v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Real Christmas

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - Nice

Adopting Liberals

From the Liberty Counsel, this is not a joke:

Liberty Counsel is proud to introduce -- and invite you to participate in -- a vital new prayer program solidly built upon St. Paul's admonition to pray for our national leaders:

Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.

 -- 1 Timothy 2:1-3

Since the landmark 2008 general election, there can be no doubt that a very large percentage of our Nation's leaders have a liberal mindset. The undeniable fact is that the 111th Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama Administration demonstrate a far left political philosophy. And since the President nominates federal judges and Justices of the United States Supreme Court, the judicial branch of government could take on a decidedly more liberal bent as the Obama Administration wears on.

Liberty Counsel has therefore named this special new prayer-in-action program Adopt a Liberal. And that's exactly what we invite you to do -- adopt a liberal who is in authority for regular, intense prayer in accord with St. Paul's admonition to his disciple, Timothy. In fact, we expect that many of our friends and supporters will choose to adopt many liberals as subjects of regular prayer!

More Crazy Stuff

The Order of Things

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - the way it is in Bangkok

At the Basilica

Vallejo Nocturno 2008 - saturday night at church

Sam Harris-10 Myths about Atheism

From EDGE-3rd Culture Sam Harris writes about 10 common myths about atheism:

Several polls indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.          

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.         

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."         

That  was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.         

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.         

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that   life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.         

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.         

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious    hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

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Bianco Luno's Notebooks

There may be a biological necessity for God to exist, or at least belief in the proposition.
Spleen, vanity and the curious requirement that experience cohere pretty much guarantee that we will elevate some proposition or other to the top shelf, out of reach of critical reason and its suicidal ambitions.

from Bianco Luno's Notebook X, 94

The begining of the end to suffering

From the Loggernaut Reading Series, an interview with writer Pankaj Mishra:

Loggernaut Reading Series: In An End to Suffering, you write that, "Just as European travelers had once alerted me to the India the Buddha had belonged to, so American Buddhists made me see the new role the Buddha had acquired in the modern world." What does it mean to you that your engagement with Buddhism was facilitated and mediated by Western eyes?

Pankaj Mishra: I suppose that while I was in India, where Buddhism had died a long time ago, I had thought of the Buddha as too much of a historical figure. In America, I was intrigued to see how his teachings had a great impact upon extremely well-educated people—people who may have had little time for the organized religions they had been born into but were ready to embrace the ideas of an Indian thinker. This really started the process in my head of rethinking about the Buddha, seeing his position in the modern world, or more precisely what were the aspects of his teachings that people still found relevant in a world where science and technology had rendered so many of the old belief systems irrelevant. It made me see how Buddhism could serve as an alternative way of living and conceptualizing life, how its critique of the self, undertaken through the practice of meditation and mindfulness, could become a personal antidote to the ideologies that preached self-interest and self-aggrandizing. In that sense American Buddhism really is different from all the other revivals and growths of Buddhism around the world. Nowhere do you see it so sharply counterposed to a dominant way of life, the reigning belief systems.

LRS:   Why do you feel Buddhism has gained a foothold with the extremely well-educated, as opposed to other sectors of American society?

Mishra:   I suppose that Buddhism doesn't offer consolations of the kind found in other non-western religions that have become popular in America. There is no God to pray to, no prescribed rituals that could give order to one's life, no promise of an afterlife. Instead there is, for the uninitiated at least, a rather cerebral worldview, and an austere spiritual regimen. I also think that Buddhism has always attracted the elite of whatever society it has traveled to, partly because you need to have traveled through a certain experience of materialism in order to arrive at the sense that there is something problematic about desire and longing, how they don't lead to happiness, and more often than not lead to unhappiness. If you are still struggling to fulfill your fantasies of wealth, power, status, Buddhism is less likely to appeal to you.

LRS: Yet one of Buddhism's founding premises, that all life is suffering, seems like it would have a stronger resonance with the poor and unfortunate. During the course of researching your book, did you look into the attraction of Buddhism for these groups, such as the Dalits in India?

Mishra: Yes, I think it is possible to take a pessimistic or fatalistic view of Buddhism and conclude that life is suffering. The Hindu version of this idea does induce a kind of fatalism and complacency in India. But Buddhism diagnoses suffering as a mental condition, one that can be removed. It is saying that both the rich and poor can find happiness if only they are able to control their minds, their desires. Such an austere regimen is likely to appeal more to the well-off people than to people who are still living materially deprived lives. The Dalit movement in India has interpreted Buddhism rather radically: as a program for political action. There are aspects of the Buddha's message that can be seen as a critique of social and economic hierarchies, but he never thought of organized politics as a means to redemption.   

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Flying Spaghetti Monster

By now you have probably already read this letter (below) as it has taken a life of its own on the Internet, but I felt compelled to join in and to distribute it to the few of you who come to these pages and provide you with some necessary humor in these dire times of ours:

OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD       

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design.I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific      evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed,then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but  we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining      all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist  does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying  Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible  and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.

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Vaporous Clouds of Nonsense

Justin Cartwright in The Guardian, his essay Beyond Belief:

Near the end of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote these words to a correspondent who had asked the great imponderable:

"As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken."

It's time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense. I do not deny the good work of religious people, nor the cultural effects of religion, nor its deep penetration into our consciousness, but what I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and responds to our plight. As AJ Ayer said, if God has constituted the world in such a way that he cannot resolve the phenomenon of evil, logically it makes no difference whether we are believers or unbelievers. The hypocritical respect now being accorded to Muslim "scholars", people who believe that the Qur'an was dictated word for word by God, is just one example of the mess we have got ourselves into by pretending to take religion seriously. Disagreements about society can only be resolved in the here and now on liberal principles of discussion and compromise. You cannot have a sensible discussion with fundamentalists, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, because they start from a different point.

What preoccupied Berlin as a philosopher and historian of ideas was the very prevalent belief that somehow life is other than the one we live. "Things are what they are," he was fond of saying, paraphrasing Bishop Joseph Butler, "why should we wish to deceive ourselves?" He regarded the essentially religious belief that we could forgo our freedom now for some future society - Marxism was his particular bugbear - as ludicrous and against all the tenets of common sense. Freedom was, in his view, the freedom to conduct our own lives in our own way with as little interference as possible. He had no time at all for the idea that we are living with a false consciousness, which needs to be changed either by the religiously or the ideologically enlightened. In an age when fascism and communism were battling for the soul of Europe, he saw that they were essentially the same thing, offering a sort of heaven for those who gave up their personal freedom.

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The Real Story of Dinosaurs

From Creationism.org, this fascinating piece of exploratory fiction-it kind of explains in a round about way why certain people will believe anything they are told:

Every natural history museum in the world today displays large dinosaur models. Their defensive teeth, spikes and claws are often shown extended. As evidence of the prior existence of these kinds of creatures we have a myriad of bones found on multiple continents, footprints buried in sedimentary layers and ... legends. All over the world people remember the dangerous dragons of old. But they slowly went extinct. Men feared and hated them. Stories of ancient encounters with dinosaurs/dragons are found in China, Thailand, including other parts of Asia, and in Roman, Russian, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, North, South, and Central America, and across Africa too. Are we so much smarter and more academically inclined than all of our ancestors that we should reject all of their historical records - just to prop up temporary evolutionary theory?

Carbon-14 dating of carbon buried in the same layer with dragon bones helps to confirm that they are really only thousands of years old. The myth-ions and myth-ions of years never happened; only in the past 200 years has it become fashionable to forget our true ancient history (of thousands of years) in favor of God-hating (or: "bumbling-inherently-weak-god") evolution. Evolution requires the belief in long epochs of supposed time and chance improvements.

Dragons and sea monsters have become mostly extinct prior to our modern era. By the way, there is evidence that they grew much larger prior to the Great Flood. Just as humans lived much longer (Genesis records ages of some people to have reached over 900 years!) so a reptile ... living much longer then could have grown much larger before the Flood - which is indeed what we see in the fossil record of the pre-Flood world.

Humans and lions live on Earth at the same time today.  But we live in different places.  Porpoises will ram sharks that come into their waters.  So naturally then they also live in different places - while living at the same time.  Why couldn't humans and dinosaurs have lived at the same time?  They'd probably keep mostly separate and then get buried separately if there was a catastrophe, but this could be theoretically possible, correct?  There are at least two places known today with human and dinosaur tracks in the same sedimentary layer: one is in Paluxy, Texas, the other in Eastern Turkmenistan.  Plus we have the legends, from all inhabited continents mind you, which should not be automatically discounted.