Musings on the Lovecraftian Universe: Part 1

    What follows is not meant to be a scholarly exploration or dissertation. S.T. Joshi and others far, far more qualified and eloquent than myself covered any territory I might wish to navigate. Instead, it is simply my random thoughts about the Mythos (some call it the Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft called it Yogsothery; I’ll almost certainly use different names on different occasions). In part, this is to solidify or hash out some of my own interpretations that might appear within my fiction and in Lovecraftian roleplaying games I might run. And in part, as with all these blog posts, I hope (usually fruitlessly) to instigate some conversation on the topic. I called this “Part 1” because I assume I’ll want to revisit the subject at some point.

    You will no doubt notice that my ideas of the Mythos are heavily colored by the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game. Absolutely. And I also don’t worry too much about ‘canon.’ This is true. Like Lovecraft, I tend to pick and choose, lift what I like, drop what I don’t, and re-combine it into something more to my liking. Any writer, or artist, or musician does the same thing. They’re not always honest about that. I stand on the shoulders of giants (and dwarfs, and mortal men).

    First up, some thoughts on hierarchy, gods, monsters, and the nature of the Universe. Lovecraft postulated a specific type of universe in his fiction. He broke with a good deal of horror tradition by putting forth a universe where there was no Divine.  The God of the Bible is a myth, and nothing more.  He takes that one step further and puts Humanity in a universe where we are completely alone, just a biological infection clinging to life on the surface of a rock ball, hurtling through a soulless void.  For some, that idea would be bad enough (I actually find it exhilarating and liberating, but that’s another post).  Lovecraft then populates the universe with beings so alien, so powerful, so mind blasthingly outside of our understanding that they seem to be gods; are worshiped by some as gods.  But they are not gods.  The gods of our mythology are at best made up, and at worst, masks pulled over the more terrifying reality.

    There seem to be different strata of these things. Some are powerful on a multiverse level, others are galactic scourges, others dominate worlds, and yet others slink in the shadows, hunting for scraps. Cthulhu, the most famous of these things, is to my mind nothing more than a very ancient, very powerful, very strange being from another world. Likely part of or a last remnant of some ancient, ultra-alien civilization. Some say he is trapped, but I think it more likely that he simply sleeps, under the ocean (or in a pocket dimension) in a weird city, filled with alien architecture. And while he sleeps, psychic projections of his dreams have tainted Humanity, especially the more sensitive and artistically prone, leading to cults and myths and even some ‘revealed’ knowledge. But Cthulhu isn’t the chief of these aliens; he isn’t a god, he isn’t the ultimate evil. Whatever he has planned, no matter how unfathomable to humans it might be, it is still the plan of a thinking being. He/it may not conform to the physics we understand, but he conforms to some deeper, physical truth we haven’t grasped. Like all the ‘beings’ in the Mythos, he exists in the Universe and follows its rules. The rules only seem to be broken due to our lack of understanding. Once again, I cite Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  In the case of Cthulhu (and many of the other alien beings/species in the Mythos), there is some technology, some scientific understanding that is either beyond our current understanding, or more troubling, beyond our capability to understand (at least with our current physical brains).

    Now, where I’ll probably get controversial is with my take on a few of the others.  Hastur, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, and Azathoth, in particular. I think of these not as beings; not as consciousnesses, but as embodied concepts or forces. Azathoth is blind creation, the Big Bang.  When an atomic bomb is set off, it momentarily communes with Azathoth. Azathoth lives in every star, in the heart of every atom. The ‘Blind Idiot God’ is simply manifest creation, spewing forth into the void. Hastur, on the other hand, is manifest entropy; the chaos of ultimate dissipation; the winding down and crumbling of all things. Shub-Niggurath is the manifestation of biology, of organic life. She is the drive behind certain types of matter coming together and forming into basic life forms, evolving into more complex forms, and spreading throughout the Universe. She is the drive for survival inside all life to its cellular core. And Yog-Sothoth is, in a sense, the binding agent. He is physics; he is reality; he is spacetime. These manifest concepts occasionally coalesce into things more rightly thought of as beings. They become avatars of their associated ‘god.’ The King in Yellow is a shadow, a reflection of Hastur. He is a concept, become flesh. A bringer of chaos and madness; a Typhoid Mary of Entropy. The Black Goat in the Woods is a similar residue of Shub-Niggurath. And when a so called wizard tries to gain Outside knowledge from Yog-Sothoth, he or she taps into an avatar of the concept, perhaps seeing weird glowing spheres or monstrous tentacle things. If, at the core of all reality, there is a burning mass of something, with things dancing around it playing insane music, then that thing is but a bleed-off of the idea of Azathoth; something of flesh and blood (even if it isn’t flesh and blood as we understand it).

    Compared to those manifestations of concepts, beings like Cthulhu, Dagon, or Tsathoggua are almost (I stress almost) comprehensible. Though defying our common understandings of life, they still seem to be individual things, things that are the result of something similar to evolution some kind of environment somewhere else in the Multiverse.  And on a much more relatable level are species not too dissimilar to our own. I don’t just mean Ghouls and Deep Ones, which seem entwined with us in some way; offshoots of a close branch on the evolutionary tree, or something produced by genetic tampering. But things like the Flying Polyps, the Elder Things, the Mi-Go, or the Great Race of Yith are not so unlike us as to be incomprehensible.  They are alien, with alien thoughts and alien feelings.  They may be technologically and culturally very different, possibly much more advanced, but they are just other creatures, such as ourselves, clinging to the faces of planets, trying to survive in a universe that carelessly grinds us all into dust. Their plans, schemes, civilizations, and kingmaking is no less pointless than our own. Perhaps we will never share enough common reference points to be able to satisfactorily communicate or cooperate with them, but we could potentially operate on roughly the same level with a bit of time and development. I suppose the same could be said for Cthulhu and others more on his level, but the scale of time and development would likely be in the billions of years, as opposed to hundreds or thousands.

    Codifying the Mythos is tricky, and perhaps ultimately pointless. It is malleable and changes with each author who dabbles in it. I think that’s part of what makes it so wonderful and strange. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, by the nature of its game mechanics, needed to do just that; to solidify and classify the unimaginable. There are times where that makes some sense in the game, but I feel that once you go beyond species like the Mi-Go or the Deep Ones, you’ve really entered the realm of Clarke’s ultra-tech, where rules of what is and could be break down. How does that play out in a story?  How does that work in a game?  That is up to the author, I guess.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Star Trek VS Star Wars

While I’ve written about Star Trek and to a lesser degree Star Wars before, I thought I’d revisit it for a few reasons. First, the recent success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a movie that I thought was OK and much better than the previous three films, but not all that great. Second, the recent announcement that a Star Trek TV series is in development. And third, the aftermath of Star Trek Into Darkness (worst Trek film ever?) and the build-up to Star Trek Beyond.

I read an article (see here) that compared Star Trek and Star Wars a while ago, which bothered me. In it, the author postulated that the major difference between the two was that Star Wars was about fighting the Man, and Star Trek was about being the Man. I disagree. Getting past various categorization squabbles (science fiction vs. science fantasy, blah, blah, blah), there are some pretty big differences that separate the two. I’d argue the target audience, for one, is different. Also, the nature of the two is profoundly different. One started as a weekly TV series in the 1960s, while the other started as a blockbuster theatrical release in the 1970s. That difference alone is profound. And when I think of Star Trek at its best, I think of the original series and some of The Next Generation. I don’t tend to think of the films, which from Wrath of Khan on (with the exception of Star Trek IV) are very much more in the Star Wars, summer blockbuster, action film camp.

Star Wars is generally marketed for children. It’s enjoyable for adults, but rarely deals with particularly deep themes or complicated issues. It often relies on gross caricature when presenting characters, so that everyone is on the same page. Good guys are obviously good guys. Bad guys are obviously bad guys. Typically looking at them is all you need to do in order to know what sort of person they are. And the general theme is about as simple as they come, and roots back at least to Zoroastrianism and the duality that would help to form three of today’s major religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). It is the conflict between Good and Evil.

While still frequently marketed toward younger viewers, Star Trek often presents more complicated issues. There are absolutely ham-fisted attempts (see: most episodes actually written by Gene Roddenberry, for example), but there are occasionally subtle ones, too. With Star Trek, the viewer is frequently presented with a moral question. Unfortunately, as was the style of the day, they were then given the answer to that question. But the questions were often serious, sometimes deep questions of morality, philosophy, and meaning. The question wasn’t “do I submit to the horible forces of Evil?” but rather “is it right to do this evil thing for the greater good?” Or, “do I need to make peace with the evil within me in order to better the good?”

Star Wars never grew out of its simple nature. It remains a story of Good vs. Evil. Even as it distanced itself from its Flash Gordon, pulp roots, it moved deeper and deeper into a universe of constantly warring sides in a battle between ultimate Light and ultimate Dark. Villains rarely seem to have any motivation beyond cruelty and the hunger for power.

Star Trek has changed and evolved many times over the years. Unfortunately, more often than not, this seems to have moved it more in line with the Star Wars tradition. Though not going so much for the Good vs Evil line, it has frequently fallen into the trap Batman & Superman have, the “let’s make it darker” trap. Star Trek was a semi-Utopian setting...so let’s show how the Utopia of the Federation is actually corrupt and evil (Deep Space 9). Star Trek was about brave people who faced the unknown of space for the pure joy of it. So, let’s make the characters hate their jobs and be forced into it (Voyager). Star Trek was about big ideas and moral questions. So let’s make action movies that must be solved by the hero punching the villain (the theatrical films). And as time went on, folks behind Trek tried to make it more ‘sciencey’ by throwing in lots of buzzwords and technobabble which muddied the dialog and provided too many opportunities for technological deus ex machina rescues.

But when Star Trek was at its most Star Trek, it wasn’t about ‘being the Man.’ It was about being the best we could be, then striving to be better. Star Wars, for better or worse, was and is about Good vs Evil. Star Trek made young Matt think about what choices he might make, about what it was to be a good person. Star Wars made young Matt say, “AWESOME!” I loved both. And while Star Wars has lost a lot of its charm over the years, thanks to terrible prequel movies and some other issues; and later expansions of the Star Trek universe seem to have lost the thread; I still have fond memories of both. I just find myself going back to Star Trek, watching the original TV episodes, even popping in the original films (the first four, anyway), far more than I do with Star Wars. Star Wars doesn’t give me the same thrill it once did. Though I enjoy the heck out of the first two films. I’m a Science Fiction nerd, and I have a lot of room in my heart. But when it comes down to it, Star Trek at its best is better than Star Wars. There. I said it.

-Matthew J. Constantine

A Fistful of Influence! (Matt’s Picks)

    OK, everything Brad said in his post on this same subject.  These aren’t necessarily my favorite films, but these are five of the films that shaped who I am as a movie viewer.  Movies have been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember, becoming all the more so when we got a spankin’ new VCR and color TV in the mid 80s.  These movies represent a few important street signs on the road map of my life in film.

5.  Star Wars:  Growing up in the 80s, Star Wars and the renaissance of genre films that followed in its wake was like a warm blanket I wrapped myself in.  The toys, the bed sheets, the Underoos, sure.  But the movies themselves.  To a lonely kid who spent much of his time inside with a TV, the Star Wars films were trusted friends.  And Star Wars itself was the beginning of it all.  I love all things (almost) science fiction, and I never held with the idea that you were either a Star Wars or a Star Trek person (the 60s Star Trek remains one of my favorite TV shows, and if I did a list like this for TV it would be right near the top).  But Star Wars had a lasting impact, even with all the later tainting of my love that came with the dreaded prequel trilogy and overdose of merchandising.

4.  Fist of Legend:  I’d watched a few Chinese martial arts films before I watched this Jet Li film, mostly Jackie Chan stuff.  But it was while watching this movie that I realized Kung Fu films could be more than just stunts and bad dubbing.  They could also be about stuff.  They could also have compelling characters and solid plots.  They could also tap into genuine emotions.  Fist of Legend has some excellent fights, but it’s a good movie, too.  So, in a way, it was the movie that really introduced me to Kung Fu films.

3.  The Phantom Empire: This Gene Autry serial was a very early viewing for young Matt the Lad.  Not only did it make me fall in love with the idea of the movie serial, but I also became captivated by the mix of genres (here Cowboy Musical and Science Fiction).  Over the years, bits of this film were always floating around in the back of my head, leaking into my fiction and into my choices of movie rentals.

What could I possibly have found to like in this?

2.  Coffy:  When I broke up with my high school girlfriend, I suddenly found myself with more time and more money than sense.  Being me, instead of re-directing those resources into doing something that would improve my life, I descended into a black whole of video rental madness.  For a couple years, I watched more movies than I could possibly count.  I mean, I watched EVERY DANGED THING I could get my hands on.  And while I’d been aware of Shaft, and I knew there were Grindhouse films that had been made in the 70s, I was largely ignorant of them, and knew little of Blaxploitation beyond a few articles in film texts.  But one night, walking through the stacks at the local Front Row Video (yeah, it wasn’t even Movie Gallery, yet), I spotted a very sexy picture of Pam Grier looking out at me from a video box.  I was in love, and my movie lust found yet another new direction to stretch.

1.  Raiders of the Lost Ark:  Almost everything about me, my tastes, and my interests eventually leads back to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the old Bangor Opera House when I was five years old.  I wanted to be Indiana Jones.  I wanted to fight Nazis, travel the globe, find ancient cities, have love affairs with feisty brunettes, and live in Hollywood’s version of the 1930s.  Pulp, history, geography, the desert, the jungle, nature, religion, and so many other life long interests started here, not to mention my eventual love and fascination with the films and the era that inspired it.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: Lying

    I like to be challenged.  People might not think that about me, because I have a strong inclination to resist change and my suspicion of fixing things that don’t appear to be broken is quite deep.  But it’s true.  I like to be challenged.  I think that’s why I found myself genuinely enjoying reading Nietzsche (for fun, not for a class or something).  And I’m sure it’s why I developed a fondness for the forthright and provocative works of Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, and Sam Harris.  I first encountered Harris through various web videos of debates and speeches, often on the subject of religion and the rejection thereof.  But by the time I found him, that was no longer a challenging subject for me.  He may have helped me find better ways of saying what I meant, but I had already come to terms with my lack of belief in the supernatural.  Where he began to challenge me was in his book The Moral Landscape.  In my gut, I’d never felt right about some of the moral relativism that my 80s-raised mind wanted so much to hold on to.  Something didn’t sit right when it came to justifying barbaric acts in the name of cultural sensitivity, standing silent when I knew in my very bones that something evil was afoot.  And with The Moral Landscape, Harris challenged my thinking, and helped me forge that discomfort into a more coherent and I hope productive way of looking at the world.

    With Lying, Sam Harris has challenged me once again.  As a general thing, I consider myself an honest person.  I suppose most people do, but I have a long standing tendency to call it as I see it (not necessarily as it is) and to play as fair as I can with folks.  Admittedly, I’ve often used silence as a means of avoiding saying truths that might put me in socially awkward positions.  But generally, I’ve tried to be an honest person.  Or so I thought.  Reading Lying, I see that, while on a spectrum, I might be on the honest side of the middle, I still perpetuate our culture of lies.  I’m not a disciplined person.  I’m not going to lie here and say that I will be embracing a strictly and more thoughtfully honest life from this point forward.  It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible (though it would be difficult as I did grow up Catholic, where honestly, especially with oneself, is not generally well received or encouraged).  It’s that I know myself well enough to know that my commitment to being more thoughtful and honest will not be as deep and conscientious as it should be.  Still, the book challenges me to be a better person, and to think more about the damage that lies, even so called ‘white lies’ can do.  I do think that going forward, I will be more careful about telling the truth, more apt to avoid even those socially lubricating fabrications.

    The idea of living in an honest society, a conscientiously honest and straight-forward world, absolutely appeals to me.  And the goal Harris seems to have of shifting our cultural mindset in that direction is an honorable and important one.  Lying seems like the sort of book that should be read by as many people as possible, but probably won't be read by those who could be most served by it (like The Moral Landscape).  Being in business, I can see the need for this book in the business community.  But the medical, governmental, educational, and other arenas could all use a healthy dose of self-reflection and positive reinforcement of honest speech and behavior.

    The book, originally an e-book, now comes in a hardcover edition which features a Q&A between Sam Harris and Ronald A. Howard, a man who was a huge inspiration in Harris’s own quest to lead an honest life.  The two discuss various aspects of lies and truths, and the potential pitfalls and benefits.  In addition, there are questions from readers of the e-book with responses by Harris.  The book itself is quite short (42 pages), with the appendixes bringing it up to 95 pages, plus a few more pages of notes.  But while the book is short, I think there's a lot to think about within its pages.  Again, coming from the business world, this is a heck of a lot more useful and important than something like the oft lauded Who Moved My Cheese.  Whatever your career or lifestyle, I would recommend taking this challenge.  Read Lying, and think more about the truth and lies in your life, how they effect you, the ones you love, and society in general.

Lying
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Four Elephants Press
ISBN: 978-1-9400-5100-0

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: A Manual for Creating Atheists

    You hear it all the time.  “Faith is a virtue.”  “You’ve just got to have faith.”  “Without faith there is no meaning.”  Peter Boghossian disagrees.  He takes great pains to separate the term ‘faith’ from the term ‘hope.’  And to clarify what atheism is.  Faith is the belief in something without evidence for that something, or ‘pretending to know things you don’t know.’  Whereas, like me, he sees atheist as meaning ‘there is insufficient evidence to belief in X deity.’  It isn’t a dogma or a belief system, just as a Buddhist doesn’t have a specific set of beliefs about there not being a Thor.  With this book Boghossian provides some handy hints on how to deal with those who claim to know things they don’t have know.  Unlike some before, he does not target religion, which he sees more as a social structure, but faith itself.  The root cause, and not the symptom.

    As he puts it, ‘faith claims are knowledge claims,’ statements about how things are (the world is 6000 years old, lightening was sent from Zeus, the Emperor of Japan is a god, Muhammad rode a flying horse, etc.), thus must be treated as such.  And when they are baseless, they must be challenged.  He also calls out relativists, who claim that other cultures either can’t or shouldn’t be subject to judgment or challenge.  Like Sam Harris, he makes the case that relativism isn’t a path to success.  Pluralism, the coming together and peaceful coexistence of many cultures is good, multiculturalism, having different rules for different peoples is bad.  Many ‘academic leftists’ seem to be willing to accept absolutely anything in the name of tolerance.  But both Boghossian and Harris have called them out on this sort of behavior.  If you claim that throwing acid in a little girl’s face or shooting her in the back of the head because she tried to read a book is OK, then you’re either A) delusional or B) profoundly evil.  And excusing this sort of thing because it is consistent with someone’s religion is immoral.

    Like Sean Faircloth in his book Attack of the Theocrats, he also calls out religious exemptions from the normal rule of law that applies to everyone else.  Be it taxes or bad behavior, too often faith based groups are given a free ride and legal protections they should not have.  But we are constantly bombarded with the message that criticizing faith is tantamount to racism and other egregious behaviors.  Because, as Boghossian says, ideas are now given a respect they shouldn’t have.  Attacking a person should be wrong, but attacking an idea should be encouraged.  Ideas deserve only as much respect as they can retain under assault.

    Boghossian takes on many of the common arguments for faith and against atheism, from the Kalam Cosmological Argument to Pascal’s Wager.  He gives categories for where people are on their journey away from faith, from those who have never been exposed to alternate ideas to those who are questioning, and beyond.  He doesn’t suggest that with one or two questions, one can make someone abandon years of indoctrination, nor necessarily should they.  But by presenting Socratic questions, by making a person take a moment to examine why as much as what they believe, you may have done a lot to break the spell.  As he brings up, while many people’s journey to faith is quick (a traumatic experience, for example), people’s journey away from it is often long and carefully thought out.  I think of my own, and I know that the journey away from faith for me took a very, very long time.  There were fitful leaps, but the whole process must have taken more than twenty years.

    Boghossian also encourages us to read up on various schools of thought.  He suggests reading the works of religious scholars like William Lane Craig and peddlers of what he terms ‘deepities’ like Deepak Chopra.  Listen to what others say, question them, challenge them.  Don’t insult the person, don’t try to make a person feel dumb or small.  Just be that voice of descent.  Ultimately the journey away from superstition and faith is a personal one, and should be encouraged and nurtured, but not forced.  And of course, don’t pretend to know what you don’t know.  Not knowing is perfectly OK.  Knowing that one doesn’t know is the beginning of the journey.  And in a life without faith, the journey is what it’s all about.  At least, that’s what mine is about.  I can’t speak for others.

A Manual for Creating Atheists
Author: Peter Boghossian
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
ISBN: 9781939578150 (I read this as an ebook)

-Matt

Comic Review: Boxers & Saints

    Set during the late 1800s, Boxers chronicles the rise of a peasant revolution.  Bao is a happy young boy who enjoys the opera and idolizes the masked characters and his father.  But his whole world begins to crumble when his father is beaten and broken by ‘foreign devils.’  When a jovial martial artist arrives in the village, Bao finds a way to embrace his love of the heroes of opera.  What follows is part history, part Shaw Bros. fantasy adventure, as the villagers learn to fight, gather around Bao, and head to the foreign tainted Peking.  Fueled by nationalism, racism, and the pains of oppression, the so called Boxers fight back against the soldiers of the outsiders.

    Saints follows Four-Girl, a child raised under a cloud of family tragedy and ill omen, who tries to find herself in a rapidly changing world.  In an attempt to rebel, and to embrace her ‘cursed’ nature, she joins the foreign devil Christians, taking the name Vibiana.  Her journey is different, but she too ends up in Peking when the rebellion comes to its bloody climax.

    Each volume explores the protagonist’s relationship with various aspects of religion, tradition, and gods.  Bao and his fellow Boxers are inhabited by the spirits of the heroes of opera, while Four-Girl seeks guidance from some horrible raccoon demon, and then from the spirit of Joan of Arc.  Are these possessions and visions real?  Are they the dreams of youth, or delusion?  Are Bao, Four-Girl, and the rest simply mad from the horrors of their times?  It gives you a lot to think about, and I think a lot of interpretive wiggle room.

    As companion volumes, Boxers and Saints make for a good read, each looking at different aspects of the same historic event.  Each complements and juxtaposes the other.  The colorful palette of Boxers and the muted tones of Saints for example.  And the question of religion, of its use, its dangers, etc. seems to be left open.  All this makes for a compelling read with plenty to think about.  And like the best books, it makes me want to read more.  I’ll certainly be reading Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.  But I also picked up a book on the Boxer Rebellion, and another on the Taiping Rebellion.  As much of my knowledge of China’s history and culture comes from martial arts movies and Hong Kong melodramas, I figured now would be a good time to read something more scholarly.  It should also help give me more context for enjoying those films.

-Matt

Book Review: Attack of the Theocrats

“Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity.  It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven…it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”  -John Adams

    I’ve felt a change in the air as the years have passed.  As a boy, there was a great deal of hope and longing for a future of technological advancement, world peace, and a reign of compassion and reason.  Science and evidence based reasoning were the tools we would use to build a brighter future.  It was in the literature, on the big and small screen.  We were going to space, we were curing illness, we were learning about our past (and learning from it), and we were going to clean up our planet and make things right.  But, as I entered high school in the early 90s, I got my first taste of something.  Something that had been building in the shadows of American politics for a long time.  A conscious, directed effort on the part of a faction of American Christianity had been using their considerable wealth and grass roots energy to erode basic tenants of American law, democracy, and our nation’s very spirit.  Why were we abandoning science?  Why did we start denying the facts of evolution, of climate change, of our founding fathers, and so much more?  Why were established and understood maters of science being cast aside left and right?  Why was innovation and intellectual curiosity held up as a thing of ridicule?  When did trying to get an education become ‘elitist?’  When did fair taxes, chipping in, taking care of your fellow man, coming to a consensus, etc. become ‘socialist?’

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law representing establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” -Thomas Jefferson

“I believe that God wants me to be president.” -George Bush

    Sean Faircloth’s book goes into details on how this shift happened, who was behind it, what their goals were and are, and what can be done to stop them, and to wrestle the future of America back from religious extremists who want to create a theocracy in direct contradiction to the principles of the Founding Fathers and the desire of the ‘man on the streets.’  It’s a frightening, clarion call to action against the very real, and very dangerous element within our government and our civilization, who are putting our lives, the lives of our children, and the very future of our species and our planet in jeopardy.

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” -Thomas Jefferson

    Using plenty of examples, and directly calling out egregious offences against the Constitution and Bill of Rights on the part of those who so vocally claim their sanction, Faircloth does a fine job of highlighting individuals and organizations that all Americans should fight against in the name of freedom and law.  Law.  That thing that has made our country strong in the past.  Law.  The tool of justice.  Law.  The thing that keeps safe the poor and the rich, the old and the young, the minority and the majority.

And this from a very religious man.

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church.” -Thomas Paine

    If you’re worried about the direction a small number of backward looking extremists are trying to drag our country, you should take a look at this book.  If you want to see America take the lead in science and innovation again, you should read this book.  If you are tired of people claiming to be for ‘small government’ while they simultaneously try to legislate every aspect of your personal life, you should read this book.  If you’re tired of sending your tax money to support religious organizations you don’t belong to or support in any way, you should read this book.  If you're sick of hearing how our founding fathers wanted America to be a Christian nation, in spite of all the mountains of written works by those same founders to the contrary, you should read this book.  Tired of government sanctioned religion that flies in the face of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, changing our money and even our Pledge of Allegiance, in the name of their particular beliefs, you should read this book.  Are you angry to see Jefferson and Madison’s ‘separation of Church and State’ attacked time and again, except when used as an excuse for not paying taxes on massive megachurch incomes and financial double-dealings?  Are you sick to your stomach at the idea that our children are tortured and allowed to die in the name of ancient superstitions?  You should read this book.  Faircloth looks at specific examples and general trends, and shows how wrong the attempted Theocrats are, and how anti-American they really are.  Men and women who wrap themselves in the flag, while they soil everything it stands for.  Read this book.

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature.  Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” -George Washington


Attack of the Theocrats
Author: Sean Faircloth
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
ISBN: 9780984493241

(I read this as an ebook, which you can get for the Nook or Kindle)

-Matt

Book Review: God is Not Great

“Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities.  No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact.” -page 161

    It was the success of this book that first made me aware of Christopher Hitchens, though it was various footage of him in debates and readings that made me really take note, made me a fan if you will.  So, it is a bit odd that I’ve only just gotten around to reading God is Not Great, after his autobiography Hitch 22, his massive collection of essays Arguably, his book about the process of death by cancer Mortality, and others.  The book stands as a kind of clarion call for people of reason to shake off their placating politeness and collectively call BS on the aggressive, pervasive, divisive, and morally bankrupt purveyors of the ultimate bait-and-switch scheme, religion (you give me money and power now, and when you’re dead you’ll get some vague reward).  And as you might expect from Hitch, it is full of wit and rage.

    As usual, he spares no fool.  Be it the media monster and champion of suffering (not for those who suffer, but for their suffering) Mother Teresa, or blowhard fools like Pat Robertson, or imams, priests, and charlatans of all stripes, he is on the attack.  And he uses the greatest tools of the trade.  He uses evidence, history, logic, and the most damaging weapon of all, the words of the holy texts and of their followers.  Is there a book more obviously cobbled together, disjoined, and nonsensical than the Bible?  Well, perhaps the Koran.  Both draw heavily on the Torah, which is itself a patchwork mess.  Claims of historic merit are at best dubious, and more frequently patently fraudulent.  Connections to historic places and people are often wildly inaccurate or incongruous, but that doesn’t stop the faithful from dubbing them proof of authenticity.  And when considering how many generations (frequently centuries) after the supposed events anything at all was written down, can even those less than air tight connections be seriously considered.

“Who--except for an ancient priest seeking to exert power by the tried and tested means of fear-- could possibly wish that this hopelessly knotted skein of fable had any veracity?” -on the horrors of the Old Testament, page 103

    Reading the Bible, the Torah, The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or any text with spiritual lessons or claims of the divine, it should be obvious to all but the most painfully unaware that these books are as much the product of humans (men, specifically), as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, or the music (elevating as it may be) of Beethoven.  The rampant bloodletting, petty local squabbling, complete lack of understanding of the world outside of the knowledge of the original readers, and total lack of knowledge of the workings of the world and greater universe should make perfectly clear that there was no mystical revelation, no angelic dictation, just the fevered imaginings of savage men bent on power and scared of death.  No amount of rape, theft, child murder, genocide, or general awfulness is too much, it seems for the righteous.

“If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.  The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more ‘miraculous’ and ‘transcendent’ than any theology.”  -page 71

    And one can easily compare this century’s UFO mythology with any of the major religions.  It relies on vague stories, shoddy evidence, faulty logic, esoteric writings, and an understanding of the universe that relies on faith instead of reason.  And, like the major profits of old, heavenly forces reveal themselves to illiterate yokels on the fringes of society or beyond.  In a world full of well read, literate people, beings wishing to bring their ‘truth’ to the world find people of limited resources and capability.  That’s just poor planning.  Like with the concept of Intelligent Design, it requires that these cosmic forces are either cruel and deviant devils, or blind idiots (I guess a creature evil enough to make people in a specific way, only to condemn them for being that way might be F-dup enough to put the eye together backwards, put too many teeth in our heads, and have waste come out of our mating organ).

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar.  They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace.  But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” -page 67

    I’ve always liked talking with, or listening to people much smarter and well read than myself.  Gleaning wisdom and knowledge, and finding new books to read or what have you.  Reading Hitchens feels like sitting down to great dinner conversation, and it’s led me to check out many things, and will continue to do so (one of these days I’m going to try Wodehouse).  But it was pretty sweet when he referenced a book I’d actually read already.  I think it’s the first time outside of one of his book reviews (for a Harry Potter novel) that it’s happened.  I read Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why several years ago.  A fascinating book.  It was like listening to Dennis Miller back when he was funny (remember the 80s?) or the boys on MST3K, when you manage to catch an especially clever or obscure reference, you feel just that bit more cool, even if it is only for a moment.  Whenever I read Hitchens I feel like I’m learning something, but I also feel inspired to go out and learn more when I’m done.  That is the mark of a great teacher, and I’ve been lucky enough to have many of those (only a very few of them involved in my formal schooling).

    Lest one assume Hitchens only chastises and takes to task those religions more familiar in the West, he does go after several Eastern religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, etc. with both barrels.  Whether exposing the awful hypocrisy of the hereditary horror-show that produced the Dali Lama, or the cult of the god-king that produced the famous kamikaze and was supported by the Buddhist mainstream in Japan, or the sectarian violence between Hindu and Buddhists that still grips Sri Lanka to this day.  And he addresses a couple of the most common attacks on atheism, the Nazis and the Stalinists.  Getting past the problems with the Nazi argument (like that most Nazis were practicing Christians), both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were more like theocracies than any kind of ‘secular’ state.  They did not attempt to suppress religion so much as replace it with a worship and obedience of the state.  He goes into some depth about the complicity of various churches and religious organizations in the creation and maintenance of these monolithic states, including the support of the Catholic Church for several fascist regimes, including Hitler’s Germany (though he does mention some of those few who stood up, including Catholics, to those same evils).

“But an extraordinary number of people appear to believe that the mind, and the reasoning faculty - the only thing that divides us from our animal relatives - is something to be distrusted and even, as far as possible, dulled.” -page 198

    Perhaps his most bold, but in a way most important question (and chapter title) “Is Religion Child Abuse?” looks into the effects of religion, both physical and psychological on children and on the adults they become.  Not just the obvious stuff like institutionalized sexual abuse or genital mutilation, but the more subtle things like telling a kid his grandfather is in hell, suffering for an eternity, because he was a different religion.  Or of course, racism, the ancient partner in crime of religion.  I remember hearing constantly throughout my Catholic upbringing that those evil (fill in the blank with Protestants, Satanists, Homosexuals, etc.) tried to ‘get you while you’re young.’  And I remember even then thinking, ‘wait, isn’t that what you’re doing, too?’  And of course, it was.  The best way to produce adults who believe in this mumbo-jumbo is to force them to believe it when they’re too young and malleable and credulous to turn away.  Otherwise, if you let children get to the point where they’re more rational, there’s almost no way they’d believe much of the crazy stuff written in the various holy texts.  They’ve lived long enough to spot a con, to know a lie, to see a fantasy.  And they’ve certainly lived to the point where getting the tip of one’s penis cut off or vagina sewn up doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even the of the sexual organs.  It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.” -discussing the horrors of circumcision, mandated celibacy, and sexual repression, page 228

    Though not my favorite book by Christopher Hitchens, nor his most readable, it is a worthy effort and hopefully a conversation starter.  It identifies what he believed to be the great enemy facing humankind, calls it out, and gives it a sock on the jaw.  The book works as something of a call to action for all those who feel that religions of all stripes have a lot to answer for, if not a lot of answers.  And that the denial of reality one must embrace in order to believe in the supernatural is inherently damaging to us as individuals and to society as a whole.  That morality and ethics exist in spite of (and some times as opposed to), not because of religion.  The greatest gift that Hitchens, Sam Harris, Penn Jillette, and Stephen Fry, among others have given people like myself is a sense of community and hope.  We are not alone in our desire to leave behind the damaging and stultifying beliefs of our ancestors in order to create a more just and viable future.  That the way to live need not be dictated by squabbling illiterates who lurked in the deserts of our distant past, but in rational exploration of the world that is.  There are others out there like me, who found no answers to the questions that really matter in myth anthologies written by greedy savages, or in the expectation of rewards and punishments in the hereafter.  I constantly hear people talk about how silly, strange, or unfounded the religious beliefs of other peoples are.  But these same people can’t see the silliness in their own.  My hat is off to the late Hitchens for pulling back those curtains just a bit, and shedding light on a great many shadowed things.

“Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.” -Page 280

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 978-0-446-57980-3

-Matt

Book Review: A World Lit Only By Fire

    The more I read about history, the more questions I have, the more I want to read and learn, and the less appealing any part of it becomes.  I know a lot of people who say they’d want to live in a certain era in the past.  While I’ll admit, I’d love to be able to visit or observe certain places and things, the past holds no draw for me.  It is something to be learned, understood, and escaped.  A dark, monstrous, horror filled shadow from which great and terrible people eventually led us.  I imagine that our world of today, still steeped in superstitious nonsense, butchery in the name of old books, and still primitive medicines will look much the same to a reader in the future.  But reading about the nightmare world of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, makes me so glad to be alive today, and not at any time in our grim past.

    As expected in a book like this, William Manchester gets right into the obvious differences, like the lack of hygiene, proper nutrition, education, etc.  But the lion’s share of this book is about the appalling, grueling, and disgusting savagery of the time we rightly refer to as the Dark Ages.  From the Church as State/State as Church dominance of Rome through the bloody minded tectonic shift that became known as the Protestant Reformation.  The fear, the bloodlust, the corruption, and the oppression are simply awful.  And Manchester doesn’t shy away from it.  At first, while he described the decadence of the Vatican in excruciating detail, I assumed this was (like the film Elizabeth) going to simply be an anti-Catholic book.  And frankly, I can’t blame anyone writing about that era for being so, as hyperbolic as the reality of its evil was.  But no sooner had Luther gained some ground than Manchester opened up on the hypocrisy and evils of the Protestants with just as much relish.  Few beyond Erasmus, who stands as a kind of moral hero through the narrative, escape their lashings.

    Even in this horror story, you can see the stirrings of light, the rebirth of logic, reason, and science that had been so soundly drowned in the dogmatic excesses of the rise of Christianity in Europe.  Though it seems an eternity, people will not be held down forever.  The human will eventually rises above.  It has to, it’s how we’ve evolved.  And a theocracy is not a tenable state.  People want to know, want to ask, want to seek.  We need to strive, to understand, to grow, and that is the antithesis of the theocracy (be that State as Religion, like in Communist Russia, or Religion as State as in Medieval Europe), where obedience, ritual, and conformity are the rules of the game.

    It is with the explorers, especially Magellan, that the author finally lets loose with some hope and joy.  Not that it’s all smiles and sunshine, but one gets a sense that the crushing darkness may finally be rolling back, even as a new kind of oppressive savagery (colonialism) is being born.  Though even Magellan’s amazing adventure was tainted by the behavior of his men, and his own growing religious zealotry.  His descent into pious madness makes a sad ending to an otherwise grand life.  But the exhilaration of discovery and bold action kept making me think of heroes from our own time, stepping into the void of space.

A World Lit Only by Fire
Author: William Manchester
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 978-0-316-54556-3

-Matt

Dork Art: More Hilary White

Artist Hilary White is at it again.  Found these classic art re imaginings over at Geek Tyrant and I've been chuckling to myself ever since.  My faves are the Muppet centric pieces.

--Brad

Book Review: Arguably

    This massive volume is nice peppering of works by the late master of words and professional malcontent, Christopher Hitchens.  From current affairs to religion to history and biography, and even a meditation of the phrase ‘fuck off,’ there are few subjects that escape his pen.  There isn’t much I can say about Hitchens that hasn’t been said before, and by far more eloquent people than myself.  Suffice to say, this book contains his trademark humor and barbs.

    Some of the highlights include an essay on why women aren’t funny (though he believed they had a profound sense of humor) and conversely why men are and in fact, must be; another that puts into words my feelings about religiously enforced face covering; and a great one about his love of books that rounds out the volume.

    Along the way, Hitchens traveled the world, met some fascinating people from politicians to cab drivers, experienced war zones and art, and confronted bullshit artists of all stripes.  Never willing to let anyone off the hook, least of all himself, he constantly tries to get at the heart of matters, cutting through emotions and rhetoric. 

    I’m always impressed by folks like Hitchens, who are so well read about so many subjects, and can discuss them lucidly.  Willing to use his extensive vocabulary, not dumb things down, yet perfectly comfortable with a cracking good expletive.  He appealed to the best in us, expecting others to keep up, and leaving it up to us to do so. 

    Like the best of non-fiction, Arguably made me want to read more, to learn more, and shed light on subjects I didn’t know anything about, while giving me a new perspective on some I did.  His reviews of biographies and histories, his explorations of political ideologies, and his look around at America are all inspiring and challenging in the best ways. 

    I listened to the audio book version, read by Simon Prebble, who manages to do a fair job of capturing Hitchens’ cadence.  29 hours.  Wow.  But it was good listening while prepping and eating many a breakfast.
 

    The man is missed, but his words remain.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
ISBN: 978-1-61113-906-8 (audio version), 978-1-45550-277-6 (hard cover)

-Matt