Poppycock.

The framers were Masonic Deists. This belief system seeks knowledge of God through the application of reason and meditation on natural laws. God here is the Great Architect, not a “life coach in the sky.”

So the next time you hear someone like Michelle Bachmann or Rick Santorum prattling on about America being a Christian nation, keep the following quotes in mind.

John Adams
“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”

“The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”

Adams also signed the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 states:
“The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Thomas Jefferson
“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

“Christianity…(has become) the most perverted system that ever shone on man… rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and imposters led by Paul, the first great corruptor of the teachings of Jesus.”

“The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulturated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves…these clergy in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.”

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.”

“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

Thomas Paine
“It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.”

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of… each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all… of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.”

“The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretend imitation of a person (Jesus) who lived a life of poverty.”

James Madison
“What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyrrany. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.”

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Madison was also against tax exemption for churches.

Another fun fact: a mere 7 percent of dwellers in the original 13 colonies belonged to a church at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Separation of Church and State
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, January 1, 1802

And here’s one last quote, but not from a framer:

“Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” —Adolph Hitler

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” – Luke, 20-21

I have a cousin who is a born-again Christian. I haven’t seen her in years, but she is, of course, on Facebook. Recently, I came across one of her status updates, compelling the OWS protesters to “occupy a job,” and poking fun at the mass arrests. Now, this sentiment doesn’t seem particularly Jesus-like to me, but then again, I am entirely confused by contemporary interpretations of the New Testament.

I’m also fascinated by the shift from the social gospel and its emphasis on community and cooperation to the me-first, “Jesus-as-life-coach” culture of modern evangelicals. And I’m scared shitless by their political influence. (There is some great literature on the subject, including a book I’ve recommended before, The Family, by Jeff Sharlet.)

Even more mind-boggling to me is that another Facebook acquaintance, a self-professed LaVeyan Satanist, made a comment on my wall in defense of my cousin’s initial statement. He used five economical words: “She’s right. Deal with it.” Then he proceeded to unfriend me.

Isn’t it interesting that the contemporary evangelical movement espouses the same moral perspective as a religion whose express purpose is to eliminate Christianity? Both groups owe a tremendous amount to Ayn Rand, and preach individuality above self-sacrifice. That’s fine for Satanists, as their beliefs reflect no internal contradictions. But how does any of this jive with the Gospel of Christ?

Clearly, it doesn’t.

The Jesus of the Bible railed against money-lenders and “redistributed” loaves and fish to the hungry. He tended to the needy and sick. Moreover, he encouraged others to do the same.

Compare that to the sweeping push by those aligned with the evangelical movement to eliminate social programs meant to aid our society’s most needy. These are the same folks who loudly and proudly tout their so-called “Christian values” and claim a moral high ground.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth. Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” – Mark, 10:21-25

Let’s see here… Jesus instructed his disciples to redistribute their personal, material wealth to the poor as a key means to entering the Kingdom of God. It’s right there in the Bible. I hope I don’t need to mention that Jesus freely healed the sick with no regard to “pre-existing conditions” like leprosy.

These teachings were carried on by the disciples after Jesus’ crucifixion. It would be amazing if the Christians of today were to take them to heart instead of celebrating the suppression of speech and liberty.

My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong? – James, 2:1-7

To me, the more frustrating thing than the outright hypocrisy is the unwillingness to engage in even moderate self-reflection. No need to account for your actions, no reason to adjust your personal behavior to be more in line with the articles of your supposed faith. The act of becoming “born-again” simply guarantees your place at the Lord’s table. I can see why this belief system is attractive, as it requires practically zero effort. But it is absolutely not in keeping with Jesus’ actual teachings.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded or disingenuous.

Look, I have some sympathies with the OWS movement. I certainly think that my cousin’s statement is ignorant, and that there are hundreds of reasons why people in an economic depression (when one in 16 are below the poverty line, that’s what it is) may want to publicly demonstrate their dissatisfaction with wealth inequality in the United States. But this isn’t about my political views. It’s about the tendency of the modern evangelical movement to mask their disgust for their brothers and sisters behind a veneer of faith.

I don’t care if you happen to be related to me. I’m calling bullshit.

I’ll be in Paris. For real. That is, if I don’t get spirited away to my Father’s Kingdom along with the rest of the pious bigots faithful. Yesiree, Saturday, May 21 is the day — at least according to religious radio broadcaster Harold Camping, who came up with the latest apocalyptic meme to sweep the globe.

Camping is basing his end-times prediction on a numerological formula of his own device. Meaning, all the billboards loudly proclaiming “the Bible guarantees it!” are utter bullshit. In fact, the Good Book explicitly says the opposite: “Of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.” [Matthew 24:36].

That hasn’t stopped Camping’s ministry from driving paranoid Christians into a tizzy. So what’s the math behind his claim? It’s kinda complicated, even to Scientific American. Apparently, it has to do with the date of Christ’s crucifixion, which is conveniently unverifiable. But not to this wackadoodle:

Camping takes Christ’s crucifixion to be April 1 in 33 AD. Come May 21, 2011, Camping says, 722,500 days will have elapsed since that occurrence. And 722,500 is (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17). Those numbers are important, according to Camping, because 5 symbolizes atonement, 10 represents completeness, and 17 is for heaven.

Why does 5 symbolize atonement? Here we turn to Exodus 30:15: “The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the Lord, to make an atonement for your souls.” For those of you who prefer fractions, “half a shekel” would be 1/2 shekel; the decimally minded might favor 0.5 shekel. Camping is evidently in the latter camp; he takes this verse as evidence of 5′s association with atonement.

Blarbity-blarb, derp-derp. Is anyone even taking any of this seriously?

Turns out, yes. Some Christians are even taking that job and shoving it in anticipation of Armaggeddon. I assure you, this is not why I’m going on vacation. Total coincidence.

Organized atheists are also taking advantage of the insanity. According to DC rag Roll Call:

A group of self-described Godless Americans is defying predictions of the Rapture to kick off a new campaign this week against the religious right. As some Christians quit their jobs this week to prepare for the end of the world, the Secular Coalition for America headed to Capitol Hill with an ambitious task: reducing the influence of religious interests on government. The lobby group — created in 2000 to unite atheists, humanists, nontheists and nonbelievers of all stripes — chose this weekend to meet because of its significance to a small faction of Christians. For followers of religious radio broadcaster Harold Camping, Saturday marks the beginning of the end of civilization and the return of Jesus Christ as predicted in the Bible.

Getting ready for a three-week vacation is actually not that different from preparing for the Rapture, come to think of it. We have four cats and a bunny, which makes it difficult to plan a holiday. Imagine if you were taken by God? Thankfully, The Creator has a plan for our furry friends (or at least his followers do). It’s called After the Rapture Pet Care, and it’s an honest-to-Jehovah business.

If the Rapture does come this weekend, I guess most of our readership will be “left behind.” Which leads me to my final point: if there’s a lack of posts here over the next few weeks, it’s because I’m ON VACATION, not sharing fondue with Sarah Palin and Moses.

Unless, of course, I am…

Nomad is partly a recounting of how her family’s rigid interpretation of the Quran brought catastrophe upon them, and partly a broader condemnation of Islam. The firs section describes how an unbending religious orientation invited a host of troubles: financial ruin, improperly treated mental illness and FGM inflicted upon Ayaan and her sister at young ages. The book describes how Islam’s obsession with female virginity inspired a state of denial among the women in her family that resulted in one having an a child out-of-wedlock and another contracting HIV.

Nomad is far more polemical than Infidel. The former begins with a pious, devout young girl faced with an abusive mother. Ayaan is determined to get an education despite maternal objections, eventually fleeing familial demands and seeking refuge in Holland. Although she condemns the strictness of her upbringing — which she describes as all too common in Islam — for much of the book, she remains a believer, albeit a lapsed one. In Infidel, she assumes a strong  atheist position and is unapologetic in her condemnation of the religion.

Much of the book is a plea for Western feminists to intervene on behalf of Muslim women. When she discusses honor killings, child marriage, girls being yanked out of school and female genital mutilation, any counterargument seems moot.

American feminists — particularly those of the white, middle-class variety — can be caught in a double bind-if they become active in Muslim nations. Often they called “cultural imperialists,” with critics arguing that, because US feminists have yet to solve problems like rape and domestic violence and lack universal access to reproductive services, they are in no position to criticize other cultures until conditions in their own backyard are improved. It is gratifying to read a Somali argue that Western feminists should become allies with Muslim women.

Yet Ayaan ignores those who do work on behalf of Muslim women, such as Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn describe in their book Half the Sky. Despite the problems I had with that account (namely how it left out an entire continent), it’s an impressive work that doesn’t flinch from describing the oppression many faced by many women, Muslim and otherwise.

Then there is is microlending pioneer Muhammad Yunus, pioneer. As Yunus states, “…the more we lent money the more we were shouted at and condemned… we had male opposition, and it was translated into religious position. People said we were destroying their culture; that women needed to be kept at home because they weren’t supposed to have or handle money. I said, ‘“You keep your culture; I am creating a counterculture” (Bust, “A Few Good Men” Erin DeJesus).

At the end of the day, Ayan Hirsi Ali is not the only advocate of Muslim women, but she may be one of the loudest.

I have failed you, dear readers. I promised to journey into the heart of Glennbeckistan for “Restoring Honor,” or “Whitestock,” or “The Greatest Affront to American Ideals in History,” or whatever you wanna call it. Instead, I ended up watching it on C-SPAN and monitoring real-time reactions on Twitter.

The following was repurposed from my various statements made elsewhere; it should suffice as ongoing documentation of Our National Shame. (For extra credit, I implore you to read this lengthy but important article about how the Tea Party movement is underwritten by the elitist world-destroyers at Koch Industries.)

Lincoln Memorial, The National Mall, Washington, D.C., 8.28.10

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Insane in the Membrane

One thing to understand right off the bat: there was not a single word of substance uttered at “Restoring Honor.” Yet the various speeches and pre-recorded video segments transcended your average jingoism and entered the realm of tailored mindwashing. Overall, the event had all the hallmarks of carefully staged cult propaganda. That it took place on the anniversary of the most stirring call to American virtue in our nation’s history is even more appalling.

Think I’m exaggerating about the cult aspects?

If you listen closely (but not too close!), you’ll hear elements of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) in both the live and canned oratory. NLP is the get-rich-quick scam version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is actually sound science. CBT is simply the Western scientific confirmation of neurological plasticity, which has been beneficently described by Buddhists for many centuries. Buddhist practitioners employ certain techniques to their own minds to transform delusional thinking into an holistic comprehension of impermanence. Since thoughts are squirrelly and their origins not always obvious, there’s an emphasis on stillness so that the turbulent mind can settle and its essential characteristics considered. At this point, an experienced meditator can perceive subtle cognition without becoming attached to any single idea, concept or emotion. After a while, new thought patterns are established and existential strife is greatly diminished.

That’s the healthy, self-directed version.

In the West, similar strategies are used by Cognitive Behavioral Therapists to ameliorate the effects of certain pathologies in their patients. NLP, on the other hand, is endorsed by skeevy marketing dudes as a way to get gullible people to buy stuff. The former is a legitimate branch of neurophysiology, the latter a cargo cult science.

In mindwashing, the idea is to enhance a target’s susceptibility to a given idea or concept. Even before Scientology or pyramid marketing, political operatives and tent revivalists made surprisingly effective use semantic suggestion. Applied skillfully, those with positional power can plant rhetorical, emotional or ideological “seeds” with the subconscious permission of the receiver. To succeed, the operator must have a sense of the target’s value set and informational capacities.

It’s like the old-fashioned Jedi mind trick: softer noggins are the most susceptible, as are those under stress or experiencing collective turmoil. Clearly, the Tea Party is low hanging fruit. In the absence of once-stable ideological constructs (like manufactured consumer consent based on free market fantasies), these folks are putty in the hands of even a marginally-gifted communicator like Beck.

Josef Goebbels was adept exploiting these phenomena. Sarah Palin and her ilk get it. Barack Obama seemingly doesn’t.

Welcome to Bizzaro World

“Restoring Honor” was positively Orwellian; a true exercise in doublespeak. Up is down, left is right, bigotry is tolerance, aggression is compassion, reality is what they say it is, facts be damned. I mean, to not-so-subtly imply that the Framers were proponents of organized Christianity, and that Martin Luther King, Jr. would endorse the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Wow.

It’s not honor that needs restoring in this country, it’s a basic understanding of our history.

First of all, America was not intended to be a nation with fealty to either Rome or the Protestant Church of Europe. That’s the reason for the clearly articulated separation of Church and State, which has steadily eroded ever since the GOP made its pact with the Moral Majority and exiled the last conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley. Hey, didja know that Ronald Reagan — that camera-ready darling of the Religious Right — attended church far less than Obama, and regularly consulted soothsayers? Good thing he had cover from evangelicals in exchange for giving wedge issues a spotlight in the national discourse. Which turned out to be a great way to distract Americans from the hollowing out of the public sphere and the dismantling of the US labor market.

But back to our Founders. These fellas were hardly the kinds of Christians Pat Robertson would recognize. Most were Enlightenment-inspired Masonic Deists with radical notions of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality borrowed from the French, of all people. (For various reasons, the French Revolution came later; they had a far worse go of it).

Some of the Founders’ statements about Christianity are so brash that Palin, Beck, et. al would find them nothing short of heretical. Here’s a taste:

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced.”
-John Adams

“The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion.”
-George Washington

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
-Ben Franklin

Even the Great Emancipator, whose marble effigy provided the backdrop to Whitestock, was unambiguous:

“The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion.“
-Abraham Lincoln

If you watched the rally, you’d have thought that these guys conceived the country as the first megachurch.

Glenn Beck is hardly an exemplar of Christ-like behavior. More like “Who Would Jesus Kill?” Apparently, the answer to that is Michael Moore. Here’s some Beck-style “honor” from 2005:

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it… No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus Do wristband, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

You didn’t hear any of that kind of talk at the rally. But you did hear from MLK’s niece, a notorious campaigner against the rights of homosexuals, trotted out to demonstrate the Tea Party’s deep commitment to social justice. For everyone that isn’t gay. Or Muslim. Or willing to consider secular solutions to problems perpetuated by right-wing corporatocracy.

I saw a comment on a prominent liberal blog calling the Beck event “a proto-facist rally to mobilize the brownshirts in defense of the fatherland.” While I’m not sure I’d go that far, the “support the troops” part of the show was completely out-of-step with the MLK-lauding. Unsurprisingly, it was Palin who tried to make the connection between the civil rights leader and those brave men and women who defend our nation. Here’s a response from that same liberal blog commenter: “Anybody who thinks King would have supported the current War on Terror really should read his wonderful 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech he gave at the Riverside church in Harlem. Is the military under attack? You’d think Obama was proposing to disband all branches of the armed services, the way Beck and Palin are carrying on.”

Reparation Nation

Having recently lost advertisers over having called the president a racist, Beck likely needed to put a more inclusive spin on his standard bile. But holding a funtime rally where fear-addled white folks can hear how Jesus is colorblind won’t magically erase the many things Beck has said about the threat of African-Socialist-Muslim enslavement. Here’s a few choice quotes you may have missed:

“This guy is not who he says he is. None of his bills, none of his proposals are about what he says they’re about. The health care bill is reparations. It’s the beginning of reparations. He’s going to give — if you want to go into medical school, the medical schools will get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead.”

“When the president was sitting there, or standing there, and he was talking about Native American rights in the middle of a tragedy, Fort Hood, it didn’t feel right. And it seemed, maybe to me, that he was even promising reparations.”

“Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America. And they are all driven by President Obama’s thinking on one idea: reparations… These massive programs are Obama brand reparations — or in presidential speak, leveling out the playing field. But, just in case the universalness of the program doesn’t somehow or another quench his reparation appetite, he is making sure to do his part to pay the debt in the other areas.”

“You were voting for — not change, but change, I think, in race. You were like ‘Hey, let’s put this behind us.’ I think a lot of people were there. They weren’t necessarily for his policies because his policies and everything else are — what are they?”

I don’t care how many persons of color you trotted out at your event, Glenn. What you’re saying is clear: the scary black man in the White House is coming to take your stuff and redistribute it to minorities.

All of this offends me deeply, because I’m a Patriot. I patriotically defend Americans from the forces of bigotry and ignorance. I patriotically defend those who are unable or unwilling to see how they are being manipulated from being preyed upon for profit. I patriotically defend the right for Americans to be non-religious. I patriotically defend Americans’ right to self-determination and to reject coercion by corporations that seek to limit individual choice and shirk civic responsibility. I patriotically defend Americans from state intervention in the sexual and reproductive decisions of adults. Most importantly, I patriotically defend Americans’ right to pursue happiness and contribute to the advancement of the ideals that made this country great.

I hope you will start calling yourselves Patriots: loudly, proudly and often.

Yes, Frist is right and Maher is wrong. I know, I had to watch it twice!

Bad Astonomer, Phil Plait discusses the video here, and there’s more about Maher and his crazy beliefs here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB5DLf1Qt78

I sat on the fencepost for over an hour, cursing aloud to the bull penned in the nearby fenceline and the faceless moon hanging above my head. It was a cold autumn Georgia evening, chill even to this New England ex-patriate. With each forced exhale my breath appeared in front of my face like mist on a windshield, disappearing into the night. The bull snorted.

“Fuck this,” I thought to myself. “Fuck this.” Nothing makes sense.

I like to be the one paranormal investigator without any stories. When people find out that I do this beyond just a hobby they first ask me “What is the weirdest thing you have experienced on an investigation?”

“Two flat tires,” I reply. “The odds are astronomical.”

“No, I mean, what is the weirdest thing you have seen in an investigation?”

“Nothing,” I enjoy saying in response. “I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Never? Have you ever been scared?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe in ghosts,” I will say. “As a matter of fact, the more I investigate, the more of a non-believer I become.”

“Why is that?”

“Because nothing ever happens.”

Everything that has ever occurred to me during an investigation, every event I have experienced, can all be explained naturally, without bringing the supernatural into the equation. The gentle tap on my shoulder that I felt in Decatur? A muscle’s contraction. The lights in the corner in Buffalo? A lack of oxygen flow to my brain and its appropriate response — similar to standing up too fast. The graceful phantom fingertips that brushed the top of my hand in Macon? A spider web caught in the wind and briefly scraping across my skin. In all, the odds of all of these natural events occurring are astronomically greater than a lost soul stuck in a house reaching out and interacting with me.

At each of these experiences, my initial reaction has been the same: the adrenaline flows, the blood rushes to my head, I get excited and my heart rate shatters. Suddenly, my barren, ghost-less life may have its first ray of hope. But after taking my head out of the excitement of the moment, reality comes rushing back and it all becomes secular and reasonable.

It can all be explained: all of it.

In my head, I have conjured the following to explain the paranormal. People who want to see a ghost will see a ghost. People who want to hear voices in the middle of the night will hear them. Not because they are liars or are easily self-persuaded, but because the human brain follows patterns. Your brain is designed to interpret different energies, electrical impulses pumped into your noggin, into data that is experienced: the pulse from a nerve in your fingertip tells your brain that something hot is touching you, your brain receives this information and transforms it into the response of heat and sends the information back to your muscles which respond by taking your hand off of the coffee mug. It is a highway of data transferals, interpretations, and responses, all happening near instantaneously from outside stimuli. This happens to your brain millions and millions of times in a single day — that blob of grey Jell-O in your skull is a nonstop data processing/response machine that also holds memory.

So, your brain is conditioned, through time, to respond to messages from the environment in the appropriate manner and it can do this manually or automatically. The impulse to run up the stairs for fear of something reaching out and grabbing your ankles is a manual response — though in actuality, there’s (probably) nothing there, your brain tells you to feel fear so you do, and you run because of it.

A corollary of this reaction is the purely automatic response. This, my opinion, explains the vast majority of paranormal encounters. At night, right when you are on the cusp of following asleep, your brain’s fatigue misinterprets the coming sleep as death and the body shudders in response to wake your body up — this is an automatic response system that you do not control. Your brain does not understand the messages that your body is sending northbound, the pulsing of electrical current confuses the brain leading it to respond with as much logic as it can muster – it wakes you up for fear of shutting down, similar to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Your brain is confused and it reacts in a manner that it deems fit. You are flawed. You are one of Nietzsche’s “bungled and botched.” Congratulations.

A group of people standing in a room and bathing in high pulses of either electromagnetic fields, radiation or other forms of energy could easily have their brains tricked. And perhaps that’s why two people in a group of four will hear something the others didn’t hear. What if the person in an old home with faulty wiring swimming in unbridled electric current essentially short circuits his or her brain? Then, that same grey matter interprets this strange new message in a manner that seemingly makes sense: sight, sound, and touch. The person sees, hears, and feels something that is not actually there but is the byproduct of the human brain’s confusion over random currents of energy entering its hemisphere.

As a paranormal investigator, this explanation is far more believable than ghosts.

Meaning, the people who experience hauntings, who fully believe that they experience spirits, are necessarily flawed people. They have brains that are easily confused and interpret wayward power surges as phantoms, mists, and voices. It is a sign of human weakness and something we must be aware of as investigators.

Tonight, the house is an abandoned farmhouse in Elberton, GA. The owner claims to see things moving around at night. When he resided here many years ago a television turned on by itself when it wasn’t plugged in. Voices can be heard throughout the house when you are alone in it and the sound of doors slamming can be heard even though every door was removed many moons ago. There is a rumor that a man killed himself at the summit of the second floor.

There is no electricity in the house.

Earlier, I was standing at the top of the stairs looking down into complete darkness. Our cameras are being powered in the horse barn that is still in use to this day. The house sits alone in the field, the closest neighbor and roadway can barely be seen in the evening night. It is completely and utterly isolated from all outside distortion.

Crystal is next to me in a neighboring room. She holds an EMF detector. Dragon and Jason are in the barn watching the cameras with Mike. No one else is here.

All night the EMF detector read flat – ranging from 0.0 to 0.1 — the fluctuation can come from a myriad of things: our own equipment, our own bodies, passing radio waves, or the sun itself. Never has it passed 0.1 this evening. We are going on the third hour of watching the gauge lie flat.

The hair on my neck stands on end.

Crystal calls out, reading a sudden pulse on the EMF: “7.1!” — a very high number.

I turn to her and reply, “Really?” I look back down the stairs in time to see it.

It’s the outline of a woman. She is roughly 5’6. I can make out her shoulders and neckline. She is a milky-blue white liquid that appears to glow in the night, but surrounding objects cast no shadows away from her.

She glides at the bottom of the stairs, turns a corner, and moves gracefully out the front door.

“Oh my God!” I scream into the night and rush down the stairs. Crystal follows after me, she is the perfect wingman tonight. I tell her what I saw. Dragon, Mike, and Jason come into the house and I repeat the story. Dragon and Jason were both watching the monitors more than 100 feet away from the house — I am told that Mike stepped outside for a moment but was only two or three feet out the barn door. We go back to our original positions and do our best to recreate what I saw with no luck.

We roll the IR camera’s tape back and see nothing. Just the black and white glow of the staircase and, after a few moments, me rushing down them in a frantic search for whatever it is I saw.

All in all, there was nothing there to back up what I experienced: nothing on film, nothing on audio. We had an IR camera positioned at the bottom of the stairs and the only thing visible was my rushing body and the startled expression on my face.

And now I am thinking out loud to the bull, who paces back and forth in his pen and yearns for me to shut up. I rationalize what I saw to him. I saw it, I swear to God, I saw it. Clearly. Just like a person standing in front of me. It must have been that EMF pulse that triggered something in my head to see her. She wasn’t there, at all, she wasn’t there. My brain was confused and interpreted the data as it deemed fit. But where did the EMF reading come from? Crystal read it, but I felt the damn thing.

The bull, the fence post, and I never came to a conclusion.

My skepticism still exists. It was easy to toss aside the stories of others who experienced the same occurrence before tonight in their own homes. It was easy to say “she wants her house to be haunted, so it is” or “he wants people to come to his restaurant so he is unknowingly trying to make it haunted.” It’s far simpler to rationalize the stories of others without coming out and saying they are liars.Yet under my my paranormal investigation gear beats the heart of someone looking for organic answers and would rather find fault with the human body than spirituality, or God, or the afterlife in general, or the ever plaguing fear in my head that it might be possible that once you die you may get stuck in this world alone and unwatched, bereft of an ultimate destination.

It’s easier to say people are flawed than face those thoughts. But that is hard to do now that I know that I am now one of the bungled and botched.

This week’s episode of “Poli-Sci-Fi Radio” (a weekly politics and science fiction radio show and podcast that I do with Washington Monthly blogger, Steve Benen) featured a discussion inspired by last Friday’s episode of “Dollhouse,” in which a woman who was murdered is brought “back to life” in the body of Eliza Dushku because she’d had the foresight to scan all of her thoughts and memories before she was killed and then after her death those thoughts and memories were implanted in one of the Dollhouse’s “actives” so the woman could go back and solve her own murder.

If you don’t watch “Dollhouse,” the above explanation probably makes little or no sense to you, but the discussion we had on the radio quickly went beyond the episode’s plot and became a discussion about the nature of identity w/r/t the SF concept of teleportation. (If you’re curious, this discussion takes place in the last 1/2 hour of the two-hour episode.) Here’s the 50 cent tour…

Suppose someone invents a teleportation device (like the transporter from Star Trek). Bob steps into little teleportation booth in New York, there’s a flash of light as the precise position and orientation of every cell, molecule, atom and quark in Bob’s body is scanned and that information is “beamed” at the speed of light to a similar booth in Paris, where a machine, using some local material, reassembles an exact replica — down to the subatomic structure — of Bob. This perfect replica of Bob (who literally is Bob is every measurable respect) then steps out of the booth and from Bob’s subjective experience, he stepped into a booth in New York and stepped out an instant later in Paris.

Great! The problem is: what happens to the “Bob” that stepped into the machine in New York? His atomic structure was scanned so his body could be replicated in Paris, but all of the material that made up the Bob that stepped into the machine in New York is still there, standing in the booth, wondering what he’s going to eat for dinner in Paris. He is still there, that is, unless the teleportation process kills him.

In science fiction movies and TV shows, at the moment of teleportation, the starship captain dematerializes in one place and rematerializes in a new place, as though her atoms were being physically moved from one spot to another. But from chemistry we know that a carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom — the physical constituent matter that makes us up isn’t anything special — it’s the arrangement of that matter that makes us live, breathe and think as conscious beings. So to build a working teleportation machine, all you really need to do is scan the precise positions of each particle of material and reassemble those bits in the right order in the destination spot using whatever materials are present at the new location (assuming all the right constituent elements are present in sufficient quantities).

So that means that at the moment of “dematerialization,” what’s really happening is that the starship captain’s atoms are being destroyed — she’s being killed by the teleporter — and a new identical version of her is appearing on the planet’s surface. From the perspective of the now planetside captain, everything is hunky dory — one second she was on the transporter pad and the next second she was standing on the planet’s surface. But what about the perspective of the woman who stepped onto the transporter pad and was annihilated? Did she show up on the planet’s surface? Are there two separate consciousnesses or just one? Can she choose to not have her original body destroyed, thereby yielding two distinct people? Should she?

This is only scratching the surface of the implications of such a technology. There’s a bit of a comments thread going on at the PSFR post. For the record, despite not believing in anything like a “soul” and being aware of the fact that my consciousness is merely the result of the collection of physical stuff that is me, I am deeply troubled by this thought experiment and I, for one, would never choose to step into such a teleportation device, not knowing whether “I” would be the copy that stepped out of the booth in Paris or the original that gets destroyed in New York. The commenters at the PSFR blog so far agree with me, but on the show on Sunday Steve and Emily did not. They were just fine with the simultaneous annihilation and creation of themselves in the teleporters.

What do you think? Would you let yourself be “transported” in such a fashion?

For other takes on this problem see…

• The Ship of Theseus paradox
• Four Reasons Why “You” Don’t Exist
• The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
• The Prestige

Cross-posted at Candleblog.

The belief is both ancient and cutting-edge: nothing material actually exists. Everything we can experience is an illusion, because it is a combination of parts, not actually a thing in of itself. A table doesn’t exist because it is built out of smaller pieces: the legs and the flat top, both of which are made of wood. The wood doesn’t exist either, because it is made up of countless atoms. There is no wood, only atoms and space. There are no atoms, only protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons don’t exist, they are built up of quarks.

According to current physics beliefs, quarks, leptons, and fundamental or gauge bozons are the only things that can’t be further broken down (author’s note: The Leptons is already taken as a band name. The Fundamental Bozons, however, is not…). These smallest blocks are known to particle physicists as elementary- or point particles. These are the only things that actually exist, because everything else is made up of them. Electrons, being leptons, are the only part of the scientific atom that do exist. As we are unable to experience elementary particles, nothing we can experience is real.

The idea that everything is made up of smaller particles is not new. Buddhist thinkers have taught this as the true nature of reality for thousands of years. Often known as Buddhist atomism, or just atomism, this is a key aspect of Buddhist thought. Leucippus, the Greek philosopher, wrote about atomism 5th century BCE. The idea that nothing with parts is truly real is referred to as mereological nihilism, mereology being the study of the relations between parts and wholes.

The first stream of Buddhist atomism, and the true source of the discovery of scientific atoms, developed in approximately 4th century BCE. It taught that all we see and experience is made up of atoms, and that there are four basic atoms, each corresponding to one of the elements. These atoms, the physical embodiment of the original elements, are what many magickal traditions believe they are working with when doing their work.

Jeffrey Grupp, who studies atomism, mereological nihilism and Indian Buddhism, points out that the scientific use of the word ‘atom’ is different from the traditional use, in that the old use of the word meant the smallest possible building block, whereas the scientific use refers to a particle that can be broken down, which means, according to the mereological nihilist view, they do not exist.

Atomism and mereological nihilism do not necessarily have to go together. The basic idea behind mereological nihilism is that nothing that is built up of other things is real. It is only our very limited human senses that make us think we see, feel and touch things. We may come in contact with a highly compacted (to our senses) group of elementary particles, but the thing we think is a table is not, it is a collection of elementary particles. Also, the hip that bangs against the chair doesn’t exist, because it is made up of bones, blood, muscles and skin, and each of those is an illusion. The pain we feel when we bump the hip isn’t real, it is just messages warning the brain of danger or the possibility of damage to the body (which doesn’t exist).

Notre Dame philosophy professor Peter van Inwagen argues that even though the table may not exist, it is still ok for us to refer to tables, because we are using our language to more easily describe what is actually a group of elementary particles “arranged tablewise.” All the same, many would argue that whether or not the objects we experience truly exist has no relevance to our lives.

Following this idea brings the question of what it is that we actually are. We are not our bodies, because they all have parts. If we are the brain, which part of the brain are we? What exactly is it that is observing everything we think we see and touch? What is it that makes a certain group of elementary particles alive, while another group is a rock? As science and spirituality grow closer together, we may be working towards an answer to some of these questions.

Interest in the occult always peaks when times are tough. If people are feeling perfectly content, secure, loved, happy and empowered in their lives they typically have no reason to look beyond that which is in front of their noses. However, it is when they are poor, desperate, disenfranchised, frightened and hopeless and feel they have exhausted every conventional earthly option for improving their lot that the search for answers and solutions pushes beyond tangible reality. Which is why you’d be wise to invest what pennies you’ve got in psychic hotlines, new age book publishers, gurus, and tarot card readers right now.

Another unfortunate trait of stressed cultures is the depersonalization and demonizing of others. People crave someone to blame, an external personification of their misfortune at whom they can direct their anger and frustration. Minorities, dissidents and immigrants are popular targets in times like these.

I don’t mean to be a big downer, my loves. But I would like to ask you to bear these sweeping sociological generalizations in mind as you survey this week’s Picayune.

• I found the above image on Obamaconspiracy.org (link goes to their bookmark page).
• The Council for Secular Humanism is challening the Baylor Religious Landscape Survey.
• Are you fated to be killed by a tiger?
• Are you up to speed on the whole Jay-Z/Illuminati situation?
  

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNBnKjfqG-M

• The Evil! It’s everywhere!
• Psychics raking it in in the UK.
• Oh, cool. Road trip!
• Interview with a Brooklyn cemetary security guard.
• Put on your Endtimes Hat, it’s party time!
• Skull and Bones makes TIME.
• New Lovecraftian Anthologies coming up.
• Indiana Paranormal Fest
• So here’s a fetish I hadn’t heard of before today.

Have a good week, nibblets!

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly