J.T. McDaniel's blog

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.