My Book
Troubled Teen-agers in Iowa have uncovered a sinister conspiracy.
What happens when they face ultimate evil?
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 5:53 PM
6 comments
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Troubled Teen-agers in Iowa have uncovered a sinister conspiracy.
What happens when they face ultimate evil?
Friday, August 05, 2005
The Government Wants You to Smoke
Well ... maybe not the Department of health and Human Services, but the Government as a whole, they do pretty well off of tobacco.
On the average, every smoker saves the government twenty thousand dollars per head on costs saved. That’s because cigarette smokers die early and don’t collect so much retirement money. You might think they make up for it in added health care expenses, but that twenty thousand is after those are deducted.
Also, the Government makes a ton off of the taxes they charge to addicts. When the Clinton administration was trying to achieve universal coverage for Americans (like every other civilized nation) one of the ways they wanted to raise money was by increasing cigarette taxes but they had calculated that if they raised those taxes too high people would actually start to quit smoking and the revenue would decrease at that point. There was a real careful calculation about how high they could go before that horrible thing happened. (And America still doesn’t have universal health care and our life span ranks twenty sixth in the World and forty five million Americans don’t have any coverage at all).
If you ask me there’s the real secret to saving social security. It’s not private accounts, it’s smoking. Everybody in the U.S. should be required to smoke, the system would become solvent again with everybody dying off and not using up their benefits, plus - and here’s the real beauty of the plan - everyone would be cool. (As we all know from highschool, cool people smoke). Finally, the Government, both state and Federal, has made billions off of tobacco settlement money which was supposed to be earmarked to get people to quick smoking and cover medical costs related to smoking, but ... not all of it has. At a guess, I’d say not much.
Is it any wonder that the U.S. still pays farmers to grow this stuff when they make so much off of it?
On the average, every smoker saves the government twenty thousand dollars per head on costs saved. That’s because cigarette smokers die early and don’t collect so much retirement money. You might think they make up for it in added health care expenses, but that twenty thousand is after those are deducted.
Also, the Government makes a ton off of the taxes they charge to addicts. When the Clinton administration was trying to achieve universal coverage for Americans (like every other civilized nation) one of the ways they wanted to raise money was by increasing cigarette taxes but they had calculated that if they raised those taxes too high people would actually start to quit smoking and the revenue would decrease at that point. There was a real careful calculation about how high they could go before that horrible thing happened. (And America still doesn’t have universal health care and our life span ranks twenty sixth in the World and forty five million Americans don’t have any coverage at all).
If you ask me there’s the real secret to saving social security. It’s not private accounts, it’s smoking. Everybody in the U.S. should be required to smoke, the system would become solvent again with everybody dying off and not using up their benefits, plus - and here’s the real beauty of the plan - everyone would be cool. (As we all know from highschool, cool people smoke). Finally, the Government, both state and Federal, has made billions off of tobacco settlement money which was supposed to be earmarked to get people to quick smoking and cover medical costs related to smoking, but ... not all of it has. At a guess, I’d say not much.
Is it any wonder that the U.S. still pays farmers to grow this stuff when they make so much off of it?
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:38 PM
0 comments
Reincarnation in the Bible
The doctrine of reincarnation originally existed in the Bible.
Surprised?
I heard this one from my Uncle, an Episcopalian minister.I was in military language school on the East Coast (Maryland) and had popped over to where he lived in New York for a week-end visit. At his invitation, we played a game of chess together which was no challenge at all to him - he was a chess master - while I played occasionally and indifferently. My Uncle, (Roy Sommers) I should say, was a very educated man and wrote extensively on religious matters. I’ve read some of his writing and would say that he wrote, for public consumption, in a rather orthodox manner while keeping his privately held beliefs to himself, as they conflicted with that orthodoxy.
He explained to me that a number of years previously he and another minister had conducted experiments with a OUIJI board. This is controversial to say the least. A large contingent of Christians would say that he was clearly consorting with the Devil and that the ‘spirits’ contacting him were demons with a mission to mislead he and others into believing that they would never face God’s judgement.
My Uncle brought this up and had a response, which I can’t exactly remember, other than it didn’t quite satisfy me. I mean, how do you identify who’s moving that board, after all? The simplest explanation would be that it’s the participants sub-conscious, except, of course, that routinely people come up with information that they have no conscious or sub-conscious knowledge of, which I suppose could be from their own psychic facilities, but let’s not even go there. Alright? That’s another kettle of fish.
The ‘spirits’ (or demons, if you insist) that contacted my Uncle and his fellow minister told about past lives they had lived and also about past lives that my Uncle and co-experimenter had lived. My Uncle who was well educated on the history of Christianity knew that reincarnation had once been part of the original writings but had been suppressed when it was taken over by Rome. A good book that includes this is Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
They tell an apocryphal story about how when Pope Innocent the third ordered the slaughter of a large heretical sect of reincarnation believing Christians in France, named the Cathars, he was asked: “But Your Holiness, what if there be true Christians among these heretics?” To which the pontiff wittily replied: “Slay them all. God will know his own!”
Ha. Ha. Good one, Pope.
However, there are still verses in the Bible that point to Reincarnation. Here’s one: in Luke Jesus cures a blind man of his blindness and the disciples ask Jesus what the man had done that he should have been born blind. To which Jesus answers that the man had done nothing, but had instead been born blind so Jesus could perform this miracle in front of them.
Well, here’s the thing. If the guy was born blind, then he obviously couldn’t have done much to deserve that particular punishment from God. Unless, I suppose, he was a really bad fetus. More likely, the disciples could only be referring to what the man had done in a previous life. Okay, here’s another. In all four of the gospels the disciples pester Jesus on how come Elisha (Or Elijah. I just don’t feel like stopping to look this up) has not come to herald the coming of the messiah. To which Jesus replied, that Elisha had already come but the disciples were too dense to realize it. They understood this to mean that John the Baptist was Elisha. I ask you: How could John the Baptist also be Elisha unless he were Elisha reincarnated?
There are probably other examples I could find for this, if I really wanted to, but how many do you really need? In this case, one is a lot. Personally, I tend to accept reincarnation. However, I’ve never been particularly interested in knowing who I might have been in previous lives or what I might have done. That’s really living in the past and not even a past I can do much about, because I can do things about things in this life but those other ones - well, I’m already dead and it’s way to late to fix things. None the less, I’ve had a past life memory, which I will reveal now. I have to warn you that it’s not all that interesting and I need to give a little tedious background to explain how it was that I had this memory. I
’d become interested in a technique called the frequency following response which had been patented by a radio station owner and engineer (then later psychic researcher) by the name of Robert Monroe. Monroe had discovered that by using certain pitches of sound separated in the ears, you could get the subject brainwaves to synch on to these signals and manipulate these brainwaves.
I came across a device based on this principal at a health food store once and the owner, Mary Beth, allowed me to try it out. It was sort of a set of eyeglasses with flashing lights and attached headsets. You might have seen these things advertised in various magazines, I know OMNI use to have Ads for them all the time and while they interested me, I just couldn’t see spending around two hundred bucks for what seemed to be a novelty.
So, in Mary Beth’s store I tried it out for free. You close your eyes when you used it, I found out, so that the lights flash on the back of your eyes. The sound that the machine made was sort of like a heavy clicking and it was different for each ear.
After a few minutes of using it, I realized that something was happening. I started to get a real trippy feeling like I was flying through space or at least flying through a sort of tunnel of flashing lights. The device’s program stopped after about ten minutes and when I took it off I felt kind of floaty and at peace, like a cheap nirvana of sorts, which wore off after about fifteen minutes. Later I came across a website for the Monroe Institute in Faber West Virginia where I found I could buy a taped series designed by Robert Monroe himself. Which I did. The tapes consisted of a narrator, an older man, I believe Robert Monroe himself, giving directions much as in a self hypnotic tape. In the background the special sound was playing. With the other device this sound was very noticeable but here it was quieter and scratchy. The instructions with the tapes indicated that this was on purpose and not a malfunction of the tape.
The tapes were more subtle than the machine and took more patience to feel an effect. About four or five tapes in, I was using one of these tapes and starting getting flashes of Egyptian type architecture of the type that you’d see in Thebes. At this point I heard the narrator on the tape say: “You will know who you were.”And that’s when I had the memory.
A whole bunch of information came to me in a complete gestalt along with the image. The person I saw was man of about sixty in a lower room of a temple complex in Thebes (Egypt) about three thousand years ago. It was twilight and starting to become cool. The man who I apparently used to be was perhaps five feet tall but I knew that at this period he was not considered short. He (I) was crop haired with gentle eyes and a very lined face. His skin was brown and he was bare chested to the waist. I ‘got’ that his profession was ‘alchemist’ although I also ‘got’ that this was entirely imprecise as there would be no current translation as to what he did in his society.
It seemed to me that he was considered to be a very humorous man. I should also say that it’s possible that in this scenario I could also have been the person looking at this man.
There wasn’t any dramatic context to this vision, in fact, it seemed to be a rather ordinary day. It does make me feel a little disheartened, though, to think that if this is in some way real, I don’t seem to have progressed much in those thousands of intervening years. After all, back then I was an alchemist and could presumably turn all sorts of things into shiny gold while now I can’t turn nothing into nothing.
Surprised?
I heard this one from my Uncle, an Episcopalian minister.I was in military language school on the East Coast (Maryland) and had popped over to where he lived in New York for a week-end visit. At his invitation, we played a game of chess together which was no challenge at all to him - he was a chess master - while I played occasionally and indifferently. My Uncle, (Roy Sommers) I should say, was a very educated man and wrote extensively on religious matters. I’ve read some of his writing and would say that he wrote, for public consumption, in a rather orthodox manner while keeping his privately held beliefs to himself, as they conflicted with that orthodoxy.
He explained to me that a number of years previously he and another minister had conducted experiments with a OUIJI board. This is controversial to say the least. A large contingent of Christians would say that he was clearly consorting with the Devil and that the ‘spirits’ contacting him were demons with a mission to mislead he and others into believing that they would never face God’s judgement.
My Uncle brought this up and had a response, which I can’t exactly remember, other than it didn’t quite satisfy me. I mean, how do you identify who’s moving that board, after all? The simplest explanation would be that it’s the participants sub-conscious, except, of course, that routinely people come up with information that they have no conscious or sub-conscious knowledge of, which I suppose could be from their own psychic facilities, but let’s not even go there. Alright? That’s another kettle of fish.
The ‘spirits’ (or demons, if you insist) that contacted my Uncle and his fellow minister told about past lives they had lived and also about past lives that my Uncle and co-experimenter had lived. My Uncle who was well educated on the history of Christianity knew that reincarnation had once been part of the original writings but had been suppressed when it was taken over by Rome. A good book that includes this is Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
They tell an apocryphal story about how when Pope Innocent the third ordered the slaughter of a large heretical sect of reincarnation believing Christians in France, named the Cathars, he was asked: “But Your Holiness, what if there be true Christians among these heretics?” To which the pontiff wittily replied: “Slay them all. God will know his own!”
Ha. Ha. Good one, Pope.
However, there are still verses in the Bible that point to Reincarnation. Here’s one: in Luke Jesus cures a blind man of his blindness and the disciples ask Jesus what the man had done that he should have been born blind. To which Jesus answers that the man had done nothing, but had instead been born blind so Jesus could perform this miracle in front of them.
Well, here’s the thing. If the guy was born blind, then he obviously couldn’t have done much to deserve that particular punishment from God. Unless, I suppose, he was a really bad fetus. More likely, the disciples could only be referring to what the man had done in a previous life. Okay, here’s another. In all four of the gospels the disciples pester Jesus on how come Elisha (Or Elijah. I just don’t feel like stopping to look this up) has not come to herald the coming of the messiah. To which Jesus replied, that Elisha had already come but the disciples were too dense to realize it. They understood this to mean that John the Baptist was Elisha. I ask you: How could John the Baptist also be Elisha unless he were Elisha reincarnated?
There are probably other examples I could find for this, if I really wanted to, but how many do you really need? In this case, one is a lot. Personally, I tend to accept reincarnation. However, I’ve never been particularly interested in knowing who I might have been in previous lives or what I might have done. That’s really living in the past and not even a past I can do much about, because I can do things about things in this life but those other ones - well, I’m already dead and it’s way to late to fix things. None the less, I’ve had a past life memory, which I will reveal now. I have to warn you that it’s not all that interesting and I need to give a little tedious background to explain how it was that I had this memory. I
’d become interested in a technique called the frequency following response which had been patented by a radio station owner and engineer (then later psychic researcher) by the name of Robert Monroe. Monroe had discovered that by using certain pitches of sound separated in the ears, you could get the subject brainwaves to synch on to these signals and manipulate these brainwaves.
I came across a device based on this principal at a health food store once and the owner, Mary Beth, allowed me to try it out. It was sort of a set of eyeglasses with flashing lights and attached headsets. You might have seen these things advertised in various magazines, I know OMNI use to have Ads for them all the time and while they interested me, I just couldn’t see spending around two hundred bucks for what seemed to be a novelty.
So, in Mary Beth’s store I tried it out for free. You close your eyes when you used it, I found out, so that the lights flash on the back of your eyes. The sound that the machine made was sort of like a heavy clicking and it was different for each ear.
After a few minutes of using it, I realized that something was happening. I started to get a real trippy feeling like I was flying through space or at least flying through a sort of tunnel of flashing lights. The device’s program stopped after about ten minutes and when I took it off I felt kind of floaty and at peace, like a cheap nirvana of sorts, which wore off after about fifteen minutes. Later I came across a website for the Monroe Institute in Faber West Virginia where I found I could buy a taped series designed by Robert Monroe himself. Which I did. The tapes consisted of a narrator, an older man, I believe Robert Monroe himself, giving directions much as in a self hypnotic tape. In the background the special sound was playing. With the other device this sound was very noticeable but here it was quieter and scratchy. The instructions with the tapes indicated that this was on purpose and not a malfunction of the tape.
The tapes were more subtle than the machine and took more patience to feel an effect. About four or five tapes in, I was using one of these tapes and starting getting flashes of Egyptian type architecture of the type that you’d see in Thebes. At this point I heard the narrator on the tape say: “You will know who you were.”And that’s when I had the memory.
A whole bunch of information came to me in a complete gestalt along with the image. The person I saw was man of about sixty in a lower room of a temple complex in Thebes (Egypt) about three thousand years ago. It was twilight and starting to become cool. The man who I apparently used to be was perhaps five feet tall but I knew that at this period he was not considered short. He (I) was crop haired with gentle eyes and a very lined face. His skin was brown and he was bare chested to the waist. I ‘got’ that his profession was ‘alchemist’ although I also ‘got’ that this was entirely imprecise as there would be no current translation as to what he did in his society.
It seemed to me that he was considered to be a very humorous man. I should also say that it’s possible that in this scenario I could also have been the person looking at this man.
There wasn’t any dramatic context to this vision, in fact, it seemed to be a rather ordinary day. It does make me feel a little disheartened, though, to think that if this is in some way real, I don’t seem to have progressed much in those thousands of intervening years. After all, back then I was an alchemist and could presumably turn all sorts of things into shiny gold while now I can’t turn nothing into nothing.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:32 PM
1 comments
Apocalypse When?
I’ve been wondering if the rapture, where good Christians are brought up to Heaven in the end times, hasn’t already happened - only the reason we don’t know it is that God is really, really picky and he only raptured up like about a dozen people and nobody much noticed it. All those other people who expected to be raptured up, well, he didn’t like them so much because they were too arrogant. They just expected that God should go out of his way to fetch them and he didn’t like being told what he had to do.
Anyways, that’s just a thought.
Please read the following sentence: “I plan to go to the Mall of America, in Minneapolis, and buy socks.”
After reading that did you believe that I meant that I, after dying and going to Heaven, plan to be resurrected and return in two thousand years to a Mall that had in those two thousand years been destroyed which does not exist in two thousand years but must be rebuilt in a place called Minneapolis, that also will not exist and must also be rebuilt? Or, on the other hand, did you think that I (more reasonably) meant that I was going to buy socks sometime during my present lifetime, most likely pretty soon?
Aha. So ... you selected the second option. Didn’t you? Then why if you didn’t automatically assume that I was talking about aeons in the future would you assume that in the book of Revelations that St. John the Divine did.
This one occurred to me at a time when I had both insomnia and no cable and the only thing on TV was a show called the World Tomorrow which of course, I had to watch. (What? Turn off the TV? I’m sorry, that’s just not an option). I remember this one show in Texas called the 3 to 5 AM Solution that featured a married couple in their sixties. She had too much make-up and a blonde bouffant, and he had the most remarkable comb-over I’d ever seen with ever single hair remaining on his head grown long and shellacked over the bald parts, which was most of it. I rather admired him for that spectacular comb-over. About then I’d started to get a little bit thinner on top myself and I paid very careful attention to how he did it - just in case.
The World Tomorrow was set up like a news show with the star Jack Van Impe reporting. He had his wife, too, I think, doing her special commentary. Jack Van I. Was giving his interpretation of Revelations and I followed along in the Bible I had at that time, which had belonged to an ex-room-mate named Al who still owes me two hundred and thirty dollars for long distance calls to Washington State, where he became a big, fancy engineer for Boeing. (Al, pay up. I need that money). This particular Bible started each chapter with a little summary of the book, including who wrote it, where and more importantly when.
It said Revelations had been written between 66 and 69 A.D. By this time I knew a little bit about the history of this era. At this time Israel was in revolt and Rome was experiencing a civil war as the reign of the emperor Nero was coming to a close. 69 A.D. was called the year of the four Caesars, who were successively: Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. In 70 A.D. Vespasian’s son (and future emperor) Titus destroyedthe temple in Jerusalem.
Well, this just made sense. Of course, St. John the Divine would be talking about a temple that existed when he was writing. Just like he was talking about a Rome that existed when he wrote about it and not some future Rome-like entity like the Common Market or the European union. Just like he would be talking about an Israel that existed at the time and not some future new Israel.
Revelationists usually have a problem in explaining why the United States does not show up in any form in their great prophecy, like Hal Lindsay, who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth and excuses this omission by saying that the United States must have declined so much by the End of the World that it didn’t even bear mentioning.
Maybe. Or maybe it was that nobody in the first century Roman era had any idea that there were a couple of extra continents across the Atlantic. And that’s why it isn’t mentioned. In general I have a bone to pick with Lindsay and other authors of his ilk. He uses basic fortune tellers tricks, taking very vague references out of context and then bending them to his own uses. When I got wise to him, I went through his book and then read the verses before and after the ones he cited. In context, it looks entirely different from what he says. Here’s one that sticks in my mind: he says that the quotation from Revelations that ‘a great noise will come from the North’ (or something like that) actually means that Russian troops will invade Israel because the word or noise in Hebrew is Ra-ash (true enough) which sounds like Russia (kind of. Okay) so obviously that means Russian troops.
But why would the author, writing in Greek, switch to Aramaic to indicate foreign troops from a specific area when in all other places he specifically names the countries - in Greek -and when he talks about troops, he says so? Russia just becomes ‘noise’ and we’re supposed to accept that? OR maybe he really did mean a literal noise. You think?
One more thing. There’s a lot of talk about in these circles about the increased number of natural disasters indicating the approach of the end times - like birth pangs for the end of the world. Are there really more natural disasters or is it just that there are more people on the Earth and so more people are going to be affected by them and it seems like more, but it isn’t? Ninety percent of the World’s population lives within a hundred miles of a major coastline which if you look at a world map is the area occupied by the line that shows you where the coastlines are. When a natural disaster hits a coastal area, like the Tsunami, or hurricanes or typhoons or Earth quakes, then a lot of people are going to feel it.
It all comes down to this question: How obtuse is God, anyways? If he really has something he wants to tell us, why is he only sending us cataclysmic hints and not getting to the point. If he wanted to, for example, he could write on the moon what’s on his mind, like maybe ‘stop fornicating’ and then we’d all know for sure that he’s really serious about us not fornicating.
Anyways, that’s just a thought.
Please read the following sentence: “I plan to go to the Mall of America, in Minneapolis, and buy socks.”
After reading that did you believe that I meant that I, after dying and going to Heaven, plan to be resurrected and return in two thousand years to a Mall that had in those two thousand years been destroyed which does not exist in two thousand years but must be rebuilt in a place called Minneapolis, that also will not exist and must also be rebuilt? Or, on the other hand, did you think that I (more reasonably) meant that I was going to buy socks sometime during my present lifetime, most likely pretty soon?
Aha. So ... you selected the second option. Didn’t you? Then why if you didn’t automatically assume that I was talking about aeons in the future would you assume that in the book of Revelations that St. John the Divine did.
This one occurred to me at a time when I had both insomnia and no cable and the only thing on TV was a show called the World Tomorrow which of course, I had to watch. (What? Turn off the TV? I’m sorry, that’s just not an option). I remember this one show in Texas called the 3 to 5 AM Solution that featured a married couple in their sixties. She had too much make-up and a blonde bouffant, and he had the most remarkable comb-over I’d ever seen with ever single hair remaining on his head grown long and shellacked over the bald parts, which was most of it. I rather admired him for that spectacular comb-over. About then I’d started to get a little bit thinner on top myself and I paid very careful attention to how he did it - just in case.
The World Tomorrow was set up like a news show with the star Jack Van Impe reporting. He had his wife, too, I think, doing her special commentary. Jack Van I. Was giving his interpretation of Revelations and I followed along in the Bible I had at that time, which had belonged to an ex-room-mate named Al who still owes me two hundred and thirty dollars for long distance calls to Washington State, where he became a big, fancy engineer for Boeing. (Al, pay up. I need that money). This particular Bible started each chapter with a little summary of the book, including who wrote it, where and more importantly when.
It said Revelations had been written between 66 and 69 A.D. By this time I knew a little bit about the history of this era. At this time Israel was in revolt and Rome was experiencing a civil war as the reign of the emperor Nero was coming to a close. 69 A.D. was called the year of the four Caesars, who were successively: Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. In 70 A.D. Vespasian’s son (and future emperor) Titus destroyedthe temple in Jerusalem.
Well, this just made sense. Of course, St. John the Divine would be talking about a temple that existed when he was writing. Just like he was talking about a Rome that existed when he wrote about it and not some future Rome-like entity like the Common Market or the European union. Just like he would be talking about an Israel that existed at the time and not some future new Israel.
Revelationists usually have a problem in explaining why the United States does not show up in any form in their great prophecy, like Hal Lindsay, who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth and excuses this omission by saying that the United States must have declined so much by the End of the World that it didn’t even bear mentioning.
Maybe. Or maybe it was that nobody in the first century Roman era had any idea that there were a couple of extra continents across the Atlantic. And that’s why it isn’t mentioned. In general I have a bone to pick with Lindsay and other authors of his ilk. He uses basic fortune tellers tricks, taking very vague references out of context and then bending them to his own uses. When I got wise to him, I went through his book and then read the verses before and after the ones he cited. In context, it looks entirely different from what he says. Here’s one that sticks in my mind: he says that the quotation from Revelations that ‘a great noise will come from the North’ (or something like that) actually means that Russian troops will invade Israel because the word or noise in Hebrew is Ra-ash (true enough) which sounds like Russia (kind of. Okay) so obviously that means Russian troops.
But why would the author, writing in Greek, switch to Aramaic to indicate foreign troops from a specific area when in all other places he specifically names the countries - in Greek -and when he talks about troops, he says so? Russia just becomes ‘noise’ and we’re supposed to accept that? OR maybe he really did mean a literal noise. You think?
One more thing. There’s a lot of talk about in these circles about the increased number of natural disasters indicating the approach of the end times - like birth pangs for the end of the world. Are there really more natural disasters or is it just that there are more people on the Earth and so more people are going to be affected by them and it seems like more, but it isn’t? Ninety percent of the World’s population lives within a hundred miles of a major coastline which if you look at a world map is the area occupied by the line that shows you where the coastlines are. When a natural disaster hits a coastal area, like the Tsunami, or hurricanes or typhoons or Earth quakes, then a lot of people are going to feel it.
It all comes down to this question: How obtuse is God, anyways? If he really has something he wants to tell us, why is he only sending us cataclysmic hints and not getting to the point. If he wanted to, for example, he could write on the moon what’s on his mind, like maybe ‘stop fornicating’ and then we’d all know for sure that he’s really serious about us not fornicating.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:25 PM
1 comments
Energy is Limitless
Well, it blows in the wind and falls from the sky and pops up from the ground, for starters. If everybody in our country, say, took all the money they spend on oil and gas and built themselves a wind-mill and bought an electric car there absolutely would be no energy shortage - ever.
“But, Ste-eve,” I hear you whining, “I don’t want to build a windmill!”
Okay. I’ve got a solution for you polluters out there, too. Here’s how it goes. I am a big fan of the Jon Stewart show. A couple of times on his show he’s made the quip that he can’t understand how people aren’t able to produce oil a lot more cheaper since: “it’s only carbon.” He said that once to the former New Jersey governor and then head of the EPA, who chuckled merrily and then did not answer his question. I wrote to him at an address I got off of the Internet and then got the letter returned, so, I’ll tell you instead.
Thermal depolymerization, if I remember correctly, is the name of the process. It was featured in Discover magazine in May 2003 and the name of the article was Anything into oil. This article discussed how the process was being used to take biological waste, in this case it was at a chicken farm where they took the unusable parts of the chicken and turned them into oil.
The way it works is that the biological/carbon containing material is put into the device, a vacuum is created, and the water on the material is boiled away. As this happens, it frees the bonds of the carbon containing material and it is turned into oil. The vacuum is necessary so that the amount of energy needed to cause the moisture to boil is greatly lessened. The thing looks like a huge tangle of pipes and takes up a lot of real estate, but it’s really basic and simple technology that’s used in an innovative way.
The company, I believe, is called Changing World Technologies. At present it costs them twelve dollars a barrel to turn animal waste into oil - which is a nice profit with oil at fifty bucks a barrel, however, it’s still a whole lot more expensive than pumping the same amount, which costs the oil company three dollars a barrel.
Discover magazine did an update on this company a few months back. They were attempting to build a demonstration facility but had a setback when their contractor produced faulty workmanship (ie) pipes that needed a huge amount of re-welding.
It really was one of these things that sounds too good to be true, turning garbage into oil. Well, you can look up the article for yourself, or I suppose have an assistant of yours do it for you.
Now, believe it or not: not all scientists accept that oil is, in fact, a fossil fuel or a limited resource. There is an alternate theory that oil is not composed of decayed biomass that seeped down into deep pockets in the Earth but rather is a result of geological processes within the planet and it bubbled up into those same pockets. Time magazine had an article about a scientist named Gold who proposed this and was also responsible for some other unconventional theories that turned out to be true. I forget what those theories were, maybe about comets. I filed his away in my mind and then forgot about it - because everyone kept saying oil was a fossil fuel and it seemed a pretty safe bet that they weren’t all wrong. Although, I always found it odd that oil which would have to be created by an abundance of life is found underneath some of the world’s most inhospitable areas. (Deserts, frozen wilderness, deep, deep under the ocean).
Then NASA came back and said that the probe they had sent to one of Saturn’s moons, Triton, had found seas of oil on the surface. Triton, they estimated, had temperatures of below two hundred and eighty degrees centigrade and a methane atmosphere. How did that oil get there? Did Triton have a whole bunch of really cold dinosaurs up there or was it maybe the result of geologic processes that might be similar to Earth’s?
Okay. That’s something for you to think about. It’s an alternate theory and I don’t necessarily believe it, but you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty interesting.
“But, Ste-eve,” I hear you whining, “I don’t want to build a windmill!”
Okay. I’ve got a solution for you polluters out there, too. Here’s how it goes. I am a big fan of the Jon Stewart show. A couple of times on his show he’s made the quip that he can’t understand how people aren’t able to produce oil a lot more cheaper since: “it’s only carbon.” He said that once to the former New Jersey governor and then head of the EPA, who chuckled merrily and then did not answer his question. I wrote to him at an address I got off of the Internet and then got the letter returned, so, I’ll tell you instead.
Thermal depolymerization, if I remember correctly, is the name of the process. It was featured in Discover magazine in May 2003 and the name of the article was Anything into oil. This article discussed how the process was being used to take biological waste, in this case it was at a chicken farm where they took the unusable parts of the chicken and turned them into oil.
The way it works is that the biological/carbon containing material is put into the device, a vacuum is created, and the water on the material is boiled away. As this happens, it frees the bonds of the carbon containing material and it is turned into oil. The vacuum is necessary so that the amount of energy needed to cause the moisture to boil is greatly lessened. The thing looks like a huge tangle of pipes and takes up a lot of real estate, but it’s really basic and simple technology that’s used in an innovative way.
The company, I believe, is called Changing World Technologies. At present it costs them twelve dollars a barrel to turn animal waste into oil - which is a nice profit with oil at fifty bucks a barrel, however, it’s still a whole lot more expensive than pumping the same amount, which costs the oil company three dollars a barrel.
Discover magazine did an update on this company a few months back. They were attempting to build a demonstration facility but had a setback when their contractor produced faulty workmanship (ie) pipes that needed a huge amount of re-welding.
It really was one of these things that sounds too good to be true, turning garbage into oil. Well, you can look up the article for yourself, or I suppose have an assistant of yours do it for you.
Now, believe it or not: not all scientists accept that oil is, in fact, a fossil fuel or a limited resource. There is an alternate theory that oil is not composed of decayed biomass that seeped down into deep pockets in the Earth but rather is a result of geological processes within the planet and it bubbled up into those same pockets. Time magazine had an article about a scientist named Gold who proposed this and was also responsible for some other unconventional theories that turned out to be true. I forget what those theories were, maybe about comets. I filed his away in my mind and then forgot about it - because everyone kept saying oil was a fossil fuel and it seemed a pretty safe bet that they weren’t all wrong. Although, I always found it odd that oil which would have to be created by an abundance of life is found underneath some of the world’s most inhospitable areas. (Deserts, frozen wilderness, deep, deep under the ocean).
Then NASA came back and said that the probe they had sent to one of Saturn’s moons, Triton, had found seas of oil on the surface. Triton, they estimated, had temperatures of below two hundred and eighty degrees centigrade and a methane atmosphere. How did that oil get there? Did Triton have a whole bunch of really cold dinosaurs up there or was it maybe the result of geologic processes that might be similar to Earth’s?
Okay. That’s something for you to think about. It’s an alternate theory and I don’t necessarily believe it, but you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty interesting.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:17 PM
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UFOs are Real!
I read a review once about a book where the author argued that the universe must be almost completely barren of life and Earth is pretty much the only place where life could have sprouted. From the review I picked out a few poor premises and I wasn’t about to go out and purchase that particular book. The fact of the matter was that this was an example of a scientist being un-scientific.
First of all, scientists really do not have a handle on how life itself came to be. They think they might be getting close to the answer, but you know what? I think they’ve had enough time and they should be a little bit more than close. Life arises in a vast variety of circumstance, at the bottom of the ocean, near volcanic vents, in arctic sub-zero.
The proper stance as far as life existing elsewhere in the Universe should be this: We have exactly one data point, us (or two, if you want to count Mars) about Life and the assumption we should make is that we are in fact average and not at either end of the bell curve of possibilities. The Universe, really, looks to be extraordinarily biophilic and of all the Universes possible, why do you think we got this one?
But if we’re average, that also means that we’re not the smartest of the life forms out there. We can’t figure out how to easily move across the reaches of space, but what do you expect from what are really just extra-large ape brains? There are pictures of what Extra-terrestrials (more later) are supposed to look like, and these guys have very big brains indeed. A monkey could never, ever build an automobile no matter how far monkey science progressed. It might well be the same with humans and interstellar space travel.
I put this proposition to a fellow I used to work with. He was a former military man (Army Rangers) in his middle years, still tremendously fit, though now with a bit of a pot belly . He had quite a bit more personal discipline than me. We were traveling together back from work when his car ran out of gas and as we walked to the gas station, about a mile in bitter cold January weather, we both saw a light in the sky.
We watched it for awhile and concluded that it was a helicopter, but I offered to him my view plus the further observation that most certainly there must be many people who’ve had encounters with UFOs which no one will ever know about because they, wanting not to appear even slightly insane, will never reveal it.
Then he told me his story.
One day he and his sixteen year old son were on the Florida coast when they saw a UFO. This UFO made erratic movements across the sky and after a few minutes the UFO went straight down into the water. They had no missing time or other after effects. It’s not the most dramatic story I’ve heard on the subject, but it is one that I have no doubt is absolutely true. This sober-headed ex-ranger was simply not lying to me.
First of all, scientists really do not have a handle on how life itself came to be. They think they might be getting close to the answer, but you know what? I think they’ve had enough time and they should be a little bit more than close. Life arises in a vast variety of circumstance, at the bottom of the ocean, near volcanic vents, in arctic sub-zero.
The proper stance as far as life existing elsewhere in the Universe should be this: We have exactly one data point, us (or two, if you want to count Mars) about Life and the assumption we should make is that we are in fact average and not at either end of the bell curve of possibilities. The Universe, really, looks to be extraordinarily biophilic and of all the Universes possible, why do you think we got this one?
But if we’re average, that also means that we’re not the smartest of the life forms out there. We can’t figure out how to easily move across the reaches of space, but what do you expect from what are really just extra-large ape brains? There are pictures of what Extra-terrestrials (more later) are supposed to look like, and these guys have very big brains indeed. A monkey could never, ever build an automobile no matter how far monkey science progressed. It might well be the same with humans and interstellar space travel.
I put this proposition to a fellow I used to work with. He was a former military man (Army Rangers) in his middle years, still tremendously fit, though now with a bit of a pot belly . He had quite a bit more personal discipline than me. We were traveling together back from work when his car ran out of gas and as we walked to the gas station, about a mile in bitter cold January weather, we both saw a light in the sky.
We watched it for awhile and concluded that it was a helicopter, but I offered to him my view plus the further observation that most certainly there must be many people who’ve had encounters with UFOs which no one will ever know about because they, wanting not to appear even slightly insane, will never reveal it.
Then he told me his story.
One day he and his sixteen year old son were on the Florida coast when they saw a UFO. This UFO made erratic movements across the sky and after a few minutes the UFO went straight down into the water. They had no missing time or other after effects. It’s not the most dramatic story I’ve heard on the subject, but it is one that I have no doubt is absolutely true. This sober-headed ex-ranger was simply not lying to me.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:14 PM
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The Government Lies to You
Well, Duh.
No, I mean aside from weasel politicians telling you just and only what you want to hear and then doing something exactly opposite, or bureaucrats giving you mush mouthed explanations - the Government really lies. And do you know why?
Because you can’t handle the truth.
I had a security clearance for a number of years and while I can’t reveal any actual classified information, I can tell you a couple of important policies that will give you a clue. Number one: The official policy is neither to confirm nor deny classified information, to say nothing about it at all ever. Number two: What we do when we gather intelligence information is not nearly as important as how well we do it. Put those two together and you will know that any time the government reveals to you something that is or has been classified they are doing so for a purpose, and that purpose is usually to make our intelligence efforts look worse than they actually are.
If it’s secret and the government is talking about it, then they most certainly are lying about it. Here’s an example: George Tenet, who as CIA director supposedly muffed the intelligence that supposedly showed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which turned out not to be there, recently received the Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honor) from the hands of the president. Odd reward for someone who screwed up so badly, wouldn’t you say? Unless, of course, he hadn’t screwed up at all but had done exactly what he was supposed to.
Hmm.
No, I mean aside from weasel politicians telling you just and only what you want to hear and then doing something exactly opposite, or bureaucrats giving you mush mouthed explanations - the Government really lies. And do you know why?
Because you can’t handle the truth.
I had a security clearance for a number of years and while I can’t reveal any actual classified information, I can tell you a couple of important policies that will give you a clue. Number one: The official policy is neither to confirm nor deny classified information, to say nothing about it at all ever. Number two: What we do when we gather intelligence information is not nearly as important as how well we do it. Put those two together and you will know that any time the government reveals to you something that is or has been classified they are doing so for a purpose, and that purpose is usually to make our intelligence efforts look worse than they actually are.
If it’s secret and the government is talking about it, then they most certainly are lying about it. Here’s an example: George Tenet, who as CIA director supposedly muffed the intelligence that supposedly showed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which turned out not to be there, recently received the Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honor) from the hands of the president. Odd reward for someone who screwed up so badly, wouldn’t you say? Unless, of course, he hadn’t screwed up at all but had done exactly what he was supposed to.
Hmm.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:11 PM
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Atlantis Missing
About fifteen thousand years ago, the superiorly evolved continent of Atlantis sank in the Atlantic Ocean, thus giving the Ocean its name. The Atlanteans were an advanced race with pyramids and Ray guns and other marvelous technology powered by special crystals. Their overweening lust for power led to their own destruction. Or at least that’s how the story goes.
It was first written about by Plato as related by an Egyptian mystic. In the twentieth century this tale gained credence through the words of the sleeping prophet from Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce. Edgar Cayce used to go into trances and when in a trance he would have remarkable knowledge of things. Mostly he healed, that is, he would come up with remedies for the sick people that were supposed to be highly effective. Although this is disputed. He spoke through the voices of disembodied spirits who among other things said that there was such a thing as reincarnation and that the continent of Atlantis would rise again. Cayce gave somewhat specific ranges of years when this would happen and ... it hasn’t. I think he said it would happen in the eighties, which of course, it didn’t.
The mechanism that would cause this was polar shifts, that is to say, the whole planet would flip on it’s axis. There are people who believe this and they do cite evidence, such as magnetic pole reversals and residue of lush, growing life on the South pole, which is presently very inhospitable to most life.
The conventional explanation for this residue is that the jet stream must have been circulating over the South Pole in distant pre-history and that’s why that residue is there. That’s kind of an incredible theory in itself. But I think more scientists should be plumbing the depths where it used to be just for the fun of it.
Ignatius Donnally wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World which details the evidence from archaeology and geology that supports this. His evidence is of the type of pointing out architecture, various hieroglyphics and the such in Egypt and South America that have remarkable similarities. He was writing at a time when plate tectonics was not generally accepted by geologists.
Mostly, scientists try and explain away Atlantis as one of the many Mediterranean island civilizations that sunk in antiquity. And there are a lot of those. It doesn’t seem to matter much that Plato placed Atlantis not somewhere in the Mediterranean sea but squarely in the Atlantic Ocean, I mean, why do they Think it’s called the Atlantic Ocean?
It was first written about by Plato as related by an Egyptian mystic. In the twentieth century this tale gained credence through the words of the sleeping prophet from Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce. Edgar Cayce used to go into trances and when in a trance he would have remarkable knowledge of things. Mostly he healed, that is, he would come up with remedies for the sick people that were supposed to be highly effective. Although this is disputed. He spoke through the voices of disembodied spirits who among other things said that there was such a thing as reincarnation and that the continent of Atlantis would rise again. Cayce gave somewhat specific ranges of years when this would happen and ... it hasn’t. I think he said it would happen in the eighties, which of course, it didn’t.
The mechanism that would cause this was polar shifts, that is to say, the whole planet would flip on it’s axis. There are people who believe this and they do cite evidence, such as magnetic pole reversals and residue of lush, growing life on the South pole, which is presently very inhospitable to most life.
The conventional explanation for this residue is that the jet stream must have been circulating over the South Pole in distant pre-history and that’s why that residue is there. That’s kind of an incredible theory in itself. But I think more scientists should be plumbing the depths where it used to be just for the fun of it.
Ignatius Donnally wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World which details the evidence from archaeology and geology that supports this. His evidence is of the type of pointing out architecture, various hieroglyphics and the such in Egypt and South America that have remarkable similarities. He was writing at a time when plate tectonics was not generally accepted by geologists.
Mostly, scientists try and explain away Atlantis as one of the many Mediterranean island civilizations that sunk in antiquity. And there are a lot of those. It doesn’t seem to matter much that Plato placed Atlantis not somewhere in the Mediterranean sea but squarely in the Atlantic Ocean, I mean, why do they Think it’s called the Atlantic Ocean?
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:08 PM
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The Conspiracy Starts
In general I’m a big fan of conspiracy theories.
In my heart of hearts, I know I should be more skeptical, but I just love the idea of a world that is more interesting and multi-layered than the one that is apparent and that I live inevery day. The title I put up above isn’t one I came up with myself - Alas - but comes from an album I listened to a long time ago by The Firesign Theater, which was a comedy troupe along the lines of the famed Second City Improv group. It was owned by a buddy of mine in the Air Force and this was back in the days way before videotape and definitely not DVD when you would listen to comedy.
I’m going to start with a story.
There was this woman I used to work with a few years back who was irritating in every way possible, or to be fair, I allowed myself to be irritated by pretty much everything she did. She was a large woman of middle years, with a single eyebrow and a tendency towards facial hair, who had no concept of personal space and would talk to you with her body pressed right up against yours, speaking in a little girl voice that belied her size and age. She dressed inappropriately for the workplace, with plunging necklines and too short dresses (and she didn’t wear underwear, either. Please don’t ask me how I know this). I later found out that women who behave in this manner tend to have a specific horrible thing in their background, which I’m thinking she probably did, too. But I didn’t have this information when I knew her. If I did, I might have acted a little more sympathetically towards her and I kind of feel guilty for being a jerk, at least more of a jerk than she deserved.
I used to wonder to myself what lesson God (or my higher power, or the universe, or whatever) was trying to teach me by constantly inflicting me with this person.
‘Patience’, I decided was the lesson. Although, I got to say, I don’t feel like much more of a patient person for having known her all those years. She used to constantly say things that I thought were just inane and for the most part I kept quiet, and usually managed to keep myself from rolling my eyes at her. Usually. One day, she happened to say something in her usual inane style, I think it might have been: “Angels are very popular these days.” Which I took to mean that she was basing her life’s philosophy on what was popular in the media that day and how on Earth can you do that?
Nowadays, I’m considerably more respectful to someone whose views differ from my own, and I’ll explain why. Later. However, at that time I wasn’t so thoughtful and understanding and so, I said something insolent. I forget what it was, but it caused her to comment that I wasn’t being very ‘Christian’.
To which I replied: “I’m not a Christian.”
Which was sort of, but not quite true. By that I mean if, like Thomas Jefferson, you confine your Christianity to just what Christ did and just what Christ said, then I can be a pretty good Christian. Mostly. There are still a few problems for me, but I can take most of it. I’m not down with him rebelling against Rome (See The Problem with Jesus) but other than I’m cool with the J-man.
She thought for a second, then asked: “Well, what are you?”
That was kind of an insulting way to ask that particular question, and I was kind of bugged - like ‘what’ might mean she thought I was other than human. Mostly I was bugged at myself for opening myself to that sort of enquiry. And I really resented that she thought that she could demand that everybody provide her with a label for themselves.
Nonetheless I did.
“I’m an existentialist,” I told her.
“Oh. What’s that?”
I let out a big exasperated sigh and said. “I don’t have the time to explain it to you.”
She took this to mean that I was saying she wasn’t smart enough to understand this and she huffed away. The truth, though, was I couldn’t explain existentialism to her because I didn’t understand existentialism. I’d had it explained to me a couple of times and I never quite got it thought I think I might have a philosophy that’s sort of like existentialism but as for the actual thing - I have no idea. Right now, I have a book by Sartre, Being and Nothingness, on my book shelf that exists for no other purpose than to impress people with my braininess and well-readness.
After many, many years of thinking about it I finally realized what my belief system was. I don’t believe anything.
Now, I know that I’ve already used the phrase ‘I believe’ a dozen times or so already on my website and I have and will continue to use it in the ordinary way everyone does. But as for true belief ... Nah. Here’s how it works, and this is the most important point, whatever you believe, whatever system of hought you may use to describe to yourself what is ‘real’ it is entirely separate from the thing itself. The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, and your philosophy is not reality.
I personally use what I call the multi-model approach, recognizing that whatever theory I happen to be applying to a situation, it is flawed. Every single theory so far has had it’s flaws.
In my heart of hearts, I know I should be more skeptical, but I just love the idea of a world that is more interesting and multi-layered than the one that is apparent and that I live inevery day. The title I put up above isn’t one I came up with myself - Alas - but comes from an album I listened to a long time ago by The Firesign Theater, which was a comedy troupe along the lines of the famed Second City Improv group. It was owned by a buddy of mine in the Air Force and this was back in the days way before videotape and definitely not DVD when you would listen to comedy.
I’m going to start with a story.
There was this woman I used to work with a few years back who was irritating in every way possible, or to be fair, I allowed myself to be irritated by pretty much everything she did. She was a large woman of middle years, with a single eyebrow and a tendency towards facial hair, who had no concept of personal space and would talk to you with her body pressed right up against yours, speaking in a little girl voice that belied her size and age. She dressed inappropriately for the workplace, with plunging necklines and too short dresses (and she didn’t wear underwear, either. Please don’t ask me how I know this). I later found out that women who behave in this manner tend to have a specific horrible thing in their background, which I’m thinking she probably did, too. But I didn’t have this information when I knew her. If I did, I might have acted a little more sympathetically towards her and I kind of feel guilty for being a jerk, at least more of a jerk than she deserved.
I used to wonder to myself what lesson God (or my higher power, or the universe, or whatever) was trying to teach me by constantly inflicting me with this person.
‘Patience’, I decided was the lesson. Although, I got to say, I don’t feel like much more of a patient person for having known her all those years. She used to constantly say things that I thought were just inane and for the most part I kept quiet, and usually managed to keep myself from rolling my eyes at her. Usually. One day, she happened to say something in her usual inane style, I think it might have been: “Angels are very popular these days.” Which I took to mean that she was basing her life’s philosophy on what was popular in the media that day and how on Earth can you do that?
Nowadays, I’m considerably more respectful to someone whose views differ from my own, and I’ll explain why. Later. However, at that time I wasn’t so thoughtful and understanding and so, I said something insolent. I forget what it was, but it caused her to comment that I wasn’t being very ‘Christian’.
To which I replied: “I’m not a Christian.”
Which was sort of, but not quite true. By that I mean if, like Thomas Jefferson, you confine your Christianity to just what Christ did and just what Christ said, then I can be a pretty good Christian. Mostly. There are still a few problems for me, but I can take most of it. I’m not down with him rebelling against Rome (See The Problem with Jesus) but other than I’m cool with the J-man.
She thought for a second, then asked: “Well, what are you?”
That was kind of an insulting way to ask that particular question, and I was kind of bugged - like ‘what’ might mean she thought I was other than human. Mostly I was bugged at myself for opening myself to that sort of enquiry. And I really resented that she thought that she could demand that everybody provide her with a label for themselves.
Nonetheless I did.
“I’m an existentialist,” I told her.
“Oh. What’s that?”
I let out a big exasperated sigh and said. “I don’t have the time to explain it to you.”
She took this to mean that I was saying she wasn’t smart enough to understand this and she huffed away. The truth, though, was I couldn’t explain existentialism to her because I didn’t understand existentialism. I’d had it explained to me a couple of times and I never quite got it thought I think I might have a philosophy that’s sort of like existentialism but as for the actual thing - I have no idea. Right now, I have a book by Sartre, Being and Nothingness, on my book shelf that exists for no other purpose than to impress people with my braininess and well-readness.
After many, many years of thinking about it I finally realized what my belief system was. I don’t believe anything.
Now, I know that I’ve already used the phrase ‘I believe’ a dozen times or so already on my website and I have and will continue to use it in the ordinary way everyone does. But as for true belief ... Nah. Here’s how it works, and this is the most important point, whatever you believe, whatever system of hought you may use to describe to yourself what is ‘real’ it is entirely separate from the thing itself. The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, and your philosophy is not reality.
I personally use what I call the multi-model approach, recognizing that whatever theory I happen to be applying to a situation, it is flawed. Every single theory so far has had it’s flaws.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 6:02 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Why am I Going Straight to Hell?
It’s not my intention to change any one’s beliefs, so if you’re happy being a Christian and you don’t want to know any better, please stop reading now. As a matter of fact, I know that there are people who if they weren’t Christians, would be stealing my car or robbing my house and I really want them to remain godfearing.
That’s not guesswork on my part, either.
They've told me.
It’s a curious facet of Christianity , if you didn’t know it, that the worse a scumbag you started out as, the better you are in the eyes of the lord when you finally redeem yourself. It works out that just by being average you can claim to have accomplished a great deal. It’s pretty common for people to brag about how awful they used to be before they were born again. Like this one guy I remember (he wanted to be a preacher. They all do) telling me, with a big smile on his face that: "I used to be a rapist, and if it weren't for the Lord, I'd still be raping!"
Eeww. Too much information, Man.
But you see my point, don’t you? No way was I about to give that guy a cogent, well reasoned argument on why he should abandon the one thing that was stopping him from a life of vicious sex crime. If he believed Keebler Elves were his salvation I would have nodded my head and agreed with him.
Well, you’ve been warned.
And, please, if the only reason you're not raping is because of your Christian faith, then ... Um, I agree with you. And you can stop reading this and do some Bible study or something.
Still with me? Okay. Here goes. My first problem with Jesus is the doctrine of original sin, which states that because of man’s inherently sinful nature, due to the original disobedience of Adam and Eve, every person is automatically doomed to Hell unless they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and master. Nice, huh? Just by being born it turns out that I’ve screwed up. I’m already on God’s sh*t-list and I haven’t done one tiny sin yet.
Is that fair? I’m a scumbag because some people at the dawn of time that I never knew goofed up and me and the rest of humanity have to pay for this for all eternity. Can’t God just get over it already? That is, of course, if you insist on taking the story of Adam and Eve literally, not symbolically.
And if you do, doesn’t that mean that everybody on this planet is here because of incest, because who did Adam and Eve’s children marry and fruitfully multiply with if not each other? Or Mom and Dad, I suppose. Oh sure, nowhere in the Bible does it specifically say not to sleep with your siblings, but don’t you think that should just be a given without it having to be spelled out?
God, he sure is one vain and insecure deity if you ask me. He creates the whole universe and then once a week every week of their lives every single man woman and child has to drop what their doing and go somewhere special to tell him how great he is. Why does he need so much flattery? Can’t he just take quiet pride in his accomplishments (everything) and let the whole universe have their weekends free? But, no. After nearly destroying the entire world in a fit of petulance he creates Hell.
Which never, ever seemed very fair to me. It’s okay, I guess, for people like me who’ve been given all the rules, but what about all those people in the far corners of the globe who haven’t a clue? You could be a really good Bushman, for example, kind to your neighbors, giving to charity, faithful to your wife, leaving the kangaroos all alone, but just because you never happened to hear about Jesus, you have to spend all eternity in unending agony. That’s not right.
By the way, if you don’t want to go to Hell, I’ve found a great loophole - last minute repentance. Here’s how you do it: Be as wicked as you want right up until the moment that you think you’re going to go, like when you see a beer truck barreling down at you, then ask Jesus for forgiveness for everything and Bam! Straight to Heaven. Timing is everything on this one, however, and you do want to get it right. But it really works. Try it.
This does mean that in Heaven you’ll meet some real former scumbags like serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy who both became born again Christian at the end of their lives. They said pornography made them do their crimes, which you can believe, if you want, but my opinion is that magazines don’t rape and Kill. When you get to Heaven, however, don’t go looking for Gandhi because he won’t be there (not a Christian).
This brings me to the question: Who’s the Devil working for? It seems to me that the Lord of the Flies is, in fact, doing a service for God by punishing God’s sinners. Think about it: Whose rules are all these people breaking? Not Lucifer’s. So why should the Devil go out of his way to re-enforce God’s will? Why would he even care? You know, I thought he and the Lord didn’t like each other all that much, but here you have Old Nick spending his time, his money and his effort to help Jehovah out by being his policeman and providing an eternal corrections system for him.
Does that make sense? If they’re in this big almighty competition for the Universe and all the souls in it, don’t you think Satan should offer a better incentive, a better product to lure in customers? All he offers is eternal damnation which has got to be the worst idea for a business ever.
Another thing I don’t understand about Christianity is the crucifixion. Why is the crucifixion the centerpiece of a faith base on Jesus’s words and works? Why couldn’t it be healing the lepers, or feeding the masses with fishes and loaves or Christ being nice to the children? Why is it this gruesome story? Christians complain about violence on TV, but what about violence in Sunday School? Little children get treated to a detailed, blow by blow account of the most horrible torture thought up by man and then later get told that we all get to eat his flesh and drink his blood. How ghoulish is that? Stephen King never came up with a story that was that Gorey.
The crucifixion is of course one of the central mysteries of faith. (Mystery of Faith = stuff that doesn’t make sense). I think the verse goes like this: “Christ sacrificed himself for you on the cross to the end that all who believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life”. This is really hard to take either literally or symbolically.
I wasn’t alive in first century Israel, but if I were, I’m pretty sure I would have supported the lawful and highly beneficial occupation of my land by the Roman Empire. So, Christ really didn’t give himself up for me because I would have been a happy Quisling to the Romans.
And when they came to arrest him, did he give himself up for anyone else? No. They weren’t after Peter, for example, or Thomas or John. They were after ... Jesus and only Jesus. He didn’t step forward and say: “Take me instead.” Frankly, I think the Romans got the right guy. Look at it from their perspective: Here you have this guy who has a parade for himself when he enters Jerusalem. He doesn’t exactly call himself the rightful King of Israel, but everyone else does.
When they arrest Jesus, a known terrorist (What else was throwing the money-changers out of the temple but an act of terrorism?) who is hanging out with armed revolutionaries (Simon the Zealot. Zealots were revolutionaries. And Peter had a sword with which he attacked a Roman guard). The Romans sent an entire co-hort to pick up this guy. That’s a hundred soldiers, so you can bet they were taking him pretty seriously.
But that’s if you want to take it literally. If you want to take it symbolically it gets even more tricky. It’s kind of explained that God was going to give up on humanity again and somehow Jesus stepped forward and offered to take upon himself all of our sins .. but how exactly did he do that? Does the Roman empire somehow represent God in this scenario? And if they do, they didn’t try to destroy all of humanity or all of Israel, but again, they were after just one guy and it wasn’t the rest of us.
The reason why is that Christianity is fundamentally a Roman religion, following almost exactly the Roman pattern with other religions. They were a wonderful empire, the Romans, but when it came to religion they were hardly original. The Romans had a habit of importing religions from different places and incorporating them as their own. For example, they lifted the entire Greek Pantheon, they took a few from Egypt, Isis (for one), from Persia they got Mithras and a lot more I can’t think of right now. The Romans had a habit of deifying important people they knew, like: Romulus and Remus, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, the emperor Claudius and Caligula while he was still alive. Of course the Egyptian Pharaohs were also considered living Gods. It’s not very surprising that they would want to do the same with Jesus. Christianity is also weirdly polytheistic in its form (Romanly) which no one wants to admit. You have God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, plus a host of other powerful supernatural game players like angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim, demons and, of course, the Devil.
Sure they’re not exactly called Gods, but they behave in much the same ways as the former collection of Roman and Greek Gods. I know that it was always explained to me that God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are as one, but how does that work? When Jesus was praying in the garden of Gesthemane was he really praying to himself? Or when he was teaching his disciples the lord’s prayer who was his father who 'wert in Heaven' if he was God and he was already down here for a spell?
Finally, you can tell that this is a Roman religion because it was obviously re-written to make the Romans come out smelling like a rose. Historically the Roman Pro-consul in Israel, Pontius Pilate, was one son of a Bitch. He had no problem at all in nailing up as many jews as he thought necessary to make his point. Why then is he doing so much supposed hand-wringing about sending Jesus to his fate, whining about how the mean jews were forcing him to it?
Well, he didn’t.
And the Jews who welcomed Jesus as the Messiah a few days before didn’t suddenly and viciously turn on him for no apparent reason. The whole thing was rewritten when it was made into a Roman religion. (By the Emperor Constantine, an excellent book on this subject is The Sword of Constantine by James Carroll).
The last problem I want to mention is that the Bible does not have internal or external consistency. For example, the Gospels don’t always agree with each other, like whether Jesus had wine or bread first at the last supper or who exactly Jesus’s relatives were. It’s difficult to take the Bible as the infallible word of God when it is demonstrably fallible.
A book that makes all of my points much better than I just did is Holy Blood Holy Grail, which also seems to be an inspiration for a book called The Davinci Code. As I understand it, studios are in hot contention to make The Davinci Code into a movie, but are rather perplexed as to how to make it palatable to a mainstream audience, when the big secret that is revealed in it is **Spoiler Alert** that Christianity is hogwash. Or more precisely that Pagan religions were more female centered than Christianity worshiping also or maybe even more so mother Goddesses. I suppose Hollywood is also sensitive to the fact that Jews tend to be heavily represented in the entertainment industry and it might seem negative to have Jews make what might be seen as an anti-Christian movie.
By the way, I thought the book was only so-so, but maybe that was because I kind of knew most of the stuff they were revealing beforehand.
That’s not guesswork on my part, either.
They've told me.
It’s a curious facet of Christianity , if you didn’t know it, that the worse a scumbag you started out as, the better you are in the eyes of the lord when you finally redeem yourself. It works out that just by being average you can claim to have accomplished a great deal. It’s pretty common for people to brag about how awful they used to be before they were born again. Like this one guy I remember (he wanted to be a preacher. They all do) telling me, with a big smile on his face that: "I used to be a rapist, and if it weren't for the Lord, I'd still be raping!"
Eeww. Too much information, Man.
But you see my point, don’t you? No way was I about to give that guy a cogent, well reasoned argument on why he should abandon the one thing that was stopping him from a life of vicious sex crime. If he believed Keebler Elves were his salvation I would have nodded my head and agreed with him.
Well, you’ve been warned.
And, please, if the only reason you're not raping is because of your Christian faith, then ... Um, I agree with you. And you can stop reading this and do some Bible study or something.
Still with me? Okay. Here goes. My first problem with Jesus is the doctrine of original sin, which states that because of man’s inherently sinful nature, due to the original disobedience of Adam and Eve, every person is automatically doomed to Hell unless they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and master. Nice, huh? Just by being born it turns out that I’ve screwed up. I’m already on God’s sh*t-list and I haven’t done one tiny sin yet.
Is that fair? I’m a scumbag because some people at the dawn of time that I never knew goofed up and me and the rest of humanity have to pay for this for all eternity. Can’t God just get over it already? That is, of course, if you insist on taking the story of Adam and Eve literally, not symbolically.
And if you do, doesn’t that mean that everybody on this planet is here because of incest, because who did Adam and Eve’s children marry and fruitfully multiply with if not each other? Or Mom and Dad, I suppose. Oh sure, nowhere in the Bible does it specifically say not to sleep with your siblings, but don’t you think that should just be a given without it having to be spelled out?
God, he sure is one vain and insecure deity if you ask me. He creates the whole universe and then once a week every week of their lives every single man woman and child has to drop what their doing and go somewhere special to tell him how great he is. Why does he need so much flattery? Can’t he just take quiet pride in his accomplishments (everything) and let the whole universe have their weekends free? But, no. After nearly destroying the entire world in a fit of petulance he creates Hell.
Which never, ever seemed very fair to me. It’s okay, I guess, for people like me who’ve been given all the rules, but what about all those people in the far corners of the globe who haven’t a clue? You could be a really good Bushman, for example, kind to your neighbors, giving to charity, faithful to your wife, leaving the kangaroos all alone, but just because you never happened to hear about Jesus, you have to spend all eternity in unending agony. That’s not right.
By the way, if you don’t want to go to Hell, I’ve found a great loophole - last minute repentance. Here’s how you do it: Be as wicked as you want right up until the moment that you think you’re going to go, like when you see a beer truck barreling down at you, then ask Jesus for forgiveness for everything and Bam! Straight to Heaven. Timing is everything on this one, however, and you do want to get it right. But it really works. Try it.
This does mean that in Heaven you’ll meet some real former scumbags like serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy who both became born again Christian at the end of their lives. They said pornography made them do their crimes, which you can believe, if you want, but my opinion is that magazines don’t rape and Kill. When you get to Heaven, however, don’t go looking for Gandhi because he won’t be there (not a Christian).
This brings me to the question: Who’s the Devil working for? It seems to me that the Lord of the Flies is, in fact, doing a service for God by punishing God’s sinners. Think about it: Whose rules are all these people breaking? Not Lucifer’s. So why should the Devil go out of his way to re-enforce God’s will? Why would he even care? You know, I thought he and the Lord didn’t like each other all that much, but here you have Old Nick spending his time, his money and his effort to help Jehovah out by being his policeman and providing an eternal corrections system for him.
Does that make sense? If they’re in this big almighty competition for the Universe and all the souls in it, don’t you think Satan should offer a better incentive, a better product to lure in customers? All he offers is eternal damnation which has got to be the worst idea for a business ever.
Another thing I don’t understand about Christianity is the crucifixion. Why is the crucifixion the centerpiece of a faith base on Jesus’s words and works? Why couldn’t it be healing the lepers, or feeding the masses with fishes and loaves or Christ being nice to the children? Why is it this gruesome story? Christians complain about violence on TV, but what about violence in Sunday School? Little children get treated to a detailed, blow by blow account of the most horrible torture thought up by man and then later get told that we all get to eat his flesh and drink his blood. How ghoulish is that? Stephen King never came up with a story that was that Gorey.
The crucifixion is of course one of the central mysteries of faith. (Mystery of Faith = stuff that doesn’t make sense). I think the verse goes like this: “Christ sacrificed himself for you on the cross to the end that all who believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life”. This is really hard to take either literally or symbolically.
I wasn’t alive in first century Israel, but if I were, I’m pretty sure I would have supported the lawful and highly beneficial occupation of my land by the Roman Empire. So, Christ really didn’t give himself up for me because I would have been a happy Quisling to the Romans.
And when they came to arrest him, did he give himself up for anyone else? No. They weren’t after Peter, for example, or Thomas or John. They were after ... Jesus and only Jesus. He didn’t step forward and say: “Take me instead.” Frankly, I think the Romans got the right guy. Look at it from their perspective: Here you have this guy who has a parade for himself when he enters Jerusalem. He doesn’t exactly call himself the rightful King of Israel, but everyone else does.
When they arrest Jesus, a known terrorist (What else was throwing the money-changers out of the temple but an act of terrorism?) who is hanging out with armed revolutionaries (Simon the Zealot. Zealots were revolutionaries. And Peter had a sword with which he attacked a Roman guard). The Romans sent an entire co-hort to pick up this guy. That’s a hundred soldiers, so you can bet they were taking him pretty seriously.
But that’s if you want to take it literally. If you want to take it symbolically it gets even more tricky. It’s kind of explained that God was going to give up on humanity again and somehow Jesus stepped forward and offered to take upon himself all of our sins .. but how exactly did he do that? Does the Roman empire somehow represent God in this scenario? And if they do, they didn’t try to destroy all of humanity or all of Israel, but again, they were after just one guy and it wasn’t the rest of us.
The reason why is that Christianity is fundamentally a Roman religion, following almost exactly the Roman pattern with other religions. They were a wonderful empire, the Romans, but when it came to religion they were hardly original. The Romans had a habit of importing religions from different places and incorporating them as their own. For example, they lifted the entire Greek Pantheon, they took a few from Egypt, Isis (for one), from Persia they got Mithras and a lot more I can’t think of right now. The Romans had a habit of deifying important people they knew, like: Romulus and Remus, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, the emperor Claudius and Caligula while he was still alive. Of course the Egyptian Pharaohs were also considered living Gods. It’s not very surprising that they would want to do the same with Jesus. Christianity is also weirdly polytheistic in its form (Romanly) which no one wants to admit. You have God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, plus a host of other powerful supernatural game players like angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim, demons and, of course, the Devil.
Sure they’re not exactly called Gods, but they behave in much the same ways as the former collection of Roman and Greek Gods. I know that it was always explained to me that God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are as one, but how does that work? When Jesus was praying in the garden of Gesthemane was he really praying to himself? Or when he was teaching his disciples the lord’s prayer who was his father who 'wert in Heaven' if he was God and he was already down here for a spell?
Finally, you can tell that this is a Roman religion because it was obviously re-written to make the Romans come out smelling like a rose. Historically the Roman Pro-consul in Israel, Pontius Pilate, was one son of a Bitch. He had no problem at all in nailing up as many jews as he thought necessary to make his point. Why then is he doing so much supposed hand-wringing about sending Jesus to his fate, whining about how the mean jews were forcing him to it?
Well, he didn’t.
And the Jews who welcomed Jesus as the Messiah a few days before didn’t suddenly and viciously turn on him for no apparent reason. The whole thing was rewritten when it was made into a Roman religion. (By the Emperor Constantine, an excellent book on this subject is The Sword of Constantine by James Carroll).
The last problem I want to mention is that the Bible does not have internal or external consistency. For example, the Gospels don’t always agree with each other, like whether Jesus had wine or bread first at the last supper or who exactly Jesus’s relatives were. It’s difficult to take the Bible as the infallible word of God when it is demonstrably fallible.
A book that makes all of my points much better than I just did is Holy Blood Holy Grail, which also seems to be an inspiration for a book called The Davinci Code. As I understand it, studios are in hot contention to make The Davinci Code into a movie, but are rather perplexed as to how to make it palatable to a mainstream audience, when the big secret that is revealed in it is **Spoiler Alert** that Christianity is hogwash. Or more precisely that Pagan religions were more female centered than Christianity worshiping also or maybe even more so mother Goddesses. I suppose Hollywood is also sensitive to the fact that Jews tend to be heavily represented in the entertainment industry and it might seem negative to have Jews make what might be seen as an anti-Christian movie.
By the way, I thought the book was only so-so, but maybe that was because I kind of knew most of the stuff they were revealing beforehand.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 5:37 PM
0 comments
Monday, April 04, 2005
Why I'm Smarter than a Board Certified Neurologist
I happen to know one of the 'figures' in the Terry Schiavo case. I was watching This Week with George Stephanapolas on the TV and the conservative commentator, William Crystal of the Weekly World ... something or other ... it doesn't matter, nobody reads it anyways except probably William Crystal. Anyways, Crystal said that the Doctor in thiscase who testified for the husband was: 'Ronald Cranford who's from Minneapolis and does a lot of these'.
Hey! I know him! Or did a couple of years back. I tuned my ears up then for what Crystal would say next about Dr. Cranford, expecting that Crystal would add more about Dr. Cranford than just the fact that he did a lot of testifying, like Dr. Cranford was obviously doingit for the money, or that he was a fanatic of the Dr. Kevorkian ilk or was some sort of egotistical glory hound or- I don't know - was an organ thief who sells human bodyparts to China. (By the way, Ronald Cranford has never denied that last accusation). Maybe that was all there was: Dr. Cranford testified on the wrong side more than once. And that was bad enough.
I met Dr. Cranford when I was working at the desk of the Physician'sIncomplete Room at the Hennepin County Medical Center. I'd just started working there when Dr. Cranford came in to sign some records. He introduced himself to me, the new guy, and then mentioned that many people thought he looked like Gene Hackman and what did I think? My reply was that I supposed that I could see the resemblance, but Gene Hackman wasa lot thinner than he was and had more hair on the top of his head.
I might have gotten on his bad side at that point.
He really didn't look much like Gene Hackman, actually, I was saying that to be nice. He looked more like Buddy Hackett, if you can imagine a thinner Buddy Hackett with not so much hair, and living. The chief resemblance between the two was that Dr. Cranford had the habit of talking out of the side of his mouth when he was making wise-cracks like Buddy Hackett used to. Dr. Cranford was one of the more friendly doctors at the hospital. To start with: he actually talked with us. Often he would come in and tell jokes with that being his only purpose for visiting us. Like the other Doctors, he was always busy but he had enough time to be personable. By the way, this might be just a Minnesota thing, but the vast majority of the Doctors at that hospital were very nice indeed and not at all the God-complexed jerks that Doctors are supposed to have a reputation for. They were politer than the general public, as a rule.
So, I would talk with him occasionally and I found out that he was somewhat known nationally and had been on Oprah more than once. (Oprah's a nice lady, he says). He had been earlier involved, maybe a decade earlier in a famous 'right to die' case. I think it might have even been the Karen Quinlan one. "They don't like me here," he told me, referring to the hospital, "I'm too controversial."
I believe he might have been an atheist who viewed consciousness andpersonality as the 'ghost in the machine', the machine, of course, being the human brain and the ghost being our self awareness. I'd asked him once what he thought about Near Death Experiences, him being a neurologist and all he must know something about it. He told me thatit was all made up that there was an industry being built on what was nothing more than hallucinations. (I beg to differ, but I'll get into that later).
Here's the question that William Crystal failed to address about Dr. Cranford's participation in cases like Terry Schiavo's: Why does he doit? My guess - I don't know for sure - is that it's because he took an oath not to prolong suffering. The Hippocratic oath says something about that, I'm pretty sure. Doesn't it? I think it also makes you swear your oath by the God Apollo.
Anyways, regarding our conversation about near death experiences, what I should have said to Dr. Cranford was that near death experiences had, in fact, been investigated and that at least one medical doctor, Dr. Raymond Moody, had written a book about it (Life after Life) and come to the exact opposite conclusion, which was that near death experiences were indeed more than hallucinations. In his book, Dr. Moody, related numerous instances where patients relayed accurate information aboutthings outside of their hospital room that they would have no possible way of knowing. What I should have then asked Dr. Cranford was where's his book and where's his thorough investigation? Huh?
But, you know, that's one of those clever, devastating rebuttals that youcan only come up with, like, a couple years later. This evidence is what's called 'anecdotal', that is someone says it happens to them and that sort of evidence doesn't count. Unless of course you're on death row waiting your execution, as hundreds of condemned men know personally. Then, of course, it's golden. Can someone please explain to me how the same type and sort of evidence that's good to end a man's life (a couple of women, too) is still not good enough for science?Just because something hasn't happened in a laboratory, with control groups and then been repeated, it doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. Most everything happens outside of the lab. The same thing with stuff that falls out of your particular philosophy: Just because you don't believe it can't happen or doesn't exist doesn't in the least affect whether it really has or does. Reality is not something you can vote on. It exists entirely outside of the democratic process.
Ok. Here's another devastating rebuttal I should have used on Dr. Cranford. When he told me that near death experiences were nothing but hallucinationsI should have looked him straight in the eye and said: "Then prove to me that you're not an hallucination."
Zing! That would have shot him right down. Because how could he?
You know, I just realized that almost nobody who's reading this would actually ever know who really said what or when, so ... yeah, I did say that stuff to Dr. Cranford. Not only did I say it, but he was absolutely dumbfounded and his only reply was to bow his head respectfully and say to me: "You're a much smarter man than I am, Mr. Sommers. I am hanging up my stethoscope, posthaste, and will give up the practice of medicine. Entirely."
Alright, that's not what happened. He's still practicing medicine and probably thinks he's as right in all of his opinions now as he did then. I do think the guy had a tendency to exaggerate, though, as in: "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." For example, he golfed a lot and claimed that over his lifetime he'd gotten four holes-in-one.
Forgive me if I'm wrong in this, but most professional golfers never get that many in their career. How does he do it?
Someone should tell him that miniature golf doesn't count.
Hey! I know him! Or did a couple of years back. I tuned my ears up then for what Crystal would say next about Dr. Cranford, expecting that Crystal would add more about Dr. Cranford than just the fact that he did a lot of testifying, like Dr. Cranford was obviously doingit for the money, or that he was a fanatic of the Dr. Kevorkian ilk or was some sort of egotistical glory hound or- I don't know - was an organ thief who sells human bodyparts to China. (By the way, Ronald Cranford has never denied that last accusation). Maybe that was all there was: Dr. Cranford testified on the wrong side more than once. And that was bad enough.
I met Dr. Cranford when I was working at the desk of the Physician'sIncomplete Room at the Hennepin County Medical Center. I'd just started working there when Dr. Cranford came in to sign some records. He introduced himself to me, the new guy, and then mentioned that many people thought he looked like Gene Hackman and what did I think? My reply was that I supposed that I could see the resemblance, but Gene Hackman wasa lot thinner than he was and had more hair on the top of his head.
I might have gotten on his bad side at that point.
He really didn't look much like Gene Hackman, actually, I was saying that to be nice. He looked more like Buddy Hackett, if you can imagine a thinner Buddy Hackett with not so much hair, and living. The chief resemblance between the two was that Dr. Cranford had the habit of talking out of the side of his mouth when he was making wise-cracks like Buddy Hackett used to. Dr. Cranford was one of the more friendly doctors at the hospital. To start with: he actually talked with us. Often he would come in and tell jokes with that being his only purpose for visiting us. Like the other Doctors, he was always busy but he had enough time to be personable. By the way, this might be just a Minnesota thing, but the vast majority of the Doctors at that hospital were very nice indeed and not at all the God-complexed jerks that Doctors are supposed to have a reputation for. They were politer than the general public, as a rule.
So, I would talk with him occasionally and I found out that he was somewhat known nationally and had been on Oprah more than once. (Oprah's a nice lady, he says). He had been earlier involved, maybe a decade earlier in a famous 'right to die' case. I think it might have even been the Karen Quinlan one. "They don't like me here," he told me, referring to the hospital, "I'm too controversial."
I believe he might have been an atheist who viewed consciousness andpersonality as the 'ghost in the machine', the machine, of course, being the human brain and the ghost being our self awareness. I'd asked him once what he thought about Near Death Experiences, him being a neurologist and all he must know something about it. He told me thatit was all made up that there was an industry being built on what was nothing more than hallucinations. (I beg to differ, but I'll get into that later).
Here's the question that William Crystal failed to address about Dr. Cranford's participation in cases like Terry Schiavo's: Why does he doit? My guess - I don't know for sure - is that it's because he took an oath not to prolong suffering. The Hippocratic oath says something about that, I'm pretty sure. Doesn't it? I think it also makes you swear your oath by the God Apollo.
Anyways, regarding our conversation about near death experiences, what I should have said to Dr. Cranford was that near death experiences had, in fact, been investigated and that at least one medical doctor, Dr. Raymond Moody, had written a book about it (Life after Life) and come to the exact opposite conclusion, which was that near death experiences were indeed more than hallucinations. In his book, Dr. Moody, related numerous instances where patients relayed accurate information aboutthings outside of their hospital room that they would have no possible way of knowing. What I should have then asked Dr. Cranford was where's his book and where's his thorough investigation? Huh?
But, you know, that's one of those clever, devastating rebuttals that youcan only come up with, like, a couple years later. This evidence is what's called 'anecdotal', that is someone says it happens to them and that sort of evidence doesn't count. Unless of course you're on death row waiting your execution, as hundreds of condemned men know personally. Then, of course, it's golden. Can someone please explain to me how the same type and sort of evidence that's good to end a man's life (a couple of women, too) is still not good enough for science?Just because something hasn't happened in a laboratory, with control groups and then been repeated, it doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. Most everything happens outside of the lab. The same thing with stuff that falls out of your particular philosophy: Just because you don't believe it can't happen or doesn't exist doesn't in the least affect whether it really has or does. Reality is not something you can vote on. It exists entirely outside of the democratic process.
Ok. Here's another devastating rebuttal I should have used on Dr. Cranford. When he told me that near death experiences were nothing but hallucinationsI should have looked him straight in the eye and said: "Then prove to me that you're not an hallucination."
Zing! That would have shot him right down. Because how could he?
You know, I just realized that almost nobody who's reading this would actually ever know who really said what or when, so ... yeah, I did say that stuff to Dr. Cranford. Not only did I say it, but he was absolutely dumbfounded and his only reply was to bow his head respectfully and say to me: "You're a much smarter man than I am, Mr. Sommers. I am hanging up my stethoscope, posthaste, and will give up the practice of medicine. Entirely."
Alright, that's not what happened. He's still practicing medicine and probably thinks he's as right in all of his opinions now as he did then. I do think the guy had a tendency to exaggerate, though, as in: "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." For example, he golfed a lot and claimed that over his lifetime he'd gotten four holes-in-one.
Forgive me if I'm wrong in this, but most professional golfers never get that many in their career. How does he do it?
Someone should tell him that miniature golf doesn't count.
posted by Everything You Know is Wrong at 7:29 AM
3 comments
