J.T. McDaniel's blog

Shakespearean Musings Again

I read a couple interviews with Sir Patrick Stewart recently. These were old interviews, but they were new to me. What surprised me was that Stewart seemed to view Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius, in a very similar vein to what I used in creating my own version of the character in 2015. Not an evil man at all, but one who simply committed one horrible act in an otherwise, if not exemplary, then by no means bad life. 

I put a lot of my own musings into my one-act play, To Kill a King, which suggested that old Hamlet was far from the saint his son seemed to think him to be, and that his blissful marriage was mostly a triumph of public relations over reality. In my play, King Hamlet is first of all a soldier; Claudius is a diplomat. My play also suggests that Claudius, not his brother, is Hamlet's actual father. This is hardly a new suggestion, by the way. I merely suggest that Claudius and Gertrude got drunk one night and Hamlet was the result of a one-time slip. Others have suggested that the Ghost was right when he used the word "adulterous," and that his wife had been carrying on with his brother for a very long time. If that were the case, then it would be entirely possible that Claudius killed his own brother, but it was Hamlet who killed Hamlet's father. 

Claudius, after all, would no doubt still feel remorse and guilt over his brother's death even if he had a perfectly valid reason for killing him. I give him one, with a soliloquy that provides a counterpart to his "confession" in Hamlet. It allows him to speculate on his future, portraying his decision to murder his brother as something he finds morally repugnant, but preferable to allowing his brother to kill Gertrude, as he's already tried to do once. In effect, he chooses to damn himself rather than allow any harm to come to a woman he's loved for years. 

One place where my own portrayal resembled Stewart's was at the end, with Claudius seemingly drinking the poisoned wine of his own accord, rather than having it forced on him, as it usually is. I chose to do it this way for two reasons. First, I had reached an age where this was absolutely preferable to anything more strenuous, such as being bent backwards over a table. Second, hearkening back to Claudius' statement to Laertes of how important his wife was to him, it seemed entirely reasonable that, with Gertrude dead, Claudius would decide he had no reason to live anyway and drinking the poison could be seen as a way of defying Hamlet by taking away his revenge.

Now, I've seriously thought of trying to produce a senior citizen version of Hamlet, which would allow me to play the title role. Claudius and Gertrude would likely be in their eighties, Ophelia a lovely young thing in her early sixties, Polonius another octogenarian (as he's often played now, though considering his children's age he probably shouldn't be much over forty), and so forth. Possibly this would be a "concert" version, an unstaged, or minimally staged reading, rather than a fully produced play, if only because most of the actors might well be too old to do a staged version.

Shakespeare wasn't always kind to his characters. His treatment of Macbeth, for example, didn't merely "verge" on the libelous, it actually was. The real Macbeth didn't murder Duncan, didn't murder Banquo (who may never have existed), and was generally regarded as a good king during his seventeen-year reign. Richard III wasn't a hunchback and, if the young princes were actually illegitimate, wasn't even a usurper (Henry Tudor actually had stronger motives for getting rid of them, but Shakespeare could hardly blame the queen's grandfather, could he?). He was also a young man when he died, despite often being played by actors ten to twenty years older than the real king. 

 

Psychics, God, and Death

One of my books is an edited edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The New Revelation, subtitled, for my version, "The Annotated, Debunked, and Exposed Edition." From time to time I include it in my daily cycle of Twitter posts, the majority of which are intended to sell books. Not too long ago, a reader noted that, while he hadn't read the book, he questioned whether I could really disprove the "private" revelations of a Medium. 

I didn't see much point in responding on Twitter, but I'll mention the obvious response now. There's no reason for me to attempt to disprove such revelations, for the entire burden of proof is on the Medium to show that these revelations are correct and, more importantly, that the only possible source for them was the spirit of a dead person. 

That's how it works. The person asserting something to be true has the burden of proof. If you say, "There is a God," and I say, "I don't believe you," it's not up to me to show he isn't there, it's up to you to show that he is. 

If one were to ask, "What constitutes the strongest disproof of God as conventionally perceived," I think the most obvious answer would be, "There is more than one religion." Doesn't it seem logical that, if an omniscient, omnipotent God actually existed, and had revealed himself, everyone would worship in the same manner? Why would a genuine God reveal himself as a cosmic unity to the Jews, as a tripartite unity to Christians, and as again a unity, but with a conflicting set of laws and history, to the Muslims? Not to mention as half of a dualistic divinity to Zoroastrians, a flying snake to the Aztecs, a polytheistic monotheistic entity to the Hindus, and any number of other forms to various cultures over the centuries. If he were real, and there was only one of him, why wouldn't all cultures have perceived him in the same way?

An interesting quirk in Christianity, by the way, is the question of whether God is to be perceived as a Trinity or a Unity. Jesus is asked to name the most important commandment in the Gospels, and the answer quoted is almost always the version from Matthew, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." (Matt. 22:37) Luke has it the same way. 

The thing is, of the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke are both largely based on Mark, which was written first. Both also differ from Mark in one very important way. While these two give the answer to "What is the most important commandment" in this way, Mark begins what is, in fact, a quoted passage, one verse earlier, saying, "And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear O Israel; the Lord our God is one." (Mark 12:29) A rather important omission, one might argue, for it suggests that Jesus, while considered a part of the Trinity, was himself a Unitarian who didn't see himself as divine. The reason it was left out of Matthew and Luke is obvious; the reason no one ever excised it from Mark is somewhat more obscure. After all, no one seemed to have a problem with tacking a dozen verses onto the end of Mark, including four purporting to be a command to evangelize the world from a risen Jesus.

The living Jesus generally seemed pretty indifferent to anyone who wasn't Jewish. He might help out a gentile from time to time, but usually only after a good bit of prodding. The Gospels, written after the Pauline epistles, and at a time when the Church was trying to establish a tradition of Jesus as having once lived on earth in human form, would later be modified to conform to what the established church was teaching. Since the appeal of Christianity was almost entirely to gentiles, it was necessary to include a mission to that polity. Imagine the chagrin of modern Christians if they thought Jesus would return and ignore them because they're not Jewish.

Jesus himself seemed to be preaching a kind of early reformed (as distinct from Reform) Judaism. Whether Jesus himself was entirely mythical, or based on an actual person, is a matter for a different essay. Historically, if he was a real person, he made no obvious impact on the contemporary world. The New Testament speaks of earthquakes, darkness, and walking dead people at the time of his execution, yet apparently no one living in Jerusalem, or anywhere else for that matter, at the time noticed any of this. Josephus, who was not a contemporary of Jesus (he was born from seven to eleven years after Jesus' execution), supposedly mentions him twice, but one of the mentions is an obvious interpolation, and the other seems to be about someone else who just happens to have the same (rather common) name. 

More significantly, while Josephus has very little good to say about Herod the Great, the one crime he never accuses him of is the "slaughter of the innocents." This suggests that either this biblical massacre actually involved only a handful of infants or, more likely, that it simply never happened. It's the sort of thing Herod would have done, had he believed there was a threat to his reign, but none of his contemporaries nor any first century historians other than the Gospel writers ever accused him of it.

As to claims that no one would believe these things if they were not true, all manner of miraculous events were reported at the birth of each of the Kims in North Korea, and the people there seem to have no trouble believing them. Many American Conservatives believe everything Donald Trump says, even though the man often seem pathologically incapable of telling the truth even when there's no reason not to. 

Returning to psychic phenomena, we must always ask the question, "Which is more logical? that a Medium is communicating with someone's dead relative? or that the Medium is relating things he learned from other source, or, for that matter, is simply saying something comforting and the client is subconsciously attaching significance to it?" No Medium has ever produced statistically significant result under properly controlled conditions. Watching psychic mediums at work on television almost always reveals their methods to anyone paying attention.

More often than not, the Medium starts with something vague, and that would likely apply to a fair number of the people in the audience. Receipt of a message from someone whose name begins with "R," for example. In a room holding a couple hundred people, someone is going to have a recently deceased relative named Robert, Roger, Rachel, Richard, Reinhardt, Rose, Ruby, or some other "R" name. The audience member supplies the actual name, and the Medium then tells the audience member that he's correct, it's from that person. 

This is basic cold reading. The audience member actually supplies most of the information, while the Medium continues to throw in vague comments that his victim will only remember later if they prove to be correct. If the victim fails to provide sufficient feedback, the Medium is unable to give it back to the victim, and eventually will end up saying that the spirits are being reticent that day, or that conditions aren't conducive to psychic transference, or some such twaddle.

Psychics do have one thing in common with most clergy. Either they are deliberate frauds, or they have succeeded in deluding themselves that what they are delivering is actually true. There is, after all, zero evidence that consciousness continues after physical death. "Near death" experiences cannot be entered into evidence, for their very name categorizes them as living experiences. "Near death," after all, means "not dead yet." Dreams seem entirely real while we're experiencing them, and what is more natural than for someone who believes he or she is dying than to dream about an afterlife? 

Still, the experience is created in one's own brain, and nothing truly suggests that we are capable of experiencing anything once the brain stops functioning. No one has ever actually died and then returned to life to tell what the experience was like. Lots of people have almost died and related their dreams and hallucinations, but no one has literally died and come back. 

Perhaps the best thing is to recognize that death will be no more unpleasant than were the 13.72-billion years each of us spent not existing before we were born. It's virtually impossible for a human being to imagine not existing, because none of our conscious memories can be formed before our brain starts to function, and we won't retain long-term memories of anything until three or four years after that. Our entire consciousness has been spent existing. Even if we recognize that the end will simply be oblivion, we somehow can't help feeling we'll be conscious of not being conscious. 

On the bright side, the one thing that's almost certain about dying is that the majority of us will never realize that it's happened. We'll just lose consciousness and never regain it. We'll be no more aware that we've died than a glacially-deposited boulder in the middle of a creek realizes that it's wet. We won't see our long-gone family members, but we won't be conscious of not seeing them, either.

Looked at philosophically, discarding belief in an afterlife makes actual life far more significant.

Viral Marketing, but...

I like history. Most of my novels are set in the past, predominantly during wars. Even the contemporary ones, such as The Alukam (written as Jacob Thomson) spend a good bit of time in the distant past. Much of Returning is set in the distant future, so the history in that one is speculative. Some of it is contemporary, and I'll take a look at that a little later in this post.

The latest story is not only historical fiction, being set in a Great War trench on the eve of a battle, but even has a history of its own. We'll All Die in the Morning falls into the longish short-story category. I suppose I could have tried to get a full novel out of it, but I think it tells the story at its present length. It also took something like 47 years to write. Maybe a bit more. I had it in finished form as a one-act play by 1971. I think I may have started writing it in high school, and certainly did parts of it while I was in the Army. 

Then the dog ate it. Literally. He tended to chew on things if I left him alone too long. On a different occasion he ate one of my favorite pipes. On that day he ate the only existing copy of the play. Remember, this was 1971, long before personal computers and easy archiving. If you were writing a play and wanted a backup, you used carbon paper in a typewriter. I tried to reconstruct it over the years, but never managed to do that.

Then, recently, I essentially started over, retaining the basic premise of a World War I trench and dugout, and one incident during the night, but otherwise rebooting the story. The original play had involved American troops, with a good part of it taking place as several enlisted men played poker. There were also small, walk-on type parts for two or three women, who appeared as memories of girlfriends, wives, mothers, or that girl in Paris who became so affectionate once you handed over a wad of francs.

Rewritten as a story, the characters became British, and the action was moved to an earlier point in the war, after it was known that America would be entering the fight, but before the troops started to arrive. The story no longer centers on several enlisted men, but focuses on Lieutenant Oliver Black, the platoon commander. Having survived two major battles, he's not too keen on trying again. I speak about some of this in this video.

 

This is actually the second version of this video. My eldest son works as a CGI animator, film technician, and film restorer, and he gave me a hard time about the color in the first try. Too moody, for one thing. I've still played with the color a bit here, because the raw footage tends to look a bit over-exposed, but I have to admit it does look a lot better this way. 

The video serves a dual purpose. It advertises the story, at least to the usual handful of people who will actually see the thing. It also plugs the audiobook version, which I narrated myself. I don't read anything from the story in the video, but I do talk, so an audiobook buyer gets some idea of what he's buying. 

Videos such as this, and frequent Twitter posts, are a part of what you call viral marketing. The idea is simple enough. You post something, someone reads it and shares or retweets it to their own followers, those followers do the same thing, and before you know it a simple video such as this one has been viewed by hundreds or thousands of people, a certain percentage of whom actually buy the book. For a $0.99 book such as We'll All Die in the Morning, a thousand sales are worth roughly $700, and 10,000 sales worth $7,000. Of course, at the moment I believe I've sold six copies, four of them in the UK, and a single audiobook, also in the UK. 

Well, it's a British unit in the story, and it's written in English, not American, so perhaps there's reason for that. Still, I've tweeted about the story dozens of times. The tweets have gone out to my followers, who number less than 100, and, so far as I can tell, that's as far as they've gone. There have been a couple likes, but no retweets. I may be trying for viral marketing, but at this point it appears I've been vaccinated. 

What else have I been up to lately. I'm looking at doing some work on Broadway Beat, my 1940s noir detective story set in the New York theater district. That's a project for my Patreon patrons. Since I still don't have any, the story is stuck in limbo for now. 

There's a play I've been working on, on and off, for the last year. I should probably try to finish it, so that it can join the rest of my unproduced masterpieces on the shelf. I'd love to see it actually produced, of course. One of the roles would be a perfect vehicle for Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, or Derek Jacoby. I doubt I'll ever see it with any of them, but, of course, Bob Anderson in Coming Out was written with Rowan Atkinson in mind, and I ended up playing him myself. That's more or less how it goes. 

I could make a good argument for regretting ever producing that show, or for producing Hamlet in 2015, since both of those ended up as significant losses, and right now I could use the money. They entertained some people, certainly, but not enough of them. Coming Out could easily have netted thirty thousand or more if we'd managed to fill the theater every night, but ended up as a $13,000 loss. Hamlet only lost about $3,500, mostly because it didn't run as long, so the rent was less. Right now, still having that money would be really useful.

If anyone would like to help out with that, there's a GoFundMe campaign for my septic system. Ostensibly. At this point, it's really more a "help pay the mortgage while the rent is being withheld to pay for the septic system" fund. The rental agent is paying the septic tank people, but I won't get any rent until they've been paid back. The most likely outcome here will be losing the house and starving to death in relative comfort, since I think my Social Security will cover the rent and utilities, but definitely won't cover anything to eat. 

That lack of virality more or less assures writing income won't make up the difference. And there's not a particularly big job market for 69-year-old men. Me simply being me more or less assures that the GoFundMe, like every other fundraising attempt, will remain at Zero, or never net enough to even make the bank inclined to the slightest leniency.

Seeing is Believing, Except When it's Not

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most popular writers of his day. His Sherlock Holmes novels and stories are still read. His Professor Challenger stories remain in print, and The Lost World has been filmed, and re-filmed. Holmes, of course, is still his best-known creation. He is known for his deductive skills, his brilliant mind, eccentric behavior, and application of observation and logic to the mysteries he becomes involved in. 

His creator, likewise, did his best to apply the same principles in real life. Unfortunately, unlike Holmes, Conan Doyle wasn't very good at telling the real from the imaginary or the sham. Perhaps he just had a trusting nature. Religious people tend to think that way, and if Conan Doyle's religion happened to be Spiritualism instead of Church of England, we need not be surprised that he fell for psychic scams right and left.

His book, The New Revelation, was a catalogue of concrete examples of why, to Conan Doyle, it seemed logical to believe in life after death, and a Spiritualist connection between the realm of the living and the realm of the departed. He produces example after example of psychic mediums performing astonishing feats, of levitation, table rapping or tipping, automatic writing, and communication from the beyond. The mediums he presented were talented, impressive, and as phony as any modern psychic.

It's just that he never seemed to recognize this. His friendship with Harry Houdini ultimately ended because Conan Doyle couldn't recognize the truth, even when Houdini carefully explained how the illusion was performed. Like many religious believers, regardless of faith, Conan Doyle's desire to believe outweighed his own common sense. Just as you'll find fundamentalist Christians adamantly believing that Adam and  Eve were real people, and the Genesis creation story is literally true, so Conan Doyle believed in these psychics, and in spirit communication.

The curious thing is, Conan Doyle spent a good bit of his efforts in finding and exposing fake spirit mediums, because he felt their scams detracted from people's faith in the "real" mediums. It never seemed to occur to him that they might all be fakes. The ones he "exposed" tended to be the most amateurish, with the least polished performances. The ones who were most expert in their trickery he found believable.

I spent a lot of time reading his book, and tracking down the people he mentions, learning everything currently available about them, and using that information to annotate this edition. None of them are considered even remotely reliable today. None of this would have mattered to Sir Arthur, who wrote: "The objective side of it ceased to interest for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an end of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely greater importance."

Conan Doyle was, as this suggests, a "true believer." Just as fundamentalist Christians are able to simply ignore any scientific evidence that conflicts with their religious beliefs, so he was able to ignore evidence of fraud and conclude that the mediums he investigated were legitimate, and actually did communicate with the departed. It's a common human problem. Our brains are, more or less, programed to recognize patterns and react to them in more or less predictable ways. This effect is the same whether the pattern exists, or is merely imagined.

Celebrities die in groups of three. It's a common belief, but, leaving out the possibility of a car crash, or an airplane falling out of the sky, it almost never happens that the "three" actually die together. The grouping is entirely arbitrary. Someone dies, and then the next two to go are added to the grouping. Except that, upon investigation, you may find that number two in your group is number one in someone else's group, or number three in another's. You can always come up with a group of three because you can arbitrarily start it with anyone you like. There are a lot of celebrities, and quite a few of them are elderly, and others are prone to taking foolish risks, so you can really expect someone famous to die on almost any given day. 

Psychics rely on coincidence and trickery to achieve their results. They also rely on people having poor memories. For example, back in 1998, I predicted that Donald Trump would one day be President, thereby proving conclusively that I'm an actual prophet. Now, I didn't write this down anywhere, and I can't remember who I said it to, but that's not important. I just told you that I said it, and I'm obviously a trustworthy source, so it has to be true. This sort of thing is the basis of most religions. Someone claims to speak for a god or gods, perhaps writes all of this down in a book, and the proof is that it's written in that book. There is very little in the Bible that can be confirmed, and the few events that can be often turn out to be mutually exclusive, such as Jesus' birth during the reign of Herod the Great and, simultaneously, during a census that wasn't conducted until after that king's death, or the utterly ridiculous notion that Mary was pregnant for more than 700 years, which is the only possible way Isaiah's 'Immanuel' prophecy could apply to her, given that the original Hebrew text doesn't say "shall conceive," but "has conceived." It doesn't say anything about virgins, either, but it's likely the New Testament writers didn't understand Hebrew, and took their quote from the Greek Septuagint, which mistranslates the passage.

Psychic experiences can usually be explained rationally, given some effort. Someone phoning just as you're thinking of them, for instance, is often taken as a sign of psychic abilities, though it's really nothing more than an exercise in selective memory. The times that it happens are remembered, while the far more numerous times when it didn't are forgotten. Psychics also use tricks like cold reading, wherein they essentially trick the victim into telling them the information they feed back. Before a large audience, if a psychic says he's receiving a message from someone named Tim, or, maybe, Tom, normal statistical odds suggest that one or more audience members will have a dead relative with that name.

"That could be my Uncle Tim," someone will say.

"Yes, yes, that's it," the psychic agrees. "He says he's here to communicate with his nephew." 

Notice that the psychic hasn't done anything more than throw out a name, and then agree with something his victim told him. He'll follow up with more details, most of which will be supplied by the victim, and end with a "message" telling the victim about how nice things are in the afterlife, and to keep up the good work, or to reform, whichever seems most appropriate. 

Conan Doyle would fall for this repeatedly. He'd put down failures to a lack of faith on the part of the observers, which is still the most commonly cited reason for psychics failing tests conducted under rigorous controls. They like to claim they can do all these things, but the "negative energy" from the observers prevents it. 

As I mentioned earlier, when I was researching this book, I spent a lot of time looking up the people mentioned, and the incidents described. Between the annotations and the Afterword, I added so much new, mostly explanatory material, that, for copyright purposes, the result became my commentary, a new work, which incorporated Conan Doyle's original text. More than half of what is published here is new. You can buy the book as a Kindle eBook, or a slender trade paperback.

Somewhat Improbable

Last night (or, to be more precise, early this morning) I found myself watching Mistress of the Apes. The plot is rather silly. Beautiful young anthropologist in labor falls victim to crazed druggies raiding the hospital for drugs and the baby is stillborn. Meanwhile, her husband has gone missing in the Congo. An expedition is organized, they tangle with poachers, the rich friend organizing everything turns out to be the chief villain (which, considering he spends the lead-up to his revelation as the heavy trying to jump every female he encounters, with the notable exception of his wife, and shooting everything in sight, shouldn't be that surprising), and the anthropologist discovers a tribe of Homo habilis living in the remote jungle, befriends them, and ends up knocked up by one of them. Happy endings all around, and weirdness predominates. The lead, Jenny Neumann, never appears in that outfit, by the way. The Boris Vallejo poster art does do a fairly good job of depicting the "ape-men."

So much for the movie. It's typical late 1970's semi-exploitation, with acting ranging from fairly good to awful, and a lot of violence and a little nudity. What I have a problem with is the premise. Homo habilis lived about a million and half to two million years ago. The plot of this movie has at least a few of them living now (or, in 1979, anyway). 

Now, these "ape-men" do not, in fact, look that much like what any scientific reconstruction of actual Homo habilis skulls would seem to suggest. The genuine article bore nearly as strong a resemblance to chimps as to modern humans, though the two lines had split five or six million years earlier. They were tool users—that's where the scientific name, which translates as "handy man"—comes from. But they were more ape-like in general appearance, including having shorter legs in proportion to their bodies.

The actors playing the ape-men in the movie, of course, look like physically well-developed modern men wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. They're also at least a foot too tall. What they most strongly resemble, and what would have made more sense in the context, are Neanderthals. Neanderthals became extinct only in the last twenty to fifty thousand years. Recently enough that surviving pockets would be at least within the realm of possibility.

What would a surviving band of Homo habilis look like if they had survived into the modern period? They might look like us, because, of course, from an evolutionary standpoint they are probably what we evolved from. It's rather silly to presume that an isolated band would simply stop evolving. They also might look significantly different. Just because certain features were selected for once, doesn't mean it would happen again.

Another problem pops up towards the end of the movie. The anthropologist, having mated with one of the ape-men, becomes pregnant. Presented with this, it's hard not to wonder if this would even be possible. While Homo sapiens and Homo habilis belong to the same genus, we are different species, separated by more than a million years of evolution. Mating would certainly be possible—you can physically mate with anything that has compatible genitalia, as the occasional bestiality prosecution makes clear—but the likelihood of producing viable offspring would be extremely low, and the likelihood of producing fertile offspring even lower. You might get something like a mule, the offspring of a mare and a donkey, having some characteristics of both, but completely incapable of reproducing. The most likely outcome, though, would be no pregnancy at all. 

Just because Homo habilis, so far as we can tell, evolved into us, that doesn't mean an isolated population would do the same thing. A physical resemblance would be fairly likely. Genetic compatibility is another thing entirely. This would not, after all, be a modern human trying to mate with an original Homo habilis, but of a modern human trying to mate with an ancestral species that had, itself, undergone over a million years of further evolution.

If this group had somehow not evolved, it's likely the initial meeting with the pretty young anthropologist would have had a different outcome, most probably involving her ending up as the entree. The band would have just identified her as some unrelated primate species, like a chimp or gorilla, and added her to the menu. It's not technically cannibalism if it's a different species. Modern humans eat chimpanzees from time to time, which is unfortunate for both species, as this is probably how HIV jumped the chimp/human barrier. 

I can see some religious types liking this movie because it implies that species are stable, and evolution doesn't occur. They'd likely dislike it because of the nudity, of course. They'd also dislike it because it suggests that the world is somewhere around its actual age, and not the 6,000 or so years that creationists delude themselves into believing. 

Looking to more current entertainment, the audiobook version of Returning was released today. The audio version is narrated by British actress Bridget Thomas. I wanted a woman for this book, given the predominance of women among the most important characters (captain, navigating officer, Marine detachment commander, Marine company commander, and so forth). This unabridged reading runs just under eight hours.

As of now, the audio version is available at Audible.com and Amazon.com. And, of course, if you prefer to read it yourself, you can find it on Amazon in both print and Kindle editions.

International Blasphemy Day

I'll admit the idea sounds a little silly. Why would there be an International Blasphemy Day? And just what, exactly, are you supposed to do in recognition? Are you supposed run up and down the street, shouting, "Fuck you, {insert god of choice}!" 

I suppose you could, if you really wanted to. And that's the point. Do that in some places and they'll haul you into court. Insulting God is still illegal in several states, even though those statutes are no longer enforceable. But if anti-blasphemy laws in the United States are now just relics, sitting on the books only because no one has bothered to formally repeal them, that's not the case in a number of countries, where conviction on blasphemy charges can carry the death sentence.

Can anyone, in good conscience, believe it's a good idea to execute someone for being disrespectful to an imaginary being? Are Thor and Odin real? Only if you're talking about comic book/movie characters. Were they ever real? Same answer. Scandinavians used to worship them, but that didn't make them any less imaginary. The fact that billions of Christians worship their god, and over a billion Muslims worship theirs, says only that there are a lot of people who'll believe the most ridiculous fantasies if those fantasies are a part of their culture. 

In and of itself, worshiping a deity is no more problematic than any other delusion. The majority of people who believe in God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost/Spirit are essentially good people, and manage to remain compassionate, sympathetic, and helpful despite the actual teachings of their religion, which are parochial and rather hateful. Christians may think Jesus is a cool guy, but if you actually look at what he had to say, you're going to have to conclude that he wouldn't care very much about them because they're obviously not Jewish. Pay attention when you read. He had no time for anyone who wasn't Jewish, and if a non-Jew asked for help, his disciples usually had to talk him into giving it, and he gave it grudgingly.

He didn't enter public life with the goal of starting a new religion. His goal was to reform an existing one, and actually along stricter, not more lenient lines. His views on divorce agreed with the School of Shammai, who was ridiculously strict about everything, while mainstream Judaism mostly adopted the School of Hillel, who generally sought the less stringent opinion (which was still pretty strict by modern standards). 

The obvious fact about all gods is that they tend to be rather ignorant. If we look at the Judeo/Christian/Islamic God, who is at least supposed to be the same for all, we discover that while he created the universe, he doesn't have any idea how it works. If people are designed, we need to fire the designer, because he made a right mess of it. This should hardly surprise us. Since God is imaginary, invented by humans, it's only natural that he doesn't know any more about the universe than those who invented him. In fact, a god invented today would likely be a lot more believable, because today he'd come with a far better understanding of the universe, and would no doubt invoke evolution instead of special creation.

Ancient Jews came up with something that, in operation, is essentially the Big Bang theory, a couple thousand years ago. The problem was, they had no way to carry the idea through to its logical conclusion, so they simply decided that this was how God had created everything, and at the same time added that this explained why God often seemed remote, because the physical universe existed within an empty part of his otherwise universal spiritual being, adding great distances to the problem of communication. 

When people sit down and try to figure things out, it's not unusual for them to intuit the correct answer. It's also not unusual for them to then muck it up by adding a religious element whenever they get stuck. "And then a miracle happens," as the cartoon put it. Not that miracles happen. Miracles are just unusual, but still natural, events that happen at a fortuitous time. Most would go unremarked in a different situation. Hume got that one right. You can only legitimately claim a miracle if every alternative outcome would be even more miraculous. Spontaneous remission of aggressive cancer is more common that most people think. It's entirely possible that the "cure" was nothing more than the patient starting to eat better and in the process kicking his immune system up a notch to where it could overpower the cancer.

We need a day when we can point this out. God gets a tremendous amount of respect, despite there being essentially zero actual evidence that he exists. Muslim countries frequently impose long prison sentences, or even death, for blasphemy. A disgustingly high percentage of American Christians would like nothing better than to be able to do the same thing. 

The America in Returning has restored blasphemy laws, even as the rest of the world has managed to progress beyond that. One really can't over emphasize the importance of a secular education. Christians want Christianity taught in public schools as if its myths were actual events, while secularists are really fine with teaching Christianity as long as it's part of comparative religion course, and its myths are given no more credence than those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Scandinavians. 

God is a pretty nasty character anyway. The Christian God is, without doubt, even worse than the Jewish version, who was himself essentially a selfish, petty, omnipotent, genocidal two-year-old. The Christian version did seem to give up the genocide, but he replaced it with Hell, which as a concept is even worse (though, as a reality, not so much given that genocide happens and Hell isn't a real place, except maybe in Michigan). You can spend as much time as you want searching the Old Testament for Hell, but you won't find it. Sheol isn't hell, it's just an underground place for the dead. Very likely, it's just an alternate word for bor, or pit, which in Old Testament context doesn't mean hell, but simply means a hole in the ground. In other words, a grave. Jewish thoughts on an afterlife are rather nebulous, ranging from reincarnation, to resurrection at the coming of the Messiah, to living forever in Heaven, to no afterlife at all. Jewish scriptures leave all of that up in the air. It wasn't until the Babylonian exile, with its exposure to Zoroastrian beliefs, that the One God of early Israel was split into a god and a devil, and the idea of an immortal soul really started to take hold. 

In Jesus' time, the main difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was that the former believed there was an afterlife and the latter didn't. I'm sorry if this annoys you, but that makes Jesus a Pharisee. Well, I'm technically still a Republican, but that doesn't stop me from going after the lot currently running the GOP, which, in my opinion, aren't really Republicans anyway. You knew the party was going to hell as soon as David Duke made his first run as a Republican and not nearly enough people objected to the idea. 

There's a degree of irony in poll results that say people don't trust atheists, despite atheists being, statistically, considerable more honest than religious people. Seventy out of 100 Federal prisoners are Christians; one out of 400 are atheists. If the tendency toward criminality were the same with both groups, that second number should be closer to 10%, not a quarter percent. Perhaps, as some Christians like to suggest, this is because atheists are simply smarter and don't get caught as often. They even say this with conviction, apparently not noticing that what they're really saying is that Christians aren't even smart enough to be good criminals.

Or, perhaps, it's because atheists are simply more aware of their responsibility for their own actions. An atheist can't blame a devil for his actions. He can only blame himself. And he also lacks the Christian's get out of jail free card, the ability to repent at the last moment and enjoy a blissful afterlife. Atheists just figure there won't be an afterlife, so the one they're living is what matters. This is real; that's an unlikely fairy tale. 

The Gehunite space travelers in Returning take a very practical view of religions. They have them, but virtually no one believes in actual gods, and their religious observance is mostly just a matter of performing some ritual on the holidays and then having a big meal. Sort of like Passover, but without actually believing the story and minus the constipation (eat matzohs for a week, you'll see what I mean). They find Christian ritual either quaint but meaningless, or, as when the concept of communion is related, actually barbaric. (It is, after all, a symbolic cannibal feast.) 

I actually like the concept. You get to keep the holidays, but throw away the nonsense. The greatest appeal of religion in modern times may be the way it functions as a social hub. If you take the mythology seriously, it can cause a great deal of trouble. If you just want to get together every week with a bunch of friends, that's cool. 

Well, the day is close to over. Some places it already is. So I guess it's time to wind this up and get back to writing that private eye story.

I'm Still Here

It's September 24, 2017. The world was supposed to end yesterday. Obviously, it didn't. No astronomers posted that a giant planet has just popped out of nowhere and is heading our way. The only threat to our continued existence seems to be Donald Trump's "I've got a bigger dick than Kim Jong Un" campaign. It's just life as usual.

Sure, planetary collisions are possible. Most astrophysicists figure that's where the moon came from. Something planet size, or nearly so, collided with the young earth and the impact spewed out enough material to form the moon. But it should also be obvious that, if there was a threat of this happening today, someone would have seen the rogue planet approaching long before now.

I used a type of planetary collision to explain how modern people had managed to forget a previous technological civilisation in Returning. There it was a small moon coming out of orbit after it collided head-on with an asteroid and lost just enough forward speed for its orbit to decay. It made quite a mess and killed off nearly everyone.

That was fiction, obviously. But the chap predicting yesterday's destruction was treating it as an inevitable fact. Or he was. He's apparently changed his mind, now that nothing happened. Slight miscalculation of the date. This wasn't what Daniel meant after all.

These predictions are usually biblical, and most of them tend to be based on Daniel and Revelation. Christians love to cite Daniel because they can find so many fulfilled prophecies in that book. They ignore some basic details, however. The most obvious of these is that, to the best we can determine, Daniel was written after the events it predicted had already happened. Saying this is true prophecy is a bit like me predicting that President McKinley is going to be assassinated, then backdating it to 1870. Jesus predicted the Jerusalem Temple would be destroyed, but no one seems to have written this down until well after the Romans had destroyed it.

The Jews, by the way, have never considered Daniel to be a prophet, which is why that book is including in the Writings, the least authoritative of the three sections of the Jewish scriptures. It's in the same section as Job, which was acknowledged to be fiction at the time it was included in the canon, and Esther, which gives every appearance of being an early romance novel. Certainly nothing in Esther actually happened or, if it did, the numbers, and her status, are wildly exaggerated.

Revelation, the other popular source of apocalyptic predictions, is just nuts. It's the sort of thing a hippie might come up with after a pot and LSD binge lasting several days. In any case, its predictions are tied in with the Roman Empire, so obviously none of them came true, and the time when it could have any possible meaning is long past.

Most religions are somewhat ridiculous, particularly if you look at them from the outside. The basis of Christianity, for example, is that God created everything, but got mad when the first man and woman disobeyed him and ate the wrong piece of fruit, so he burdened them, and all of their descendants, with Original Sin, meaning everyone was condemned to spend eternity in Hell (despite the little detail that no one ever heard of the place until the New Testament). Later, feeling a bit sorry for these poor people, he knocked up a virgin, who then gave birth to Jesus, who was really God, and then sacrificed himself to himself as expiation for original sin. Naturally, he then resurrected his dead self, had himself preach about himself for a few days, and then took himself up into heaven, where he could sit next to himself on the heavenly throne.

The way this is celebrated is, of course, to have his worshipers take communion, a ritual in which they cannibalize Jesus and drink his blood. Protestants do this symbolically. Catholics, thanks to transubstantiation, do it literally, even though the literal flesh and blood still taste like wine and bread.

If you take what's really just fiction, and try to draw a prediction from it, you're generally going to come up short. No doubt there are historically accurate things in the Bible, but there are also plenty of events chronicled there that never actually happened. Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, Jesus' resurrection. There's no independent confirmation of any of these. There was never a first man or woman, just a point along the evolutionary line where humans who would be capable of breeding with modern humans began to diverge from those who couldn't. But it wasn't a discrete point. There would have been an overlap of hundreds of generations. Noah was probably extrapolated from some local flood, perhaps from legendary tales brought down from the time the Mediterranean basin filled up. In any case, Noah was stolen from earlier stories.

As for Jesus' resurrection, it was accompanied by all sorts of miraculous events that no one seemed to notice at the time, nor would they be noticed until after most potential witnesses were dead. It's very convenient to do it that way. Even more so in ancient times, when record keeping was sketchier, and people still believed stories simply because someone told them. If you wrote that a man was raised from the dead, and at the same time scores of dead people hopped out of their graves and wandered around Jerusalem, you could get people to believe it. There were no witnesses to refute the claim. People didn't really understand that much about biology. The Egyptians, whose medical knowledge was roughly on a par with that of ancient Judea, used to remove the brain during mummification, presuming that even though the dead soul needed the body, the brain wasn't that important. It simply hadn't occurred to them that the entire personality exists only in the brain. They were more concerned with the heart.

Religious end-time predictions are always parochial. The Rapture is strictly a Christian idea, and mostly confined to fundamentalist and evangelical groups. Jews aren't even sure there is an afterlife, though they tend to be hopeful. Others figure the spirit just keeps getting recycled, as if it's a battery pack that's moved from saw to drill to sander as needed, but really doesn't have a particular identity it carries from one life to the next. Atheists generally tend to figure that once you're dead, you're simply dead, and since there's no consciousness without a functioning brain, you won't be bothered by it because there won't be a sentient "you" to be bothered.

The reliability of any end-of-the-world prediction, then, rests on its origin. If it's religious, it can be discounted. If a religion says that human life on this planet will one day end, that's accurate enough. At some point, it will. Either we'll kill ourselves, something will kill us, or we'll evolve into something that wouldn't be considered human today. But it won't be because some imaginary deity has decided to kill some of us and grant eternal life in Paradise to others.

And it's extremely unlikely that it will be predictable based on an ancient book.

 

I Did Warn You

One of the things that happens in Returning, two years from now, is the Right manages to con enough states into calling for a Constitutional Convention. It's called to address a pair of non-problems, abortion and same-sex marriage, which the religious right tends to view as dangers to, well, something. Their power to dictate to the less religious, most likely. The more extreme one's religious leanings, the more one is inclined to force conformity on others "for their own good."

Naturally, once that Constitutional Convention is convened, it does exactly what any sensible person would expect. It throws out the existing Constitution and writes a new one. Those promoting what they call a "Convention of the States," which is a Constitutional Convention under a slightly less frightening name, claim that it could be limited to those amendments, or to whatever amendments the state legislatures decide need passed. That's a nice idea, but I can't help hoping people aren't really that gullible. There's no real power of enforcement. Particularly when you consider that any convention deciding to impose a new Constitution could easily include a clause prohibiting the prosecution of anyone involved in passing it.

In the book, the new Constitution does forbid abortion, under any circumstances, which pleases the religious right. Now, if a woman has an abortion it will have to be done in the proverbial back room, and the chances of the mother dying will shoot up dramatically. If they can't save the "baby," the religious right can at least feel somewhat mollified that the mother is likely to die as well. Divine punishment, they'll call it, as if sepsis is some sort of punishment and not just poor sanitation.

The new Constitution also gives the President the power to enact law by decree, with Congress only able to override if it can muster a 90% vote. This is something those who want government run "like a business" would love. The far right dislikes the idea of governance. They prefer to be ruled. Or, perhaps more accurately, they prefer to rule. The concept of democracy is utterly foreign to business. Company heads are subject only to the will of their board, and even then only if the CEO isn't the majority stockholder. If he is, then there's simply no way to get rid of him.

The Constitutional Convention in Returning also removes presidential term limits, though they do set the expiration date for those limits in 2025. They may be fictional idiots, but they're not dumb enough to give our current President any chances at staying in office for an unlimited time. (Personally, I think it likely he'll become a voluntary one-termer, now that he's starting to realize that he's in over his head, and that, shock of shocks, not everybody likes him. Learning that Congress, even one controlled by his party, isn't just going to do whatever he tells them to has apparently come as something of a shock as well.)

How did the Returning Convention come to pass such a Constitution? How did it manage get a convention called, for that matter? More of less through exactly what's happening now. They created a climate of fear and conned the legislatures into acting. It's probably impossible to overestimate the ability of people to act against their own best interests. After all, the new Constitution, as it turned out, didn't actually make same-sex marriage illegal. What it did do was make homosexual intercourse a crime and impose a Federal death penalty for violation. The law applied only to men, naturally. Women would merely be subjected to reeducation, because somehow God forgot to mention lesbians when he was telling people to kill gay men. (This is true, which is why, in Jewish law, gay male sex is considered a grave sin, technically subject to execution, while lesbian sex is considered only slightly less serious than a woman walking around with bare elbows.) Straight men usually don't give a damn what gay men do, but the "straight" men screaming about the "gay agenda," and gay threats to marriage almost never turn out to actually be straight. It's just that lobbying against gays makes them feel safer, because they see it as removing the temptation.

So the Returning Constitution simply handed all jurisdiction over marriage to the individual states. It didn't mean an end to gay marriage; imposing the death penalty for being gay took care of that. But it did get the religious right something it's been want to get back since 1967, the ability to legally limit who can marry whom based on race. The churches, most of them, were just fine with segregation, and mostly didn't have any problem with slavery, considering that the Bible, including the New Testament, says it's normal and part of God's plan. After the Civil War, most of the churches discovered that they'd always been anti-slavery, and after lying about it long enough people believed it. The truth is, except for Quakers and a few other small denominations, churches were always for preserving the status quo.

The current problem in the United States with Nazis (fuck this "alt-right" bullshit, these guys are Nazis) may be, at least in part, a result of our evolution not having caught up with our culture. We are still essentially tribal. We're far more likely to notice differences than similarities. The right thinks the left is crazy, the left thinks the right is crazy, and those of us in the middle tend to think they're both nut, and we're not all that sure about ourselves, either, but figure a middle road is most likely safer. The Nazis want to eliminate Jews from America, along with blacks and Muslims.

The truth is, Islam isn't the problem. Neither is Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Hinduism, or any other specific religion. The problem is religion itself. It may confer some benefits on an individual believer, but overall it serves only to provide another way of dividing people. There are thousands of religions, every one of them convinced it's the only real religion, and given the slightest chance ready to force all the others to conform.

If there were actually a god, a real one, not the imaginary ones espoused by modern faiths, it would be obvious, and none of this religious strife would exist. Let's get this clear. If there really was a God, then there would only be one religion, because he wouldn't have made all those contradictory revelations that serve only to set each group at the others' throats. If there's more than one religion, then there's either more than one god, or no god at all. None that interacts in any way with humanity, at least. There might be some slight chance of the sort of "start things going, then go away and let things do whatever they do" type of Deist god, but obviously there isn't one that interacts with people or, from time to time, he'd actually do it. Not whisper to the deluded, who then claim to be prophets, but regrow an arm, or bring a dead person back to life (after a day or two, not "restore" life to someone who wasn't actually quite dead). Jesus predicted he'd return before the last of his disciples died, and people are still waiting nearly 2,000 years later. And advances in the understanding of physics is making it more and more unlikely that creation actually needed a creator.

At the quantum level, creation from nothing seems to be not only not impossible, but ridiculously likely, and the only thing unusual about ours was that the original event somehow created more matter than anti-matter, leaving enough over to become the universe. That was unusual, but didn't require any divine intervention.

Alright, true, if you throw away God, people will find something else to kill each other over. It's just that it's harder to muster the same degree of fanaticism without the promise of eternal reward for or eternal punishment for your enemy. Realizing that you're simply going to die, and that will be the end of you, that no conscious essence will remain, is remarkably liberating. You didn't exist for nearly 14-billion years, and you won't exist for the next 14-billion, either. Why should you care? You didn't notice not existing before, and you won't notice it later.

I feel I could on for a while yet, but it's 5 o'clock in the morning, so I don't think I will.

 

But I Don't Want to be Right

The latest stories suggest that the President wants to amend the Constitution to allow a president to sue anyone he believes has insulted him. At the moment, it's not quite impossible to slander, or libel, a politician, but you have to really try. Presidents have even successfully convinced Congress to pass sedition laws in the past, though never with good results.

Of course, what Trump seems to be proposing is a little different. Sedition is normally thought of as insulting the country itself. It's a bad idea mostly because, as often as not, there's a legitimate grievance involved.

But that's not what Trump's concerned with. He seems to be more interested in getting a law that would allow government officials to sue their critics. That ability has traditionally been limited, with the limits usually extending to candidates for public office, and not just to those actually holding those offices. If it was easy to sue, Hillary Clinton would own several media outlets and the personal fortunes of half my acquaintances.

Of course, people were merely accusing her of murder, treason, and a half dozen other major crimes. Yet she never sued anyone. Accusing your political opponents of being criminals is nearly as old as the country. No one really went after Washington, but from then on presidents were targets.

Trump, on the other hand, is mostly being accused of being an idiot, or acting like a two-year-old. Not that easy to defend against when your first instinct on hearing anything negative about yourself is a twitter blast.

Back at the beginning of his first term, Barack Obama more or less put aside his Blackberry. He did, eventually, take to Twitter once that platform became available, and continues to use it. Obama's tweets, for the most part, consisted of mild national boosterism, and the occasional suggestion that the country might be better off if people would actually work together for the common good. Trump's are mostly, "I really won the popular vote," "Hillary cheated," and "I didn't do that," with a liberal leavening of "so-and-so is a bully," and "I don't care what's right, I won so I should get my way." Of course, Obama is a gentleman and Trump is Gordon Gecko, but in real estate rather than stocks.

Okay, what's this have to do with being right? In Returning, sometime in 2019, enough states are conned into passing "convention of the states" resolutions to convene a constitutional convention. The convention then proceeds to ignore its "official" purpose, which is to propose amendments banning same-sex marriage and abortion, and rewrites the entire Constitution. Among the changes are a unicameral Congress, with everyone serving six-year terms, removing the two-term limit on a president, giving the president the power to create law by executive order, taking the power to declare a law unconstitutional away from the Supreme Court, and adding a new preamble that makes it clear this is now officially a Christian nation, no one else need apply. Part of that was making sure the current constitutional ban on religious qualification for holding office was eliminated.

Potentially, the new Constitution would give America the sort of country that John Calvin would have loved. Or the Pilgrims, who were actually a pretty miserable lot of religious bigots, even if they did generally dress a little better than the traditional Thanksgiving advertising would suggest. If the Puritans and their philosophical descendants had their way, we'd be living in a gloomy, anti-intellectual country.

Not that intellectuals seem to have much place in the current administration. When the chief qualification for heading agencies with a primarily scientific mandate is not believing in science, you can't expect much. If he could get away with it, you can't help thinking Trump would just love to appoint Ken Ham as director at the Smithsonian. Or Jenny McCarthy to run the Centers for Disease Control.

By the time the real action starts in Returning, in 2126, that's more of less what's happened to America. Most people live ordinary lives. The truth is, that's what happens in dictatorships. If you keep your head down and obey the rules, you get along. Maybe you have to be careful what you say, but you get along. They don't round up everybody. They just round up the "trouble-makers." There aren't that many of those, if only because years of careful education have insured that most people believe what they're told. If the Bible suggests that the universe is only 6,000-years-old, and your government assures you this is the case, why would you question it?

After all, the President is a fifth-generation evangelist, so certainly he'd never lie to you. If the President assures you that the reason there are no satellite images of a vast part of Wyoming is because it includes a top-secret military base, then why would you believe rumors they're really hiding a huge concentration camp? Sure, people sometimes disappear, but they just moved away. It's purely coincidental they never write or call.

Now, the reality is that you don't usually get dictatorships through violent revolutions. Spain did, but the Nazis took power in Germany through the normal political process. Truth doesn't matter to authoritarians, because they can make the truth be whatever they want it to be.

I guess I should point out that Returning isn't a political or religious rant. Politics and religion both get sent up, certainly, but mostly it's a bit of space opera, a lot of speculative science, and an entertaining adventure story. And, despite the starship's captain, navigator, and Marine detachment commanders all being women, it's not particularly "feminist," either. The Gehunites got past that stage a long time ago, moving on into what I suppose you could call a humanist phase, where it simply never occurs to anyone to consider sex in deciding who should do what job.

You should read it.

Religion in the Gehunite Empire

I suppose it goes without saying that, living about 87,000 years ago, Gehunites didn't belong to any of today's faiths. You wouldn't expect them to. You don't base your religion on the teachings of people who haven't been born yet. They did have religions, naturally. The purpose of this little piece is to say a bit more about those than the snippets that appeared in Returning. That novel, logically, was a bit more preoccupied with telling a story than outlining ancient religions.

The dominant religion in the Empire was L'Mikism. L'Mik was the local god of the original nation of Gehun, which occupied a peninsula more or less where modern Florida is located (only a good bit larger), and the small island nation of Kaam. L'Mik was personified as a giant, talking (naturally) wolf, and was often referred to as "the Wolf God." His teachings were found in the Book of L'Mik, and constitute one of the most unusual religions in human history.

L'Mikism, you see, had no clergy and no temples. One was simply given the Book of L'Mik to read, and then had to figure out what to do for himself. You weren't even allowed to try to tell someone else he was doing it wrong. There had originally been priests, but L'Mik decided they had corrupted the religion, so he ate them. This is set down in "The Tale of Sa," Sa being the L'Mikist prophet who was not only credited with writing all of the Book of L'Mik, but also with inventing writing to do it.

Salmik the Great, the founder of the Gehunite Empire, was named after the prophet (his name means "Sa from L'Mik," but is pronounced Sal-mik. Salmik was reputedly a demigod, the son of a mortal woman and L'Mik, in a tale of what can best be termed religious bestiality. His empress, Mira, was said to be a widow well into her 80s when she performed an act of kindness to an elderly beggar. The beggar, naturally, turned out to be L'Mik in a different form, and as a reward for her kindness he returned her to youth and found a way to get her aboard Salmik's ship. The rest, as they say, was history.

Not everyone worshipped L'Mik, obviously, unless you happened to be a L'Mikist, in which case you held that everyone did, because any other god was obviously just a personification of some aspect of L'Mik, and therefore was L'Mik.

Arzulcaldans, the Empire's main enemy until they were conquered and taken into the Empire after the War of 382, had a religious system that was essentially animistic. Rather than having a single God, they had thousands of spirits inhabiting natural objects. The system would eventually be corrupted by the Arzucaldan military, in much the same way as the old State Shinto system was in Japan prior to World War II. After the Gehunite conquest, which occurred in a war that Arzucalda had started, the system returned to its former rather benign aspect.

Callaa had its own native religion, centred on the worship of the warrior goddess Onira and her diminutive consort, Meganim. If you want a good idea of how Onira was depicted, go watch Conan the Barbarian. When Sandahl Bergman's Valeria returns from the dead you get a pretty good idea. She was tall, beautiful, and powerful. Meganim, on the other hand, was a little shrimp less than a third her height, though he rather made up for that with an endowment that tended to make his idols fall over from all that weight in the front. Onira conferred Callaaite women with their martial skills, and Meganim was credited with teaching them to make steel weapons, a monopoly they held onto for nearly 400 years.

Now all of this mostly affect pre-technological Gehun. Religion continued all during the period of imperial expansion, but with the centuries' long peace that followed the War of 382, it tended to fade. By the time Warrior and her sister starships departed, religion consisted of little beyond a ritual observance of old festivals. Mostly, the ones that involved food. Hardly anyone bothered with the fasts.

The Gehunites who returned in 2126 would likely be considered atheists in contemporary society. The American government certainly did, but that was run by a President who'd got his start as a TV evangelist, so you can see how that might happen.

If you haven't read it yet, get Returning in Kindle or trade paperback from Amazon.com.