Challenge: Best Nonfiction Book

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Best Nonfiction Book I've Ever Read

That's a tricky one. I don't read as much non-fiction as I should, and there aren't that many that stuck with me well enough for me to recommend. Still, I do have one: 

You're Stepping On My Cloak And Dagger, by Roger Hall. It's an autobiography written by a fellow who was assigned to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during World War II -- how he got there, his training, and eventually the missions he took part in. It's not what you might expect: not a lot of grand deeds, or the horrors of war, or important victories. What it is, more than anything else, is an insightful and humorous perspective into what it was like to be involved with the United States putting together one of its very first spy agencies.

Challenge: Historical Figures

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Favorite Historical Personage to read about

I don't have a particular favorite. I do read some history, but I don't generally read biographies. That said, I do sort of have a type: I enjoy reading about the wilder, less famous historical figures -- the ones who did outrageous, ridiculous things, and were frequently some sort of hot mess into the bargain. Consider, for example...

La Maupin, born Julie d'Aubigny: duelist, opera singer, cross-dresser, seducer of men and women alike, and absolute 100% drama magnet. 

The Chevalier d'Eon: diplomat, spy, soldier, and most likely what we would refer to today as a trans woman; at one point she was even blackmailing the King of France (and quite effectively, too).

Nelly Bly: pioneering investigative journalist, who among other things took Jules Verne's Around The World In Eighty Days as a challenge, set off, and made it the entire way in seventy-two days -- with a brief stop to meet with Jules Verne himself. 

I like reading about people who lived these utterly wild lives, in other words.

Put on the blame on what, again?

So after last week I've found myself re-playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for reasons I'm not entirely ready to explore. (Suffice to say that it's a game that encourages you to act horribly, which is definitely one way to blow off steam...) But it's a little different playing it now than it was when I first played it back in the day...

GTA:VC was published in 2002, but it's set during the 1980s (in a fictional city in Florida, but that's neither here nor there). In-game activities include stealing a great many cars, racing, chasing, shooting, and generally creating all sorts of mayhem. (I just finished starting a gang war last night.) All of this has the ultimate goal of taking over the entire criminal underworld, and especially the drug trade, in Vice City.

So this game, published in 2002, is set in the eighties; and as a result, the radio stations more or less all play 80s music (along with satirical fake-80s advertisements and talk radio programs). And the New Wave station -- remember New Wave? -- includes "Video Killed The Radio Star" by The Buggles: 

See? I really am going somewhere with this thought. 

Anyway, the song is lamenting the way that television, and especially brave new world of music videos, had put a number of traditional singers out of jobs. The basic idea (which was not unfounded) that musical talent was no longer enough to succeed; singers had to look good as well, and that was an artistic tragedy arising, in no small part, from the development of new technologies. 

And this is the part that's been poking at me, because it plays a bit differently here in 2021 than it did back in 2002 -- or back in 1980, for that matter. When the song first came out, it was a timely lament of a current issue. In 2002, it sounded more nostalgic and perhaps even ironic: "Remember when MTV used to play music videos?" 

But, well, here in 2021, "put all the blame on VCR" isn't just amusingly dated; technology has made another complete shift and VCRs are now also a thing of the past -- and the DVDs and Blu-Rays that replaced them are rapidly headed that way as well. 

So I guess what I'm trying to express here is the uncomfortable realization that this song about good things that have become outdated by the passage of time has now, itself, become outdated by the passage of time.

TL/DR: I feel old!

I Think The Civil War Was Run By Idiots

Compiled from Twitter:

So I'm reading a history of the Civil War, and... Y'all, I knew it was a huge, long, sometimes-bloody mess, but I hadn't realized the full scope of what a comedy of errors the whole thing was. I mean, some of that was down to the limits of intelligence-gathering and communications at the time, and some of it comes from trying to lurch from a functional peacetime economy to a state of total war with absolutely no preparation. But it sure doesn't help that activities on both sides - both military and political - seem to have largely been directed by idiots.

You want an example?

Well, all right: the one that prompted this post was the expedition of Henry H. Sibley, who offered his services to Jefferson Davis in the form of a plan to raise troops in Texas, then advance up the Rio Grand through New Mexico to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Once there, he'd drive out the federalists and turn west, eventually extending the Confederacy all the way to California (and picking up some gold and silver mines to help replenish the Confederate treasury along the way).

So he recruits his brigades and heads north from El Paso. And... well, the situation is really messy, but he basically is able to march north all the way to Albuquerque with only minimal resistance (from Fort Craig) but also with minimal supplies, in some very harsh desert. He then arrives in Albuquerque to find that that the Union garrison has set fire to their supply depots and fallen back to Santa Fe, so he takes what supplies he can find and moves on to Santa Fe, with the same result: no enemy soldiers, but no supplies to be taken.

At this point, Sibley is *shocked* to discover that the local population isn't going to greet him with cheering, parades, and floods of volunteers eager to swell his ranks. In fact, they're not very friendly at all, and they certainly aren't eager to let Sibley & Co. buy supplies with Confederate currency, which they regard as completely worthless.

Meanwhile, all the troops that have been retreating as he advanced have gathered at Fort Union. Sibley decides to attack, and... well, again, it's messy, but he meets the Union troops in Apache Canyon in a sort of horrible battle-by-attrition at Glorietta Pass. Except one unit of Union troops slips completely around the battle and torches his entire supply train. Sibley retreats to Santa Fe, and the main body of the Union Forces cautiously decides to hold Fort Union rather than risking a pursuit.

Meanwhile, the guy from Fort Craig - which Sibley had disdained to finish off after defeating its troops fairly decisively in one battle - comes north to Albuquerque, exchanges fire with Sibley's troops there, and calls for the Fort Union troops to come reinforce him.

So this should have been the set-up for a final, decisive battle to drive the confederates back down into Texas. Only Sibley has finally figured out his troops can't live off the countryside, the locals aren't going to help him, and he has no supply lines. His artillery is nearly out of ammunition, and his wagon train is gone. So he just... leaves. Heads back the way he came. Through the desert. With no supply train.

The Union forces at this point are basically just pacing him - like, they're not so much attacking as just escorting him out. This goes on for several days, until finally the Union forces wake up one morning to find that they're camped across the river from an empty camp.

Sebley has decided to make a hundred mile detour to the west, to avoid Fort Craig. Through the desert. With no road, no guide, dense brush, and only five days' worth of supplies for something like a ten day trip.

By the time he gets back to Texas he's lost something like 1700 of his troops, of which less than 500 were lost in battle. A lot the rest were lost in that last 100 miles of marching.

Sibley survives, but his idiot certainty that naturally he was the hero and the people of New Mexico would rise up to support his glorious arrival does not. His follow-up report is basically a long essay on what a horrible place New Mexico really is.

"I cannot speak encouragingly for the future, my troops having manifested a dogged , irreconcilable detestation of the country and the people."

Because, you know, invading armies and occupying foreign forces should really expect to receive *better* from the local populace. They deserve it for being so gosh-darned noble and heroic, don't you know?

Medieval Death Map

So... The University of Cambridge's Violence Research Centre has published a map showing homicide deaths in late-medieval London, as collected from the coroner's rolls. It's very, very cool.

My advice? Be careful who you insult, and stay out of Cheapside.

The Cold War-est Book Ever To War Coldly

So, my dad is sorting out old books (many of them from my childhood), which mainly means putting them in boxes and letting us go through them. Some of them are classics; some of them are odd. I mean, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a respectable title for any childhood library. I discovered (and found that I had fond memories of) Danny Dunn on a Desert Island, and passed it along to Firstborn, who also enjoyed it. On the other hand, some of them are just... kind of creepy. I'm still baffled by The Lemming Condition, for example. And only marginally less creepy is today's selection:

The Rescue
A Novel by Elizabeth Faucher
Based on the Motion Picture Written by Jim Thomas & John Thomas

"Now A Major Motion Picture from Touchstone Pictures," the cover proclaims proudly, disdaining any sensible rules for capitalization. (I have no memory of such a Motion Picture ever existing, but I'm sure it did.) But the real wonder of this thing is the summary on the back. The book was apparently published in 1988, which puts it firmly in the same era as Iron Eagle, and... well... just read it:

Their fathers are locked up in a prison camp behind the Bamboo Curtain. Their government has decided that it's too risky to attempt a rescue mission - it could lead to war. So now it's up to the SEAL kids - J.J., Shawn, Adrian, Max, and Bobby - to rescue their fathers and bring them back to freedom and safety.

That's right, kids: it's your responsibility to Save America by doing Something Insanely Stupid That Might Actually Cause A War Heroic. Yeah.

You go right ahead with that.

Man, I grew up in a weird era.

Off to Timbuktu

Nothing for today. If you want something fun to entertain you, go check out The Search for Timbuktu over at Strange Company.

The Age of Exploration was not for the faint of heart.

Every Night We Do The Speaking.

This was a comment in response to something else, but it amused me so I'm copying it over here. The topic was What Part Did The Internet Play In Your Loss Of Faith? (It's here if you want to see it.)

"Listen well and 'member. We do the Speaking every night so we don't forget. Time was, time is, time's gone. 'Member the time now, when everything was meatspace. T'weren't no Internet. T'weren't no Metaverse."

Children in chorus: "We 'member it."

"'Member the times when the tech wasn't part of you. 'Member the times before you could even wear the glasses or the goggles to see into the Network. Member when a computer was nothin' more than a big, heavy box, like furniture, with a tiny little window to let you see... and there wasn't anything to see. 'Member when all there was, was people writin' words."

Children in chorus: "We 'member it."

"Some of these boxes, these computers, they were plugged into wires. Phone lines, we called 'em then. The box computers used other boxes, smaller boxes, modems to talk 'cross the wires. Without the modems, the box computers were silent and alone. 'Member them."

Children in chorus: "We 'member the modems. We 'member the copper wires."

"In those lost, dark days, you had to know the numbers. If you didn't know the numbers, the modems couldn't find other modems. They couldn't talk. We wrote the numbers on paper, in meatspace. We left them where people could find them. We found the numbers that other people had left. We put them in our computers, so our modems could talk to their modems, so our little computer windows could show us the words they'd written, and they could read ours. 'Member the numbers."

Children in chorus: "We 'member the numbers."

"Time is, time was, time's gone. That was world, when I first drifted away from Christianity. 'Member it."

Children in chorus: "We 'member."

Music: History Is Made By Stupid People

A well-known fact among historians, but often lost on the general population:

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth, Part 4

Heh. I started this back on the 5th of February. It isn't finished, obviously. But, hey, I haven't got anything else for this morning, so here you go:

I wrote this introductory bit yesterday, when I thought I was finally recovering from the Flu. (I'm pretty sure it was the flu. Whatever it was, Tamiflu strated helping almost immediately.) So I figured I'd have time and energy to continue this the way I've been doing it so far. That was before last night. Last night was... kind of horrible. So I'm switching to a newer, shorter approach.

This post is part of an extended response to this video of a talk given by J Warner Wallace of Cold Case Christianity. Why? Well, somebody asked me to take a look and kind of offer my feedback/reactions. Here's the background. Everything I've said about the video is collected under the Cold Case Christianity tag, so that's where you should go if you want read the whole thing.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure anyone strictly needs to read the whole thing. I laid out some thoughts about Mr. Wallace's approach in the background post, and they've turned out to be fairly prescient in terms of what he has to say in this particular talk; so if you just want a general reaction, that's probably sufficient. At this point, I'm continuing on mostly for the sake of completeness, and because I'm curious if he has anything to add to the "eyewitnesses" argument for the historicity of Jesus.

In the last post, I stopped at the twenty-five minute mark, partly because the wall o' text was getting pretty long, and partly because I felt like I was getting away from explaining why I didn't find the thing convincing, and more into directly criticizing Mr. Wallace's approach. There's likely to be more of that ahead, so... um... be warned?

Yeah. Instead of going through it point by point, I'm just going to watch the rest of the talk. If he does anything that we haven't covered already, I might comment, but otherwise we're going all the way through the second half of the lecture and I'll just write down my final impressions.

I'm still very curious what the teenagers in his audience thought of this talk.

...Okay, fine, I'm going to comment a little. I'm at 31:55 in the lecture, and Mr. Wallace has been quizzing his students on whether various claims were objective or subjective. He's also been walking up the ladder of how-abstract-is-this, from physical claims, to mathematical claims (which he categorizes as "abstract"), to metaphysical claims, to moral claims. In the process, he's accidentally confirming something I talked about in the last post: this whole topic is vastly more complicated than objective/subjective and true/false. Trying to divide everything up into objective or subjective seems guaranteed to set up a false dichotomy.

In fact, rather than taking all those different kinds of claims (physical, mathematical, metaphysical, moral) and dividing them into objective or subjective, I think we'd be better off to add "subjective" in as another kind of claim: a claim of value. Are chocolate chip cookies the best dessert in the world? That's a question of value. Is tiramisu awesome? Also a question of value. That doesn't mean those claims aren't subjective; value is always perceived and changeable. But looking at it this way changes the way we make our divisions. Now, instead of having Physical, Mathematical, Metaphysical, and Moral claims which we divide into the larger categories of objective or subjective, we have five categories: Physical, Mathematical, Metaphysical, Moral, and Value claims, each of which we can approach on their own terms.

Going back to one of his earlier examples, let's look at "Hyundais can fly you to the moon." Mr. Wallace, using his objective/subjective split, classifies that as objective, and objectively false. I think there's a very good chance that he's miscategorized it -- that it isn't a physical claim at all. Instead, with such an obvious case of hyperbole, it seems far more likely that what we're hearing is the colloquial equivalent of "Hyundais are awesome," a value claim, and best considered and evaluated as a value claim rather than as a claim about the physical world.

That brings me back to Mr. Wallace's statement at 31:50 in the talk: "If there is a single objective transcendent moral claim that we can agree on, then we're stuck with the objective, transcendant nature of moral claims."

He then goes on discuss what he calls "objective, transcendent" moral claims -- basically making the claim that moral claims fall into the objective category. Now, he does acknowledge that moral claims tend to be complicated, and subject to disagreement, but I still think it's more useful to consider moral claims as kind of a separate category, rather than trying to shoehorn them into his objective/subjective setup.

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth, Part 3

Okay, I'm watching this video, because someone said they'd be interested in my response to it. The background post is here. I'm almost certainly over-thinking the whole thing, but hey -- if they didn't want over-thinking, they should have asked someone else for feedback.

In our last installment, I went through about the first third of the fifty-two minute video. That took a long time, since I'd spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes responding to things that took Mr. Wallace no more than thirty seconds to rattle off. Naturally, I'm going to stick with the same format for this installment, because I don't have any better ideas and anyway learning from your mistakes is for wimps. Wrong and strong! Full speed ahead! Here we go...

...Picking up at the sixteen minute and thirty second mark:

17:54: Talking about objective vs. subjective truth: "I'm going to test you on this, so be ready." Laughter. "And by the way, most churches and most groups that I work with will fail the test."

18:30: Now he's comparing a mission trip to explain the only medical cure for tuberculosis with the need to share your faith. By implication, he's tying in the concepts that A) his brand of Christian faith is objectively true, and B) sharing your faith is a matter of life and death. Note that he hasn't actually established either point; he's just sort of sliding those assertions in as an aside.

20:20: He's... using a metaphor about a house to basically point out that people commonly confuse objective truth-claims with subjective truth-claims. That seems like an unnecessarily elaborate way to make a relatively simple claim. Also, this is kind of a false dichotomy. Truth claims don't just fall into objective or subjective categories; there are, for example, claims that might be objective but we don't have enough evidence, or adequate methods of testing them, to be sure.

20:50: Considering theological truth as subjective weakens the truth claim, "because opinions don't really matter, if you think about it." No. Just, no. Not everything has to be Ultimately Important to matter.

21:00: "We have to reunite this idea, and get to one total truth, so we understand that the truth claims about God are every bit as objective as truth claims about math." ::sigh:: Are you really sure you want to go there, Dude? I ask because, as you yourself have pointed out, an awful lot of the reasons that people believe are... well... personal. Subjective. Francis Schaeffer has an entire book entitled He Is There and He Is Not Silent -- which, if it were true, would be far too self-evident to require a book.

Also, I'm troubled by the idea of "one total truth". Are we trying to unite subjective and objective truths here? Because that seems... problematic. Or are we just going to discard all subjective truths as unworthy of the label of Truth, and make sure that theological claims don't get discarded with them? That seems problematic too, but in a different way. Precisely which theological claims are we going to establish as independently-verifiable objective truths?

I'm just going to mention again that I have biases, and one of them is a low tolerance for showmanship. If you have a proof that the existence of God and/or the historicity of Jesus is/are real and verifiable, quit dithering around and show me.

23:38: "Now if I made this statement about Hyundais: 'I'm so committed -- Hyundais can fly you to the moon.' Objective or subjective?" Depends on how you meant it, of course, which is precisely the problem with most so-called "literal" readings of the Bible. Yes, I could assume that you were making a claim of objective fact, which in this case is relatively easy to disprove; but honestly, a statement like that is far more likely to be hyperbole, a metaphorical expression of your enthusiasm for the brand -- what you might call a poetic truth -- which would be based on your experience with the cars, and your opinion of the cars, and therefore subjective, and therefore (according to what you said back at the 20:50 mark) valueless.

Except that this also shows why the idea that subjective claims lack value is at best incomplete, and at worst simply wrong. As a data point, "This person has had such good experiences with Hyundai cars that they're willing to say things like, 'Hyundais can fly you to the moon,'" is actually useful to know. It isn't the Absolute Truth of whether you'll like a Hyundai as much as the person who said it, but it's still a useful indicator.

I'm going to un-pause, now, and see how Mr. Wallace answers his own question...

24:30: He's written it off as an objectively false claim. And, almost immediately afterwards, he's confusing objective and subjective. "If I said to you, 'I believe Chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies in the world,' that's a subjective claim." No, no it isn't. That's an objective claim, because either you do believe that, or you don't. It's a changeable objective claim, since your belief might change if someone introduced you to a new, better cookie, but it's still objective. You have to take the qualifier away to make it subjective: "Chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies in the world" is a subjective claim.

I'm pretty sure that if I were, hypothetically, one of the teenagers listening to this talk, he'd have lost me right there. But, again, I was a weird kid.

25:00: "Now, let's take the test together. We're gonna divide all true claims into two sides. On one side we're gonna put all objective claims, on the other side we're gonna put all subjective claims." That's kind of a false dichotomy -- sort of like any idea that starts with, "There are two kinds of people in the world..." Never trust a setup like that. When you're talking about claims, you're talking about things said by people, and when you're talking about things said by people, it's almost always more complicated than that.

Grouping all claims into either subjective or objective categories (while, as I've noted, a very cop thing to do) completely ignores questions of context, irony, hyperbole, exaggeration, sarcasm, humor, and really a substantial portion of all the rich variety of ways that people use to communicate. To make this division, you basically have to pretend that those things don't exist (and, by extension, didn't exist for the people living in Biblical times or the people who wrote their stories). You have to pretend that people don't interact or behave like people, in other words. You have to assume that people only ever communicate with each other in direct, literal sentences which present clear, unambiguous claims.

That's... functionally illiterate, in most cases.

(I'm sorry. I really set out just to explain why this sort of thing might not be all that persuasive to unbelievers. Instead, I'm being... well, pretty harshly critical of what Mr. Wallace has to say. Admittedly, that's precisely why this sort of thing might not be all that persuasive to unbelievers, but it still feels like I'm shading over from pointing out areas of disagreement and into actively debunking his points. Unfortunately, I don't think I can tone down my response and still offer any sort of useful or honest feedback. So just bear in mind that I don't begrudge Mr. Wallace his Christianity, or his belief that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual historical person, or any of that; it's just that I have some serious issues with his methodology.)

I'm going to stop here. (That means that this is definitely going to be at least two more installments, as we're roughly half-way through at this point. I doubt I can cram the next twenty-seven minutes of the talk into a single post; in fact, I suspect we'll be slowing down rather than speeding up. Still, I can hope, right?)

Benchmarks for this point in the lecture:

1. I'm seeing a lot more rhetoric than logic. I mean, Mr. Wallace has laid out the problem as he sees it: young people are leaving The Church in droves (and, I suspect, the occasional Hyundai), because they're going off to college without being ready to defend their beliefs. He's suggested a solution: prepare the young people by showing them that Christianity (and specifically his Baptist, definitely-not-Mormon brand of Christianity) is objectively (and, by implication, provably) true. And then, instead of just laying out this proof -- which ought not to be so terribly difficult -- he changes the subject. We're halfway through his talk, and we haven't done more than touch on the idea that this proof exists; the entire lecture so far is basically just background and build-up.

2. The hermeneutic he seems to be laying out here (at least, so far) strikes me as... well... simple-minded, and precisely the sort of thing that falls apart immediately when you try to apply it to the way actual people actually communicate. That isn't entirely Mr. Wallace's fault; a lot of what he's saying is standard, or at least very common, Christian doctrine.

3. I mentioned in the introductory post that a lot of apologetics seem to be designed more to reinforce the faith of existing Christians than to persuade unbelievers. That's definitely the case here (which, admittedly, makes sense when you consider his audience for his particular talk). Sure, Mr. Wallace has mentioned the vital need for people (and especially young people) to share their faith at all times, and the prospect of having solid proof of the historicity of Jesus seems like it could be really helpful with that; but he hasn't offered any discussion on how to approach people about your faith, how to actually share your faith, or when to shake the dust from your heels and move on to the next metaphorical town. This talk is (I think) building up to his core point about how Christians can know that the tenets of their faith are objective true, but it's building up with an explicit emphasis on keeping Christian young people in Christianity, rather than on bringing in new converts.

On to Part 4!

In Soviet Russia, The Joke Gets You

In the process of getting Firstborn ready for school this morning, I made a joke. This was a mistake, and I probably shouldn't have done it.

I was trying to get him into his hoodie, so he wouldn't freeze on the way in. Simple enough, but when he went to put his arm in the sleeve, we discovered that the sleeve was inside out. Being stiff, tired, and only barely awake, I said: "Ha! In Soviet Russia, sleeve goes in your arm!" This, in my best (read: completely atrocious) Russian accent.

Firstborn, predictably, said: "What's Soviet Russia?"

So, by the time I dropped him off at school, we'd discussed the U.S.S.R., and the fact that it doesn't exist anymore; the country of Russia, and the fact that it does; Communism, both theoretical and applied; the difference between a "cold" war and a real war; and why, if the meteor strike in Russia had happened a few decades ago instead of a few weeks ago, it might very well have kicked off World War Three.

Fortunately, we got to the carpool line before I had to explain the concept of Nuclear Winter, or even the likelihood that World War Three would have lasted about two hours, and ended with no victors and everyone vanquished.

The Cold War was a constant background presence in my childhood, though I was never as traumatized by it as some people were; I just sort of assumed that we'd muddle through somehow. Still, I remember thinking at the time that the whole situation was pretty stupid, and that it required a high degree of stupidity from the leaders on both sides to have gotten there in the first place, let alone to stay there for as long as we did.

Now that I'm older, that seems even more true.

How Like A God

I had an interesting discussion a while back, on the topic of how "atheists want to be their own gods".

Now... I never know quite what to say when that particular accusation comes up. To be honest, I don't really understand what it's supposed to mean. Are we supposed to want to worship ourselves? If so, how? By composing little hymns to praise our power and wisdom, maybe? I don't know about you, but I could only do that if I were being ironic - if I were making fun of myself. Am I supposed to want to think that I'm the most important thing around? That doesn't make any sense either. I do all sorts of things - for my wife and children, to pick easy examples, but also for complete strangers - that I wouldn't even consider if I were trying to look at myself as the most important thing in the Universe.

The least nonsensical interpretation that I've been able to come up with is that maybe I'm being accused of wanting to decide for myself what's right and wrong. The problem there is, well... Everybody does that. You can base your decisions on what you think God wants, or you can base your decisions on something else - the Golden Rule, say, or some sort of Utilitarianism - but you still have to decide for yourself what's right and wrong. This is why it's possible to have Catholics who use birth control, for example.

I'm probably overthinking it, though. If I pull back a little, it really just sounds like someone flailing around verbally. It's the sort of thing you'd say if you just couldn't wrap your mind around the idea that it's possible to not worship anything.

But, while discussing the accusation, one of the people I was chatting with asked: "Could we make ourselves gods?"

And that reminded me of a line from L.E. Modesitt - I think it's in The Parafaith War - which notes that as technology advances, worshippers have to make more and more dramatic claims about what their deity can do, just to keep up. (I'm paraphrasing.)

A great many things that we take for granted today - instantaneous communication with nearly anyone, the ability to see things happening miles or even continents away, bubbling magic potions that reliably cure your stomach aches, reliable transportation at ridiculous speeds - would have seemed miraculous not so many generations back. Even a lot of the abilities that were previously the province of gods and demi-gods can be reproduced by human beings now; the Ark of the Covenant was said to have struck down fifty thousand and seventy Bethshemites in one go, but the man-made destruction of Hiroshima accounted for at least three times that.

Are we our own gods? No, I don't think so. But I think that someone from a couple of centuries back would hard-pressed to tell the difference.

NC Amendment One vs. History

I don't really have anything profound - or even useful - to say about this. (North Carolina just amended its constitution to define marriage as only existing between one man and one woman. I'm told that the last time North Carolina amended their constitution, it was to ban interracial marriage, but I haven't been able to find a citation to support that assertion. Update: Oh, look, a cite!)

As a political move against gay marriage, it was completely unnecessary; gay marriage was already illegal in the state, and gay marriages which took place in other states were not recognized by NC. If it was meant - as at least one supporter suggested - as a message to the rest of the country, then it's almost certainly a complete waste of time; at least, the message I hear is not "marriage can only exist between a man and a woman," but rather "the majority of North Carolina voters support institutionalized bigotry." If it was meant to close some loophole in the existing law - by, say, denying any possibility of legally recognized civil unions, which it does - then a full-scale constitutional amendment is massive overkill... and in addition, it seems likely to create difficulties in prosecuting domestic violence and similar issues. The whole thing is profoundly bad idea, and the absolute best I can hope for is that it isn't quite as destructive as I expect it to be.

Basically, I'm thoroughly disgusted that Amendment One was even introduced, let alone passed.

That said, let me go back to the idea that Amendment One was meant as a message for the rest of the country. From the Huffington Post article linked above:

Tami Fitzgerald, who heads the pro-amendment group Vote FOR Marriage NC, said she believes the initiative awoke a silent majority of more active voters in the future.

"I think it sends a message to the rest of the country that marriage is between one man and one woman," Fitzgerald said at a celebration Tuesday night. "The whole point is simply that you don't rewrite the nature of God's design based on the demands of a group of adults."

This is, frankly, delusional. I mean, first of all, these sorts of issues never 'awake a silent majority of voters,' thus showing that you're in fact a heroic figure bravely leading the way to a brighter future despite all opposition from the forces of Evil.[1] No, what happens is that people get worked up about this one issue, vote on it, and then go back to their lives, voting or not voting in much the same ways that they've always done.

What really caught my eye, though, was that last line: "...You don't rewrite the nature of God's design..." Even if we leave aside arguments about the existence of God and the nature of His Design (which are far from settled issues), from a historical perspective this is derisible nonsense, parochial and short-sighted.

Traditional marriage? Biblical marriage? King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Lamech, Abraham, David: all had multiple wives. In 2 Samuel 12:8; God, speaking through the prophet Nathan, said that if David’s wives and concubines were not enough, He would have given David even more. (Source) Abishag was one of King David's concubines - at least in name, though the king apparently "knew her not" - and when his fourth son, Adonijah, asked to marry her, David refused to allow the match; he had the authority to do that. And yet, polygamy/polyamory remains illegal in modern America, and the idea of having formally-, legally-recognized concubine is, for most people, completely bizarre - a relic of another age. Over in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul states clearly that the Christian ideal is actually celibacy, with marriage as second-class fallback for people who can't remain celibate - "It's better to marry than to burn" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Yet I don't see anyone advocating laws that would require people to prove that they can't remain celibate before being legally allowed to marry.[2]

Look, the definition of marriage is not some eternal, universal ideal that unrepentant sinners are only trying to change here in these Last Days. It's changed many times over the centuries, and it will again. (In fact, Amendment One to the contrary, it's changing now.) The closest thing to a consistent historical "tradition" of marriage is that marriage serves as an alliance of two families; love and even procreation are often secondary considerations, if they're considerations at all.

Yes, you can use the Bible to argue against marriage equality. The Bible was also used to argue against interracial marriage, and against the abolition of slavery. And I strongly suspect that future generations of Christians will find the former argument just as embarrassing as modern Christians find the latter two. God's word may be eternal and unchanging, but people aren't; people change, and societies change, and clinging to this idea that marriage can only ever be between one man and one woman - this revisionistic, non-traditional, not-particularly-Biblical idea - puts your Christianity on the wrong side the issue. It puts you on the side that's hurting people.

Is that really where you want to be?

Update: Christian writer Rachel Held Evans offers her own perspective on why initiatives like Amendment One are a mistake:

Regardless of whether you identify most with Side A or Side B, (or with one of the many variations within those two broad categories), it should be clear that amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.

So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it?

Read the whole thing.

Second Update: What if this were a fairy tale?

Third Update: A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

"[This type of union]... is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of...government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately...will bring this nation a conflict... Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy." ~Rep. Seaborn Roddenberry, of Georgia.

Arguing against interracial marriage in 1912. Sounds creepily familiar in light of North Carolina's vote today.

She adds:

And obviously, as a proud miscegenationist, this is a cause particularly dear to my heart; had Derek and I been born just one a generation before, we might not have been permitted to marry. That's just insane to me, and it's just insane that people are saying the same ignorant stuff about preventing gay people from getting married as well.

[1] That's almost exactly the same thing the Hutaree Militia apparently thought was going to happen after they attacked law enforcement officials, except with more voting and less bloodshed. Here's the money quote: "It is believed by the HUTAREE that this engagement would then serve as a catalyst for a more wide-spread uprising against the Government." Yes, really.

[2] I'm tempted to add something about the long, proud history of arranged marriages here, but honestly this screed is long enough already.

The Good Old Days before the Internet

So, Matt Mikalatos invited his readers to share their memories of The Time Before The Internet for the benefit of the young'uns that might not understand what life was like without it. Since that called up some amusing memories, I'm reproducing - and cleaning up - my response here.

All right, here you go: I remember dialing in to a BBS server on a 2400 Baud Modem - man, that was waaaaaaay faster than the old 1200 Baud models used to be! And once there, you could post messages and read other people's messages - in plain text, no avatars. No graphics at all, in fact: if you wanted graphics, you had to make them out of ascii characters.

Let's see if that still works... No, not in the blogspot editor. So I'll use a jpeg graphic of a text graphic - how's that for irony?



There you go: St Basil's.

Dragging and dropping to move files? Nope. Anything you wanted to do, you did with text commands. Even our video games were text-based.

Oh, and that server that we dialed into? It had a 1 MB hard drive. Yes, you read that right. It was really that big - I mean, absolutely huge, we were never going to be able to fill up that much storage space.

Well, you know, until we did.

We didn't share URLs for sites; there weren't any. We shared phone numbers for BBSs and other servers. Search engines? Ha! No such thing.

Ah, the good old days...

What is Normal: Shakespeare in the Bush

Normal is a funny sort of concept. Often, it simply means "the way I do things." Doing things differently - at least, in ways that are perceived to be significantly different - is "crazy."

This is not the definition of "crazy" that covers legitimate mental illnesses. This is the more colloquial, social use of the term. For that matter, this isn't the only (or even the best) use of the term "normal" either. But it is a significant part of the way people look at the world. We judge things by our own experiences, our own behaviors, our own reactions. It's sometimes hard to see why other people would do things differently, or how they could see things differently - especially when our beliefs and conclusions are so glaringly obvious to us. And it's especially hard to imagine that some of those beliefs and conclusions might simply be wrong.

Explaining one's perspective is a surprisingly tricky thing to do.

All of this is a lead-in to exploring how getting a Minor in Anthropology has affected my view of religion. But before we start talking about world religions, I want to emphasize that a lot of what we think of as universal, obvious, and natural is (instead) very frequently provincial, contextual, and relative. And one of the best examples I can think of is Shakespeare in the Bush - an account of an Anthropologist trying to explain Hamlet to the Tiv people of Africa.

Seriously, go read this thing. I promise you'll be enlightened and amused, though possibly not in that order.

A Quick History of Easter

As most of you know, Easter is fast approaching. It falls on April 24th this year, and today is the beginning of April. That being the case, I thought I'd talk a little about the holiday, maybe fill in some things that you may not know about it.

In the Christian Liturgical calendar, of course, Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. As with many Christian holidays, its place in the calendar is not based on the timing of actual events, but instead corresponds to a pre-existing pagan holy day - in this case, Ēastre (or Ēostre), which is where we get the modern word Easter. Historically, Christian imagery and celebrations of Easter drew heavily from the Jewish festival of Passover (which begins on April 19, this year), and the earliest Christians in all likelihood observed Jewish holy days rather than specifically Christian ones.

Most of that is pretty well known. Where the story gets really interesting is when you start trying to trace the history of the pagan symbolism - a surprising amount of which is still retained in our modern Easter celebrations. (Actually, it may not be all that surprising. Modern Christianity can be a lot more... purist... about meanings and symbols than historical Christianity was.)

The earliest elements of the Easter holiday can be traced to the Assyrian nation in the Fertile Crescent, starting around 2200 B.C. The collapse of the Akkadian empire had left Assyria and Babylonia as the two major powers in the region, and as a result there were both military conflicts and a lot of migrations. During this time, the Gonim Fac Tern (literally, Priests of the Sacred Hare) gained prominence in the Assyrian priesthood. They claimed through their rites to be able to increase fertility, which was very important to an expansionistic nation, and to command the "sacred madness" that hares experienced in the Spring. (This "madness" is actually the mating behavior, which involves a lot of seemingly-random darting back and forth as the males try to impress the females; it's also where we get the phrase "mad as a March Hare.")

By the time Assyria ceased to exist (it was defeated by a coalition of other nations in 608 B.C. but remained a distinct territory under the Persions, Greeks, Romans, and others), these rites and practices had spread throughout Mesopotamia. They had also become conflated with traditions from another group, the Worshippers of the Sacred Egg (Herim Tornt Mardik Sim), who occupied a similar role in Babylonian worship starting around 1,000 B.C.

The practice of actually dying eggs doesn't appear until around 700-800 A.D., and seems to originate with the worship of the goddess Ostara in northern Germany. It may have been introduced as a way to associate the older practices with the blooming flowers which indicate the arrival of the goddess in the Spring. The connection seems fairly natural, as Ostara was also associated with birds (again, returning in the Spring) and their eggs. This is probably also where we get the idea of an "Easter Nest" (which has become a basket in modern practice) where the holy hares can lay their sacred colored eggs.

So there you go: a little bit of history to mark the beginning of April. And now you know the secret origin of the Easter holiday: it all started with a cult of Assyrian bunny-worshippers four thousand years ago.

(Happy April Fool's Day!)

Friendly Evangelism: The Christian Imperative

Christians are commanded to spread the Gospel. I don't have chapter and verse, but D'Ma was kind enough to offer it in the comments: "These commands are found in the gospels, namely Matthew 28:16-20. They are found again in Mark 16:9-20 but appear to be a later interpolation." It's in the New Testament, of course - part of the transition from the God of the Israelites to the God who sent his only son to redeem the whole of the world. And, of course, it plays a prominent part in Christian oral tradition as well: it's the subject of sermons, stories, discussions, and songs.

Christianity has a strong oral tradition, though it varies in content and importance from denomination to denomination, church to church, Christian to Christian. I firmly believe that in some areas and on some issues, the oral tradition actually takes precedence over the written tradition - the written tradition being, of course, the Bible. In this case, however, the written tradition retains its dominance. I think that's mostly due to the letters of the Apostle Paul, but I'm really not sure - it could just be one of those things that's worded so compellingly and unmistakably that the oral tradition has trouble changing it.

This is kind of a problem, because it keeps the Christian approach to evangelism firmly rooted in a situation that has been out of date for sixteen hundred years.

The Christianity of the Apostles was very similar to a doomsday cult: Christians were an extreme minority, and they believed that the Messiah was coming back within their lifetimes to judge the living and the dead. Explaining the Good News was urgent, vital, and utterly necessary. The people that the early Christians were evangelizing had never heard about it before. Perhaps equally important, the Gospel was a deeply subversive story. There's only one God?[1] And His son was born to an unmarried woman, in a feeding trough in a barn, and spent his life as an itinerant preacher and sometime healer? And this holy son's great achievement, his one truly divine accomplishment, was to be tortured and die in a particularly horrible and ignominious fashion?

...It's a wonder that Christianity made it off the ground at all.

But the most successful stories often are subversive at heart, and a millenia and half later I have to explain why those ideas might have been a bit... unusual. Christianity isn't just widespread; in most places, it's the default. In some places, it's part of the definition of "normal" - if you aren't Christian, you're abnormal. Nowadays, the idea that most people in Western nations have never heard of Jesus is, frankly, silly. Christianity is so dominant that here in the 'States, even the adherents of other religions understand its broad outlines. Yet Christianity clings to this view of itself as a minority religion (and frequently persecuted at that), in no small part because the written tradition - the Bible - says that it must be so. In much the same way, Christian doctrine clings to the idea that non-Christians must never have heard the Good News of Jesus, or - failing that - must not have understood it.

The idea that someone could know, and understand, but still disagree escapes far too many people. The fact that these assumptions lead to Christians mainly evangelizing other Christians is actually kind of funny. Keep these thoughts in mind; we'll likely be coming back to them.

This leads me to two initial pieces of advice, if you wish to share the good news without giving offense:

1. Do us the courtesy of assuming that we're already familiar with the broad outlines of Christianity. Odds are, you aren't the first to share the Good News with us.
2. When a Christian starts making generalizations about why unbelievers don't believe, cover your ears and walk away. The odds that they have anything useful to say are so close to zero as gives no odds.

Next up: Finding a workable goal.

Previous: Opening Question | Next: What is the goal?

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[1] Monotheism in the Roman Empire was... unusual, and it was probably a big part of the reason why early Christians were persecuted. Accidental Historian has some comments about this.

It's a whole new world...

Back in the late eighties and early nineties, my father taught high school science. One of the bonus questions (which he would occasionally include on his tests) was this: "How many grooves are there on a phonograph record?" It's an interesting question, because the answer is simple but not immediately obvious.*

He finally quit using the question when one of his students responded with this: "What's a phonograph record?"

* * *

I've mentioned before that my son is a huge fan of Transformers. Apparently, if you're a boy, anything that turns into a giant robot is cool. His first exposure was the live action movie, which he watched until my wife and I were both completely sick of it.** So, to salvage our sanity, I purchased some of the original Transformers cartoons on DVD. This was at least partly successful; while he still occasionally asks for the live action movie ("the one with the helicopter"), he also loves the cartooons.

One of his favorite characters in the cartoon version is the Decepticon called Soundwave. Soundwave transforms from a rather large robot into the sort of portable stereo system that we used to call a Boom Box.*** What's cool about Soundwave is that he has a set of at least four smaller robots who transform into tape cassettes - so, when he needs them, he opens the cassette deck on his chest, and other robots come out. ("Rumble! Ravage! Operation: destruction! Eject! Eject!")

This remains completely cool in spite of the fact that my son has never seen a boom box, or even a tape player, let alone a cassette tape.

* * *

One of my co-workers has a daughter who's... I don't know... eighteen or nineteen now. This particular co-worker shares my love of Bad Horror Movies, and zombie flicks in particular. At one point, she realized that her daughter had never seen the original Terminator, and set out to rectify this tragic oversight in her daughter's cultural education.

So they're watching the movie, and they come to the scene where Sarah Connor is walking down a city a street. She's afraid that someone might want to kill her, and she's looking for help. Finally, she ducks into a club to use the pay phone and call her roommate. Co-worker's daughter has been watching this with a faintly puzzled expression, and finally she turns to her mother and asks: "Why didn't she just use her cell phone?"

The thing is, she at least knew what a pay phone was. Theron probably won't - and if he does, they'll be a curious, antiquated concept. With the easy availablity of mobile devices, pay phones are rapidly disappearing from the landscape.

* * *

My son is growing up in a very different world from the one I grew up in. I'm not sure it's particularly better or worse, but it's changing fast enough to actually create some culture shock. Technology is the most dramatic example, but there are plenty of others; public acceptance of homosexuality, for example. Opposition to gay marriage correlates heavily with age: the older you are, the more likely you are to oppose it. The younger generation, by and large, just doesn't see what the big deal is.

Time was when you had to travel in order to really get that sense that They Do Things Differently Here. Now you can get that just by hanging out with someone significantly older or younger than yourself.

Oops. I'd better get back to work. I didn't realize it was this late; I forgot to wind my watch...

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* The answer is two - one for each side of the record.
** This did not take long at all, actually. Despite a certain amount of spectacle, it isn't a very good movie.
*** Apparently conservation of mass doesn't really apply to hyperadvanced alien robots.

Hysteria as a National Pastime

Opinion article by Tim Rutten:

"If you reengage the American media after a month out of the country, as I've done this week, it's hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation."

For me, the money quote is down at the bottom of page 2:

"Back in the early 1970s — an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign — social scientists here and in Britain coined the term "moral panic" to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic's spread as "moral entrepreneurs" — a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the "tea party" and its attendant movements.

"In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur's — or should we say provocateur's — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

"Looking around the United States in the summer of 2010, hysterical moral panic seems an apt description of our fevered political condition."

I recently commented that I don't really care whether or not other people watch television; my decision not to watch is personal, rather than ideological. That's still true, but I would like to encourage people to unplug themselves from the panic factories.

Edited to add: Just to be clear, I'm not talking about television in general; "panic factories" is a refence to the sort programming which is specifically designed to make people panic about things in the real world. News shows are pretty bad about this ("Could your kids be in danger because of this common household item? Tune in at eight to find out...") and I suspect that a fair chunk of talk/opinion shows are as well. There's some portion of the population whose churches are panic factories, and there's plenty of people whose friends are as well.

Basically, if something or someone spends most of their time telling you things that make you worried or scared, it's time to stop listening to them. A well-placed (and truthful) warning is one thing; a constant litany of reasons to panic is another. I'm talking about the American news media in particular, but I think it's good general advice.