J.T. McDaniel's blog

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.

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.

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.

How to Lose a Culture

When the Gehunite starship Warrior returns to Earth in Returning, their own culture has long since been forgotten. In the year 2126 by our contemporary calendar, the ship has been away for 86,985 years. Because most of that time has been passed during light-speed travel, the crew has only aged about 15 years, while the rest of the universe continued on at the normal rate. When they left, Barzak—their name for Earth—had two moons, and there was a large island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. When they got back there was only one moon, the island was gone, and the topography had changed significantly after the deorbiting of the small second moon and an ice age or two.

Is it really possible there was a previous, technological civilisation on this planet? Sure. Is it likely? Not really, no, but this is fiction, so we can do whatever we like. The impact of the second moon, which was significantly larger than the asteroid that brought an end to the dinosaurs, but was travelling much slower when it came crashing down, and so had an effect on the planet only marginally greater than Chixulub event, would later be remembered in the Atlantis stories. It would also wipe out nearly all human life in the northern hemisphere, and leave only a handful of survivors in southern Africa to repopulate the planet. A small group of Neanderthals also survived, in a deep valley in the Alps. A population of over six billion was reduced to less than a thousand individuals in a few weeks.

Not nearly enough to sustain any sort of technological civilisation. The population rapidly reverted to the stone age simply because they lacked the skills to do anything else. In South America, the survivors were too scattered to find each other, so in a few years they died out. The Americas would have to be repopulated later, after the descendants of the African survivors had migrated north into Europe and Asia, and a glacial period had erased what little the small moon's impact hadn't destroyed.

A technological civilisation requires at least a minimum number of technicians, along with energy sources, to sustain itself. Lose either and you're back in the stone age starting over again.

 Of course, in Returning, it isn't only the ancient Gehunite culture that's lost. In the near future (2019, according to the story), the United States succumbs to the pressure to convene a "convention of the states." Sure, it was intended to be limited to passing two constitutional amendments, one outlawing abortion, and the other stating clearly that the stage legislatures would be the final arbiter of who was allowed to marry whom. Some of the people organising the convention were hoping all along that no one would notice the second wouldn't just mean a state didn't have to recognise same-sex couples, but would also allow for the restoration of anti-miscegenation laws.

That, however, was only the stated purpose behind the convention. The real purpose was to throw out the existing Constitution and replace it with one more amenable to the desires of the extreme religious right. The new Constitution would bring in a unicameral Congress, a Supreme Court without the power to declare a law unconstitutional, and a President empowered to enact law by executive order. He could be overruled, naturally, but that required 90% of Congress to vote against him. The two-term limit on a President would also be removed, however, the leaders of the runaway convention not being complete idiots, that provision wouldn't come into effect until 2025, just in case the incumbent managed to get himself re-elected in 2020.

It would become the sort of country today's religious right has been pushing for years. One where Christians would have rights, and everyone else would essentially be shut out. Christians, naturally, meaning Protestant fundamentalists.

In Returning, one outcome of this new Constitution is that, by the time Warrior returns in 2126, Reverend Will Gordon has been President of the United States for 29 years, and the US has truly become, as people today like to incorrectly claim, a "Christian nation." For the most part, everyone else left years ago.

In any case, it's not a prediction. It's just a vehicle for some of the action. And, perhaps, a mild warning that calling for a constitutional convention is a bad idea, because even if you limit your delegates and threaten to punish them if they exceed their mandate, if they decide to make major changes, there's nothing at all stopping them from simply including a pardon for themselves in the new document, or having the new Constitution declare that any such limitation was ab initio invalid.

Get thee over to Amazon.com (or your local Amazon, if you have one in your country), where you can Returning as a Kindle eBook (which you can borrow if you're a Prime or Kindle Unlimited member), or a trade paperback. For those who find doing their own reading a burden, it will also be available as an Audible audiobook later this year.

On Fanatics and Crooks

So far, only a single review has appeared on Amazon for my most recent novel, Returning. I can't say I'm particularly happy about it, because the only thing you see at the top of the page is the single star. You have to scroll down quite a ways before the reason is readable. Not a very good reason, when you come right down to it, but it does point up an ancient problem with human perception.

The reason, according to the review, is that the book portrays all Christians as fanatics and all preachers as crooks. This is hardly the case. Of course, I really have no idea how far the reviewer even read. They apparently stopped as soon as their sensitive perceptions detected this supposed tendency.

Human perception is often like that. Someone too strongly invested in a particular set of beliefs will often look at fictional characters who display a negative aspect of those beliefs, in this case actually a dozen or so people out of a population of several hundred million, and simply decide that everyone is included and they're being attacked. It's a bit like the way Bill O'Reilly would construe a shop clerk saying "Happy holidays" to a customer as an attack on Christmas. 

In Returning, President Gordon's family have been big-time evangelists for several generations. Unsurprisingly, for a family that's been selling salvation for four generations, they do tend to view religion as much as a way to generate an income as something you actually believe in. They tend to be a bit puritanical, and the Puritans, one should remember, weren't exactly the nicest people who ever lived. The Mayflower bunch, and those who immediately followed, had a very familiar outlook on religious freedom. It meant they were free to worship in the manner they preferred, and that no one else was allowed to deviate from that standard. It doesn't hurt to remember that those early Puritans held exactly the same beliefs as the ones who stayed behind in England and a few years later started the Civil War and murdered the king. 

Of course, that hardly indicates that all Christians are fanatics, or that all preachers are just in it for the money. In a lot of small churches, there isn't that much money to be in it for. On the other hand, TV preachers, and travelling evangelists are always suspect. The sort of religious con featured in Marjoe was not an aberration, it was common practice with many touring preachers and remains so to this day. If a preacher is charging admission, and then takes a couple of collections during the service, he's probably a con artist. Sorry, but that's reality.

In any case, the majority of people in Returning, once you exclude the Gehunites aboard the starship, are probably Christians of some sort. Or follow some religion, anyway. For the most part, they're fairly ordinary people. The King of England, who is, after all, the head of a major religion, is a pleasant enough chap. 

True, the religious right has managed to impose a theocratic government in the United States, but that hardly means that all Christians are fanatics. Or even that all Americans are. The imposition of a religious regime doesn't require everyone to be religious. It just requires that there be enough people who are religious enough, or just gullible enough, to elect enough people to push it through. You don't get a government like that because you want it, you get it the same way you get school boards that try to force science teachers to include creation myths in science class, or "return" organised school prayer so that they can force Jewish kids to pray to Jesus before class, or Jehovah's Witnesses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. These people don't get elected by saying what they really plan to do. They appeal to "family values," and "returning to when things were better."

It's that Puritan idea of religious freedom again. Like "religious freedom restoration" laws, the concept is actually that you are free to do whatever you wish, but everyone who believes differently should do whatever you wish as well. There is certainly actual persecution of Christians in some parts of the world, but what Americans usually mean when they say they're being persecuted is that someone is stopping them from persecuting someone else. It's common for TV preachers to claim gay rights advocates are hypocrites because they're telling Americans to change, but not doing anything to stop ISIS from throwing gay men off the top of buildings. At best, this is idiotic. An inability to stop a great evil in one part of the world doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do something about a lesser evil in a place where you can do something about it.

All religions have their fanatic fringe. The majority just want to get along and live their lives in peace. The minority, on the other hand, is more willing to take extreme measures. It's hardly surprising when that minority convinces the majority that it's better to just go along with their wishes than to suffer the consequences if you don't. 

The Gehunites seem to have the right idea. They recognise that their gods are mythical, and preserve their old religions mostly through holiday observances. Over the years, ritual has diminished and cuisine has expanded to fill the gap. The fast days are gone and the feast days are emphasised. The religious right may complain about secularism, but keeping the government strictly secular is the best protection against religious tyranny.

Arkhgaiizim Passageways, and Why We May Never Have Them

The Arkhgaiizim Passageway is a central element in my new novel, Returning, which goes on sale 3 April 2017. Essentially a wormhole in the space-time continuum, an Arkhgaiizim Passageway allows Imperial Gehunite spacecraft to travel astronomical distances without the need for several generations to be born, live, and die on the ship before it reaches its destination. By making use of an Arkhgaiizim Passageway, the ship is able to make an instantaneous jump of up to 850 light years, during which the crew will age, at most, a few seconds. 

This is very useful, provided the goal is simply one of exploration. Such is the case with Gehunite ships, the larger ones also carrying prospective colonists, should they encounter suitable unoccupied planets. Policy with regard to planets already having native life is one of strict non-interference, and even non-contact, unless the occupants of that planet have already ventured into space.

Were the goal one of conquest, this would be pointless. Though the ships are commissioned into the Imperial Navy, and commanded and crewed by naval personnel, their primary function remains exploration. The sort of faster-than-light travel and communications beloved of television and motions pictures, unfortunately, still violates the laws of physics, which dictate that nothing having mass can travel faster than light.

Nor does this allow practical warp drives, though here the laws of physics seem to agree with the possibility. By warping space, the hypothesis suggests, one could bring two distant points together and move instantly between them, traversing light year distances without actually having to exceed the speed of light. Originally, it was thought that an Arkhgaiizim Passageway would work this way. But when a test was conducted, in which the test ship made a modest five light year jump, spent a few hours exploring, and then immediately jumped back, a problem was discovered.

The crew, who were, after all, only a few hours older than when they left, were both astonished and dismayed to discover that they had actually been gone for ten years, and were presumed to have died during the test jump. Nature, it appeared, was not to be cheated. It was now possible to use technology to travel at a speed of .9999 light speed using the Arkhgaiizim Passageway, but that was as fast as anyone could travel, and regardless of the fact that no one aboard the ship got any older in the process, the rest of the universe did, and it still took 200 years to travel 200 light years from the perspective of anyone not aboard the ship. 

It says a great deal about the Gehunite character that this didn't discourage the Empire from building more and larger ships that would be able to explore deep space, even though their crews might not return home for thousands of years. Because of this, exploration became essentially a quest for pure knowledge, even if the beneficiaries of that knowledge, when the ships returned to Earth, would live in the far distant future.

This isn't something you could expect an organization like NASA to do today. This is not because NASA wouldn't care to do this sort of pure science, but because there is almost no chance it could be funded even if the technology already existed. Which it doesn't. Most NASA long-range projects have a life of no more than eight years, because that is the practical limit of any one President's influence unless he/she came to the job as a vice-president elevated upon the death of a predecessor during the latter half of that predecessor's term, which would allow the new president to run twice on his/her own ticket. 

Projects have this limit simply because it's unlikely any successor President will continue with them. The new President will start new projects, not continue old ones he won't get the credit for. 

The closer to pure science a project is, the more likely it is to be canceled. Making the Administration look good can keep a project going. So can having a military value. Pure science, on the other hand, and particularly during a Republican administration, becomes harder to justify. The payoff may be years down the road. Or it may conflict with party policy. There is a strong strain of neo-Lysenkoism in the Republican Party, where the politicians tell the scientists the results they want, then expect the scientists to get those results. There's no question that climate is changing, and that human action is largely responsible for the rate, but as this conflicts with the results expected by the energy company donors that dictate policy to Republicans, only those results that agree with what's expected are cited. This is the reason behind the frequent citation of reports by Nobel laureates who disagree with the whole concept of anthropogenic climate change, despite the fact that the Nobel Prize winner is no more competent to express a scientifically informed opinion on climate than your average Conservative talk radio host (most of whom are barely competent to express an opinion on anything). 

Deep space exploration, particular deep space exploration that would make use of an actual Arkhgaiizim Passageway, is unlikely to be financed simply because there would be no payoff within the lifetimes of anyone voting to finance it. Americans are loathe to spend money on anything that doesn't pay off immediately, or have a clear military use. This is why Europe has the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and all the United States has is a big hole in the ground in Texas where the Superconducting Super Collider would have been installed if congress hadn't canceled it in 1993. 

Nearly Done, but the Campaign Rolls On

According to my copy of Word, Returning has reached 56,000 words. So it's officially a novel at this point, albeit, one still lacking the last three or four chapters. I know what happens in them. I just haven't finished writing them yet. 

That won't be the end of it. Once the book is complete I'll need to print it out and go over the manuscript two or three times looking for all those silly little goofs that always seem to creep in. Writing "escape" when you meant "escaped," for instance, or leaving off the odd "ing" here and there. You're also looking for the bigger goofs. It can be a little jarring when you're reading a novel and suddenly realize that the author has lost track of who's talking and has a character answering his own question. 

Naturally, as the basic writing winds down, and the editing starts, I still need people popping in to my Indiegogo campaign. Visiting is nice; donating is nicer. It would be cool if authors could just turn out books on a regular basis and make a living at it, but that only happens to a few, and, so far, I don't seem to be one of those. Maybe I should write about billionaire bondage freaks, huh?

Some of the money raised is going to go toward basic stuff, such as making sure the author eats regularly. That's hard to guarantee, what with paying the mortgage on a house in Georgia and rent on a townhouse in Ohio. It's only in the last year and half or so that the rent on the house has been higher than the mortgage. Logically, I should move back there and stop paying rent up here. I might even do that, but Mom is 91 and I don't really want to move an extra 500 miles further away right now.

That's not the only reason to raise money, obviously. Because of the perks system, any such campaign has a secondary function of selling copies of the book. Depending on the size of the contribution, it could be a Kindle book, a paperback, or even a custom-made leather-bound edition. There are potentially t-shirts, polo shirts, and baseball caps to produce. There's even a $200,000 level (which is a lot to give on a $10,000 campaign), but there's only one of those, the perk is a two-year option on the film rights, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to claim that one. Maybe later, after the book has been published.

I'm going to need a proper cover designed. What's on this post, and the previous one, is probably okay for basic fundraising, but it needs to be better if I want to sell books later. I've got someone working on that, and I'm quite sure he expects to eventually be paid for the job. 

Meanwhile, I suppose it's fair to ask what's happening in the book? Not to it, but in it.

To start off, there's a good deal more back story. Originally, the story started with the astronomer in Greenwich noticing the energy burst when Warrior emerged from jumpspace out past the orbit of Saturn. Now it starts 86,985 years earlier, with the ship getting ready to leave. Then, for a while, it alternates between the ship and events back on earth. A reasonable explanation is provided for the disappearance of an advanced civilization. There is some coverage of the Second Constitutional Convention, which begins the conversion of the United States into the theocratic dictatorship the evangelicals have been trying to bring forth for so many years. 

There are a few jokes that some people will get, and others will wonder about. In 2126 London, Sara Ellsworth is a bit puzzled by a billboard advertising Series 121 of a television show she's never seen, because it's being censored in America by then. The presence of an oddly dressed young actor and a somewhat more conventionally dressed young woman on the billboard may give a hint as to which contemporary BBC program is still around more than a century from now. Two drunks arguing the merits of Number 87 versus Number 92, and anyway, Number 95 is who we've got now, so stuff the others, might be another clue.

Like any novel, this one has a lot of characters. Some appear only briefly. A few are there for a minute or two and then are gone. Doctor Tuttle, the Greenwich astronomer, is one of these. She notices the ship emerging, gets a bit of news coverage before they figure out what's actually happening, and that's about it. Some are, so far, only mentioned in passing, like the ephebophile Southern Baptist chaplain at the internment camp, and just as well, because letting him get away with anything would be in rather poor taste anywhere, and might even be illegal in a few countries. If you're not quite sure what an ephebophile is, watch Family Guy. Certain crew members get more page space than others. Sara, the young HAM from Denver who gets involved by accident, is more important than she originally was.

I've been thinking about how long I've been working on this book, and it's a very long time indeed. The basic idea dates back to the mid 1970s. Back then, I created the entire Gehunite civilization, originally as a swords and sorcery milieu, but later developing into a technological culture and finally a space-faring one. It just never quite hung together.

Then the modern GOP came along, with their penchant for lying about everything that might negatively affect their masters' profits, and their thralldom to modern commercial religion. Frequent calls for a "convention of the states," ostensibly to propose anti-abortion and anti-gay amendments, but obviously capable of simply throwing out the entire Constitution and starting over, suggested someone might just manage to pull this off, and sooner rather than later. Donald Trump's early-term enchantment with ruling by decree, rather than going through Congress, figures in as well, though obviously no current politicians are mentioned by name. The Returning 2019 new Constitution, after all, gives the President that power, though it does curiously make it effective only after 2025.

Just in case the incumbent gets reelected, you know. 

In any case, a theocratic, totalitarian United States, where getting an abortion or being homosexual could get you executed, provided a nice villain. Making the President a fifth-generation evangelist, and one who recognized, at least inwardly, that he was really just a remarkably successful con man in a long line of successful con men, adds something as well. We try to be realistic. Or as realistic as possible, given the speculative nature of the novel.

In any case, I can certainly use your support. So drop in at my campaign. Look around, see if any of the perks appeal to you. Contribute for one of the perks, or just make a donation. If nothing else, you'll get your name in the book and on my website.