Thou Shalt Not Argue

Yesterday, the new Pope, Benedict, released his first encyclical.

Where Are The Photos?

An Italian court is about to decide whether Jesus of Nazareth is an historical character, or a fictional one. Italy has a law against "abusal of popular belief" and the plaintiff has accused his ex-friend, a priest, of conning the public. The trial has sparked the usual division of people into "believers" and "non-believers". The believers have faith on their side. The non-believers have facts. Unfortunately, faith usually trumps facts. Otherwise, why would fundamentalist Christians still believe that gay marriage would destroy the world as we know it?

Bomb Hats Away!

Whenever I find the mass media monopolizing its airwaves and headlines with the same story, hammered over and over, it makes me wonder what they're trying to hide.

A Man Without A Country

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

Religion and Politics

The reason we are told that religion and politics are topics to avoid, is obvious once one attains adulthood: Of everything one might discuss, these are the only two subjects on which people are so unreasoning, so illogical, as to come to blows over a disagreement.

Sea Change

As you drive from Miami to Key West, down around the swamps and cypress islands of Key Largo, there's a place where the road is a causeway with water on each side . The most stunning thing about this causeway is the difference between the east and west sides. Both sides are viewed through thickets of scrubby bushes; both bodies of water are dotted with palm tree-bearing islets and, if the wind is blowing, saucy little whitecaps. In fact, it is the same body of water, or should be; occasionally the causeway gives way to a drawbridge and the water flows freely between.

Mining the Da Vinci Lode

It may be that the ordinary person is the most likely to cause mayhem on behalf of dearly-held religious principles; note that no Pope ever got on horseback to lead a crusade; and not only has President Bush not fired a gun in Iraq—or in any other war—not a single member of his extended family has, either.

People Will Believe Anything

Most ancients didn't read, and relied on tales told by travelers, or more frequently, tales told by people who heard them from someone else who heard them from a traveler. That's how the myth of the unicorn came to be. Early Roman travelers, exploring Africa, saw rhinoceroses and tried to explain them to the folks back home. "They're big, like a horse," they said, "but with a huge horn growing out of their heads." The Romans knew lots of animals with pairs of horns growing from their heads; the distinguishing feature in this case was the single horn. So the folks at home came to call them "one-horn"—or, in Latin, unicorn.

The lack of photos didn't stop illustrators, who'd never been to Africa (or met the original travelers) from drawing exactly from the description—a horse with a single horn. Had to put it somewhere; and the other horned animals had horns growing from their foreheads. Thus the unicorn was born.

Armor

To justify all this hatred, Christian extremists tell themselves that there is a "homosexual agenda" from which they are under attack. Homosexuals, they convince themselves, are only intent on converting them, the religious extremists, into homosexuals. (They believe this is possible because they've also convinced themselves that homosexuals can be converted into religious extremists, and spend a great deal of time and money attempting to do so, though without documented success. Well, no matter; they make up documentation and then use it to support their own lies.)

Just Say 'No' To Crazy Religious Freaks

There's an urban legend that, in the days of World War II when radar was first being developed as a defensive weapon, Hitler might have had it first. His scientists on both sides were working on it. But Hitler had a lot of strong metaphysical beliefs, largely influenced by Theosophy, that, besides the certainty that Germans comprised a superior form of humanity (which was used to justify the extermination of "inferior" forms), included the belief that the sky above us was, in fact, a star-studded dome suspended just a few miles above the surface of the Earth. When his scientists sought to demonstrate the power of radar to detect distant objects before they could be seen, Hitler had them direct their radar devices upwards, in order to determine exactly how far overhead the dome of sky was located. The radar, of course, detected nothing—no dome. To Hitler's mind, this proved that radar was useless. He therefore refused to make use of it, which gave the Allies a tactical advantage as we could detect the Nazi planes and ships at a distance, while he was unable to detect ours.

Turning The Other Checkbook

Muslims believe that it is a sin to take a life under any circumstances, which is why they never engage in terrorism or suicide bombings. Hindus believe we are all One in Brahman (and therefore of equal importance) which is why they never developed a caste system. Christians believe in forgiveness, which is why none of them ever sue a pedophilic priest or minister.

Caught Up In The Rapture

A new web service allows Fundamentalist Christians to annoy their non-Christian friends after they have been assumed into Heaven in the Rapture.