www.freethoughtperspective.net

A. J. MATTILL, Jr.

On the first of his three missionary journeys, the Apostle Paul went to Paphos, the capital of the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea. The governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, a non-Jew, was a very intelligent and sensible wise man with an inquiring mind ever searching for truth. Of course he wanted to hear God’s message, and so he sent for the Apostle Paul.

Now enters a certain Jew named Elymas. Elymas practiced witchcraft and was a false prophet. Elymas was the private wizard of the governor. Elymsas knew that he would lose his job as court magician if the governor became a Christian. Therefore Elymas interfered with Paul’s work in order to keep the governor from having faith in the Lord.

In this tense situation, the Apostle Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit and with fire, fury, and holy indignation. Paul looked Elymas straight in the eye and shouted, “You son of the Devil! You’re a crook, a fake, a liar, a quack, and the enemy of everything that is good and right. You’re full of deceit, unscrupulousness, and villainy. When will you ever stop speaking against the true ways of the Lord? The Lord is going to punish you by making you stone-blind for a time. He’ll make you so blind you won’t even be able to see the sun.” 

Immediately Elymas’ eyes were covered by a dark mist and he groped around trying to find someone to lead him by the hand. When the governor saw how pathetic the blind Elymas was, the governor was struck with amazement and put his faith in the Lord, for the governor was favorably impressed by Paul’s teaching about the Lord and by Paul’s miraculous powers, all of which convinced the governor that Christianity is superior to magic and is supported by God. The miracle of Elymas’ sudden blindness opened the eyes of the governor and made a believer out of him!—My paraphrase of Acts 13:6-12.

What are we to make of Paul’s encounter with Elymas? First of all, we note Paul’s unusually harsh condemnation of Elymas: “You son of the Devil! You’re a crook, a fake, a liar, a quack, and the enemy of everything that is good and right. You’r full of deceit, unscrupulousness, and villianly.” Today Paul no doubt would have called Elymas a bastard or a son of a bitch. Be that as it may, Paul was a consummate curser like his Lord, Jesus. Jesus condemned to hell those who refused to turn to God (Matthew 11:20-24; Luke 10:13-15). He cursed the scribes and Pharisees as blind fools, hypocrites, show-offs, and snakes fit for hell (Matthew 23:13-36). Jesus knew that to be called a dog was the supreme insult, yet he called people dogs (Matthew 7:6; 15:26; Mark 7:27).

Second, to sensitive readers Paul’s action of blinding Elymas, even with temporary blindness, is unjustifiably inhumane. A person’s eyesight is too precious for an over-zealous missionary to tamper with. Loss of vision for only a few days would be frightening. Think of how Elymas must have felt when he “found himself in a thick fog, and everything went black” (Acts 13:11, Good As New Translation). We’re not told how long Elymas was stone-blind, or even whether or not he ever saw again. What an outcry there would be today if a modern Bible-thumper were to blind a person who refuses to repent and accept Jesus as Lord. Paul’s “shock and awe” policy anticipated the current strategy of the United States of physically and psychologically crushing the enemy, Iraq. Yet Paul, without  batting an eye, wrote that, “love is patient, tender-hearted, and doesn’t bully” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Good As New Translation). Elymas should have reciprocated and called Paul a few derogatory names. 

Dr. Ludmil Chotkowski, 2002, New England Novelty Books, 1143 Chamberlain Highway, Kensington, CT 06037, ISBN 978-0965785525, 202 pp, ppb, $14.95,

REVIEWED BY

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Ludmil Chotkowski has written a book that blows chiropractic out of the water. Yet the overwhelming majority of Amazon reviews were unfavorable, for the good reason that the word “chiropractic” in the title guaranteed that the only persons likely to look it up were True Believers. Believers in chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, psychoanalysis, and other medical quackery, like believers in hypotism and alien abductions, tend to be unteachable. And persons who belittle accurate evaluations of nonsense tend to be nonsense practitioners who are simply defending their bread and butter. I would expect the same responses from tealeaf readers about a book denouncing tealeaf reading as a fraud. 

I wrote about seventy reviews of books about contrary-to-fact belief systems such as religion, the paranormal, humanoid extraterrestrials, alternative medicine, recovered memory, multiple personality, and hypnotism, before I realized that posting scholarly conclusions to an unrefereed website was an open invitation to be abused by unteachable jackasses whom Amazon was willing to treat as my equals. When the negative ratings became overwhelming, because the only persons who looked up books about superstition tended to be the superstitious, I deleted all but a handful. The only time a significant majority of commentators agreed with my conclusions about a nonsense belief was when I praised books denouncing Scientology as a confidence swindle.

Let me recommend a book titled Believing Bullshit, by Stephen Law. It describes the “eight key strategies” used by believers in BS to defend their claims. The one most relevant to chiropractic and other medical quackery is, “but it works.”  So do sugar pills.    

Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, 2011, Simon & Shuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, ISBN 978-1-4391-7619-1, 565 pp, hc, $35.00, reviewed by

WILLIAM HARWOOD

The least intelligent president America is ever likely to have, George W. Bush, somehow managed to graduate from Yale University. The most criminally evil vice president America is ever likely to have, Richard B. Cheney, flunked out of Yale. Bush went on to become a puppet president, with Cheney and Karl Rove as the Geppettos pulling his strings. As a result of that unholy alliance, America was transformed from the most trusted nation on earth into the most hated. It therefore makes sense that Cheney would eventually publish a memoir in which he confessed the war crimes for which hundreds of thousands of Americans still hope to see him strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm, and apologized for them. In fact, far from apologizing for his crimes against the Geneva Convention, the American people, and the human race, Cheney boasts about them and claims that he would do the same things again. The man is pond slime, and his daughter’s endorsement of his subhuman mindset confirms the proof that she had already given the world that she is pond slime.

Neither Bush nor Cheney played any role in provoking the atrocity of 9/11/2001. The madman responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center proclaimed a war against America before Bush was even nominated for president, and the reasons for his hatred of a large portion of the human race existed only in his own mind. That he was not caught and punished until the Bush administration was out of office raises questions about that administration’s efficiency, but not its intentions. The war crimes perpetrated at Guantanamo stemmed from the inability of Bush or Cheney to grasp that information obtained under torture was invariably what the torturers wanted to hear, not what the person providing the information really believed.

I plowed through 363 pages of Cheney’s self-hagiography before finding anything on which to comment. That is not a criticism, simply an acknowledgment of my own priorities. I searched the first 523 pages of Hillary Clinton’s Living History, and similarly found nothing on which I wished to express an opinion. Only a minority of Cheney’s readers is likely to be interested in anything other than his attempt to explain and justify his actions as vice president, and I am not part of that minority. It is on those actions that history will judge him, and I seriously doubt that the verdict will be flattering. Joseph McCarthy’s status as the most morally-depraved aberration American politics has ever produced, hitherto unchallenged, is now gone forever.

In his chapter misleadingly titled “Liberating Iraq,” Cheney commences his serious attempt to rewrite history. While acknowledging (p.369) that “some of the intelligence we received was wrong,” he continues to deny that the intelligence used to delude Congress into legalizing Bush’s war of personal glorification was intentionally manipulated to support the Big Lie that Saddam posed an ongoing threat to America’s security. He alleges that, “there was no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and WMD capacity than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With the benefit of hindsight … that assessment holds true.” In fact that assessment has been totally falsified, as Cheney cannot be unaware. Osama bin Laden was as hostile to Saddam as he was to America. And the reality that Saddam had no WMDs or plans to obtain them was among the intelligence reports that Bush and Cheney suppressed when they had Powell and Rice lie to Congress. But what is a little thing like truth to a Manchurian Candidate like Cheney?

According to Cheney (p.373), “We would remove Saddam Hussein, eliminate the threat he posed, and establish a representative government.” The irony of the Bush administration imposing democracy in Iraq while systematically abolishing it in the USA is obviously lost on Bush’s co-conspirator. (Let us not forget that a Republican supreme court overthrew the Constitution in order to appoint Bush president in 2000 in full awareness that he had lost the election.) I do, however, agree that, “were the Israeli-Palestinian crisis solved tomorrow, the terrorists would simply find another rationale for their continuing jihad.”

I searched through Cheney’s index for “waterboarding” or “torture.” They were not there. But I found what I wanted under “enhanced interrogation.” It is now abundantly clear that no intelligence gleaned by waterboarding proved useful in any way. Yet Cheney continues to pretend (p. 521) that it did. Is he an unmitigated liar, or is he seriously demented? The answer most people will deduce from this book is that he is both.

Cheney reports (p.494) that his position as president of the Senate “pretty much boiled down to casting tie votes… My ability to cast those votes gave Americans the Bush tax cuts that they still enjoy as I write.” Does he really not see that as a confession that he was a culpable agent in destroying the American economy and generating a deficit unparalleled in American history—after Bill Clinton had left his successor a surplus? 

Cheney praises convicted perjurer and obstructionist Scooter Libby, and upbraids Bush for refusing to pardon him. That comes as no surprise, since Libby’s crimes were perpetrated at Cheney’s orders. He praises Donald Rumsfeld, one of four persons, including Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove, Barack Obama is for some inexplicable reason protecting from prosecution for war crimes. And he reports that he three times suggested to Bush that he be removed from the Republican ticket for the election of 2004, but Bush chose to retain him for reasons Cheney views narcissistically. To this day it apparently has not occurred to him that Bush junior retained Cheney as his running mate for the same reason Bush senior retained Quayle in 1992—as an absolute guarantee that no Congress would ever impeach him at the cost of putting such a VP in the White House.

One of Cheney’s daughters is gay. Democratic opponents cited that reality as evidence of Cheney’s hypocrisy, or something worse, in advocating laws depriving America’s thirty million gays of legal equality. Cheney interprets the Democrats’ action in accordance with the depraved opportunism he sees in the mirror.

Concerning his recovery from his fifth heart attack in 2010, Cheney writes (p.525) that he “couldn’t dismiss the possibility that more than the skill of doctors, the luck of the draw, or my own will had pulled me through. I do know that my cause was pleaded in some earnest prayers.” Were those prayers directed at the same imaginary Sky Führer who steadfastly ignores the more than a million prayers each day asking for world peace? Perhaps the deity whose regular and repeated homicides and other atrocities are chronicled in its official biography, “the Bible,” saw Cheney as “one of us”? At least his low-key confession of superstitious ignorance is less offensive to America’s 110 million nontheists than the “my god can lick your god” boasts currently coming from the Republican aspirants to be the White House’s first self-confessed resident theocrat.

Steve Martin once said, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say about someone, you’re probably talking about the Ayatollah.” Today he could as accurately say, “You’re probably talking about Dick Cheney.”

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Christian sects tend to regard the capricious rules in what they call the Old Testament as superseded. While they accept the declaration of Leviticus that the victimless recreation practiced by homosexuals is forbidden by their deity, they reject the same book’s prohibition of eating pork, lobster or cheeseburgers, or wearing a cotton-and-polyester shirt. They argue that their junior god, Jesus, changed the law, so that only those taboos Jesus endorsed are still valid. Their rejection of Leviticus’s death penalty for homosexuality stems from their dogma that Jesus abolished capital punishment. But while they reject the status of the Old Testament as unchangeable divine law, they accept it as a revelation whose portrayal of its paramount deity is totally accurate. It follows that, if the OT god was intrinsically evil when the OT was composed, then he must be intrinsically evil today.

Consider the following passage from Deuteronomy, chapter 7:

“When Yahweh your gods [dual-sex, generic plural] has settled you in the land you’re about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you … you’re to cut them down and exterminate them. You’re to make no compromise with them  or show them any mercy … You’re going to exterminate them in a massive genocide until they are eliminated.” (1) Jews see that passage as justification for the Likud Party’s continuing annexation of Palestinian land never recognized by the United Nations as part of Israel. Christians tend to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. I have yet to encounter a godworshipper of any stripe willing to concede that his Sky Führer was once a  capricious, partisan, mass-murdering psychopath, but is much nicer now. But either the OT is a product of the human imagination, or its protagonist was and is exactly that.

Consider also Genesis chapter 3:

“Yahweh informed Eve, ‘I’m going to intensify your pain in childbirth. You will give birth to your children in agony. Your man is going to exercise authority over you’ … He informed Adam, ‘Wrestling food from the ground is going to exhaust you, every day of your life.’” Even if the crime of Adam and Eve had been far more serious than worshipping the Mother Goddess by eating the pomegranate that was her sacramental vulva,  the imposed punishment is bound to strike the morally evolved as disproportionately severe—even if it had only been inflicted on the perpetrators. But the author of the fable was trying to justify Yahweh’s infliction of such unspeakable sadism on all humans. Not only did Yahweh inflict such monstrous atrocities on Adam and Eve; he did the same to all of their descendants. Hitler executed descendants of persons guilty of the crime of choosing to be Jewish. Can identical behavior be evil when Hitler did it but not evil when a god does it? Godworshippers think it can.

Genesis chapter 6: “The time came when humans had begun to proliferate upon the surface of the land … Yahweh then said, ‘Humankind must not retain forever the breath that is mine, since he is mere protoplasm. Henceforth his life is to be limited.’ Yahweh saw that the disobedience of humankind was great in the land, and that he was continually plotting disobedience in his heart [thoughtcrime] … So Yahweh said,’I'll destroy the humans that I created from the surface of the land … for I regret that I ever made them.’” Whether one sees the offence for which Yahweh murdered the entire human race, except for  one family of his pets, as thoughtcrime, or the failure to grant blind, unquestioning obedience to an unelected dictator  (as Syrians are currently refusing to obey their unelected dictator), it makes the genocide of Hitler and Stalin pale into insignificance. And believers hail such a homicidal maniac as a loving father figure? The filicidal King Herod was a more loving father.

It was the deity of the OT who perpetrated such atrocities. But the New Testament god is no nicer. Matthew 10:29 reports, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for one coin? Yet not one of them can fall to the ground except through your father.”  The gospel author thus affirms that the reason 250,00 humans die every day is that the Christian sky father executes them.

The god of the Jews murders every human being ever born for the crime of being descended from disobedient ancestors. But having exterminated a human, it cannot punish him further. So when capital punishment strikes it as inadequate, it magnifies its punishment by the means reported in Exodus 20:5, “I Yahweh your gods, jealous Allah, will make the descendants of the third and forth generation of those who despise me, victims of the same crimes committed by their ancestors.”

The god of the Christians is subject to no similar limitation. According to Jesus (Mark 9:47-49), the god’s imagined enemies are going to be posthumously “tossed into Gehenna, where their maggot never dies and the fire is never extinguished. For Everyone is going to be pickled with fire,” That sadistic torture in an underworld Auschwitz is described as “eternal” (Matthew 25:41). And to guarantee that there will be no shortage of victims to barbecue with flamethrowers, Jesus explained to his followers (Mark 4:10-12) that, while he preached to them in plain language, “to those who are on the outside, all things are to be told in fables, so that in seeing they may see but not perceive, and in  hearing they may hear but not understand, in case they convert and obtain forgiveness.” That speech alone shows Jesus to have been a sadistic psychopath. But there is more. He is depicted in Luke 16:1-9 as preaching a fable whose moral can be summarized, “Swindle those who can no longer be of use to you, and use the stolen money to bribe those who are in a position to do you good.” Reminder: While historians view Jesus as a mortal who may or may not have been a real person from history, Christians see him as the incarnation of their god.

The god of the Moslems is equally reprehensible. Only a statistically insignificant number of Moslems , and not all Christians, buy into the Big Lie that, despite their unrelated origins, the Christian “God” and the Moslem “Allah” are the same deity under interchangeable names. But even those Christians who believe that Christians and Moslems adhere to the same Sky Führer reject the Koran’s pretence to be a divinely inspired revelation from their god. Passages from the Koran that portray Allah as morally depraved will only convince such people that it was Mohammad, not Allah/God, who was an evil madman. Nonetheless, the point that the Moslem deity is every bit as evil as its Christian counterpoint is worth making. Consider:

“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other …. Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience … beat them” (4:34). “Allah misleads whom he will, and guides to the right path whom he pleases” (6:39). “You are forbidden to take in marriage married women, except captives whom you own as slaves” (4:24). “Slay the pagans wherever you find them. Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” (2)

The Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible and the Moslem Koran present dissimilar philosophies. But the one point on which they present identical portraits is that their paramount deities are as evil as Hitler, as insane as Caligula, and as subhuman as the Marquis de Sade.

(1) All translations are from the Prostestant Bible Correctly Translated, World Audience, 2010.

(2) Islam Unveiled, Robert Spencer, pp.1, 18, 29. 

STEPHEN VAN ECK

My siblings and I are providing home care for a terminally ill father. Yesterday a Fundamentalist neighbor, who has admitteddly been very good to my elderly parents, asked my brother if he and his pastor could drop by and visit my father (a Catholic). I would have politely told him that my Dad has a pastor who has visited him, and who probably would do so again. But my brother, out of appreciation for the man’s kindness, said yes. Big mistake.

The pastor and the neighbor taxed this poor enfeebled old man for twenty minutes with a typical Fundamentalist “soul winning” spiel. The way they assumed that a regular churchgoer was unfamiliar with Christianity, that someone who thought he was a Christian could yet not be, was profoundly insulting. So was the arrogant implication that the Catholic Church is not good enough, as if their hoedown denomination was so superior.

Rather than make a scene I had shut myself away in an upstairs room until they left. But at that point we did not suspect what would soon ensue. This episode underscores the profound disgust I have for aggressive Fundamentalism. And my siblings feel that way all the more.

So when I could get time away from my hospice duties, I went online to spread my disgust with Evangelical vultures. I put it out to them, is this sort of behavior acceptable? I got few responses but what I got back was an unqualified yes. They seemed utterly oblivious to the insult, annoyance, and the crass opportunism represented by the above incident. Their laser-like focus on proselytism obscured any other consideration.

Why are they like this? We know they’re raised to be aggressive, but there’s more to it than that. Their odd belief that someone could think they’re a Christian but still not be, stems from their obsessive emphasis on the “Born Again” experience. They seem to think that unless one goes through it, the hocus pocus doesn’t work. But this emphasis is making way too much of a figure of speech! And what it’s actually doing is mimicking the experience of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus; and in so doing recreates the personality and values of Paul in each “reborn” individual. (In a similar way, Muslims absorb the likes and dislikes of Muhammad.)  Paul, essentially the creator of Christianity, is really what the religion is all about.

But back to the vultures circling people’s deathbeads. Although it’s long been popular in Fundamentalist circles to repeat apocryphal tales of deathbed conversions of famous skeptics, including Tomas Paine, in fact he brusquely sent a minister away. Doing the same thing is the ONLY thing I’ll have to look forward to when my time comes. A final slap in the face for a mentality that deserves it.

BERNARD KATZ

And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.’ So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves… And God saw that it was good. And god blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” (Genesis 1:20-22) This is the first great commandment, and it  so important to have sex that it is repeated no less than seven times in the first book of the Bible.

Have plenty of sex, yes—but God does not say how! Until recently, we thought that Darwin was right—that there was only one way to have sex. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer summarized the great biologist’s thesis in the memorable phrase we all know, “the survival of the fittest.” In his The Descent of Man, 1871, when evaluating his phrase “the struggle for existence,” Darwin wrote: “The expression used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ is more accurate.” 

So up until the 1970s, it was scientific dogma that the males in every species of dung beetles and damselflies alike, all wanted to grow up to be fighters. That is, they wanted to acquire and defend  territories and harems. At least in theory, the combined forces of natural selection (getting killed by rivals or chosen by females) would ruthlessly out any sissy alternative lifestyles. In fact, Charles Darwin himself noticed that alternative forms persist in many species. But biologists generally ignored this insight because they couldn’t explain it or they just didn’t see it in the first place. Sneaky behaviors designed to fool other members of the same species often fooled outside observers too.

A mate might actually benefit from being smarter, weaker and, well, more effeminate. For instance, in bluegill sunfish a significant percentage of males actually impersonate females. They wear female striping and their eyes darken to resemble the limpid pools of a female bluegill. They also have heightened levels of the female hormone estradiol. The phrase “satellite males” describes the way these impersonators orbit the nests of conventional males.

Conventional males frequently get fooled and invite the cross-dressers into their nests. In entering a nest a female impersonator dips down and turns on one side, moving as a real female would to release eggs for the resident male to fertilize. But the cross-dresser is in fact secretly releasing his own sperm onto the eggs deposited by females. 

This kind of transvestite mating tactic has turned out to be surprisingly common in other species. Take the giant cuttlefish, a voluptuous, three-foot-long relative of the squid. Conventional mates are the Beau Brummells of the marine world. They put on a lavish, romantic display for the females. A courting male waves extended, banner-like webs and arms, and turns his body into an amorous light show with bright colors and pulsing zebra stripes. So far, so good. But sometimes a small sneaker mate accompanies the happy couple and, by assuming the shape and body patterns of a female, avoids attack. Sooner or later, the macho males will have to drive off some other big mate. In the resulting confusion: the female impersonator waltzes in, sneaks under the covers, grabs the female and starts passing sperm to her. When the macho mate comes back, the sneaker male once again tags along, looking girlish and innocent.

Cross-dressing isn’t just a way to get a mate. Some female damselflies, for example, appear to imitate males for the opposite reason—to avoid being sexually harassed. Most of the time, though, cross-dressing and other sneaky ploys have just one purpose: getting the girl. This is why the big boys of the world spend so much time and energy on what biologists call “mate guarding.”

The dung beetle, for instance, regularly patrols his tunnel to check on the female, and if he catches her having sex with another dung beetle who has sneaked in behind his back, he throws the interloper out. Then he immediately has sex with the female beetle to displace the interloper’s sperm with his one. In fact, he may have sex with her ten times a day, just to be certain—or at least a little less certain—that he’s the father of her offspring. Water bugs are even more anxious about paternity. In one study, a male mated with the female 100 times in 36 hours! The burden of mate guarding, whether by fighting or marathon lovemaking , can leave even the sturdiest male feeling weak-kneed.

Among northern elephant seals, a bull who wins bloody contests against other bulls gets to stake out a beach and wallow in splendor as king of his harem. He may mate with five females in a season, while many lesser males go celibate. But defending his harem also means not going back to the sea to eat, and he typically loses about four percent of his weight during the three-month breeding season. 

This is why “success” as a conventional male is not always all it’s cracked up to be. DNA testing in red-winged blackbirds, for instance, has revealed that the longer a resident mate stays away from the nest gathering food, the greater the likelihood that his putative offspring will actually be fathered by someone else. In one Australian bird species, the fairy wren, fully two-thirds of the offspring get fathered by someone other than the man of the house. If male animals could perform a cost-benefit analysis, they would almost certainly conclude that it’s cheaper and easier to be a sneaker male. You don’t have to keep up a large territory, court females, fight off rivals or provide parental care.

But is cheaper ever really better? In most species, females are the choosers when it comes to mating, and they usually seem to prefer the big boys. Northern elephant seal females, for instance, clearly regard the big beefy bull as their best possible mate. They howl in protest when the bull mounts them—but they howl louder and longer if a lesser male tries it, so the big bull will come thundering to the rescue.

Still, the strategy that’s lord of the dancer one season may be just a spectator the next. Take the side-blotched lizards living among rocky outcrops in the coastal mountains of central California. They’re about two and a half inches long, and conventional males typically display by doing push-ups while also puffing out the bright patch of color at their throats. Here we see three different, genetically determined mating tactics, with each identified by a distinctive throat color.

The orange-throats are the “ultra-dominants,” patrolling large territories with lots of females. The blue-throats are about 15 percent smaller, but still manage to maintain modest territories and diligently mate-guard as many females as they can round up. And then there are the yellow-throats, which mimic females, do no push-ups and maintain no territories, but instead skulk in nooks and crannies among the rocks hoping to get Lucky. It ought to be easy for everyone to spot the slackers and make them disappear.

But is life that simple? If the blue-throats happen to predominate in the population, then the slacker yellows are indeed out of luck. The blue-throats recognize them as rival mates and evict them from their territories. But blue-throats never predominate for long, because the dominant orange-throats have the size and stamina to beat them up and take away their females. Thus orange-throats get more offspring in the next generation, and in a year or two they supplant the blues.

But orange-throats apparently are not so bright. They don’t recognize the slacker yellow boys as rival males, so they tolerate them in the neighborhood. This allows the yellows to make “little sperm strafing runs” through orange-throat territories. “After a year or two,” yellow slackers actually outnumber orange-throats. Then it’s time once again for the blue-throats to make their move. In fact, the three male types regularly displace one another in the reproductive hierarchy every four-five-year cycle.

In many other species, the sneaky approach seems to work best when picky females concentrate their favors on a relative handful of big brutish males (or when the big brutes corral females in harems. The macho-males do best with this kind of strong sexual selection, but the overwhelming majority of conventional males wind up as losers. So sneaker mates in this scenario may actually do better on average than the ordinary ones. “Any time you have a great imbalance between the haves and have-nots,” says Purdue University biologist Richard Howard, “the have-nots find a way around.” Sneaking also works in habitats with lots of places to hide when the big guy comes on the scene.

So what does all this mean for us humans? The mating strategies of people are at least as diverse as those being studied in the rest of the animal kingdom. Since humans are part of the vast web of life, why should we be singled out by, say, the Church or politicians, and told that the Lord ordained only one way to have sex. Why can’t we legally enjoy the same flexibility in our mating strategies that our living associates have? After all, even though the Lord told us “to be fruitful and multiply,” he didn’t specify as to how! 

WILLIAM HARWOOD

David Copperfield—Kreskin—Reveen—Uri Geller. All are entertainers who utilize methods of deception developed by magicians to simulate the impossible. But are they all equally legitimate? Or is deception only justifiable when its audience knows that what they are witnessing is an illusion?

Ghost—Charmed—The Witches of Eastwick—Medium—Ghost Whisperer. Since those examples of the photographic arts are all fantasies, does that make them equally legitimate? Or does portraying fantasy concepts as extrapolations from the real world cross the line from entertainment into disinformation?

David Copperfield’s performances have been enjoyed by more people than any other magician in human history, including the great Harry Houdini. But with vanishingly few exceptions (a great-uncle who once saw me perform the multiplying billiard ball effect labeled it, “Purely and simply of the devil”), no member of Copperfield’s live or television audience has ever imagined that his seeming accomplishment of the impossible was anything but an illusion. To cite the illusion with which most people are familiar, Copperfield is able to make an assistant float up into the air in apparent defiance of the law of gravity. What keeps his audiences entranced and perplexed is the illusion that there is nothing holding her up. In fact there really is something holding her up, and the success of the illusion as entertainment stands and falls on the magician’s ability to make it seem that there is not. What makes such deception a legitimate art form is that Copperfield acknowledges that he cannot do the impossible, and that what the audience is witnessing is a deception. As magician John Calvert used to inform his audiences at the beginning of his performances, “My only regret is that I have to fool you. But since you came here expecting to be fooled, if I don’t fool you, you will go away feeling very fooled because you were not fooled. So I’m just going to have to fool you.”

Kreskin is a mentalist, a type of magician who specializes in illusions that stimulate mindreading, thought transference, precognition, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other alleged mind powers that exist only in the imaginative field of science fiction. Kreskin’s performances are as much a simulation of the impossible as David Copperfield’s, and at an early point in his career he acknowledged that his feats are indeed “magic,” deceptions that simulate the impossible. In recent years he has become less open, and the latest report is that he is currently encouraging audiences to believe that his simulations of the impossible are not simulations but unique “powers” of his mind. Has he succumbed to the Shirley Temple syndrome, and started believing  his own publicity? There is some suspicion that he was prompted to turn to misrepresentation when he realized that he could not otherwise compete on equal terms with a mentalist who started claiming to have nonexistent powers when he found himself having difficulty earning a living as a professional magician. That mentalist was Uri Geller.

Reveen is a hypnotist, a kind of magician who entertains by having volunteer playactors from his audience come onto his stage and pretend that they are “hypnotized.” Kreskin has denounced hypnotists as humbugs on the ground that hypnotism does not exist. And he is right. To quote researcher Robert Baker (They Call It Hypnosis) “Hypnotism does not exist, has never existed in the past, and will not exist in the future.” But whereas Kreskin and Gellar personally practice deception, or they would not be able to entertain at all, all simulation in a hypnotic show is done by volunteers, and it is by no means impossible for the hypnotist to be as much a believer as any member of his audience. As a former executive in the Reveen show, I can attest that Reveen was indeed a believer in the reality of hypnotism. I doubt that he still is, now that he has retired from the hypnotism business. But he was a believer at the time, and that gave his performances a legitimacy that Kreskin no longer has and Geller never had.

Uri Geller deceives audiences and credulous paranormalists by claiming that he is a psychic, even though there is no such thing as a psychic. There are persons who are able to delude themselves that they have psychic powers, such as the character “Daphne” in the TV series Frasier, by counting the hits and ignoring the misses. Geller’s apologists claim that his psychic powers are sporadic, and when they are not working he is forced to resort to magicians’ tricks in order to satisfy a waiting audience. He may even believe that himself. Nonetheless, he is as much a magician, a simulator of the impossible, as David Copperfield. And he does not limit his deception to entertaining audiences with magical illusions, “tricks” as such feats tend to be called by non-magicians. He also encourages the truly gullible to believe that his alleged powers give him saleable abilities, such as the capacity to make better guesses than rolling dice.

Bu even if Geller limits his deception to his audience, his pretence that his conjuring tricks are accomplished by psychic means would still encourage those audiences to believe that “psychic” is a legitimate concept. That is a crime against magicians, since it causes audiences to believe that distracting their attention while a magician bends a spoon with his fingers is a greater feat than sawing a woman in half. But more than that, it is a crime against humanity, because it contributes to the obfuscation of humankind by adding to the disinformation peddled to the masses by the scientific illiterates responsible for television  propaganda.

There is no such thing as a witch. (The word mistranslated as “witch” in the King James Bible really means a priestess of the wrong god. But that is not relevant to the present discussion.) Utilizing any means of entertainment to encourage the masses to believe in witches would be reprehensible. Using witches in a script in a manner that does not misinform is legitimate entertainment. The good witches and bad witches in The Wizard of Oz were never mistaken for real-world concepts, and neither were the witches in the book and movie, The Witches of Eastwick, or the delightful television series, Charmed.

Similarly, producers of the movie Ghost made no attempt to sell tickets by convincing audiences that ghosts really exist. Indeed, the movie’s spiritualist medium  with whom the title ghost communicated was basically a humbug who was stunned when a real ghost turned up in one of her performances. Since there is no such thing as a ghost, it follows that there is no such thing as a medium, a person who converses with ghosts. A person who believes that he has seen a ghost is self-deluded. But a person who takes money from survivors by claiming that he/she can contact a deceased relative or loved one is practicing fraud, even if she believes she has the nonexistent powers she claims. All persons who claim to be mediums are at best self-deluded. But when a self-styled medium claims that she has helped law enforcement officers to solve a crime, she is not simply fooling herself. She is prevaricating. Alison DuBois, who claimed to have done so, and on whose claims the television series, Medium, was based, is such a deceiver and, in the sense that she profits from her deception by selling books and TV rights to her fiction, a humbug.

Television decision makers are not the brightest lights on the candelabra. When Alison DuBois’s claim to possess nonexistent powers was first considered as the basis for a television series, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry attempted to explain to the TV executives that she was a poseur whose claims to have helped named law enforcement agencies were untrue. Committee members came away with the impression that the executives were incurable believers who swallowed DuBois’s deception, hook, line and sinker. But NBC did verify CSI’s warning that the law enforcement agencies DuBois named had either never heard of her or never had any contact with her. The network promptly removed her false claims from its website—but went ahead with production of the series based on her fantasies, and it was still being broadcast, although on a different network, seven years later.

Ghost Whisperer was similarly based on the claims of a self-styled “spirit communicator” named James Van Praagh. The series’ central character, however, did not carry Praagh’s name and was not of the same sex. But like Medium, Ghost Whisperer maximized its rating by promoting the Big Lie that its scripts resembled events that have happened or could happen in the real world. That it was canceled after five years should not be attributed to any attack of conscience on the part of its promulgators. Rather, as with everything else in television’s Vast Wasteland, declining ratings was the sole factor. Nonetheless, with the cancellation of Medium and Ghost Whisperer, the number of programs contributing to the dumbing of humankind has been reduced. For how long, one can only wonder.   

BERNARD KATZ

The world of modern man is dualistic. One world is “spiritualistic” while the other is “material.” The spiritual has been part of mankind’s culture since time immemorial; it is what we call “religion.” Its inhabitants are the “god’s,” goddesses,” “devils,’ “angels,” saints,” ‘ghosts,”—in short, anything that our imaginations say “go bump-in-the-night.” It is what is behind our world of perception, the clockwork that makes up what we inwardly experience. It is a world based primarily upon what is under our skins: the figments of our brains, especially when diseased; the air we breathe and exhale, including the gases from our intestinal areas. 

Our other world is new to our culture, stemming primarily from the Age of Newton in the 17th century, when rationality and empirical thinking took root. Gradually over these last few hundred years, the material world, the world primarily outside of ourselves, has slowly but surely superseded the spiritual one—and we represent this innovation by the various sciences—including the science of mythmaking and biblical interpretation! In other words, the disciplines of science have now zeroed in on the so-called spiritual world and have shown what a fraud it is.

There have been many attempts to show that these two worlds do not clash, that they each represent different roads to the truth. Thus there is supposed to be two apparently yet mutually compatible sets of scientific and religious truth—that science and religion do not overlap and therefore can coexist peacefully. This medieval doctrine is called “The Doctrine of Double-truth” and has been invoked to protect inquiry on dangerous subjects, such as the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul. Stephen J. Gould revived this doctrine under the name of NOMA (for non-overlapping magisterial). This is the “soft-hand” approach (as given in the title to this essay), one in which we wicked non-theists stop picking on religious spokesmen and walk to the altar of truth hand-in-hand like old buddies.

But this trick won’t work! It cannot bring about a truce in the age-long war between science and religion because they collide head-on in a number of crucial points. For example, religion asserts that miracles happen, whereas scientists abide by the principle of lawfulness. Prayer presupposes telepathic communication between the worshiper and the alleged spiritual being he worships, but this is discounted by experimental psychology. All religions assert that life is mysterious, which clashes with the purpose of biology. No religion admits that the mind is a collection of brain processes, whereas cognitive neuroscience assumes and confirms this. There is a constant clash between those who want the creationism as told in Genesis to supplant the science of evolution. The long clash over abortion is especially laughable because there is not one biblical text that refers to it. Most religions discourage their sacred scriptures from being explored, and expect every member of the faith to believe and worship their contents. In short, both science and religion ask the same questions, but they answer them in different ways and give mutually incompatible answers.

Over the long centuries when religion was king of the hill, did they treat non-theists, or even theists who disagreed with them with a soft glove? By today’s standards of conduct, they would be prosecuted as criminals! For they lied,  changed important texts in their sacred writings, excommunicated, exiled, tortured, burnt, stretched on the rack, confiscated property, maimed and killed those with whom they disagreed. And, believe-it-or-not, there have been a number of “warrior popes—Pope Julius !! the patron of Raphael and Michelangelo, being the most notoriously militant—who led papal armies into bloody battles!

These religious opponents have also thwarted scientists for no other reason than that they have disagreed with the conclusions of their theologians. And this is still going on in certain countries! For a fascinating no-holds-barred book on this constant warfare, read Andrew D. White’s classic “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” (Dover Publications, 1960).

I also find it ironical that those who down-play and even scorn the results of science actually use its results—e-mail and computers, broadcasting on TV and radio, printing Bibles and religious tracts—in propagandizing for their faiths!

Thus I must go along with those of us—with Richard Dawkins being in the forefront—who want to treat our religious opponents with a mailed fist instead of a soft glove.

PERFIDIOUS PROVERBS AND OTHER POEMS: A SATIRICAL LOOK AT THE BIBLE

By Philip Appleman, 2011, Humanity Books/Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228-2119, ISBN 978-1-61614-385-5, $14.00, 6′x9′ paperback, 130 pages.

Reviewed by

G. RICHARD BOZARTH

Perfidious Proverbs is an anthology of religion-themed poems culled from Appleman’s New And Selected Poems 1956-1996 and Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie. This makes the book a valuable addition to any Atheist’s Freethinker’s or Secular Humanist’s library. It’s also a good starter book for beginning an exploration of Freethought literature. 

There’s a foreward by Dan Barker. In my reading notes I summarized it as “interesting, but its absence would not have been missed.” Like most such additions to the poetry books I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them), Barker’s is essentially a waste of paper and ink. A short biography would have been better (the Great Books of The Western World offers perfect examples of this kind of foreward). Appleman’s introduction is much better. He discusses how childhood is loaded with myths that evaporate as the child transitions into adulthood—except religious myths. Religion-dominated culture conspires with religious leaders to perpetuate religious myths into adulthood. The tragedy is this: unlike relative harmless myths like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, religious myths exert detrimental moral influence.

Perfidious Proverbs isn’t always satire aimed at the Bible, but most of it is. The poems in “The Created” are particularly good. Here are comments on famous events in the Bible by Eve, Noah, Bilad, David, Jonah, Mary, Judas, and Jesus. Eve complains about the unfairness of being punished for behaving exactly the way she and Adam were designed to behave. “If human nature was a mistake, whose mistake was it?” (p.38) Noah’s version of the Flood is really excellent, and chilling because, as to be expected from the most holy man on earth at the time, he refuses to admit the atrocious immorality and utter futility of the Flood. Sarah is not impressed by Yahweh’s morality in punishing Sodom’s inhabitants for behaving exactly like humans always have and always will behave. David has no problem with revealing what an immoral, murdering fiend he really is—or admitting his enthusiasm for heterosexual promiscuity (remember he was another most-holy-man-on- Earth during his time). Mary talks about her son as a mother who is miserable because he became a cult leader and got executed for it, and is now unhappy about his followers pressuring her to say her son’s birth was a miracle. Judas tells about being in a cult when its leader has given him reason to doubt his sanity. And there is Jesus on the day of execution wondering where Yahweh is because he wants to know how his devotion to the deity ended up with him on a cross. His conclusion, too late to save him, is that “God is only a trick with mirrors, our dark reflection in a glass.” P.74)

The word “satire” generally makes people think of “humor” in its funny meaning. Satire often is fun reading, but not always. Satire can be gruesome by exposing the truth behind appearances like slicing open the skin to spill the viscera inside. “The Faith-Healer Speaks” is a very strong, disturbing exhibition of that peculiar fanaticism, which tortures or murders believers who could have been cured by doctors. It’s particularly atrocious when the victim is a child who had no choice about being given faith-healing instead of medicine or medical procedures. In this poem a child is murdered by faith-healing, and the faith-healer only anticipates an even greater miracle: the child’s resurrection! This isn’t merely fantasy. It has happened before in real life, though not always involving children, and will certainly happen again. “A Priest Forever” is an unrepentant Roman Catholic priest defending his sexual relationships with young boys. “And Then The Perfect Truth Of Hatred” is about the bigotry caused by religionism’s detrimental moral influence.

The most disturbing poem is “Alive” (p.103-104). It is an authentic horror story that reminded me of “Red Roses”, a similarly ghastly poem by Anne Sexton about child-battering. “Alive” is a horror story about blind faith in religionism and the cruelty of secular doctors who will commit atrocities to “save a life” even though what is left is a corpse that cannot finish dying because modern medical technology can keep it biologically functioning. Uncle Jimmie has cancer. Operations fail to save him, so “Stop cutting, Jimmie told them, “let me go to earth and snow and silver trees.” Aunt Flo sides with the doctors because her religious faith won’t permit Jimmie to commit suicide by stopping his “treatment”, and so “Auntie Flo went on reading St. Paul (The works of the flesh are uncleanness), and praying, and paying the bills—and the surgeons huddled, frowning at Jimmie’s want of reverence for faith and modern medicine.” Aunt Flo prayed and paid, therefore the doctors cut and cut. Naturally “one Sunday after Angelus, Jim began his dark forgetting of the green wheat fields, red hills in the sun, and how clouds drive storms across the sea. Some Monday following, a specialist trimmed away one-quarter of his brain and left no last grey memory of Omar or snowy fields or silver trees.” Aunt Flo kept praying and paying. Being paid, the doctors were glad to keep the corpse from finishing its final few inches to crossing over into death. Now “tubes lead in and out of Jimmie’s veins and vents. Aunt Flo comes every day to read to bandages the Word Made Flesh, and pray, and pay the bills, and watch with Jimmie, whittled down like a dry stick, but living.” And Earth goes on, the sun fueling life, life ending, the molecular constituents of life recycling to become part of new life, these wonderful, natural, purposeless, amoral processes that began billions of years ago, but “Uncle Jimmie is no part of these.” This is the poem that hit me the hardest and touched me deepest.

Perfidious Proverbs Has several excellent poems in it and no bad ones. There are very few lyrical poems, which are, in my opinion, the best kind of poetry, but the prose poems (meaning in rhythm or rhyme (usually have the emotional intensity that is necessary to make prose poetic. The poems deliver a very basic, very average, very expected Freethought message. Although there is no new lightning, the lightning of the familiar message is usually creative. The book does have one flaw in addition to Barker’s foreward, and that is having nothing that will disturb Freethinker’s manqué—however that is not much of a flaw compared to the book’s very excellent qualities. I recommend it highly without hesitation. 

RON STAUFFER

All too often Atheists are subjective and do not quantify their perambulations. With the exception of authors like Dawkins, Hitchens, Shermer and Harris (who are strong on statistics as well as rhetoric), our mission to convince the brain-dead is still not taken seriously by the mainstream media. The following is an attempt to scientifically/philosophically quantify an axiom of truth. I think we need to develop more axioms similar to this, to establish a science of mental reality! 

Hope you’ll enjoy—

METAPHYSICAL ASSERTIONS

 •THE CONSTANCY ASSERTION: A child born into the embrace of any one religion, tends to stay with that embrace. 

2. The PRIMORDIAL ASSERTION: Religion (formal respect of the unknown) has been the mainstay of the human psyche as an explanation of natural phenomena since the dawn of consciousness.

3. THE MORALITY ASSERTION: a. Obedience to the law, civil or religious, is a communal obligation. The latter includes code for its self-preservation but usually lacks timely enforcement. Even though both condemn a citizen’s offense against other citizens, the latter is, on parochial condition, more forgiving! (*)

b. Religion is about humans’ relationship with their deity, but morality is a person’s relationship with other people.

4. THE REPLACEMENT ASSERTION: The advancement of science and understanding is in opposite progression to the dissembling and retreat of religion.

(*) In the last sentence of MORALITY ASSERTION (item a. “on parochial condition”), is this not a form of blackmail—a threat of vengeance if not adhered to? (Scare tactics at the very least for the innocuous crime of intellectually challenging a cult’s promise of eternal afterlife). 

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Malcolm Muggeridge created Mother Theresa.

Oprah Winfrey created Dr. Phil.

William Randolph Hearst created Billy Graham.

Lowell Thomas created Lawrence of Arabia.

Stuart Lake created Wyatt Earp.

Rupert Murdoch created Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity.

John McCain created Sarah Palin.

Paul of Tarsus created Jesus the Nazirite.

And The Onion invented Ann Coulter.

That does not mean that the creations did not exist before their respective Wizards of Oz gave them their Somebody status. They already existed as nobodies whose names would have died when their bodies died. But it was the “man behind the curtain” who put their names on history’s front pages.

Let me start with the last one. No one with a functioning human brain could read the articles and books attributed to “Ann Coulter” without at least suspecting that the author of such inane drivel is really a liberal humanist parodying the thought processes of the mentally dysfunctional. Al Franken and Keith Olbermann have described Coulter in terms that leave little doubt that they believe she is a real person. Richard Dawkins voiced the suspicion that she was a creation of The Onion, but acknowledged that credible sources assured him that she really exists. The most I will say is that they are probably right. But if there really is an Ann Coulter, I can only wonder how such an evolutionary throwback to pithecanthropus godphuqtus is able to remember to take her pants down in the bathroom.  

There are two accurate biographies of Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens, and Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, by Aroup Chatterjee. Chapter three of Final Verdict begins, “There would be no Mother Theresa without Malcolm Muggeridge… It was Muggeridge who discovered Teresa, and it was owing to Muggeridge’s incessant efforts that Teresa was built up in those early years…But for Muggeridge, perhaps even now no one would have heard of her… During the 1970s, when Mother Teresa was well known in the West, but hardly an entity in Calcutta and India, The Statesman [Muggeridge was deputy editor] did its best to raise her profile in the city and the country.” Chatterjee goes on to reveal that, when MT died, she made the front pages all over the world—except in Calcutta and India where, as a nobody who did none of the heroic deeds attributed to her by Muggeridge and his imitators, her death did not rate a mention. So successful was Muggeridge in turning a lying, swindling, career criminal who collected millions of dollars by pretending that it would be used to feed the starving, and then used the money to provide an opulent standard of living for herself and her nuns and to benefit the Catholic Church while the starving remained hungry,  that when a British newspaper reprinted an article that a German magazine asked “Mother, where are your millions?” it was forced to issue an apology and pretend it had not asked a legitimate question.

Oprah Winfrey’s television program has been one long crime against humanity, furthering the dumbing of America by persistently endorsing the legitimacy of cranks, humbugs and confidence swindlers. But she sank to a new low when she unleashed ”Dr. Phil,” a fatuous, self aggrandizing poseur, whose combination of the sympathetic listening of bartenders and taxi drivers with the pretended expertise of tealeaf readers and astrologers has generated thousands of new marks for the parasites posing as “therapists” who pass off interactive doubletalk as a form of medicine.

According to the website about.com. “One of the factors which has been instrumental in the growth of [Billy Graham's] fame has been his ‘crusades,’ the first of which occurred in Los Angeles in 1949. Graham was helped a great deal by the fact that William Randolph Hearst, publishing mogul, ordered his papers to ‘puff Graham’ by promoting him and his activities whenever possible.” In other words: no Hearst, no Graham.

I am often accused of plagiarizing myself, and the accusation is valid. When I want to repeat something I have said before, either for a different audience or in a different context, I tend to copy whole paragraphs from my previous writings. And when the source for a broad summation of the relationship between A and B is Wikipedia, rather than rewrite the material I prefer to quote the source. 

Journalist Lowell Thomas and his cameraman, Harry Chase, met British Army captain T. E. Lawrence in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, “Thomas and Chase spent several weeks with Lawrence in the desert, although Lawrence said ‘several days.’ Lawrence agreed to provide Thomas with material… Thomas shot dramatic footage of Lawrence and, after the war, toured the world, narrating his film, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, making Lawrence—and himself—household names… Thomas needed more photographs of him than Chase had taken in 1918. Lawrence therefore agreed to a series of posed portraits in Arab dress in London, though he claimed to be shy of publicity. Thomas later said of Lawrence, ‘He had a genius for backing into the limelight.’ … The shows gave Lawrence a degree of publicity he had never previously experienced… Lawrence said that he never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, and called him a ‘vulgar man.’”

Some time after Wyatt Earp’s retirement to California in the 1920s, journalist Stuart lake interviewed him for a series of newspaper articles, and wrote the biography that created the Earp legend after Earp’s 1929 death. So influential was Lake’s hagiography that, when a novel called Warlock, observably based on Earp, portraying him as less than admirable, at a time when westerns were viewed as the written equivalent of TV soap operas, it caused something of a sensation. While Earp had a forty-year career in law enforcement, without Lake’s biography he would today be as unknown as ninety percent of all Wild West gunfighters.

Quoting myself (Pope Ratzinazi and the Faux News Gestapo), “While Limbaugh, Palin … would still be around with or without FOX News, the status of O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck as barking mouths of a rabid hydra would disappear if the hydra’s controlling head, Rupert Murdoch, ever confronted a modern-day Hercules. Eric Boehlert of mediamatters.org asks, “Why is Rupert Murdoch so clueless about Fox News?” He points out that, ‘The sad truth is Murdoch has no idea what kind of programming Fox News now produces, or he’s too embarrassed to watch and acknowledge…. But as I watched Murdoch casually toss out falsehood after falsehood about Fox News, I wondered if Murdoch was trying to fool viewers or if he was really trying to fool himself’ … Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, and their Absolute Plutocrat, Rupert Murdoch, are conspiring to do to America what priests are doing to altar boys.” 

From the article, “John McCain: Alzheimer’s? Or Something More Sinister?” (freethoughtperspective.net, Dec. 2010): “The earliest indication Americans received that, even by Republican Party standards, John McCain’s judgment left much to be desired, was his nomination of Sarah Palin to be vice president of the United States…. At that time he could not reasonably have been expected to know that putting Palin within a heartbeat of the presidency was dumb, let alone dangerous. That was then, This is now…. McCain still refuses to repudiate Palin or acknowledge that her nomination for the presidency in 2012 would be reminiscent of the Emperor Caligula’s nomination of his horse Incitatus to be a consul of Rome…. It is unlikely that, every time McCain has opened his mouth in recent months, he was trying to show America what a lucky escape it had in not electing him president. That was just the way it turned out.” Sarah Palin is politically dead, but she refuses to get herself buried. If she does obtain an office that permits her to screw America, history will hold her creator, John McCain, equally guilty.

As a name in world history, Jesus was created by Paul of Tarsus, an ambitious wannabe. When Paul realized that he was going nowhere as a mere “ringleader of the Nazirite heresy” (Acts 24:5), since the sect was a hereditary monarchy and, not being Jesus’ blood relative, he had no chance of ever becoming Head Nazirite, he concluded that the only way to become a big frog in a small puddle was to invent a gentile religion that, unlike the Nazirite cult, led by Jesus’ brother Jacob, was in no sense a sect of Judaism. Its detractors quickly labeled the new religion “Anointianity” (Greek: Khristianismos), since it called its dead king “The Anointed One” (Kristos). 

Paul’s choice of Jesus the Nazirite as his newly-invented religion’s posthumous figurehead was totally capricious. As I wrote in For This We Thank our Führer, “Jesus was one of at least a dozen self-styled messiahs during the fifty years leading up to the war of 66-73 CE who raised an army of less than 150 followers, proclaimed independence, and was promptly arrested and crucified without causing so much as a ripple in the Pax Romana …. Jesus was a nobody who did nothing. If Paul … had not made him the figurehead of his new gentile religion, the name of Jesus would be as unknown to Christians (whose figurehead would be whichever of the executed messiahs Paul chose) as it was to [first century commentators].” 

All of the listed public figures lived and breathed. But without the persons credited with creating them, the only permanent record of their existence would be on their tombstones.

G. RICHARD BOZARTH

Early marriage is one of the morality conflicts being fought in the U.S. and every other nation. What should a Freethought culture’s code of conduct be concerning this particular behavior? If the hypothesis of evolutionary psychology are right, we should be able to rely on the generic programming that exists in us as a result of natural selection that created our species and has controlled its development. And, if the HOEPs are right, we should. They like to insist that any behavior that is universal in all human cultures must be caused by genetic programming. Well, for nearly the entire time Homo sapiens  has existed, approximately 200,000 years according to the last estimate I read, all human cultures practiced early marriage and it still thrives today in all nations, including those that have been trying for decades—or even a century or two—to prevent it with a combination of cultural disapproval and law. If that doesn’t qualify early marriage and it still thrives today in all nations, including those with a combination of cultural disapproval and law. If that doesn’t qualify early marriage to be a genetically programmed behavior, then the HOEPs have some explaining to do since their universality-of-behavior hypothesis is how they justify using incest taboos and laws as evidence that incest-avoidance is genetically programmed behavior.

Don’t expect a HOEPs to practice intellectual integrity by including early marriage among the genetically programmed behaviors. HOEPs are not going to utter a word that might get them accused of encouraging a form of behavior that is no longer accepted by the Western majority as moral and is barely tolerated in the law by Western governments. When they discuss the morality of behaviors, they can be relied on to assure us that our genes have been programmed by natural selection to make us avoid doing what currently violates Western culture’s official code of conduct and do what is acceptable to that morality. When they change their minds about what genetic programming permits and forbids, they are following cultural change caused by people who have discovered, often by personal experience, that the official code of conduct needs revision. In other words, like cultures, the HOEPs’ hypotheses are amendable by forces of cultural evolution, which can go at speeds many times faster than natural evolution. The history psychology professionls have made is some of the best evidence for those of us who are convinced that codes of conduct are cultural creations made necessary by the facts that humans do not have genetically programmed post-infancy instincts and that they live in groups that require cultural codes of conduct to be successful. A group’s code of conduct is its morality and the code changes only by cultural evolution.

Early marriage is an excellent example of that. It should be no surprise that early marriage was universal for humans and stayed that way. Life was short, infant mortality was usually high, and the hunter-gatherer style of parenting usually spaced children three to five years apart, therefore a woman needed to start producing children as soon as possible after puberty. In those good old days, there was childhood and then there was adulthood. That bizarre period of semi-childhood and quasi-adulthood called adolescence is a cultural creation of Western culture that probably began in the 18th century, developed strongly in the 19th, and became the established norm in the 20th. Adolescence was a product of cultural evolution caused by life not being brutally short for those with enough or more than enough money, hence it was originally a luxury enjoyed by the rich and affluent who could afford to keep their teenagers out of the labor force, usually to extend their sons’ education and their daughters’ virtue. When average workers in the 20th century began to get a fairer share of the pie and started enjoying greater longevity, they embraced adolescence, first by extending the education of their children, and later as an excuse to delay marriage (meaning, early marriage had become economically disadvantageous as the economic importance of education increased).

Early marriage was universal because it had to be at first. Then in some cultural regions cultural evolution improved things when humans gained more control over their food supply. Some tribes did not progress beyond herding, but others went on to the more culturally sophisticated and successful stage that blended agriculture with herding, with agriculture being more important. Some agricultural cultures further evolved to become civilizations. Through all these changes early marriage persisted. Life was longer, but not that much for the average person—in fact, the civilized poor suffered brutal lifestyles in the cities that probably made their average lifespan shorter than the average for hunter-gatherers. Infant mortality in the cities, especially among average people, was probably as bad or worse than what it was for hunter-gatherers. And though the cities of early civilizations were the initial tumors of overpopulation that today is the worst cultural and environmental problem afflicting humans, women kept on producing children even though they really weren’t so necessary any longer. In fact, they produced them at a rate faster than hunter-gather women because agriculture and later civilizations vastly increased the economic value of children, and civilizations had an insatiable demand for soldiers because all of them wanted to be empires.

Added to the mix was marriage becoming polluted by manipulation of wealth and the political strategies of kings and aristocrats, two deplorable behaviors that probably had more to do with the cultural degeneration of women into men’s property than the discovery of paternity, which made men want to control women to ensure the children they were raising were actually their sons and daughters. Using women as economic and/or political pawns did nothing to discourage early marriage, instead it reinforced the desirableness of it, which translated into keeping early marriage a moral behavior. Waiting until the kids went through puberty, or reached the age when the kid should have experienced puberty, was the usual practice, but if the economic or political reasons were good enough, marrying prepubescent children was OK. If both spouses were children, they might not begin living together until they were old enough to produce children. If the cultural region dominated by Arabian culture, which informed much of what later became Islamic culture, ideas about when married women began living a complete married lifestyle were different from the ideas about it that evolved in Western culture.

The universality of early marriage is easy to discover. Here are some books I have read about it: Homosexuality In History by Colin Spencer (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995); Sex In History by Reay Tannahill (Stein and Day/Publishers); The Cradle Of Erotica: A Study of Afro-Asian Sexual Expression And An Analysis of Erotic Freedom In Social Relationships by Allen Edwards & R. E. L. Masters (The Julian Press, Inc. 1962); Nauvoo Polygamy: …”but we called it marriage” by George D. Smith (Signature Books, 2008); Cruel And Unusual Punishment by Nonie Darwish (Thomas Nelson, 2008); and Harmful To Minors: The Perils Of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). If you’re too modern (or is it postmodern now?) for books, ignite your favorite search engine and you’ll find plenty about early marriage floating around in cyberspace that will serve as evidence against any genetic-programming hypothesis of early marriage in particular and marriage in general.  

We Freethinkers today should recognize that among our tasks is the obligation to give our vision of how humans will live if we achieve our goal of establishing a Freethought culture, which would be that  paradise of eunomy called a land of the free. With that in mind, what place will early marriage have in a Freethought culture? Marriage has three modern functions: satisfying the fulfillment of love, legitimatizing sexual behavior, and economic. In the past the love function  has not always been recognized. In a lot of cultures the first time a husband and wife met was on their wedding day. Other things were considered more important than love. For hunter-gatherers it was the peacekeeping goals of exogamy. When individual wealth became important following the cultural evolution that turned some hunter-gather tribes into herders or farmers, using marriage to ensure a man was truly the father of the children he was raising became more important. When some cultures became civilized, the royals and aristocrats had money, paternity, and political goals that were more important than love when they arranged their children’s marriages. Getting married for no other reason than love is a very late cultural development. We Freethinkers celebrate this liberation of marriage from all those other reasons. In a Freethought culture love will always be honored as the best reason for people to get married.

But that doesn’t say anything about early marriage. Adolescents are adults who are culturally forced to live in a status that is semi-childhood and quasi-adulthood. It’s artificial, which is why adolescents, even the youngest of them, can love as passionately as culturally recognized adults and want to establish committed relationships. Fortunately marriage isn’t needed for committed relationships, even when those relationships are sexually active. Even though there is still strong cultural desire for sexual behavior to be legitimatized by marriage, which is why marriage is still able to legitimatize relationships between adolescents and adults that the law has criminalized, marriage is no longer necessary to legitimatize sexual behavior, which is why the sexual revolution in the First World eventually created the cultural conditions that terminated the laws that criminalized fortification (partner sexual events involving unmarried people), adultery, and homosexuality. Consent will be the only legitimization partner sexual behavior needs in a Freethought culture, therefore early marriage as a means to legitimatize partner sexual events involving adolescents will be totally unnecessary. (I go farther than that by advocating an age of consent that is higher than 12 years old and has no restrictive age-difference requirement.)

Love is the best reason to get married, but that does not change the economic nature of marriage. Marriage is a legally binding contract between the spouses that government recognizes. It expands their romantic bonds to include economic bonds (and also an assortment of rights that public and private institutions have to recognize, such as being recognized as family by hospitals and as custodial parents by government; these rights are major reasons why homosexuals are demanding a right to get married that is in every way equal to the right heterosexuals have). Unfortunately these economic bonds do not always have good consequences. In the First World, in the Second World (former Third World nations that are economically and culturally developing towards becoming First World nations), and in the Third  World there are a lot of economic reasons why early marriage is disadvantageous. Heading the list is overpopulation, which is a cause of individual and national poverty. Most Third World nations today that are not even close to entering the Second World are being held back by overpopulation. A Second World nation like India is threatened by its continuing population explosion, which is in part caused by too many of its people still being gung-ho for early marriage. India could easily overpopulate itself back into the Third World if it cannot control its insane rate of reproduction.

In the First World early marriage is almost always economic suicide because it usually traps the spouses in the working-poor class or in actual poverty even though First World nations are not overpopulated as badly as Second and Third World nations. It is also an economic burden on First World nations because having  a large population of poor or poverty-stricken people is very expensive since it is no longer culturally possible for the haves and have-mores to ignore the needs of the poor and poverty-stricken like they could in the good old days of the 19th and 20th centuries. People who marry early have children too early, which is the major cause of their economic distress (and also of a First World nation’s overpopulation).

People who marry early almost always never get the education that today is so vitally important to be economically successful in the First World. People who marry early become legally entangled years before they’ve had a chance to discover what their potential is and develop it in a way that will make their pursuit of happiness more successful. Yes, divorce is very easy today, but the people who marry early already have taken the middle road into wilderness of economic suicide and usually end up stuck there even if there is still time to change the road they’re on. The inadequately educated teenage or early-20s mother all too often becomes a single mother on welfare because she is incapable of economically supporting her family. The guy, if he was also an adolescent when he married early, finds himself in a culture that is hostile to inadequately educated workers. It’s not that good-paying, low-skill, blue collar jobs no longer exist; it’s just that today not enough of them exist in the First World to meet the demand, so competition for them is enormous. The alternative to perpetual economic distress is too frequently crime, which is very expensive in very many ways for a nation to deal with.

For these reasons early marriage has no future in a Freethought culture. The cultural pressure will be strongly against it. Laws, however, should not criminalize it. What makes early marriage bad today are cultural circumstances. If adolescents got married and always delayed having children while continuing their education to make them able to economically thrive to the best of their ability and then developing a career before interupting it with children, early marriage wouldn’t be very detrimental. Except marriage always will be—and should be—a legally binding contract recognized by government. It’s a level of entanglement with another person that is not good for adolescents and also one that they do not need at that period of their lives. What they need to be doing is discovering what their potential is, developing that potential, and in the process of doing that they should also be discovering what is the best way for them to pursue happiness. When they’ve matured in this way, then they are ready to become legally bonded with another person. The cultural conditions that allowed people to thrive in full adulthood starting at or soon after puberty have been culturally evolved into extinction by the increasing complexity of civilization. Adolescence is artificial, yet it has become a necessary stage in a person’s development today. Early marriage interferes with the successful completion of this phase, thus it has no future in a Freethought culture.

That does not mean the years of adolescence have to be lived without enjoying the pleasures of partner sexual behavior, including committed monogamous or polyamorous relationships. I would be the last person to advocate that. I am 100% convinced the world would be a saner and happier place if people were raised to enjoy their sexuality instead of having to repress it. Sexual liberation is in fact liberating, not corrupting, and one way it liberates is by freeing people from suffering all the psychological problems caused by sexual repression. Sexuality will be liberated in a Freethought culture. Adolescents, as well as children, will be encouraged to enjoy their sexuality. All they will need to legitimatize their sexual behavior is consent. This removes completely the one good service that early marriage still provides adolescents today. If they love their lovers enough to form committed monogamous or polyamorous relationships, they can do that. In fact, it would be a healthy contribution to the maturing process as long as pregnancy is prevented and the relationships don’t interfere with adolescents’ education. Since early marriage would have nothing to contribute to their lives and the legal binding would be an obstacle, even if a low one, to their successful completion of adolescence, early marriage would not be even slightly encouraged by a Freethought culture.

The philosophy, ideology, or theology we are committed to determines our thinking about morality. If our behavior was genetically programmed, how could humans have developed such amazingly different and often contradictory codes of conduct in the various cultural and subcultural regions on Earth? How could natural selection work on humans as fast as thinking about morality has changed, which history unquestionably proves has happened? If we had to wait for a fortunate genetic mutation to spread throughout our species until it was the norm of our gene pool to change a behavior that was good and now is bad, how could thinking about early marriage change from accepting it as a good behavior to rejecting it as a bad behavior in the very short period of time since the Industrial Revolution started, especially when early-marriage people always produce a whole lot more children than late-marriage people do? When it comes to morality, Evolutionary Psychology is definitely Freudian, all too Freudian.

We should be glad morality is created and changed by cultural evolution. That means there is always time to change the road we’re on. We can shape our future by our philosophies, ideologies, and theologies. That doesn’t mean shaping will always be good. Christianity, Islam, Nazism, and Marxism-Leninism were horrible ways to shape the future and we’re still trying to overcome these four disasters, which produced some of the vilest moralities humans have invented. The Freethought Movement would be a waste of time if the HOEPs were right about morality being genetically programmed. But they are wrong, therefore we Freethinkers and Secular Humanists can, if we do our best and never give up, shape the future of human cultures until there is one Freethought culture and the entire Earth is that paradise of eunomy called the land of the free. 

A. J. MATTILL, Jr.

Introduction. ”Malachi” means “My [God's] Messenger,” the name of the author who allegedly wrote the last book of the Old Testament in the fifth century BC/BCE. Malachi’s brief book consists of four chapters with a total of only fifty-five verses.

In this short study we shall evaluate  nine of Malachi’s motifs (central ideas). Many people regard Malachi as “a man of great spiritual force,” “a spiritual giant.” “Malachi, Malachi, What a wonderful guy.” I am especially indebted to the Contemporary English Version and the New International Version for their translations.

Motif One: God’s Love (1:2-5).

Many thoughtful Israelites questioned God’s love because they saw no evidence of it. “How does God love us?” (1:2). The only proof of God’s love Malachi could offer is the unloveliest of all possible answers: God loves the Israelites but hates the Edomites (as evidenced by the Lord’s devastation of Edom), and he will be angry with them forever (1:2-5. Thus God’s love is not only cruel but angry, hateful, and partial  to one people, the Israelites, the Chosen People. Malachi’s God plays favorites!

Motif Two: Butcher-Shop Religion/Packinghouse Piety/ Slaughterhouse Spirituality (1:6-14).

The Temple, the place of God’s presence among his people, was the center of Butcher-Shop Religion. The Israelities were to honor the Lord by making the right kind of sacrifices. The people were to offer healthy animals only: no blind, crippled, diseased, or injured animals. How unfortunate that the Lord didn’t forbid sacrifices of any kind. But Malachi and his God couldn’t have cared less about the pain endured by healthy animals. Thus Malachi and his God violated the lofty principle of reverence for life. The priests hit the nail on the head when they said, “There’s nothing special about the Lord’s altar, and the sacrifices are worthless!” (1:12). Truer words were never spoken! What marvelous insight for the fifth century BC/BCE!

Motif Three: Vulgarity (2:3).

Get braced for a shocker! The Lord Almighty warns the priests, saying, “I’ll send a curse on you, and I’ll rub your faces in the manure from your animal sacrifices” (2:3). Such vulgarity must be among the most repulsive in the Holy Bible! What kind of God uses such language? What sort of God administers such a cruel and unusual punishment? How revolting! Who can worship Malachi’s rub-your-face-in-dung deity?

Motif Four: Noble Ethics (3:5).

Believe it or not! Here Malachi’s Lord Almighty speaks some commendable words: “I’m now on my way to judge you. And I will quickly condemn all who practice witchcraft, or adultery, or tell lies in court, or rob workers of their pay, or mistreat widows and orphans, or deprive aliens of justice” (3:5). In fact, 2:14-16 is the strongest condemnation of divorce to be found in the Old Testament: “Why isn’t God pleased? It’s because he knows that each of you men has been unfaithful to the wife you married when you were young. You promised that she would be your partner, but now you have broken that promise. Didn’t God create you to become like one person with your wife? And why did he do this?  It was so you would have children, and then lead them to become God’s people. Don’t ever be unfaithful to your wife. The Lord God All-Powerful of Israel hates anyone who is cruel enough to divorce his wife. So take care never to be unfaithful!” And according to 4:6, Elijah will lead children and parents to love each other more.

Motif Five: Tithing (3:6-12).

Tithing is giving ten percent of one’s harvests, flocks, and herds to the Lord. How unfair the law of tithing is! Ten percent is too much for the poor and too little for the rich. What a powerful club Malachi put into the hands of church and clergy: If you pay your tithes, God will open the windows of heaven and flood you with blessings. But if you don’t pay up you are robbing God, and he will curse you.

Motif Six: The Book of Remembrance (3:13-18).

The pious people who feared God complained that God did not reward them for their service. Yet God did prosper the wicked folks. Malachi comforted the unhappy pious folks by assuring them that God had not forgotten them but had their names and deeds written down in his Book of Remembrance. God keeps an account of what people say and do. Suffice it to say, that anyone who believes in Malachi’s Book of Remembrance will believe almost anything!

Motif Seven: “Burn, Baby, Burn” (4:1-3).

Thinking people could see no trace of any moral order in the world and cried out, “Where is the God of Justice?” (2:17). The Lord answered, “The day of judgment is certain to come. And it will be like a red-hot furnace with flames that burn up proud and sinful people, as though they were straw” (4:1-3). “Burn, Baby, Burn!” A picture frightening enough to scare the hell out of people!

Motif Eight: The Laws of Moses (4:4).

“Don’t ever forget the laws and teachings I gave my servant Moses on Mount Sinai” (4:4). How unfortunate that God and Malachi didn’t tell us precisely which laws of Moses we are to obey and which laws we are not to obey. How about these for starters? 1. “You shall execute parent-cursers” (Exodus 21:17). 2. “You shall not permit a witch to live” Exodus 22:18). 3. “You shall stone to death at the door of her father’s house a bride who was not a virgin” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21. Do you obey any of these laws of Moses?

Motif Nine: Elijah’s Ascension to Heaven from Earth and Descension from Heaven to Earth (4:5-6).

Hear the promise of the Lord Almighty: “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will lead parents and children to love each other more, so that when I do come, I won’t bring doom to the land” (4:5-6).

2 Kings 2:11 reports that “Elijah was taken up to heaven in a flaming chariot pulled by fiery horses.” Thus Elijah ascended to heaven (wherever that may be) and will descend to earth. To believe such a fantastic promise today, we’d have to throw our brains out the window!

In fact, Jesus understood Malachi to mean that not Elijah but John the Baptist would appear (Matthew 17: 10-13). But according to John 1:21, John disowned the role. Jewish tradition, however, affirms the coming of Elijah. At the Passover Seder, a glass of wine is traditionally poured for Elijah. And at the circumcision ceremony, a chair is prepared for Elijah. When Elijah returns, he will clarify all obscurities in talmudic law (a collection of ancient writings on Jewish civil and ceremonial law and legend). See The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition (Garden City, NY, 1977), p. 610.

Conclusion.

In our ministudy of Malachi’s brief book, we have tried to prove nine points: 1. God’s love is angry, cruel, and hateful toward the Edomites. At the same time, God’s love is partial to the Israelites, the Chosen People.  2. Malachi’s God plays favorites 1:2-5. God and Malachi promote butcher-shop religion, thus violating the lofty principle of reverence for life ( 1:6-14).  3. Malachi’s God is a vulgar deity who threatens to rub the faces of the priests in the manure from their animal sacrifices (2:3) 4. Yet Malachi’s God also preaches noble ethics (3:5). 5. Malachi’s God doesn’t let his noble ethics prevent him from requiring the unfair law of tithing which benefits the rich but punishes the poor (3:6-12). 6. God’s Book of Remembrance (3:13-18). I wouldn’t bet the farm on the existence of God’s Book of Remembrance. 7. Malachi’s God scares the hell out of people 4:1-3). 8. Malachi’s God leaves us confused about which laws of Moses we are to obey and which laws of Moses we are not to obey (4:4). 9. Malachi’s God promises to send Elijah from heaven (4:5-6), a promise which is impossible for informed people to believe today. It’s a crock!

In short, Malachi is not one of my favorite books. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. “Malachi, Malachi, You’re NOT a Wonderful Guy.” 

WILLIAM HARWOOD

There are whole communities, especially in cultures the West regards as morally reprehensible, that accept as an act of faith that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That reasoning fails to take into consideration that Stalin was the enemy of Hitler; Ian Paisley is the enemy of the Pope; and the Dalai Lama is the enemy of China’s communists. All of those fascist dictators are my enemies. That dictator A is also the enemy of dictator B does not make either of them my friend.

Dr. Thomas Szasz shares the “church” of Scientology’s recognition that psychotherapy is pseudo-medical humbuggery, and takes the position that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He appears to be unaware that allying himself with a questionable cult, simply because he agrees with it on one issue, is making him an embarrassment to those of us who are also debunkers of the psychotherapy scam. For if there is a confidence swindle even more reprehensible than psychoquackery, it is the science-fiction “religion” of Scientology. It is incredible that Szasz does not recognize L. Ron Hubbard as the same kind of opportunist as P. T. Barnum.

An FBI agent assigned to handle Hubbard’s constant and repeated accusations against everyone who recognized him as less than admirable made a note in Hubbard’s file, “sounds mental.” No record survives of any encounter between Hubbard and a psychiatrist. But if a federal agent who had nothing to go on other than Hubbard’s letters could recognize that he could not be taken seriously, it makes sense that a psychiatrist who actually met him would reach the same conclusion. Since Hubbard assuredly lacked the rationality to recognize that psychiatrists practice the same kind of sympathetic listening as bartenders and taxi drivers, but without the true experts’ awareness that their speculations were just as likely to be wrong as right, his hostile attitude towards psychoquacks must have some other basis. The logical deduction is that a psychiatrist he once consulted was unable to conceal his suspicion that Hubbard lacked credibility, and that was the reason Hubbard included psychiatry among the alien antagonists in the religion he invented because, as he many times publicly stated(¹) “that’s where the money is.”

It is a half-century since Thomas Szasz blew the whistle on the psychiatry scam, exposing the syndromes and disorders the psychoquacks invented, including multiple personality and repressed memories, as products of their own imaginations. He identified “mental illness” as a metaphor for undisciplined thinking— useful but misleading, since it created the pretence that a behavorial problem was a neurological problem. And he identified psychiatrists as gloried bartenders posing as medical practitioners. In his own words, (²) “Psychiatrists are physicians who impersonate physicians: they possess legitimate medical credentials but neither know real medicine nor practice as real medical doctors.” While recognizing that persons diagnosed with “depression” are indeed depressed, he denounced psychiatrically diagnosed mental illness as common or garden malingering. And because a psychiatrist (presumably) once identified him as a prime candidate for Nurse Rached’s Cuckoo’s Nest, Hubbard reached a conclusion about psychiatry that by sheer coincidence happened to be the one statement he ever made in his life that non-Scientologists can accept. 

Thomas Szasz has been subjected to so much flack for his naïve association with Scientology, with which he co-founded Citizens Commission for Human Rights, that he was eventually obliged to issue a partial disclaimer to the effect that, “Thomas Szasz is not now nor has he ever been a Scientologist or a member of the Church of Scientology.” The owner of the website www.szasz.com, Dr. Jeffrey A. Shaler, wrote, “instead of asking why Scientology endores Thomas Szasz’s ideas, we should be asking why other religions do not.” He adds that, “Scientologists have joined Szasz’s battle against institutionalized psychiatry. Dr. Szasz welcomes the support of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and any other religious or atheist group committed to the struggle against the Therapeutic State. Sharing this battle does not mean that Dr. Szasz supports the unrelated principles and causes of any religious or non-religious organization.”

But then, after summarizing all of the evidence that psychiatry more closely resembles a religion than a branch of science or medicine, Schaler shoots  himself in the foot by defending Tom Cruise as something other than a brainwashed Manchurian Candidate, and by declaring Scientology to be a legitimate religion recognized by the United States government.

Scientology is not a religion. The prime function of any religion is to fleece the gullible and enrich its pushers, and on that count Scientology  is no different from Catholicism. But every genuine religion is based on the delusions of its mentally dysfunctional inventor. Scientology, in contrast, is based on a space opera scenario created by a science fiction author who most assuredly did not mistake his elaborate fantasy for nonfiction. Indeed, when Hubbard first invented Scientology, he stated unequivocally that it was not a religion, in an attempt to dissociate his new scam from his well-attested statements that religion is “where the money is.” He was obliged to reverse himself and assert that Scientology is a religion, when he learned that only by identifying his cult as a religion could he obtain the tax-free status the Supreme Court had granted to all religions. The reason equally inane cults, such as Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses, recognize Scientology as a religion, is that if it was stripped of its tax-free status as a religion, their own scams might  become the IRS’s next target.

But while semi-repudiating Scientology by making clear that he is not himself a Scientologist, Szasz still maintains that, “the enemy of my friend is my friend.” And as long as he continues to do that, he cannot expect his totally accurate denunciation of the American Psychiatric Association as a mirror image of Bartenders United to be taken as seriously as it deserves.

(1) Jon Attack, A Piece of Blue Sky, p. 137.

(2) Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, p.82. 

BERNARD KATZ

Recently AR published an essay of mine titled “Was God a Dirty Old Man?” According to the Bible, he certainly was. If you read the Bible objectively—and not selectively—you’ll soon see that there is much that is unworthy of a so-called omnipotent and loving deity. For you’ll discover flaws, errors, contradictions, debaucheries, atrocities, (holocausts), absurdities and obscenities galore. Why, there’s more than enough of this evidence to turn even a hardcore fundamentalist into a secular humanist! 

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616—the same time that the King James translation was made, making that version its greatest translation. As you know, Shakespeare is considered the greatest of all playwrights. The enduring appeal of his plays recognizes the complexity of moral questions and, as one scholar put it, “in unparalleled richness of his language.”

It may be “richness of language to him”—but an objective reading shows it to be downright pornographic, down-to-earth, raw street language that any uncouth person could easily use and understand. After all, Shakespeare wrote mostly for the low-class whorehouse crowd, not the educated middle and upper-classes.

But the greatest English translation of the Bible, the King James Version of 1611, was bowdlerized—its uncultured raw words were perfumed by a group of very talented churchmen. When James Vl of Scotland became king of England in 1603, there were two competing Bibles: the Bishop’s Bible, preferred by the church authorities, and the Geneva Bible, the favorite of the people. But James ordered a new translation that all must use, so he appointed fifty-four learned men to do the work. The translation was published in 1611 and its final revision differed from the original in over four hundred places. After forty years it replaced the Geneva Bible in the affection of the people. But it was so bowdlerized that readers were convinced that God never used the bawdy language of the whorehouse crowd of rowdies that attended Shakespeare’s plays!

To demonstrate that, like the god of the Bible, Shakespeare was also “a dirty old man,” I’m going to quote a chapter from Dr. Pauline Kiernan’s book, “Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns.” But first a brief description of her work.

Celebrating the Bard in all his bawdy glory, hers is a hilarious and insightful look into the down-and-dirty sexual puns lurking in Shakespeare’s body of work. London’s Elizabethan theaters were in the seedy part of town, close to whorehouses but never far from puritanical scum. In that climate, Shakespeare became a master of the double entendre, crafting lines and scenes that unfolded in a variety of meanings—the wickedly funny, the suggestively erotic, and even hitting hard at corrupt politicians and clerics. From the Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest  and King Lear, the plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts and what they do, and reveal shocking meanings beneath the brilliant codes. 

Shakespeare’s genius lies in his matchless understanding of the human condition, but for centuries we’ve been deprived of his most brilliant dramatic devices. Finally, acclaimed Shake-spearean scholar Pauline Kiernan unlocks the meaning behind the coded words. Her book “Filthy Shakespeare,” presents more than seventy examples of the Bard at his raunchiest, with each passage translated into modern English and the hidden meanings of the original words explained. A fascinating introduction shows how Shakespeare’s amazing range of word play had its roots in the social and political reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

What follows is one of her chapters so that you can recognize that Shakespeare, like the God of the Bible, is “a dirty old man.” Since the plot is about homosexuality, please read about David’s relationship with King Saul and Jonathon. Along with the many warnings and commands against being gay, the Bible actually cites instances in which major biblical figures engaged in activities that are homosexual in nature. For instance, in 2 Samuel 1:26, David says, “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

And Paul told his followers to greet one another with a holy kiss in Romans 16:16,  2 Corinthians 13:12, l Thessalonians 5:26, and Peter 5:14. To say that these verses are ambi-guous regarding physical love and cannot be really used to substantiate strong biblical support for homosexuality is quite misleading. In fact, what is now called the “kiss of charity” was originally known as the “holy kiss.” In the early church, it actually became a rite practiced so widely, that St. Augustine (4th CE) had to tell the women to war “clean linen” to these all-night sexual orgies so as to increase their “religious zeal”!

Here is a chapter from Kiernan’s book:

CORIOL-ANUS

CORIOLANUS

Act 4, Scene 5

Coriolanus offers an astonishingly potent mix of violence and male homoeroticism. In performance, the exchanges between Coriolanus and Aufidius pack such a powerful punch, they have an almost visceral impact on the audience.

When the two warriors, Coriolanus and Aufidius, meet in-one-to one combat, their wrestling resembles some frenzied sexual clasping of pleasure and pain. In a world dominated by military values, where blood shed in battle is worn as a mark of honor, even enemies can act like lovers—they need one another to reinforce an identity that is defined solely by their prowess on the battlefield. Aufidius’s speech here suggests an orgasmic outpouring of emotion for his enemy.

Aufidius

Let me twine

Mine arms about {thy} body…

I loved the maid I married…

But that I see thee here,

Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart

Than when I first my wedded mistress saw

Bestride my threshold…and I have nightly since

Dreampt of encounters ‘twixt thyself and me’—

We have been down together in my sleep,

Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat–

And waked half dead with nothing.

Aufidius

Let me coil my arms around your body.

I loved the maid I married, but when I see you here, see your impressive cock, my captivated heart dances more than when I first saw my wedded mistress astride my prick. Every night I’ve dreamt of erotic encounters between you and me. We’ve fucked each other in my sleep, unbuckling each other’s helmets, fisting each other’s throats, and woken up half dead from fucking.

Now here’s the meaning of the words that unlock the hidden meaning behind the coded words:

Noble thing. Impressive cock. {‘Thing’ is a pun on penis, and also on vagina}.

Threshold. Prick. {Pinning also on ‘thresh’ and ‘thrash’ in the sense of Fuck}.

Been down together. Fucked each other. {‘To down’ was also a pun meaning ‘to whore’}.

Nothing. Fucking. (As well as punning on female genitals (there is ‘nothing’, i.e. no penis, between a woman’s legs), ‘nothing’ often puns on musical ‘noting’ or ‘pricking’ of notes. ‘Nothing’ would have been pronounced more like ‘no-thing.” A ‘prick-song about fucking. ‘Notes’ also meant male genitals, and long and short notes referred to penis size. 

Peter Hall’s production of Coriolanus at the National theater in 1984 brought out very strongly the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. So strongly, in fact, that theater-goers in the crush bar could be heard pronouncing the play’s title as ‘Coriol-anus’.

During Shakespeare’s time the theater acquired a reputation for homosexuality. One disapproving commentator wrote that a sodomite is someone who is ‘at every play and every night sups with his ingles’ (an ‘ingle’ was the young passive partner in a homosexual relationship). In Poetmaster (1601), a comedy by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, a father is appalled to learn that his son wants to be an actor: ” What”? Shall I have my son a stager now, an ingle for players?”

No doubt, after this presentation of evidence, I hope you’ll read both the Bible and Shakespeare quite differently—and conclude that both the God of the Bible and Shakespeare were “dirty old men!”

STEPHEN VAN ECK

The religion of Christianity has from the beginning claimed consistency with its Apostolic origins, and that it is the legitimate fulfillment of Judaism. Such continuity is all-important. But contrary to all claims, Christianity is just not consistent with its origins, much less with Judaism. It has merely managed to co-opt both.

What we know as Christianity today is in fact something quite separate and distinct from the original movement that led to it. To think of them separately, we need to attach separate labels to them. So we can call the original movement Nazoreans, and its successor Christians.

But what happened? Why did Nazoreans disappear, and the Christians take over? Many of the Nazoreans perished in the Jewish War (66-70 CE). While not provoking the war (that was the Zealots), as patriots they sprang to action when Rome, finally fed up with constant Jewish insurrection, destroyed the Temple and massacred the population of Jerusalem. (The Church invented a necessary myth that the original Christians fled the destruction, in order to preserve their claim of continuity). For thirty years before this catastrophe, a paganized version of the Jesus cult had oddly been spreading among Gentiles far from Jerusalem, a version having little to do with Judaism other than claiming to be its fulfillment. The political movement of the Nazoreans, consisting of loyal Jews, did not approve of the strange new religion that was invoking Judaism for legitimacy. They disputed Paul, and Paul fought back (ll Cor. 11; Galatians 2).

But history is written by the winners, and as Christians told it, they were the pure essence of what the Messianic movement was all about. Those remnants of their Nazorean predecessors, under such names as the Ebionites, tried to set the record straight, but were by then easily dismissed as misguided heretics by the dominant Christian Church. The fate of the Jews in the war played into their argument, as it could be seen as the judgment of Heaven on their falseness and irrelevance. Meanwhile, the Jewish non-adherents of the Jesus messianic movement finally concluded that he was a false Messiah, so there was no further chance for gains there.

The Christian Church since then has been so effective at indoctrination that most people are unaware of any distinction between the two factions, and are close to incapable of thinking about it any other way.

The New Testament, of course, was written and assembled by and for a Gentile church, so it’s not surprising that they endeavored to slant its writing, and their own history as well, in order to present their case for apostolicity  and for the legitimacy of their pagan-derived elements. But despite their best efforts, reflections of some quite different Nazorean roots peek through the text. It’s almost like there’s two “Jesuses” in the New Testament, and these two can’t be disentabgled while we distinguish the Nazoreans from the Christians. 

The following chart endeavors to do just that. May they never be confused again.

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Concept of God:    

 Nazoreans

One 

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Deuteronomy 6:4-5 ———-l John  5:7 —passage inserted in later mss. Not older ones.  

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Christian

Triune      

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Messiah  The man Jesus [Mark 10:18; John 14:28; Acts  2:22; Rev. 3:14]  God, come down in human form — (Too similar to the virgin-born god-men of the Mystery cults.)

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Movement/Membership: A Messianic movement inherently political and still Jewish (Matthew 10:5-6; Acts 11:19). — An Apolitical  religion of Gentiles [Matthew 28:19; Acts 13:46

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Objective: This-worldly: The Kingdom of God ON EARTH (Other-worldly: Never-Never Land in the clouds. — [John 8:23,17:16, 18:36; ll Cor. 12:1-4; l Thess. 4:16-17]

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 Admission price: Adherence to the Covenant/Obedience to the Torah [Matthew 5:17-19; 19:16-19; James 1:22, 2:24, 25; Rev. 14:12]— 

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Faith alone/Old Covenant: Obsolete [Mark 16:15-16; John 3:18, 36; Acts 16:29-31; Romans 3:20, 4:4-5, 6:14, 7:6; ll Cor. 3:14; Galatians 2:16, 3:11, 25-26, 25-26, 5:18; ll Thess. 2:12; Ephesians 2:8-9; Hebrews 8:6-7, 13.]

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Attitude toward the Roman Empire: Actively or passively hostile. —Compliant [Romans 13:1-6; l Peter 2:12-15]

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Attitude toward Jews: Loyal, Co-optive, yet anti [John 5:16, 7:13, 8:31-44 Acts 18:5-6, 20:19; l Thess. 2:14-16]

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Attitude toward pagans: Uninterested, superior, Missionary, approval-seeking.

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Blame for crucifixion: Romans (1)

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“The Jews” collectively (2) [Matthew 27:24-25: John 7:1, 11:53, 10: 10:11; Acts 4:10, 5:30]

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Principal charge against Jesus: Sedition [Luke 23:1-2; John 19:12, 19:22; Acts 17::6-7, 24:5]

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Blasphemy (3) [Mark 14:64; Matthew 26:65-66; John 19:7. Also Acts 6:13-14, but the charge was by false witnesses]

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Organizational hierarchy: Monarchical  Ecclessiastical [l Timothy 3:1-13

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Sucessor to Jesus: James [Acts 15:13-21, 21:18-25; Galatians 2:11-12] Peter (4) (legendary)

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(1) COMMENT ON ROMANS: As a subject nation, the Jews were not allowed to carry out a death sentence (John 18:31). Had they done so, the proper Biblically-prescribed punishment would be stoning. Crucifixion was the Roman punishment for sedition.

(2) COMMENT ON “The Jews”: Collectively blaming “the Jews”, and failing to specify the High Priest (a collaborator illegitimately in the job) and his henchmen as the only accessories, not all the Jews, reveals the Gentile constituency of Christianity.

(3) COMMENT ON BLASPHEMY: Christians have been taught to see it as such, but claiming to be the Messiah was not blasphemy. (at most its delusional.) Neither was claiming to be the son of God, or referring to God as one’s father. Jewish kings were thought of as the adoptive son of God, so this is consistent with a political Messiah. And all religious Jews were encouraged to think of God as their Father. So are Christians (John 1:12-13).

(4) COMMENT ON PETER: There’s no evidence that Peter was ever in Rome, only catholic legend of negligible value. In Acts, covering a period of time up to the mid-60′s CE, when Peter is said to have died, he is stationed in Jerusalem and going on temporary field missions. If Peter was ever in Rome, why didn’t acts mention it? Plus, in Acts he answers to James. 

A. J. MATTILL, Jr.

Judge Jephthah is remembered as the judge or military leader who freed his people Israel from the oppression  of the Ammonites by repelling the Ammonites’ invasion of Israel. Jephthah was the ninth judge of the Israelites, serving for six years, B. C. E. 1256-1250, Judges 11:1-12:7.

Jephthah promised the Lord that if the Lord would give Jephthah victory over the Ammonites he would sacrifice to God the first living being to meet him upon his return from victory over the Ammonites. What a shock! Jephthah was met by his only daughter coming out of the door of his house. Since we don’t know her name, we must refer to her as Jephthah’s daughter. Jephthah granted his daughter two months to weep with her friends because she never could marry.

After two months she returned to her father Jephthah who did to her as he had promised the Lord he would do, that is, Jephthah sacrificed her as as a burnt offering to the Lord. How startling it is that the biblical account of Jephthah’s brutal sacrifice of his daughter does not condemn such a senseless sacrifice!

Some scholars have called Jephthah “an impulsive bastard” who tried to bribe the Lord with his rash promise to sacrifice his daughter if the Lord would give him victory over the Ammonites (Judges 11:29-31).

Others have referred to Jephthah as “the bastard adventurer,” perhaps because his mother was a prostitute (Judges 11:1-3). Or some people may have called Jephthah a bastard because he slaughtered 42,000 Ephraimites (Judges 12:4-6), a bloody deed which makes Jephthah an offensive person par excellence.

How amazing it is that the “inspired writer” of the Epistle to the Hebrews ranks Jephthah as one of the heroes of the faith (Hebrews 11:32). What kind of religion would honor a coldblooded man who made a rash promise and carried it out by heartlessly sacrificing his daughter as a burnt offering?

Postscript. It so happened that when I was beginning work on this article, April 20, 2011, the Jehovah’s Witnesses left on my porch a copy of the periodical, The Watchtower, February 1, 2011, containing a study of Jephthah and his daughter, pp. 25-26. The Watchtower comes to this conclusion: Jephthah permitted his daughter to go into the mountains to weep for two months, because by keeping her father’s vow, she would be giving up the right to marry and have children. When his daughter returned, Jephthah carried out his vow by sending her to God’s tabernacle at Shiloh for the rest of her life. Every year the young women of Israel would go to Shiloh and encourage Jephthah’s daughter.

Conclusion. Did Jephthah sacrifice his daughter? Or did he send her to God’s tabernacle for the rest of her life?

Here is the answer of a modern conservative scholar: “That Jephthah actually sacrificed his daughter, tragic as that would be, seems the most natural reading of the text.” He had a “burnt offering” in mind (Judges 11:31). —See Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1978), p. 104.

Now hear Steven Barabas, “Jephthah,” Pictorial Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: The Southwestern Company, 1974), p. 410: “The fact is, however, that we cannot be absolutely certain of the mode of fulfillment of Jephthah’s vow.”

Here are scholar T. Lightfoot’s comments: “As the question respecting Jephthah’s daughter cannot be certainly decided, arguments on both sides are given in these notes. The fathers were almost unanimously of the mind that he really sacrificed his daughter. Tertullian, Athanasius, Nazianzen, Hierom, Ambrose, Chrysostom. Austen, Theodoret, and others were of that mind.” — James Cooper Gray, George M. Adams, The Biblical Encyclopedia (Cleveland, OH: F. M. Barton, 1903), Volume One, p. 652.

Cobbett’s Rule. “I speak and write not only so that I can be understood, but so that I cannot be misunderstood.” If God had spoken clearly, then we would understand what he was saying about Jephthah, and we wouldn’t misunderstand what he was saying about Jephthah. Therefore the biblical accounts of Jephthah are not divinely inspired. If they were inspired we would not now be drowning in a sea of misunderstanding.

STEPHEN VAN ECK

John the Baptist is better attested historically than Jesus. This is something few Christians are aware of. But even the Gospels (Mark 6:18; Luke 9:7, 20:6) can’t help but indicate he was more prominent than Jesus!

Something even fewer Christians know (and Christian educators would not want pointed out) is that there’s a historical record of a John the Baptist Messianic cult, meaning some thought of him as the Messiah. (Clementine Recognitions, 1. 53, 60). In fact, the cult still exists today. They’re called Mandaeans, and their few hundred members live in Iraq, where their ancestors fled in the first century to escape Jewish persecution. (Their books, like Sidra d’ Yahya, refer to Jesus as “the liar” and “the deceiver”.)

In the early years of the Nazorean movement, the proponents of Jesus as the Messiah had to contend with this and other rival groups. Most, like the Gnostics, were targets for vilification, but rather than warring with this one rhetorically and alienating them, the Nazoreans instead decided on a co-optation strategy. This is a conclusion that makes sense of all the information presented about John in the Gospels. Here’s what I accuse them of doing.

First, they had John flatly deny he was the Messiah (John 1:30, 30:28). And John the Revelator interrupts his Logos hymn twice (1:6-8, 15) to emphasize that the Baptist was not the Messiah.

They incorporated material by the Baptists themselves: “The narrative of John’s birth (Luke 1) probably originated in the circle of his followers, independent of the narrative of the birth of Jesus.” (Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible)

They gave John the Baptist the consolation prize of having been the forerunner, the herald of Jesus. That way, his followers would still have something to be proud of. And the Gospels praise him lavishly (Matthew 11:11), even designating him the return of Elijah (Matthew 11:13-14, 17:10-13). But to keep him in his place, they had him say he wasn’t fit to unlatch Jesus’ sandal (Mark 1:7). By the time of the later Gospel of John, though, his cult was no longer much of a rival, so they could have him deny the association  with Elijah that they’d created earlier (John 1:19-21). And Jesus could now announce his superiority to him in John 5:32-36.

Luke arbitrarily made John the cousin of Jesus, He probably wasn’t. Luke has him prophetically recognize Jesus while in the womb (Luke 1:41), a nifty story but unrealistic. Worse, this contradicts what John himself was said to have asked (in Matthew 11), “Are  you he that should come, or should we look for another?” Coming after John had supposedly seen him revealed as the Son of God (Matthew 3:11-170, to express such a doubt makes no sense. The expression of doubt is more likely than the Baptism scene (that’s different in every Gospel), so John may in fact have never heralded Jesus at all! Josephus, for what it’s worth, doesn’t connect him to Jesus in “Jewish Antiquities”, where he mentions the Baptist.

Andrew and Peter were disciples of the Baptist. So in the Gospels, written after both were dead, they are said to have jumped ship and joined the Jesus movement (John 1:35-41). Whether they actually did or not, it was an example for their fellows to follow.

Most tellingly, to symbolically speak to the whole Baptist cult, John is made to say, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Must he? the first part may be plausible in a real-world setting, but the second smells too suspiciously of having been crafted for strategic purposes, and the whole quote put in his mouth. The Nazoreans wanted the Baptist cult to decrease, by converting to theirs. Sometimes it worked (Acts 18:24-25, 19:1-5), but given the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem along with most of the original Nazorean movement, and its succession by a paganized Gentile variation far from Jerusalem (and from any awareness of the facts), the scheme ultimately failed—except that the existence of this rival Messianic  movement is largely unknown. that’s how they want it today.

Once one abandons the unverified a priori notion that the Gospels are entirely accurate and devoid of any spin, the idea that their handling of John the Baptist was intended to co-opt his movement makes sense. More sense than the standard understanding.

WILLIAM HARWOOD

Science fiction has long played a respected role on television. Even before Star Trek, arguably television’s most successful franchise ever, Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone did not cross the line into prostitution by pretending that its fairy tale episodes were documentaries.

More recently, a series touted by Canadian Dan Aykroyd, called Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal, did cross the line. Aykroyd informed Entertainment Tonight and other tabloid programs that Psi Factor, which would have been right at home as episodes of The Twilight Zone, was comprised of the cases from the files of the Office of Strategic Intelligence, an agency of the United States government that Wikipedia acknowledges to be purely fictitious. By pretending that fairy tales about time travel and other impossibilities were true stories, Aykroyd made himself an embarrassment to Canada. In contrast, a delightful fantasy series called Charmed featured shape-shifting witches and other Alice in Wonderland concepts at least as far removed from reality as Psi Factor—but with no pretence that the series was anything but a dramatized fairy tale. 

Many of television’s most successful science fiction series have gone unrecognized as such, since the SF elements have not involved technology that cannot exist, as opposed to technology that does not exist. Programs fitting that description include Mission Impossible, which regularly had character A impersonating character B by wearing a face-hugging mask that made the impersonator indistinguishable from the person being impersonated. Another example was MacGyver, whose improvisations were not definitively impossible but were nonetheless science fiction.

Pseudo-documentary series such as In Search Of, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, presented alleged investigations of such superstitions as the nonexistent Bermuda Triangle in a matter that, for the sake of ratings, suppressed the reality that the claims being investigated were nonsense, and encouraged viewers to believe that such fantasy beliefs might have a factual basis. Later series such as Medium and Ghost Whisperer consisted of episodes that, while acknowledged fiction, pushed the Big Lie that the series’ basic concepts were consistent with events that could happen and did happen in the real world. While the network executives responsible for such disinformation appear to be True Believers, the fact remains that they contributed to the dumbing of America by encouraging viewers to believe that the impossible is possible and that self-styled psychics are something other than swindling humbugs.

A couple of years ago CBS introduced a series called The Mentalist, about an investigator who openly acknowledged that there is no such thing as a psychic, but encouraged viewers to believe that the science-fiction concept of hypnotism and the fantasy concept of repressed and recovered memory really do exist. They do not.

In 2011 an episode of NCIS showed the character played by lead actor Mark Harmon participating in conversations with a recurring character killed off in an earlier episode. What made the episode defensible is that believers in ghosts do let themselves imagine that they are conversing with dead people, and the script was consistent with the possibility that the Harmon character was fantasizing. Similarly, an episode of CSI Miami showed a living character seeing and obtaining information from a dead person. Again, the episode allowed for the possibility that the ghost-watcher was hallucinating.

But the bulk of current disinformation-peddling occurs in programs that are not science fiction but nonetheless include science fiction episodes. Episodes of the Law and Order and CSI series have treated suppressed memories, hypnotism, and other creations from the imaginations of psychoquacks as if they are more real than alien abductions or recovered memory. A Law and Order episode debunked facilitated communication. Yet later episodes of those same series have validated superstitions that the producers are clearly aware have no existence in the real world—with no disclaimer warning that, “The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has identified the story line in this episode as a science fiction concept that has no existence in the real world.”

Those same programs also depict psychiatrists as something other than fatuous wannabes who testify “X” if they are called by the prosecution and “not-X” if they are called by the defence, passing off as expertise guesses that are no more accurate or valid than those of bartenders or taxi drivers. 

As an appreciator of science fiction, I have no wish to see less SF on television. What I do not want to see is science fiction passed off as real-world fiction. A program such as Stargate needs no disclaimer, since its scripts could not possibly be mistaken for something that could really happen. But when regular crime or law series depict events that can only happen in fantasy, I expect, even demand, an acknowledgment that, “This program is science fiction.” Anything less is disinformation.

BILL GRIGG

When I joined the Canadian Army in 1941, along with numerous other Americans, we did not have access to computers for the purpose of obtaining information. We had books. Donated. But not very many.

It was quite a different story when we got to England. We soon discovered the great libraries of London. Books, Books, and more Books, going back to the earliest days of publishing. Fascinating antiques with fascinating ideas, claims and assumptions.

Mankind got busy on that religion stuff early on.

So, it was pretty obvious that our forbears felt the need for forcing profound insights out of their primitive and limited mentalities. Good luck!

But as “luck” would have it, it turned out to be a slow grueling process.

It was not easy to get to London during the Blitz. it was even harder to keep one’s mind on what they were reading with all those bombs coming down.

Antique and novel theological writings offered ample entertainment to keep us coming back. For the laughs, that is.

Laughs, yes. But there was more to it than that. The substance of “knowledge” was there too. Vaguely discerned insight could be detected in the ponderous labors of the ancient authors. Their endeavors were not without merit.

It is obvious that from the earliest man that humanity has felt the need for a God… and all of the supporting evidence that goes with it. When these theologically disposed writers ran out of words they would invariably resort to pictures. That is how “incredibility” arrived on the scene.

Their artistry was note worthy. But the inspiration for those weird and grotesque drawings would make you do a “double take. This was also the beginning of the screwed-up human mentality.

Of course, as time and human mentality progressed, theology tended to get away from the “spooky”. You can test public credibility only so far…

It was pretty good entertainment until the last bomb came down.