELIEVE how smug I feel about it all. And I'm a person who's rarely felt smug about anything. Apparently I occasionally appear to be smug. People have sometimes accused me of smugness, but they've been wrong. Now they're right.

As the old saying goes: even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The yahoos were bound to be right about something eventually.  

I'm not saying that these feelings of superiority are accurate, just that I'm feeling them. For several months before the EV, I was without any sort of  personal-transportation vehicle. I walked or I took the bus. And I definitely THINK that those who do so are better than all of us who drive, no matter what we drive. 

But I didn't have this smirking, smug FEELING when I was on foot.

Can anyone else out there relate? Are we right to feel this way? Are we being manipulated by Big Something? Are are we the Vanguard of the Future? Are we silly? Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B?

Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

"I'm Not On Obamacare"

Now, if the GOP succeeds in doing away with the ACA, and can convince their supporters who were on ACA plans and are outraged that the ACA is gone, and who still think Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things, that the ACA disappearing is completely Obama's fault -- well, I guess that would be just more of the same. And speaking of Holy Shit: the Republicans, not just Trump but Republican legislators, are talking about building that fucking wall. "Mexico will pay us for it after it's done." You'd figure at some point their BS would become too stupid to fly anymore. However...

Afraid Of AI? You Got It Backwards

I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. I don't see it coming anytime soon, for one thing. You disagree? Take the most advanced computer translation program you can find, use it to translate a simple 5-word English sentence of your choice into Japanese, take that Japanese sentence and use the same program to translate it back into English, and then we'll talk. As Stephen Root said in the 4th-season episode of "News Radio" entitled "Super Karate Monkey Death Car":

"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business come to my hut, but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung. Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match! The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."

You can call that hilarious, you can call it great TV. One thing you can't call it, in my humble opinion, is evidence of the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.

But even if I'm wrong, and AI is even now on the verge of happening -- it doesn't worry me. More intelligence? That would be great. That would be most helpful. The main threat to humanity is the very opposite, the same thing it's been for thousands of years: a lack of intelligence. Any threat posed by artificial intelligence is laughable compared to the constant threat posed to us by natural stupidity.

The most obvious current example? The moron who was just elected POTUS and all the millions of morons who voted for him. We were on the verge of cutting US dependency on petrochemicals in half, on the verge of getting a smart grid, on the verge of shoring up the social safety net, on the verge of making minimum wage a living wage -- but all of that and a whole lot of other very good stuff is just going to have to wait now, because of stupidity. Because of nothing other than stupidity. Artificial intelligence would be great right now. It could be a tremendous help with that question so many of us are asking: "What the Hell are we going to do now?!" It's not as if there's an overabundance of intelligence currently working on that one.

Another example of stupidity being the greatest danger to humanity? Hitler. Some say he was an evil genius -- to that I say, "Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!" Hitler believed that the Soviet Union and international banking were united in a Jewish conspiracy to impurify the "German race." He actually believed that. He was a moron.

Artificial intelligence? Bring it on! Artificial intelligence, natural intelligence, hybrid intelligence, any kind of intelligence: we need it, we need more of it, we need much, much more of it, just as we have for thousands if not millions or billions of years.

Straight Democratic Ticket, Is What I Recommend

At 4:02 today, Ex-US Representative Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom of Illinois tweeted:

On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump.

On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.

You in?

About an hour later, having apparently suffered in a meantime a backlash over that tweet severe enough to alarm even him, Walsh explained in an interview that he was "talking metaphorically."

Walsh is an unbearable jackass.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. He's not actually a donkey. That part was metaphorical.

The part about him being unbearable was not. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Walsh was one of the Tea Party freshmen Congesspeople voted in in 2010 and voted out again in 2012. He has repeatedly gotten into trouble for speaking in a racially insensitive manner and repeatedly had to explain that he was speaking metaphorically and so forth and that what he really meant was, and so forth.

Earlier this year, Walsh Twitter account was suspended -- not for the musket tweet, but for something much worse which Twitter deleted, which I won't repeat here. Walsh had to explain that he hadn't really meant what he said and promise to cut it out to get his account back. In an interview the next day, Walsh said of what was in the deleted tweet which he hadn't really meant that way:

That's crazy and stupid and wrong. It would end my career and it's wrong."

It would end his career -- AND it's wrong. Nice to see a man of integrity who has his priorities right.

My point is just to remind my readers, once again, that Trump didn't come out of a vacuum, that Trump really isn't even much of an anomaly in the GOP. As much as the Republican primaries seemed to be a complete cluster****, they in fact did not nominate him completely by accident.

Of course, for those of you who live in the many parts of the US represented by Republicans who aren't distancing themselves from Donald Trump, it's probably not even necessary for me to point out that Trump is not an anomaly. This is more for those of you watching all the Republicans running full speed away from Trump on the nationwide news and in places where he's messing up the campaigns of the local Republicans.

You know of any Republicans running for office or for re-election in areas where Trump leads Clinton in the polls, who are distancing themselves from him? Me neither. Isn't it a remarkable coincidence how closely bad poll numbers for Republicans and Republican moral outrage at Trump coincide?

No Republican politicians running for office anywhere should be considered completely free of association with Trump. The main difference between "moderate" Republicans and jackasses like Trump and Walsh is that the "moderates" have a better sense of when it's expedient to keep their mouths shut -- or, for example, to distance themselves from a colleague who's going down like the Hindenburg, or to pretend that they think Hillary is just swell and always have thought so. And, of course, the "moderates" are running for office in places where people like Trump and Walsh are very unpopular.

Bernie Said Global Warming Is The Greatest Threat To National Security...

...and Hillary lost West Virginia because she didn't pander to coal miners by telling them their mining jobs would last forever. That, ladies and germs, is whatcha call irony.

Bernie called his win in West Virginia a "tremendous victory." He gained 2 delegates on Hillary. 2 down, 769 to go. Tremendous. He said, "We can do arithmetic," and the crowd (in Washington state) went wild. But they can't. And they don't listen to people who can.

Who says, over and over, that they can do arithmetic? People who can't. It wasn't Michael who said over and over that he was smart, it was Fredo.

Yes, Hillary broke the rules by having a private email server. Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice broke the same rules. And while Hillary was using the private server she wasn't supposed to be using, the Chinese hacked the State Department email server. You can't make up good stuff like this. What a shame nobody notices it.

What's the greatest threat to the security of the world? Stupidity. What did nobody see coming in the 2016 Presidential campaign? How stupid Bernie is. Those reporters Bernie smugly tells more and more often not to moan or roll their eyes at him, they're moaning and rolling their eyes because they can do the math. Those superdelegates even Bernie admits he would need to get the nomination? They are the very same politicians Bernie keeps trashing, the ones he claims have been thwarting him and "the will of the people" at every turn.

Christopher Columbus lived until 1506, believing until the end that he had sailed to Asia. Will Bernie go to his grave believing that the race between himself and Hillary was close and that the nomination process was conducted unfairly and that he would've won in a fair fight?

Will he ever actually concede? Will he be dragged off of the convention stage, raving, literally unable to let go of the rush to which he's become addicted, the rush of pleasing those crowds? Will he refuse to concede and set off a riot of morons?

New Atheism: Because Thinking Is Hard

75 years ago, the most prominent exponents of atheism were Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today it's Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Then, English-speaking atheists watched No Exit and read The Stranger, or at least pretended to have read it; today, New Atheists repeat Hitchens' would-be bonmot "religion poisons everything" and think of ways to insult religious believers with Facebook memes, and pay for billboards which are basically identical to those memes.

I suppose it's risky to actually try to understand people with whom one disagrees. What if one eventually understands so well that one no longer disagrees and becomes one of them? Why look at good things which some religious people do in the name of religion, when it could make things look more complicated than the memes showing clergy who are thieves and child molesters, and congregations who are blind, fearful, obedient, fleeced sheep? Yes, there are some clergy and some congregations who are like that. But others are somewhat different. Some New Atheists definitely do not want to talk about religious believers who do not fit their favorite stereotype, whether it's Christian congregations who actually use most of the collection-plate money for charity work instead of Super Fly lifestyles for the clergy; or Muslims who actually are peaceful and opposed to terrorism; or Muslims who do not advocate subservient roles for women, and actually don't torture, misfigure or kill women who are assertive; or whatever doesn't fit their pet stereotypes.

I agree with the New Atheists that belief in God or multiple gods is mistaken. I agree that this belief can have many negative effects. But I also think that New Atheism is having many negative effects. I don't think we're going to overcome religion by sneering at it. I don't think "We're all atheists -- I just believe in one less God than you do." is brilliant; on the contrary, everytime I see it on a sign someone's holding at a rally or on a billboard or a meme I just go: Uhhhhhhh, (That was a sound of disgust) that again? I really cannot imagine a Christian or a Muslim finding it clever, much less convincing. And of course Hindus and other polytheists are liable to feel both disgusted and slighted, treated as if they don't exist or don't matter.

How many minds are actually being changed by simpleminded garbage like that, or like holding up a sign next to someone holding up a sign with a religious message saying "FUCK THIS GUY", or a meme showing a collection plate and a caption comparing Christianity to a family of children paying their abusive father not to punish them, or the popular message "YOU KNOW IT'S NOT TRUE", etc? It all seems to me like a lot of people agreeing with each other and slapping each other on the back.

Eh. Maybe that's what they need, if they come from abusive fundamentalist backgrounds and have never before felt safe expressing disbelief, and never before met others who don't believe. Maybe they have a lot of hurt to get out of their systems, and need a place where they're allowed to vent.

See what I did there? I made an attempt to understand people whom I loathe for the constant stream of nonsense they produce. Because if we never understand them, how are we ever going to have any clue about how to interact with them in any way which is at all productive?

And, on the off-chance that someone is reading this who was one of those atheists who badly needed to know that there were others, who needed to escape from an abusive religious home; but now agrees with some of my critique of the New Atheist scene, which is beginning to annoy him or her, and wants to get a bit deeper -- welcome. There are a few others like us: atheists disenchanted with the New Atheists. I don't know whether we yet have a name, which we can use to distinguish ourselves from the New Atheists, to make it clear that we're not with them, that we realize "religion poisons everything" is a bit of an oversimplification, etc. I have suggested the name Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

Bernie Supporters: No Offense, But You're A Bunch Of Schmucks

1) so Bernie's a Socialist, huh? What's the name of the Socialist party Bernie belongs to, again? Who are some of his colleagues from that party? Uhhh, uhhhh, uhhhhhh...

You're darn right, uhhhh. Bernie's a Social Democrat, but the part of the history lesson he leaves out is that the rest of Democratic Party are Social Democrats too. The US has this irrational phobia about the word "socialism," but what it is is things like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Postal Service, publicy-owned utilities, unions, increasing the minimum wage, health care for everybody, etc. Democratic stuff. Look at Bernie's voting record. He's just another liberal Democrat, and he's scammed you all into thinking he's something completely new and special.

2) Hillary's a liberal Democrat. Boy, the far Right has got to be loving the way you schmucks hate her, because they hate her too. They hate and fear her more than anyone else in the world. And the people they hate the most are not the Democrats who are so centrist that they're practically Republicans, it's the liberal Democrats who kick ass. (Known in other countries as Socialists or Social Democrats.) Like Hillary. Above all, Hillary.

You're such schmucks! Educate yourselves!

I know you won't. I tried.

An Attempt To Explain How Horribly Disappointed I've Been By Many Of The Atheists I've Met And Heard About

Not all of them. And I'm sure that some of the atheists I've met, or read, or seen on TV, I don't know they're atheists, because they don't talk about being atheists all day long every day. This is also not including the atheists who don't admit that they're atheists, and call themselves something else which means exactly the same thing, like non-believers or skeptics. Presumably because they're embarrassed by the yokels who are the subjects of this post, and would rather not be associated with them.

I'm an atheist. However, my impression is that everybody has their mental weak spots -- certainly including me. If all I know about person A is that he or she believes in the rapture and all I know about person B is that he or she doesn't trust anyone who believes in the rapture, I tend to think that B is very likely a judgmental douchebag and I probably won't like them, and chances are I might get along with A just fine.

And I'm sorry that A still hasn't recovered from the trauma of his or her fundamentalist Christian or conservative Catholic upbringing. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

Just now when I googled "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" to make sure I quoted and spelled it correctly, I came across "tout comprendre c'est rien pardonner," speaking of judgmental douchebags.

And yes, I certainly am a judgmental douchebag myself, but I'm aware of it.

Where was I? Ah yes -- stupid, obnoxious, smug, knuckle-dragging atheists who think that they're smart because they're atheists. Not to mention a few atheists who are actually quite bright in some areas -- Richard Dawkins, for example -- but who still turn on the stupid full-blast when the subject is religion.

It's their one-category mentality which is the major cause of their disappointing nature, I think, and which has lead some to call them "fundamentalist atheists." Just as obnoxious fundies -- and not all fundamentalist believers are of this obnoxious type -- divide the world up into the saved and the evil, New Atheists divide the world up into the atheists and the stupid. In order to maintain such simplistic, black-and-white impressions of humanity, both of these groups of obnoxious twits have to ignore a lot of the things which most of us see, because they're everywhere: the fundies have to ignore the believers who are horrible people and the atheists who are wonderful and kind and good, and the New Atheists have to ignore the stupid atheists and the brilliant believers. Perhaps the need to maintain these simplistic illusions is the major reason why both groups are so remarkably weak in the knowledge of history.

There simply is so much more to people than whether or not they believe in God. If you narrow it down to that and judge people just according to that, you miss the great majority of remarkable things about most people. And it makes you very unpleasant, whether you're a believer or an atheist. Who was Bertrand Russell's best friend? TS Eliot, who was not merely Christian, but extremely Christian. (Come to think of it, that's naturally a point in Eliot's favor as well. Although there's no denying that he wrote well now and then, I've come to have a horror of Eliot because of some of the tendencies which seem to have been associated with his traditionalist religious belief.)

You Can't Talk To Some People -- Or At least You Shouldn't

When you've become convinced that someone isn't listening, and that talking to them would be a waste of your time, what remains? Talking about them.

There are two people here who, I'm convinced, wouldn't listen to me if I tried to get through to them. The first quotes one of the more far-fetched passages in the Bible and seems to have no doubt that it's 100% true -- because it's in the Bible.

The second, who seems to have the opposite problem, replies to the first:

"Why is it that not one independent historical source ever mentions any of these things happening? Possibly because they didn't happen, and once again the wholly babble is a lie? Hmmm."

Oh, it makes me angry, how stupid this "the Bible is a lie" talking point is! All the more stupid because the people parroting it think of themselves as the voice of reason, as rationality incarnate. A collection of over 60 texts, with dozens of authors, is not "an" anything, it is more than one thing. It shows you how these two idiots are the flip side of one another, this all-or-nothing approach to the Bible. To the one it's absolutely all true, to the other it's absolutely all "a lie."

Who talks that way about a book by one author, let alone a compilation of works by many different authors?

In this case, the Bible verses quoted as Gospel truth are actually from one of the Gospels and have to do with one of the less-believable details of the Biblical account of Jesus' life, and the New Atheist was dutifully responding with the party line: "No historical sources mention Jesus."

So why is this, hmm? Could it be that Jesus never existed?

Yes, hmm? it could be that Jesus never existed. But one of the long list of things which these smug hmm? -ers don't want to hear is that very few non-New-Testament sources say anything at all about Judea and Galilee between 6 BC and AD 40, and one of those sources, Josephus, does mention Jesus, and not just in the discredited Testamonium Flavianum that they're always talking about because it's been discredited, but in a second passage as well.

They don't want to hear it. They don't want to have an intelligent conversation about 1st-century Judea and Galilee, they wouldn't recognize such a conversation if it slapped them in the face.

The Shape Of The Earth And Of New Atheism

"The world is a sphere can only be colored in so many ways."

Have you heard it colored this way? If the New Atheists were even slightly acquainted with Hebrew and Greek, they'd know that those Bible passages mentioning the shape of the Earth can be understood to refer to various shapes including spheres. In other words, although New Atheists love to insist that the authors of the Bible all believed that the Earth was flat, it's far from clear that this is the case. And that's one way -- one of many -- that we who are familiar with ancient languages and have gone round and round with Dawkins & Co on subjects like the Biblical descriptions of the Earth know that the New Atheists not only aren't familiar with ancient languages, they don't want to become familiar with them.

If they learned a little Hebrew and Greek and Latin and Coptic and Aramaic, they might learn some new things. And they definitely don't seem interested in learning new things when it comes to Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their holy books. They know everything they feel they need to know. They're set. They're done.

They're stupid.

Luke Savage knows what I'm talking about. Here are a few tidbits from his recent and delicious takedown of New Atheism's Islamophobia :

"[...]it is a crude, reductive, and highly selective critique[...]Its leading exponents wear a variety of ideological garbs, but their espoused politics range from those of right-leaning liberals to proto-fascist demagogues of the European far-right[...]The title of Hitchens’s bestselling book tells us something about the priorities and focus of the New Atheist movement ('God is Not Great' is clearly intended to be a facetious inversion of the common Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar, which translates as 'God is Great,' something which he no doubt thought was both hilarious and iconoclastic). Without exception, an overwhelming preoccupation with Islam infuses the whole discourse, even as it posits itself as a disinterested scientific critique of religion as such[...]Sam Harris’s much-discussed October appearance on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' — a crude spectacle in which he pigeonholed most Muslims as 'jihadists,' 'Islamists, or 'conservatives' — merely complements a lengthy record of Islamic demonology from him and other leading figures in the New Atheist movement[...]For the New Atheists, then, all religions are equally bad — but Islam is more equally bad[...]The excessive focus on Islam as something at once monolithic and exceptionally bad, whose backwards followers need to have their rights in democratic societies suppressed and their home countries subjected to a Western-led civilizing process, cannot be called anything other than racist[...]

I highly recommend the entire article. And I would just add that the crudity and ignorance which New Atheists apply to Islam, they apply to most of the rest of the world as well. (It's amazing to me that several of the leading New Atheists are competent or brilliant biologists -- how can they be so sensible, so informed, and so eager to learn about one scientific discipline, and about absolutely nothing else?)

I don't highly recommend this absurdly over-optimistic piece in the Spectator declaring that Richard Dawkins has lost. But if you despise the New Atheists and want to comfort yourself with a daydream that they're about to blow away like dry leaves, then by all means read it.

I, on the other hand, am cursed with an aversion to illusion. We're going to be dealing with these chumps for a while.

I also don't like that the Spectator refers to the atheists who are done with the New Atheists as New New Atheists, rather than Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

Minds Ruined By Religion -- And I Don't Just Mean The Minds Of Believers

I believe I've just had an epiphany.

Nietzsche said that Pascal was the saddest case he knew of a fine mind being ruined by religion.

Last Friday, Richard Dawkins was the 1st guest on "Real Time" with Bill Maher. Bill's 1-on-1 guest. Dawkins appeared on the occasion of his new book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.



I haven't read the book, I have nothing to say about the book except that its title made me hope that Bill and Richard might actually talk about science -- the way that Neil deGrasse Tyson did later on in the very same episode. The way that Richard wrote about science up until 2004.

Up until he became a full-time atheist, a New Atheist, a professional atheist.

No, Richard and Bill said fuck-all about science. Within 30 seconds they were knee-deep in those tired old New Atheist cliches and claiming to be oppressed because some people, "deluded liberals," don't like their Muslim-bashing.

Bill isn't a full-time atheist, a New Atheist. Not yet. He still actually talks about a wide variety of issues. Unless he's around Dawkins or Sam Harris.

I'm not as familiar with Pascal's scientific and mathematical work as I am with Dawkins' work on evolutionary biology, and so, for me personally, the saddest case I know of a mind ruined by religion is Dawkins. I'm still an atheist, I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant over these years of getting to know New Atheists better and better and becoming more and more appalled by them. But one thing which has changed enormously for me is that a person's religious beliefs or lack of them have come to mean less and less to me in my overall opinion of a person. (You notice I said "person," singular. Almost as if I regarded people as individuals or something.) Although I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant, I still do think about things other than religion, and I sometimes even have very positive thoughts about religious things -- religious art and architecture and music and literature, mostly.

And to those of you who are offended by being compared to religious fanatics, let me quote Dawkins and Hitch and Stephen Fry and the millions of you human parrots who are constantly quoting them: "Oh, you're offended? So fucking what?!"

Chess Log: Sometimes Success Is As Easy As Remembering 1 Simple Thing

In this case: reminding myself to go fast, fast, fast in 5-0 blitz games. Things to remember don't get much simpler than that. Just a little over 24 hours ago I posted my last Chess Log post, and at the time, as I remarked,

"I haven't been playing very well at all lately."

I'd lost over 100 rating points in just a day or 2. Then I remarked that I'd been losing lots of games on time while having the better position. So I just told myself: "Go fast, fast, fast," and for the past 24 hours, for the most part, I haven't forgotten to do so, and I've gone 12-8 against highly-rated opposition and gained 70 points.

Oh, actually, I've reminded myself to do 2 very simple things, actually: go fast, and not assume that I've won until I actually have. The two things often go together: I gain an early advantage and get smug, assuming the game is already won, and before I know it, a tough opponent has been playing so much faster than me that I've got 10 seconds or so left against mt opponents 1 1/2 minutes... and I lose on time. Because I got smug and assumed I'd won before I actually had.

PS, 2:33 PM: And sure enough, as soon as I posted about how great I am at chess, I started another losing streak. Overconfidence messes you up in chess, every time.

Being Smart -- A Good Thing, Or What?

Not long ago, in an online discussion, in the middle of a somewhat garbled rant which I didn't try very hard to decipher, someone asserted that a certain cultural tendency had been around for 2000 years.

I replied that the tendency has existed for at least 30,000 years, and maybe much longer than that. Maybe 100,000 years or even longer.

The writer of the first comment asked me, with an lol or 2, why I was bringing numbers into this, and claimed that -- something like: nobody knew what the real numbers were because "they threw the numbers out when they made the calendars," and called me a smart guy.

I pointed out that it was he who had brought numbers into the conversation, and quoted Catullus: "Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est." (More than 2000 years old, that quote.)



He responded with a couple more lol's, repeated his charge that it was I who had brought numbers into the conversation, and asserted further that a smart guy had been called out. I went back to his original comment, thinking that I might want to go to the trouble of cutting and pasting the part about the calenders and 2000 years -- it would be a good opportunity, I thought, to point out that calendars as well as religion were more than 2000 years old -- but I saw that he had edited the comment and removed the part about 2000 years.

So I gave up on that guy, and here I am talking to you instead.

It seems that everybody likes to think they're smart. (Cue the Fredo Corleone "Not like everybody says. Like -- stupid! I'm smart!"-- clip.)

I watched "The West Wing" for several seasons until I decided that it was a Democratic fantasy world, a fantasy of great Democratic success distracting us from the real world, and that reality urgently needed more of our attention, as indicated by non-fictional events such as George W Bush being elected President. "The West Wing," famously employing several former Clinton White House staffers as technical advisors to achieve its hyper-"realism," went so far in its denial of reality as to create a Republican Presidential candidate clearly based on W, Gov Robert Ritchie of Florida, and have Jeb Bartlet resoundingly beat the fictional W in his re-election. In 2002, just to put a cherry on the sundae of unreality.

Not only does Bartlet trounce Ritchie, there is a specific moment, quite a while after the re-election campaign has begun, when he decides he's going to trounce him. It's during a private meeting of the two, sometime after Bartlet has inadvertently been caught on-air insulting Ritchie for being dumb, and immediately after Ritchie, in their private meeting, very deliberately insults Bartlet for being smart. Bartlet gets up to go and tells Ritchie he's decided to kick his ass (his words.)



The theme of intelligence is emphasized over and over in "The West Wing" -- mostly in the form of it being remarked that Bartlet and his staffers are incredibly smart, just the most intelligent people in the entire USA. Above, I mentioned the denial of political reality embodied in the show creating a W-like character and having the Democratic hero trounce him. Is that the extent of the denial involved in the program -- or is the constant emphasis on how brilliant the regular characters are also overcompensation for feelings of insecurity on the part of the actual former White House staffers and "West Wing" technical advisors about their own intelligence?

And who feels insecure about their intelligence? Those who have reason to. Actual geniuses don't go around screaming, "I'm not stupid, like everybody says I am!" I don't think they generally need constant reassurance that they're smart. Maybe "The West Wing" was realistic inasmuch as the Clinton staffers did constantly tell each other that they were astonishing geniuses.

Think about how much taller Rob Lowe is than George Stephanopoulos, and then try to tell me that no flattery, conscious or subconscious, was going on on "The West Wing." (For all I know, Lowe is actually more intelligent than Stephanopoulos. He certainly has a better sense of humor.)

Anyway, I'm not nearly smart enough to have any idea of what to do about all of this. Well... you could vote for Democrats -- real Democrats, not the feel-good fictional kind with which some Democrats in Hollywood have been flattering me and you and themselves. Voting for real Democrats will increase support for real education.

The 2014 Mid-Terms And The Can't-Do Attitude Of Some Leftists

First of all, let's try to shake off this reluctance to call ourselves Leftists if we're left of center. Let's get a grip and speak plainly: yes, there are some Communists in the Democratic Party. And there are some Nazis in the Republican Party. And that's one of the long list of reasons why the Democratic Party is much better than the GOP.

It irks me so to hear people say that they "usually" vote Democratic, but they hate doing it, because Democrats and Republicans "are all pretty much the same," all "bought and paid for by corporations," and "things will never really change" because "those in power" don't want them to.

Things change all the time, so there's one of those premises I don't buy. You can read about some dramatic changes about to occur as a result of the mid-terms in this brief, accurate and depressing portrait of Jim Inhofe, who will probably be the next chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The stupidity of the readers' comments on the article are even more depressing, matching the stupidity of the US public's behavior this past Tuesday. There may be changes in Social Security and Disability checks received by the elderly and disabled. There will be changes in policy on women's rights, minority rights, affirmative action, voting rights, LGBT rights -- if you feel that Americans have entirely too many rights and that poor people have it too good and that it's time for billionaires to finally catch a break, the election returns should gladden your heart.

No, I don't buy the premise that Democrats and Republicans are the same. It astounds me that anybody could think they are.

Corporations aren't all the same either. Yes, they contribute heavily to the campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans, but they don't all contribute the same to both sides of the aisle. It'd be pretty stupid for oil companies to give as much to the party trying to take away their tax exemptions -- that'd be the Democratic Party, including that notorious wimpy centrist corporate stooge Barack Hussein Obama -- as they give to the party stamping at the bit to open up Keystone XL and remove restrictions on fracking -- yes, Sparky, that'd be the Republicans.

Also, one of the two big parties is trying to reverse the cynically-named Citizens United and VASTLY REDUCE the amount of money given to political campaigns, and no, Sparky, it ain't the GOP.

I don't buy that "those in power" all want the same things. I put the phrase in quotes because power constantly shifts, there isn't one clearly-defined Them running everything, that's a paranoid fantasy. In reality, individual human beings wield power, people who by no means always agree about everything, even when they're in one and the same of the 2 major parties. party. To those who feel powerless -- if you occasionally try to DO something to change the things which dissatisfy you, your chances of actually having more power yourself are better than if you just sit there and bitch and vote 3rd-party and stupidly, smugly believe yourselves to be morally superior to all of us who are actually trying to do something.

I'm talking to you, Greens. Yes, I blame you for Inhofe, and yes, I still blame you for W beating Gore, and no, I don't want to try to explain to you how the one individual most responsible for bringing global warming to the attention of the general public is different from the Republican POTUS whose administration shored up the near-unanimous Republican position that global warming isn't happening, if you really are too stupid to see the difference.

Oh well. About all we can do now is hold on for 2 years, dig in and try to keep the GOP from killing us all, and hope that the stupidest among us re-learn what they learned between 2010 and 2012 and then forgot again.

Yeah, I'm a little bit steamed. Just a tad.

In Which I Hand CS Lewis And GK Chesterton Their Butts

(Very often, amazingly, Christians point proudly to these two fellas. Obviously, Lewis and Chesterton aren't the very brightest of all the billions of Christians there have been. But maybe they're the best of the Christian equivalent of New Atheists: Christians who've made a career of defending their side. Well, enough of their supposed brilliance! Watch as I decimate their "arguments" with ease! [Plus one each by Aquinas and William Lane Craig while I'm here.])

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning." -- CS Lewis "Rejecting the meaning you assign to the universe, CS, doesn't mean it has no meaning. To some degree our lives mean what we are able to make them mean. This means you're weren't listening to Jean-Paul Sartre, even if that sounds mean." -- The Wrong Monkey

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” -- CS Lewis "A young Christian who wishes to remain so -- Christian, that is. Young is more difficult -- does not need to be careful about how much Lewis or Chesterton he or she reads. One page of Nietzsche or Twain or Russell or Sartre or The Wrong Monkey or Schopenhauer or Marx or the Bible or Augustine or Aquinas or Kierkegaard or Carlin or Napoleon or any of thousands of other authors, on the other hand, could instantly and irrevocably mess that plan up. But only if this young Christian really wants to learn, which most of them don't, which is why they end up old and stupid and unbearable like you!" -- The Wrong Monkey

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” ― Thomas Aquinas "That must be why you spent so much time and effort writing those proofs of God's existence. Have I told you I'm a big fan, Thomas? Well I'm not, and anyone who's told you otherwise is a stinking liar! I find your writing unbearable at best! On the question of the existence of God, arguments for are easily ripped to shreds by an average atheist who is not yet full grown, and arguments against are generally ignored by the best of you, when they're not they're distorted into strawmen. Debating with Christians is a waste of an atheist's time, time much better spent warning others about people like you." -- The Wrong Monkey

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” ― C.S. Lewis "See what I wrote above about meaning. Other than that -- wow, what can I say, except: You really can talk some mess! And maybe you should've checked out some other people's arguments against the existence of God, instead of just assuming that yours was state-of-the-art, and that when you thought you'd found a hole in it you were done." -- The Wrong Monkey

“‎"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” ― William Lane Craig "You had a couple of deep thoughts and scared yourself, and instead of continuing to think, which often, perhaps more often than not brings some consolation with no sacrifice of intelligence, you retreated to the standard conservative-Christian fall-back position and dedicated your life to interfering with those of us who are trying to continue to think." -- The Wrong Monkey

“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.” ― G.K. Chesterton "Speak for yourself, Fatso!" -- The Wrong Monkey

“The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still." ― C.S. Lewis "Atheists aren't mad at the cosmos, CS. We don't arraign heaven. In order to be able to do so we would first have to believe that heaven exists. We are impatient with morons like you, and we are angry that you still have power so grotesquely unproportionate to your intelligence and skills. As powerful as you Christians still are, and as fat as Chesterton was, very few non-Christians ever confuse or conflate you with the entire universe" -- The Wrong Monkey

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” ― G.K. Chesterton "If there were no diseases, there would be no physicians. If there had been no Chesterton, there would have been much more cheese for everyone else. (He was very fat.)" -- The Wrong Monkey

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” ― G.K. Chesterton "You must have had some very powerful connections, the way you prattled on endlessly about it. Unless what you really meant, and I think it was, is that you wished you lived in a Medieval world where no-one was allowed to breathe an un-Christian word in your presence." -- The Wrong Monkey

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” ― G.K. Chesterton "I've never met anyone like that. This is the very first time I've ever even heard of someone like that, and I'm 52 years old and astonishingly well-read. It's clear why being a Christian interferes with someone's ability to be a good novelist much less than it interferes with other things: both activities require that one constantly make stuff up. Of course, Christianity also requires that one insist that the made-up stuff is true, while the novelist admits that it is fictional." -- The Wrong Monkey

This Is Priceless

Sometimes something simply leaves you breathless. Sometimes because it's brilliant or beautiful, but not always. Sometimes something is so thoroughly stubbornly stupid that it takes your breath away. It's beautiful in own utterly ugly way. It's a negative sort of perfection: stupidity perfected.

I've been going back and forth with a person who's not hopelessly stupid in all things, but stubbornly, proudly sticks to the "Bronze-Age goat herders" meme. Coming toward the end of my rope with him on the subject, I sarcastically remarked: "I see: you can't think of anything else at all to call them [the authors of the Bible] besides 'Bronze-Age goat herders' and 'donkey hucksters.' And that's my fault."

His priceless reply:

"Actually, yes, it is. Bronze Age goat herders is slang and may be a bit dubious, but I and everybody else knows what I mean by it, so it's doing its job, which is to communicate meaning, meaning that maybe it ain't really broke, so why fix it? Donkey hucksters has the advantage of strict cultural and historical accuracy, but you haven't said whether it passes muster with you, or if not why not. In any case, nobody seems to have a problem with any of this stuff but you; why? Well, you haven't really said, in any way that makes sense to me, despite my having read your blog entries. Maybe you were raised in a cave by wolves and don't really understand how the rest of us process these things? I should think some Christians might have a problem with it, but not because of its weakness re historical accuracy. In other words, the only person in the world who has an issue with this would appear to be you, so yes indeed, it is entirely upon you to think up something else to call them."

I haven't looked into the phrase "donkey hucksters" yet, so I don't know whether it has wide currency outside of places like jesusneverexisted.com and Stormfront. I'll look into it and get back to you. To you. Not to this other guy. As far as he's concerned, I give up. I can only assume that his blind spot here comes from some deep-seated childhood trauma. I hope he gets the help he needs someday. I, unfortunately, am not a therapist.

PS, 11:49 AM: I just googled "donkey hucksters" and got 3 hits, one to this post, one in fact to Stormfront, the third to a PDF of a newspaper page from 1961.

An Open Letter To Richard Dawkins

Hey, Dick!

I regret having stood up for you for some time in your capacity as a leader of New Atheism before having properly informed myself about your statements on various religions. Doubly so since I'm always chiding others for weighing in on topics about which they haven't first informed themselves. Which is pretty much what this post is about.

Let's concede for the sake of argument that you're correct in stating that science in the "Muslim world" is in a sorry state -- you've got a huge microphone and a towering podium, you've got some power: what are you going to DO about it? Beside repeating your mantra, "Religion is bad!"? Yes, Richard, religion is bad, but "Religion is bad!" is extremely oversimplistic, and extreme oversimplification is bad, if you will pardon my oversimplifying the case.

I'll tell you some things you can do:

Read the Koran, and until you're finished with that, enjoy a nice steaming hot mug of STFU about Islam.

But I see I'm far from the first to propose this to you. Oh well. Onward:

Visit some majority-Muslim countries, if you haven't already. If you have, pardon me, but it's hard to imagine that you have. In the course of researching whether or not you've ever been to a majority-Muslim country I came across someone posting on the Internet behind the anonymous safety of a handle, claiming to have been in the Middle East and to know that it amounted to suicide to be there and admit to being an atheist. I was immediately reminded of some other Internet pussies who claimed to live secretly as atheists in the US South, because coming out of the atheist closet there, they were certain, would be career suicide.

I lived in the middle of the Bible Belt for 10 years, during which time it never occurred to me to try to hide the fact that I was an atheist, and I knew people who were bolder than I, and we all were employed.

Admittedly, simply being an atheist, and being Richard Dawkins His Dangself, are two different propositions. But assuming that your personal security could somehow be arranged, would you consider going to Damascus University, say, or the University of Jordan, and meeting face to face with scientists working there, so you'd have a better idea of whom you're dissing? Visiting their labs, discussing their research?

If for no other reason, then to give yourself a shred of credibility on certain topics, as reading the Koran would?

I think your problem here is prejudice, Richard, and prejudice consists of assuming things about people rather than getting to know them as individuals. If "Muslim science" were represented in your mind by some people you'd met, whose labs you'd seen, maybe you'd be less inclined to say such stupid hurtful things about them. If those scientists in Jordan or Syria were not faceless to you, perhaps you'd be inclined to actually say, or even to do, things which could help them perform scientific work better. Of course, if you saw them for yourself, there's also the possibility that you'd see that you had been wrong about "Muslim science" being in such a sorry state, and instead begin wondering -- aloud, and in front of hot mikes, could one hope? -- about things such as why those scientists haven't received more attention from Western institutions such as those folks from Nobel.

Realistically, I don't see any reason to think that you'll do any of these this: read the Koran, go to the Middle East, meet "Muslim scientists" or tour "Muslim universities," or anything else which might open your mind a crack on the subject. (I'd be so glad if you'd prove me wrong.) And so instead, we atheists who are not as completely stupid about religion and culture and history as you -- have you met Salman Rushdie? If so it doesn't seem to have done you any good -- are just going to have to do a much better job of distancing ourselves from you. For so many reasons, including this one: it's true that not every atheist who is critical of Islam needs to have read the Koran, but the leader of a movement of millions of them should know it forward and backward, in Arabic. (Or at least for crying out loud be able to refer us to someone who does.) That's not very much to ask at all. There are plenty of atheists who fulfill that job requirement, including some you've probably never heard of because, you know, they live in the "Muslim world."

"In 2000 Years People Will Believe Harry Potter Is True"

No, of course I don't believe that. I'm quoting stupid atheists, as I did in the blog post entitled We Possess the Works of Over Fifty Historians Who Were in Jerulsalem During Jesus' Supposed Lifetime, And None of Them Mention Him! And even if I ever did express such a harebrained notion, I would express it more elegantly, saying "nonfictional" rather than "true." ("Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?") This one about Harry Potter seems very popular, and it's staggeringly stupid, of course. (Was it actually started by someone like Dawkins or Hitchens? Harris seems a much more likely suspect.) When the Bible, or the Iliad,for example, was written, people regarded them as nonfiction. A lower percentage of their readers regards them as nonfictional today. Conversely, when the plays of Plautuswere first presented, over 2000 years ago, they were not thought of as depictions of actual people and events any more than Rowling's novels are today. And over the past 2000 years, people have not gradually come to think that they were depictions of actual people and events. Likewise, Dante's Divine Comedyand Shakespeare's Tempest,both clearly understood to be fiction right from the start, are not gradually being regarded as nonfiction.

If I were to argue in court that, indeed, there is a significant group of atheists running around loose who bear striking resemblances to religious fundamentalists, this garbage about Harry Potter just might be Exhibit A. (Hopefully 2000 years from now Rowling's mediocre children's novels will be long forgotten.) Just as a fundamentalist Christian will quote a verse or two from the KJVand stand there grinning smugly at you as if she just showed you something, so many a stupid atheist will say that 2000 years from now people will think Harry Potter is true, and stand there with the very same stupid smug grin on the front of his pointy head. When I first heard the term "fundamentalist atheist" a few years ago I found it to be ridiculous, and I wrote a blog post proudly claiming the intended insult as a label for my own, just like a punk rocker or a Gothic cathedral. Now I see that the term has its legitimate application. I still think that, by and large, the brightest folks tend to be atheists and the dimmest bulbs tend to believe in some deity or deities, but there are atheists who don't think about religion, but just parrot stupid memes about religion, just like the fundies. Let's make it perfectly clear now, I am not on their side. I am on the side of open minds, intellects which exert themselves and reach for more, people who are capable of being corrected. People who love to learn. It's never been atheists against believers with me. Scorsese and Cormac McCarthy and Kazantzakis and Kierkegaard are still my homies. Christianity is still stupid, but a person is often stupid in some areas and brilliant in others, and those four Christians are miles and miles brighter than these atheist yokels who just will not stop repeating their memes about Harry Potter becoming a religion over the next 2000 years and the Bible being written by illiterate [sic!] Bronze Age goat herders or by Constantine and the Pope at Nicea.

And Still More

(A group of them at once this time. Keep in mind, this is all in response to a story about how a software program is allegedly helping scholars identify the different authors of stories out of which some early Old Testament books were woven together, as described in the so-called "Documentary hypotheis.")

CITIZEN 1: So, some portions of the Bible have multiple authors, each with their own idealogic bent, and their own agendas. Using that premise, it's easy to see how the original text was subverted during translatio­n in the 13th century, to suit the agenda of the RCC. Control over the masses, deliberate manipulati­on of scripture.

ME: What translatio­n would that be? My impression was that in the 13 century the Catholic Church was committed to using the Vulgate, which is mostly the work of Jerome in the late 4th century, and was very suspicious­, to put it very mildly, of any new translatio­ns.

But please, enlighten me.

CITIZEN 2: please enlighten you, Why,cant you read with comprehens­ion !!

ME: I can read just fine, thanks. But I don't know of any

"translati­o­n [of the Bible] in the 13th century, to suit the agenda of the RCC"

Do you?

CITIZEN 3: In short, keeping the Bible and the liturgy in Vulgate Latin (essential­ly a dead language) meant that the church held the keys to the kingdom. Controllin­g access to seminaries meant controllin­g the worshipper­s, since they couldn't function on their own.

Twomen changed everything­: Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg. Of these, the latter was more important, developing a new technology that increased independen­t thought by increasing literacy.

ME: "Martin Luther"

16th century.

"and Johannes Gutenberg"

15th century. And both decidedly NOT conforming to the Catholic Church's agenda.

CITIZEN 3: Okay; people started getting serious about putting the Bible in "the language of the people" in the 13th century, but still it was a scholar's pursuit at a time when books were high-price­d rarities. I Googled and found a bunch of different sites; here's one:

http://www­.bookrags.­com/tandf/­biblical-t­ranslation­-tf/

CITIZEN 1: Thanks for the backup.

What I was referencin­g was the introducti­on of the translatio­ns done by the monks, prior to the invention of the printing press. Very few people were literate at that point in history, those who were existed mostly in the clergy. Very easy targets for manipulati­on by their superiors. You know, the guys in the pointy hats.

ME: Okay, so apparently you can't get any more specific than you already were.

Can you tell me who told you about these manipulati­ve translatio­ns? Was it Jesus?

And yes, I read ShinjiIkar­i's link.

Are you just assuming that any translatio­n made in the 13th century was ordered by Popes or bishops with manipulati­ve intent? May I hope that you could provide one specific example of a translatio­n and tell me how this intent was manifested in it? (Definitely getting to be pretty much an entirely rhetorical question by now. I'm feeling like Gibbs in the beginning of Gaddis' JR, with his look drained of all hope.)

CITIZEN 1: I really didn't have anyone tell me of these manipulati­ons. My assertions come from first hand experience­. Don't worry, I'm on your side in this discussion­. (At this point it's very hard to resist the temptation to say something like "You couldn't find my side with a search warrant and a crack FBI forensic team!") It's these experience­s that force me to gladly proclaim I'm agnostic.

Some of the translatio­ns were, in fact, ordered by whoever was ruling at that time. Kings and queens did have some education, and the more enlightene­d ones sought more. As far as offering a specific example, I'm sorry no. But then again, I don't have the originals in my possesion, nor the skills to translate. (Duh! This is getting very sad now. I guess I'll just leave these people alone. What else can I do?)