The Internet Is Broken

Remember the 90's? When our rock heroes wore flannel, when X-Men was a cartoon, when the internet was brand new and weird. Tech was king, dot-com's owned the planet, Seattle seemed to radiate cool, and the worst thing we could accuse our president of was banging a fat chick.

Ah, those were the days. And then it all came crashing down, so to speak. The Dot-Com bubble collapsed, the tech bubble burst, we still feel those repercussions today. More importantly, the Internet is in the middle of a monetization crisis (kind of like an identity crisis, only more expensive), because it is the victim of our second rule of broken-ness.

Causal conditions are incorrectly assumed to be normal or permanent. In other words, the world changed while you weren't paying attention.

Now, I will admit that the problem is not immediately apparent, but let's take a look at the way the Internet emerged into our culture for just a moment. You know that housing bubble that was the spark that lit the fuse of the mortgage crisis? Well, the housing bubble was an after-effect of the collapse of the tech-bubble. Think back. It was the 90's. Remember all those good things I talked about a few paragraphs ago? Dwell on those. Mmmmmm... We had just come out of a recession in the 80's and business was booming. The Fed didn't, perhaps, raise interest rates as much as it ought to have and the result was a glut of investment capital (since people had little incentive to put their disposable income in the bank).

Ergo, there was a whole, whole lot of capital being thrown around all willy-nilly and tech-stocks were the hip thing. So you have tons of startups popping up, fully or largely funded with venture capital. Some of these have a model for pulling in revenue: Amazon and eBay come to mind. Others had no such plan. Consider Yahoo! It didn't have a revenue model, but it was the hip new thing and the owners made tons of money when the stock went public.

Content was essentially free. You had some online firms that offered pay services (that allowed for things like day-trading). But mostly you had free content that was ad-based, or just free. This meant we adopted a cable-TV type business model for internet access. This made sense when there was plenty of venture capital flying around, and when companies were throwing money into a hole called "web ads". But now that all that capital has dried up and enthusiasm for web-ads is evaporating, you have tons of people online providing content with all of the money is going to the telecoms for providing access. The end result of all of this is that we have created a culture of "free" on the internet.

This is a problem. All these net services cost money to provide and have to be paid for somehow. They shouldn't cost much, but they should cost something. And here's the basic problem for providers: no one would be willing to pay for it now because they expect it to be free, but because it's free, it has no value, so people abuse it. E-mail is a great example. What if e-mail weren't free, but just really really cheap? What if it cost a penny to send an e-mail to someone, or even a tenth of a penny? That would cover the costs to providers, it would be a negligible cost to the end user, and it would all but eliminate spam.

Here are some stats on spam, which I will now summarize: In 2006, there were 12.4 billion spam messages spent daily. That's 40% of all e-mails. The costs in lost time and filtering, etc, etc, etc, were over $9 billion annually (as of '02). It's a major productivity loss. If it costs a tenth of a penny to send an e-mail, and all that did was cut the amount of spam down to a quarter volume (that is, 3.1 billion messages per day), it would pay for itself in made up wages.

There are a number of worthwhile services out there that are discovering that they can't operate on ad revenues alone, but whose customers will never pay for services. YouTube lost half a billion dollars for Google last year. MySpace just laid off %30 of its work force. Twitter is operating off venture capital, but it has no monetization model and huge costs--how long do you think it's going to stay in business?

In next few years we're going to see web services slowly redefined, and hopefully we'll develop a system of micropayments that make all that possible. But it might have been totally different if the web had emerged during a financial crisis rather than the glut between crises.

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Newspapers Are Broken

Across the country, newspapers are going out of business, folding, being absorbed into other media, or just bitching about how much money they're losing. How did this happen? Well, it happened by way of the first mechanism of brokenness I'll be discussing this week.

Monetization is decoupled from service. In other words, what you do is separate from what you get paid to do.

Let's take a look at the business model for most newspapers. They have three revenue streams: selling subscriptions to readers, selling professional ads from businesses, selling classified ads. Subscriptions alone don't cover the costs, even for a major newspaper like, say, the New York Times, so they rely heavily on classified ads to bring in money. The problem is that someone paying for a classified ad is paying for the classified service, not for a newspaper. In short, the problem is that what they get specialize in is not what they get paid to do.

They specialize in reporting the news. They get paid to run classifieds. This means that they have doubled they're vulnerabilities. If something comes along that does a better job of reporting news, they're sunk. If something comes along that gives people a better price to run classified ads, they're sunk. They're in trouble now because both have happened.

Blogs and Twitter and cable networks may not deliver higher quality or more reliable news than newspapers, but they tend to deliver it more quickly, and in the world of up-to-the-minute information, "faster" means "better", regardless of quality. So fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers. Then you have a service like Craigslist that runs classified ads for free. No wonder newsprint is in jeopardy.

Many ad-based business models run up against this problem, and it manifests itself in different ways. Movie theaters are selling a "theatrical experience" and make the lion's share of their profits from the concessions stand, but as they put more and more ads and trailers in front of movies, they cheapen that experience, and people will stay home. Television has taken a hit too now that people are used to watching their favorite shows on DVD, without commercials. And don't even get me started on radio.

But getting back on topic, what are they newspapers to do? Well, they can't scoop Twitter. It just can't be done. They might alter their angle from news reporting to news analysis (Slate is essentially a Zine that does just that), and there will probably have to be some consolidation such that a single large paper works on national news and has local bureaus that focus on integrating local events into that. But we'll see.

The big thing, obviously, is to get away from a model in which they are paid to do one thing but they actually do something else. Or at least move their monetization model towards something that no one else is doing for free.

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Things That Are Broken: An Introduction

I recently purchased a printer/scanner/fax machine to replace the one we wore out. It's a Lexmark 6500 series, pretty fancy, network enabled, all that good stuff. I installed everything on the iMac and tried to print something when my text editor crashed. That's right, trying to print something crashed TextEdit. Yeah. I tried printing from Firefox. Crash. Mac's, TextEdit, and Firefox are all pretty reliable--must be a problem with the print driver.

Well, I was able to confirm that it was a driver issue coupled with some weirdness in the install script--so I ran the installer again, which meant reinstalling all sorts of peripheral shovelware that I wasn't interested in, but what can you do? Same deal. I tried again. After a few hours, I gave up. I booted into Windows on the very same computer and was able to install the printer without any problem. I printed a test page, at which point the computer loudly announced that it was printing. Then the page printed. Then the computer announced that it was through. It installed several product suites, which I have no use for, some of which load on start-up and

Le sigh. All I wanted was a printer that any computer in our house could print to. We have both PC's and Mac's so it would need to be cross-platform compatible (which this Lexmark claims to be--even though the Mac installer didn't work). Ideally, all an installer would have to do would be install the printer driver, configure the printer to show up on the network, and perhaps provide some kind of access to the scanner functions. Those are simple and necessary functions. Not all that complicated, but it failed at that. Talking print queues and fancy interfaces are non-essential. Those are called "value-adds" (assuming that they have any value at all). These kind of things are showy, but they tax a computer's resources and are nearly always bulky and poorly made. This is a quintessential example of placing style over substance.

In short, this is broken. I saw an interesting video from marketing guru Seth Godin the other day (although the video is several years old) in which he describes the ways and reasons that things are broken. It's about a twenty minute video, but it's pretty entertaining (although his points get a little muddled throughout). One thing he said that was absolutely true is that once you are aware that much of the world is "broken", you start to notice it more. I noticed it with the printer. But I noticed a couple different things. The product is broken because it lacks functionality that it ought to have and because it tries to cripple my computer to prevent me from using anything else to print. Part of this is poor design and just bad work, so in a certain sense, Lexmark the institution is broken, but in a different way. And another part of the problem is because there is no standard for print drivers, absolutely everything is proprietary, and there's no reason that this should be the case. Mac OS includes something like 3 gigs of print drivers so you can plug-and-play most models. That's absurd.

So we have a broken product. We've all encountered those. Things that are supposed to do one thing but do it poorly, don't do it at all, or perform a number of non-essential tasks that obstruct primary functionality. Then we have a broken company that thinks the best way to win and retain customers is to force shovelware onto our computers and to falsely adverstise that they are Mac compatible. In other words, this is a company whose business practices are about deception and corner-cutting rather than building a good product and getting it to the appropriate customers.

But I'm much more enthralled with the idea of a broken system. For a company that makes printers, it seems to be in their interest to use a proprietary print driver. But because all these companies use different drivers, we have no standard, and the customer loses in the end. But there was no malicious intent, no selfish desires. The system simply failed.

I'm getting a little long-winded, so I'm going to draw to a close, but I think that over the next few weeks I'll be peppering the usual tripe with some discussion about systems that are broken because their nature is fundamentally flawed. Could get interesting.

It's worth noting that broken systems still function. They just don't function well, or correctly. Keep that in mind, because we'll be talking about a lot of systems that seem to work, at least on the surface.

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Weekness

It has been an interesting week. I narrowly avoided ship duty, one of my former favorite pop icons passed away, I turned 29, I saw a movie I was truly looking forward to and was disappointed with, and I picked up a video game that I've been truly looking forward to and really haven't had a chance to play. Tuesday had a very abbreviated woot-off. I went to a steak restaurant (didn't eat any steak, though).

Also, I'm teaching myself Nightswimming on the piano, which will bring my repertoire up to two-and-a-half songs (not counting the half-composed drivel I've penned). I can play Hey Jude and I know the chords to The Scientist, but I can never remember the words. Regardless, the old adage holds: learning a new instrument is like farting, it stinks to everyone but you.

Not sure exactly what next week will bring--I've been playing things a little close to the chest and writing stuff at the last minute, but I've got lots of time off starting, well, right now, and I need things to do apart from learning the piano, so it may be a theme week, or it may not.

Time will tell. Here's hoping that, whatever next week brings, it's less interesting than this week has been.

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Long Live The King Of Pop

So, Michael Jackson is dead.

I have some oddly mixed feelings about this. Obviously the man spent the last decade of his life as a bit of a sideshow freak, but he absolutely owned the 80's--an immense talent undermined by a complete inability to make decisions properly.

During my formative years I was a tremendous MJ fan--Bad to Dangerous eras. Those albums haven't aged as well as some of his older material, but Thriller is still an incredible set of songs, and I have a special affection for Off the Wall, his disco-fied adult solo debut. His achievements are myriad: he is the reason that MTV started showing videos from black artists, which is ironic since he was later ridiculed for abandoning his race. He pioneered the music video, set records with the number one singles off of his albums. What he did really can't be done again.

And then to languish in semi-obscurity as a punchline. It's odd. Let's not be quaint, though, he got really weird in later life, what with his unhealthy obsession with plastic surgery, his unending financial woes, the fact that he named all three of his children after himself. Also, the child molestation thing. I don't want to cast aspersions here--he was acquitted, after all. But that doesn't mean he didn't do it... making him either a lucky monster or a supremely unlucky pop icon.

So, I'm kind of sad, kind of relieved. The Michael Jackson that I admired has been absent for decades, but now he's absolutely and unequivocally gone, never to return. An icon is an icon, even if he is truly disturbed icon. It's like Saruman at the end of Lord of the Rings (the books, that is). He was this great foe who was soundly defeated at the end of The Two Towers, but becomes a petty annoyance up until his death at the end of Return of the King.

Is that a weird metaphor?

Actually, more than anything else, I think it's too bad that he will have no dignity in death. He spent what he had and then some in life. C'est la vie.

Et la mort.

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Transformers: Reaction to the Fallen

My initial ardor with the original live-action Transformers film has receded upon repeated viewings. The novelty of the robots-as-eye-candy has worn off some, and the mildly cringe-inducing bits of attempted levity and cleverness are even more cringe-worthy. Unlike a film like X-Men, which is smart enough to be enjoyable after the special effects have stopped being nifty, Transformers, like The Rock, like The Island, like so many ex-girlfriends, makes a great hot, wild first impression, but if you keep it around for very long you start to see the problems with its worldview and get annoyed by its jokes.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is everything the first one was, only more: it's bigger, longer, louder, 'splodier ("SPLOW-dee-yer", adj., more explody). It was pretty dumb, but I didn't feel like it was nearly as dumb as its predecessor, but don't misunderstand, it was still pretty dumb. I gotta be honest, though--I've read the reviews and I was not expecting a real dog of a film, but I didn't hate it. It's not a good movie, but it's not an awful one. It's certainly not for everyone, but it has an audience--I'll get to that in a bit. Let's start with the things that worked.

The combat worked. It was frantic and chaotic, but it had a certain logic and rhythm to it. There was less tumble-and-roll-and-shoot than before, projectile weapons were used at a distance, melee combat up close. Vehicle forms were used for mobility and covering distance at speed as well as setting traps and operating stealthily. Robot forms were used for maneuverability and combat. The story at least paid homage to the mythology of the series, and it sort of worked. The archaeological tie-in was ill-advised, but it was far more believable than the most recent Indiana Jones movie. The other thing that I thought was fairly nifty was that they would cannibalize each other for parts. Seeing a handful of Decepticons turn on one of their own to revive their leader gave them a ruthless edge that was a little disturbing--in a good way.

The other thing that I really have to credit Michael Bay (the director) with is that he did a far better job of making important robots distinguishable in this movie. In the first film, two of the Autobots and all but two of the Decepticons looked way, way too similar to be distinguished at a distance. In this one it was far easier to identify major characters, while the blending-together-ness was reserved for the myriad Decepticon drones that showed up at the finish. Although would it kill you to tell us their names?

So what didn't work? Well, there's plenty to criticize: it hinges on a very underwhelming love story, it's rude, often incoherent, littered with blatant product placement, becomes an army recruitment film from time to time, et al. You know, the normal run of Bay weaknesses. But the biggest problem is this: the running time, the running time, the running time. It dragged on, even with all the pulse-pounding action, far too long. The second act ended on such a low note that this easily could have been two movies in the vein of The Matrix's sequels. Perhaps that's not the best example, but cramming this much story into a single movie was a mistake, keeping in mind that the story is the sticky stuff between action-bricks in a Bay film. And the bits of human drama didn't really work. Neither was I a fan of the overly exaggerated characterizations of Wheelie or Scalpel, or the twins.

...It would be remiss of me to not mention "The Twins" here...

They might as well have been called the Negrobots. They were patently offensive racial charicatures, big-eared, gold-toothed, illiterate do-nothings with blaccents. Michael Bay has acknowledged that they are offensive but defends it because "the kids love it". And as much as I hate to admit it, he's right. As offensive as these characters are, the packed audience I watched this movie with loved them, laughed at them, cheered them on. Say what you want about the quality of his film-making, he has identified his audience of 12-17 year old boys and nailed their tastes, and will make a fortune off them. I sat in a sold-out house that seethed testosterone and laughed at every ball joke and swooned over Megan Fox.

These are the people who will find the plot devices compelling, who will think of starting college without a car and saying "I love you" to a girl to be sources of real drama. They aren't bothered by the movies self-importance or casual disregard for geography. To them, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is like Red Bull on celluloid.

All that said, I have some advice for Michael Bay:

• It's seriously time to move out of the frat house.
• Hating America is not the only trait that makes a bad guy bad.
• Whether it works or not, a white, wealthy, forty-something gentile exploiting racial stereotypes for gags is in bad taste.
• GIVE YOUR CHARACTERS NAMES!!!
• But, keep blowin' shit up, man.
  

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That's a Lot of Crows

A while back someone tagged me on a Facebook note called "My Life In Music", in which the author detailed the fifteen albums that changed his/her life. I wanted to try, realized I could never narrow it down to fifteen, so I dropped my half-written, over-populated list into a documents folder and didn't look at it again until the other day, when I saw it for what it truly was: Blog fodder.

So I'll throw one of these out there every now and then, to fill in the gaps, you know?

Counting Crows

August and Everything After

Counting Crows erupted onto the post-Nirvana music scene with Mr. Jones, an enigmatic up-tempo devotional to, well, some guy named Jones. It was fast, thought-provoking, imminently singable, and prompted me to purchase the entire album. Jones was shortly followed by 'Round Here, a low-key song about... well, I could never figure that out either.

At the tender age of thirteen, I found August to be rich with symbolism and oblique references to things I didn't understand. Everything was new and vague--and not just the music. I had never heard of a band having seven members before. Why was the song titled August and Everything After, whose lyrics appear on the cover art, not included in the album. Did someone make a mistake? Why is the phrase "counting crows" included in the lyrics (for those keeping score at home, the words show up in the second verse, I think, of A Murder of One)? Are you even allowed to do that? And what's with all the accordions?

Counting Crows' large line-up allowed for complex arrangements that managed to never be over-powering. It also meant that pianos and accordions were commonplace, but they never dominated. The album was more or less guitar driven... more or less. But much of the disc lilted rather than motored. It took detours, not roads. It made absolutely no sense to me, but I loved it anyway and played it and played it and played it.

Looking back, I get it. The lyrical toil of August is informed by messed-up relationships and the frailty of human emotion. Having been through a few messed-up relationships, it makes a lot more sense to me. It helps to think of Counting Crows songs as musical poems rather than pop tunes, especially those early ones. Since then the ebb and tide have become more even and more predictable--Hanginaround is good; it's fun, but it's not art. And don't even get me started on their covers of Big Yellow Taxi and Friend of the Devil. Buuhhh!

They never bested or even matched the quality of this disc, not in my opinion anyway. They developed a sheen and a niche, and that's all well and good, but the best things about August were the way it felt raw, experimental, and laid bare. Oh well.

But my biggest complaint about it, and about Counting Crows in general, is that Duritz was always changing lyrics from chorus to chorus. Seriously, choruses are supposed to be the easy-to-sing bits between verses. When they're constantly changing, suddenly you have a marathon of segments to remember the order of, and it make memorization a chore.

Highlights: everything on it is great, including the radio fare (Mr. Jones, Round Here, and Rain King), but my favorites were Anna Begins and Raining in Baltimore, which are both very, very sad songs, and I really dug A Murder of One, the upbeat closer.

Favorite lyric: "3,500 miles away, what would you change if you could?" (from Raining in Baltimore).

Or Rather The Former First Day Of The Last Year...

Today is the first day of the former last year of my life. Okay, that doesn't make any sense by itself, but let me elaborate.

For the longest time I would tell people that I didn't expect to live to see thirty. I don't know if I believed it or not, I don't know why I particularly felt that way (no doubt my foray into eschatology informed that decision), but as I've gotten older I've moved away from that mindset.

So today is my 29th birthday. I have a job that I'm interested in turning into a career. I have a wife. There's talk of children. We have a house. So this is sort of a symbolic transition for me into a more future-centric living model. A year from today, I will have been wrong. And I'm pretty much okay with that.

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Taco-Flavored Keeeesses

The first girl I ever kissed had a drinking problem. At 14. Why, yes, it is a rather long story. Anyway, she was trying to hide her Zima-swilling from me with copious amounts of mouthwash, and ever since then I've sort of had a thing for girls who taste like Scope. This was reinforced by the first smoker I ever kissed, because apparently nicotine and mouthwash are complimentary flavors. Also, because of the nicotine, her kisses literally tingled. Very cool stuff.

Not the kind of thing you can really communicate to a woman, though. Just play it through in your mind for a second. You're on the couch, making out with your spouse/bf/gf/what-ev and you say something like "this is great, babe, but it would be even better if you used some mouthwash". Yeah. See where that gets you.

In college I had a girlfriend whose kisses tasted like broccoli. A little weird, I know, but I love broccoli, so I have to say that it topped the mouthwash thing. Although, again, this is not something you can really communicate to a woman. "You taste like broccoli" doesn't really work on a things-I-like-about-you list. Which is not to say that I didn't try to share... There's just that weirdness barrier. No matter how special it was to me, she couldn't get over being self-conscious about tasting like broccoli.

This is not, incidentally, what ended the relationship.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "how can you ever beat broccoli?" Okay, so you're probably not thinking that, but I would be. And, I'll have you know, I did. I had a girlfriend whose kisses had the faintest hint of the flavor of... what did Samuel L. Jackson call it in Pulp Fiction?... the "holiest of holies". For anyone who doesn't catch the reference, I am, in fact, talking about cunnilingus. Which I definitely like more than broccoli.

Again, not the easiest thing to communicate. But I'm about 95% certain I never tried, because I've learned my lesson. It won't work. I could have told her, but it would have just creeped her out. Oh well.

The moral of the story: honesty is not always the best policy. Sometimes shut-the-hell-up is a pretty good policy.

Apropos of nothing,

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And I Ain't Talking About The Blondie Song

Every day I reschedule this entry for the following day. If it ever goes live, that means I wasn't able to reschedule it. So, if you are reading this, I've been taken in the Rapture and you must repent immediately. Or I've overslept. One of the two. Okay, go ahead and repent, and if I post again tomorrow, you can go back to sinning, k? K.

I kid. I enjoy poking fun at religion on Sundays, although I must admit that it has less to do with my distaste for god than it has to do with my over-developed sense of irony.

Anywho.

Today is my wife's birthday. So, Happy Birthday, Abby. Aaaaaand, it's time to go all mushy for a minute. Bear with me. Also, I'm a little drunk.

I've spent the last three weeks doing "crash development", which is business-eeze for "not-seeing-very-much-of-my-wife", and at some point Friday I realized how much I like her. Obviously I love her enough to be married to her, but getting to actually spend some time together over the last day or so, I've realized that we get along very well. Obviously we're married so we drive each other bat-shit crazy from time to time, but we do seem to enjoy each other's casual company.

There's not a very non-Hallmark way to say it, so I'll just say it. Abby, I'm incredibly grateful for you. You're supportive and understanding, and yes there have been bad times and yes there will be more bad times, but there've been some really good times too, and there will continue to be good times. And I love the fact that I wake up next to you every morning, but I think I'm happier about that fact that, even if I didn't, I'd still want to hang out with you. That's a nice sort of feeling to have.

Okay, mush over. Also, I'm a little drunk.

Abby, have a Happy Birthday and I love you very much.

And all that.

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A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Virginia

So I just got the call, the trip I've been planning for a month and a half has been cancelled. It was a business trip that I wasn't dreading but wasn't exactly looking forward to, but now it looks like I'm going to be in the office all next week.

This means I'm going to have to return the laptop I'm typing this on a little sooner than anticipated. And I just got all my tools installed. Oh well.

The up side is that I'll now be in town for my birthday, my wife's birthday, the release of the new Transformers movie, the release of The Conduit, and Father's Day. That's good. It also means I don't have to miss another week's worth of band practice. Also good. But it's a little disruptive, I don't mind saying.

It means, for example, that the original draft for today's post is completely null-and-void. It also means I have some supplies that I don't need. Like two combination locks with the same combination, those were a pretty neat find, and now I pretty much have to return them. I have absolutely no need for two combination locks with the same combination. I don't think I could come up with two different things that would even take a padlock.

Also, now that I'm going to be in town, I actually have to put some effort into next week's posts, as I had some generic bit-wise stuff planned to drip out.

Still, I'm looking forward to not having to be back. Okay, better constructed sentences coming soon, I promise.

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Take Note: You're Burning

So last year a friend of mine got me into Burn Notice, a television series about an ex-spy who helps out normal people using his special set of spy-skills. It's fun, there's lots of low-tech spy stuff that's intelligent and interesting. It suffers from unnecessarily novel camera work over-reliance on family issues for drama and comedy, as well as the odd recycled plot. There's also some Spider-Man style over-narration, but that's often necessary when explaining why, for example, our hero drives backwards through a stand of trees while evading the police (answer: to avoid setting off the airbags). But on the whole, the good outweighs the bad.

Also, it has Bruce Campbell in it.

So, anyway, we finished Season 1 and were going to watch Season 2 on Hulu, but we'd missed the first couple episodes, so we thought we'd rent it right when it came out and then start watching Season 3 online. Unfortunately, Season 3 started a few weeks ago, and Season 2 only came out on DVD this last Tuesday. Since the shows expire after 5 weeks on Hulu, that means (math majors?) we have 3 weeks to watch all of Season 2 if we want to have it finished in time to start Season 3. Also, I'll be out of town for one of those weeks. If, after 16 episodes on DVD in a very short window, we still have the interest to watch the next 4 online, then we'll be caught up.

Clearly, whoever is in charge of the DVD release skipped the day in marketing class where one might learn that the Season 2 DVD could be a good marketing tool for new episodes of Season 3, but only if it comes out first. Then we popped in Disc 1 of Season 2 and the very first thing to come up was a promo advertising Season 2 of Burn Notice.

Seeing a DVD advertise itself on its first disc, well, that's pretty silly. It does not inspire confidence. It leads one to believe that there is serious ineptitude in the DVD-release-department over at USA. Seeing that very same promo on disc 2 only reinforces said belief.

Le sigh.

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At Least We Dig Each Other

A while back I mentioned that I had been searching for the perfect ringtone for Abby. Because I'm a dork. Anyway, I settled on Clocks, but I must confess that it was my second choice. My first was Dig by Incubus. The ringtone for that song turned out to be a poorly constructed loop of one line from the chorus--didn't really work, which is too bad.

Dig is one of those great songs that just grows and grows and grows on you. It's the kind of song I wish I could write. The main thrust of the song is that relationships are hard, that I'm going to let you down, and in those times I hope you can pull me back. Lyrics, lyrics:

So when weakness turns my ego up
I know you count on the me from yesterday

If I turn into another, dig me up from under
What is covering the better part off me
Sing this song, remind me that we'll always have
Each other, when everything else is gone

Definitely more mature and introspective than the typical drivel you scrape out of radio pop. The theme of "weakness" in the first verse is echoed by "sickness" in the second--great use of parallelism (which songwriters love, because it's less lyrics that you actually have to assemble).

And the arrangement is brilliant. The bass and guitar are doing things that wouldn't sound like much on their own but that complement each other perfectly, the drummer peppers the song with unsual fills, the keyboards sit in the background not doing much, but that's kind of par for the course on an Incubus song.

I could go on, but I think I'm past the point of sounding silly. With that, if you haven't heard it, listen to it, and if you already know it, or just thing I'm being silly and fanboyish, well, then thank you for indulging me anyway.

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Good Ol', Strangely Surreal Charlie Brown

This is why I still occasionally read Peanuts.

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Blasphemy Week: Reading List

An awful lot of books and movies went into last week's shenanigans. Thought I'd plug my favorites.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Christopher Hitchens) - Hitchens can be a tough pill to swallow sometimes--he is ruthlessly unapologetic, but there are lots of great nuggets in here. This is where I learned about lanugo, the hair that infants grow and then shed in utero.

Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (David Mills) - I love this book. I picked it up and could not put it down. Mills writes elegantly and intelligently, and has structured the book in such a way that every chapter represents a complete, independent argument. He encourages readers to pick a chapter that looks interesting and start there. The most fabulous-est tidbit here is one I've quoted before: he posits that without the Catholic church's war on science, there's no reason we wouldn't have had a man on the moon by 650 AD.

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew (Bart D. Ehram) - gives a very compelling argument for the origins of Christianity and cites (and reproduces) many of the existing and referenced "lost" gospels. He also has a peculiar sense of humor that bobs its head above the surface every now and then.

Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally (Marcus Borg) - I've read many, many Borg titles, and this was the first. It goes into depth about the historical context of the Bible.

Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (Marcus Borg) - more Borg, and while I don't agree with Borg's conclusions, this is an excellent resource for if you'd like a better understanding of the sociopolitical and religious climates of 1st century Jewish Palistine. Borg describes a historical Jesus whose teachings developed as a Jewish revitalization movement in response to two other similar movements: the Pharisees and Saducees. There is also invaluble discussion of the Synoptic problem and the Q document.



The Dark Side of Christian History (Helen Ellerbe) - If nothing else, this book is an excellent primer on solid, academic argumentation. I shouldn't say "if nothing else", because the book if filled with wonderful information. It particularly captures the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition.

The God Who Wasn't There - a DVD that digresses often, but gives a nice treatment to the argument that Jesus never existed. It is heavily tied to the work of Earl Doherty, whom I've not read, but his The Jesus Puzzle (and website) supposedly lay the foundation for this documentary.

Keep the faith... erm,

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Days of the Deads

Two big stretches coming up in the music queue: "Day" and "Dead". First, the days.

• Soundgarden - The Day I Tried To Live
• The Beatles - A Day In The Life (Sgt. Pepper and Love versions)
• Nine Inch Nails - The Day The World Went Away
• The Beatles - Day Tripper (yeah, more Beatles, deal with it)
• The Monkees - Daydream Believer
• Coldplay - Daylight
• Imogen Heap - Daylight Robbery
• The Kinks - Days
• Van Morrison - Days Like This
  

And then there's the section of songs starting with the word "Dead".

• Korn - Dead
• They Might Be Giants - Dead
• Thomas Newman - Dead Already (from the American Beauty soundtrack)
• Stone Temple Pilots - Dead And Bloated
• Korn - Dead Bodies Everywhere
• The Kinks - Dead End Street
• The White Stripes - Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground
• Beck - Dead Melodies
• Nine Inch Nails - Dead Souls
• Moby - Dead Sun
• Juan Schwartz - Dead, Dead, Dead (this Trey Parker singing on Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics... kind of morbid)
• The B-52's - Deadbeat Club
• Green Day - Deadbeat Holiday

There there's a few "Dear" songs (including more Beatles, but I'll leave it to you to figure out which) and some more Death in the form of:

• Coldplay - Death And All His Friends
• The Kinks - Death Of A Clown
• Sponge - The Death Of A Drag Queen
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Death Of A Martian
• Flogging Molly - Death Valley Queen
• Coldplay - Death With Never Conquer
  

The next big sections are Dirty, Do, Don't (which is effing huge, just so you know),Down, Dream, and Drive (which is immediately after three songs that start with the word "Drinking"). Should be fun.

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Crowe Watch: DMV Edition

Went to get my license renewed yesterday, and the DMV clerk told me I looked like Russel Crowe.

Whomever I look like, it's nice to resemble my driver's license picture once again (which I won't subject you to here). Abby says I look "smug", but I prefer "big, jolly, hairy man". Also, being bearded in the photo goes a long way. It's funny how much facial hair really just changes the shape of your face.

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Blasphemy Week Part VII: On Agnosticism

This is the final part of an on-going series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

On Agnosticism

I don't believe in God. I am one of those 44% [citation needed] of people who change their belief system during their lifetime. I feel like I've pretty well outlined what drove me to atheism, but a lingering question remains. How can I be certain that your (or his, or her, or anyone else's) god doesn't exist? What about all the documented "supernatural phenomen out there?  What if I'm wrong?  And suppose I am wrong, and suppose I met God, what would I do? What would I say?

Jeez, well... I suppose I'm not completely certain--I'm only as certain that there is no god as I'm certain that there are no purple tigers sitting over my shoulder. Which is pretty damned certain, come to think of it. Yes, I suppose it's not impossible that your (or his, or her, or anyone else's) god exists, but I would say that it's extremely improbable. But I don't feel compelled to acknowledge that possibility with actions. Just because something might exist doesn't mean I have to pretend that it does. Even if it's not impossible that there are no purple tigers lurking over my shoulder, I can't live my life effectively if I have to constantly look over my shoulder for purple tigers.

As for documented evidence of supernatural phenomena... the burden of proof is on it.  As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  In fact, the word "supernatural" literally means "outside the scientifically visible world".  So something that is supernatural implies that it is either impossible by definition or that it invokes some scientific principle that we don't understand yet.  That and eye-witnesses are not always reliable.  So I think I can be forgiven for a measure a skepticism.

And then there's the George Tiller thing.

Here's a man who did something routinely that was ethically hazy, maybe even morally reprehensible, but perfectly legal. He was shot and killed, in a church no less, by someone who claimed to be doing something in the service of God. He'd been shot before, in 1993 by someone who made the same argument. His alleged murderer, Scott Roeder, is being hailed by some as an American hero. If I have to open myself to the possibility that you're right about your god, because "anything is possible", then I have to open myself to the possibility that Scott Roeder and his supporters are right. And so do you.  Well, I find that morally reprehensible. I can't say for certain that abortion is wrong, but I know for a fact that murder is. And I'm embarrassed to think that as few as ten years ago, I might very well have been one of those sad, stupid people cheering him on.

No. Not embarrassed. When I look back at those chapters of my life and my upbringing, I don't get embarrassed. I get resentful. And I don't resent my parents for raising me as a Christian, and I don't resent the church. I resent God. And I don't mean God, the supernatural being; I mean God, the Institution. God-the-Institution allows people to do horrible things--nay, encourages them. God-the-Institution shelters the violent and ignorant while it condemns people--people that I love--for the heinous crimes of doubt and disbelief, for daring to reason rather than accept. And when I reached out to God-the-Institution for answers, for strength, for love, for guidance, I found nothing.

But suppose this Institution turned out to be an actual being, a causal consciousness behind all this suffering and despair and nonsense. If I met Him, what would I do? Well, I wouldn't forgive Him. I don't have to, and I don't care to. If I met Him, what would I say?

I think I'd tell Him to fuck off and die.

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Blasphemy Week Part VI: What's Wrong with Believing?

This is the sixth part of an on-going series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

What's Wrong with Believing?

The central conflict of my spiritual life has been this: even if belief in God is technically wrong (as in "incorrect"), that doesn't make it wrong wrong, does it? There's nothing wrong with sticking with a belief system you know to be wrong if it makes you feel better. Right?

The first conclusion that I arrived at is that there is nothing inherently wrong with buying into a convenient or appealing lie. It's something we all do naturally--we believe we (or our children) are smarter, better-looking, and more talented than they actually are. We believe that we are safe in our cars or our homes. We do this because doing so allows us to function from day to day. We tell our wives that they don't look fat in those pants, even when they do. We tell our friends that everything's fine, even when it isn't. The lying is not what's bad, it's the lie that gets us into trouble. Lying to ourselves about God is fine, provided that the costs of such a lie are insignificant next to the benefits. I will argue that this is not the case.

1. God steals from the poor.

According to the National Council of Churches, the 65 church denominations represented by the council reported receiving donations in excess of $34 billion in 2007. Adjusted for inflation, this was down from 2006. That's a lot of money, but as long as most of it goes to faith-based charity programs, there's nothing wrong with that (any charitable organization is going to have some overhead costs). According to that same study, "Benevolence giving – financial contributions to church programs such as relief efforts and feeding or housing the homeless – remained flat at 15 percent."

15%. 15 per-fucking-cent?!?!?!?! Where the hell is the other 85% going? It's not like churches are these huge, ornate buildings with kick-ass sound systems that occupy prime real estate. Except that it's EXACTLY like that. This 15% better be going to cure cancer. What sort of "programs" are we talking about here? Well, the examples cited in the report include transportation for the elderly, soup-kitchen meals, and church-sponsored day-care.

People only have so much charity in them. They give to their church because they believe that it's going to a good cause. What I'm saying is this: if everyone stopped giving money to their churches, and gave it to charity instead, but people were less "moved by the spirit" such that they only gave 20% as much, we'd still be better off.

2. God steals from the government.

In spite of the numbers I've just given you, churches are considered non-profit organizations, so they get tax breaks. Not much of a point, I know, but just to bring this discussion full-circle, I'll throw in a bonus stat. The U.S. is one of the most religious nations in the world (with roughly 80% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians), but it is one of the least generous with foreign aid. Look at this chart, which details foreign aid as a percentage of Gross National Income. See if you can find the U.S. I'll wait.

3. God discounts the future.

In economics "discounting the future" is when you undervalue future events on the grounds that you might not be around to face them. This is the whole reason we have borrowing at interest, because $50 today is worth more to you than $50 next week. Perfectly normal.

But throw God into the mix and this is a real problem. We can't even have a serious public discussion of climate change because people are convinced at a) the end of the world is imminent anyway, and b) if it's a serious problem, God will take care of it. And it's not just laymen. Here is video of a U.S. congressman rebutting global warming with the Bible, referring t0--and I quote--"a theological debate that this a is a carbon-starved planet". Bwah? He cites two separate Bible passages, one from Genesis saying that the world will never end and another from Matthew saying that, actually, the world is going to end, but God will decide when. That's right. Representative Shimkus of Illinois couldn't be bothered to find two scriptures that don't contradict each other before reading them on national television.

Extrapolating from that...

4. God is a convenient excuse to not take responsibility for anything.

And not just in matters of public debate. I'm talking about our day to day lives. According to the church, what do you do when you are facing adversity? You pray. When you don't know what to do? Pray. When you're having financial troubles? Pray (and go ahead and donate to the church anyway... seriously, it's in there). Nowhere does the church ever say, "do something about it" or, "get help".

Extrapolating from that...

5. God gives shitty advice.

A preacher once told me that I should regard every woman I ever date as a candidate for marriage. I now realize that this is quite possibly the worst advice I ever received. Dating is for a) fun, b) getting practice at being in a relationship, c) finding out what qualities I most want in a potential mate, and, finally, d) finding potential candidates for marriage. Of course, the problem with getting shitty advice from the Bible is that you have tremendous incentives to follow it anyway. Granted, not all of the lessons from scripture are completely irrelevant, but I'm of the opinion that there's nothing in the Bible so revolutionary that it wouldn't come up through other means. And there's a whole hell of a lot in there that is irrelevant. I have no need, for example, for a detailed description of how to sacrifice pigeons.

Why should this be surprising? Parts of the Bible were written during agrarian and pre-agrarian eras of human history. Society has been utterly reshaped many, many times since then. The face of the known world has changed since then. There are plenty of things that constituted good advice in the first century that are bad advice now. Slavery comes to mind.

Extrapolating, still, from that...

6. God enables oppression.

Nearly every tyrannical regime in the history of the planet has used religion as a tool, saying that their goals were sanctioned by God or cutting through the red tape and saying that they were God. The Nazis were extremely catholic (I'm invoking Godwin' Law, I know, but it's actually TRUE). The notable exception to the rule is the U.S.S.R. which was an atheistic government. But I can't help thinking that if they had been Russian Orthodox they might have lasted more than forty years.

Even on the home front, Christians oppress dissidents. Right now the big topic of debate is gay marriage. The entire force against it bases their claim on religion. There is no atheistic anti-gay-marriage movement. We don't care. Not that our opinion matters, anyway. 50% of Americans would vote against an atheist running for president. Section 4 of Texas' Bill of Rights excludes atheists and agnostics from even holding public office (thankfully it's overruled by the U.S. Constitution), and there are seven other states with similar exclusionary language in at least one of their governing documents.

Even a former president, George Bush, said that he didn't consider atheists to be citizens or patriots. We all know W is a fundamentalist, but the quote doesn't come from W, it's from George H.W. Bush!

This is a movement of oppression by a people--and this is the really fucked up bit--who are convinced that they are the ones being oppressed! You see that number I gave you where 80% of Americans are self-identifying Christians? Yeah. Those 80% are, apparently, being boxed in and forced to have gay sex by the rest of us who want nothing so much as to be left-the-hell-alone and don't understand why we can't buy beer before 11:00am on a Sunday.

Of course, none of this holds a candle to the centuries of murder, theft, and rape at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

Extrapolating from that...

7. God is a terrorist.

The brutal and public murder of George Tiller is a shining example of what Christians are capable of when they succumb to the delusion of God. This is not to say that Scott Roeder isn't a deeply troubled individual. Without Christianity as an excuse, he might still have committed murder somewhere, but we can't possibly know that. What we do know is that he remains convinced of his innocence and has told us that there will be more actions to come. A sect of Christianity has declared war on a group of Americans. What the hell are we going to do to them?

Well, many Christians have openly denounced Roeder's actions. So, that's a start, I guess. They say it was an isolated incident by a crazed madman, and maybe they're right. Wow, this is an emotionally charged issue, so let's remove Christianity from the equation. Take however shocked you were at George Tiller's death and double it and double it and double it again (and again and again and again). Because the murder of one doctor is insignificant compared to the routine terrorist violence that is carried out in God's name across the globe. Look at the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Look at the various Islamic groups blowing people up throughout the Middle-East. Yes, there are political motivations, but "politics" can only motivate a soldier, and a soldier doesn't strap a bomb to his chest so he can blow up children in the public market.

You can't have that kind of terrorism without God.

So if you find God comforting and feel that belief is justified because it makes you feel better, I understand. I hope it makes you feel really good.

I just don't think it's worth it.

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Blasphemy Week Part V: The Pursuit of God

This is the fifth part of an on-going series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

The Pursuit of God

I went through many permutations of progressive Christianity in an effort to maintain some semblance of belief. I arrived at some interesting conclusions along the way. If the Bible wasn't the infallible word of God--which it clearly could not be--then maybe it was the fallible word of God: God's intentions filtered through the minds of error-prone humans. Maybe we were just reading it wrong. I started thinking outside the box.

The first conclusion I arrived at, one that felt like a weight being lifted off of my chest, was that there could not possibly be a Hell. According to The Bible, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The Bible also says that any who believe in Jesus will not perish but will have eternal life. Clearly, since the Bible says that everyone will believe, and whoever believes will be saved, everyone gets saved.

But wait, there's more. The Bible also says that it's not God's will that any should perish but that all should be saved. Well, clearly then, if that's God's will, then everyone is going to Heaven. Right? I mean, how else do you read it? Maybe death isn't the final judgment. That same passage says that God will be patient with us because he wants us to be saved. Maybe, after you're dead, God let's you reflect on your life and chose whether or not you want salvation.

All of this satisfied one of the questions I had never been able to answer: if Jesus is the way, the truth, the light, et al, then what about people who are not raised as Christians? Are they just shit-out-of-luck? Nope. Not according to my new-found revelation.

It also satisfied my need to be critical of the church and of the ethical inconsistencies of its policies. I realized that maybe it's not about salvation at all. Maybe it's the teachings that are important, that we can focus on the teachings of Jesus and find guidance and wisdom within them. I found a church I could attend that was seeker-friendly, it was less about Bible-thumping and forcing behavioral standards onto people than about getting together and celebrating God. Their treatment of the homosexual debate was brilliant, and it could be summed up this way: if the gay community views the Church as the enemy, the Church has done something horribly wrong. It was a remarkable thing to hear.

I started reading Marcus Borg's books about how to look at the Bible as a quest for God, not a map, and how you could still take it seriously without taking it literally. This awakened an interest in the historical Jesus, but again, the more I studied, the more I realized that there is no factual basis for even the texts of the Bible, that even the evidence for the existence of Jesus is sketchy.

So I adapted. The road-map given by God was clearly (to me) broken, but that didn't mean that God didn't exist. I reasoned that maybe it didn't matter what you believed--that the pursuit was, in and of itself, righteous. That made sense--people from all walks of life and religious backgrounds "feel the touch of God" every day. Maybe he didn't play favorites. Maybe the presence of all of these different sects meant that there was some incarnation of God for everyone. Maybe God was adapatable as well. I set out to find the right one for me.

I dabbled with Buddhism, Judaism, Vedanta, Tantra (that one was fun, if fruitless), transcendental meditation, nature-worship, and all manner of vague spiritualism. I kept coming back to the same conclusion: I couldn't intellectually defend any of the belief systems I had sampled. It was all anti-intellectual bullshit, none of it made any sense, and--most importantly--none of it was actually making my life any better. The only thing that kept me looking was a paralyzing fear of life without some kind of god.

My inability to live godlessly was eventually outmatched by my inability to consciously choose to live a lie. You see, it's not that I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist because there is no god to believe in. I'm an atheist because I spent twenty years looking for God, and if there was one, I'd have found him by now. Instead, I found the courage to live without him.

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Blasphemy Week Part IV: What's Wrong with the Bible?

This is the fourth part of an ongoing series on my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

What's Wrong with the Bible?

In my last post, I mentioned that studying the Bible had turned me off to it. I thought I'd take a break from narrative to discuss what exactly it is about the Bible that offends my sensibilities. In my last post I argued that most people who argue that the Bible is the literal word of God have never read it. But I believe equally strongly that most of the people who complain about contradictions in the Bible couldn't name a single one if pressed. This is because people generally arrive at a conclusion and then look for supporting evidence.  But when you actually look...

The long and the short of it is this: the Bible doesn't make any sense.

You have your more granular contradictions: In Genesis 1, God creates man on the sixth day, after all the animals. In Genesis 2, God creates man before all the animals. That's right, the Bible can't go two chapters without contradicting itself. This is one, but the bible is simply littered with them; Infidels.org gives a more comprehensive list.

Some contradictions are a bit broader. The author of Matthew (who was almost certainly not the Matthew, but in his defense, he never claims to be) takes scriptures from the Old Testament out of context. A great example is 2:15, "out of Egypt, I called my son", which is a reference to Hosea 11. Hosea was in the middle of a history of the Jewish people when he said that and was clearly talking about "Israel" when he said "son", but for Matthew this became a prophesy that Jesus would escape to Egypt during a retread of the infant massacre from Exodus. Most of the narrative of Matthew comes from Mark, with a few notable exceptions. Mark contains no birth story (which Matthew and Luke both have, although they disagree about Jesus's lineage), for example.  In the other gospels Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a single animal, Matthew places him on two (apparently he misunderstood what he was copying).   It's also worth pointing out that major plot points in the gospels coincide with the myths of Osiris and Mithra (and others, find an Osiris comparison here, but be warned, it's pop-up heavy).

Beyond the literal contradictions, there are any number of more conceptual ones. For example, God is eternal, but he changes character dramatically throughout the course of the Bible. First he's involved and vengeful. Then he get's a bit more mystical (in Genesis God talks to Adam directly, then he switches to prophets) and a lot more vengeful (see Judges). Then he mellows out for the New Testament, when it becomes the Jesus Show, right up until it's an acid trip ending with Revelations.

Jesus also changes dramatically throughout his life. In the canonical gospels, he has a more-or-less identifiable character, although through the Gospel of John he's kind of a douche (John is the only book, incidentally, in which Jesus talks more about himself than about the teachings of God). John features the story of Jesus turning water into wine, his first miracle. It's an interesting story, but the way he rebuke's his mother, the whole nature of the incident, the fact that he was with his disciples in spite of the fact that his ministry hadn't really started--it feels more like glurge than anything else.

Granted, it's not nearly as glurgy as any of the myriad non-canonical gospels. I particularly enjoy the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus miraculously makes clay birds comes to life and also kills and resurrects a playmate. You can't make this up. Wait, clearly you can. There is a rich Christian tradition of people making shit up as evidence of Jesus' miraculous nature--one that continues in people's inboxes today.

Then there's the fact that Christianity purports to be a monotheism. You have God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. By my count, that's three.  Three being more than one. Okay, yes, they're supposedly "one", but the doctrine of the trinity is not biblical--the doctrine wasn't established until some 400 years after the New Testament timeline. But let's dismiss that, we'll assume that it's covered.  You still have a host of, well, heavenly hosts: angels--several of whom are named--seraphs, demons, a devil (who is a central character in the book of Job), and so on and so forth, including any number of strange heavenly creatures (i.e., the Leviathan in Job or Daniel's 4 Beasts). And much of what I've just referenced is from the Old Testament (with the exception of the trinity). One of the fundamental traits of Judaism is that it is a monotheism--that is what set it apart from Roman paganism--and yet it's simply swimming in divine beings.

Of coures, the biggest problem with the New Testament is that Jesus never bothered to write anything down and there are no reliable contemporaries of his that wrote about him either (no, Josephus didn't, read why here). The first mention of Jesus (chronologically) comes from the writings of Paul (Saul of Tarsus) who never met the man and never refers to any of his life, only his death, resurrection and ascension, none of which are ever given an explicitly historical context (that is to say, any time Paul writes about Jesus, it could be interpretted as having happened in Heaven rather than on Earth).

But for my tastes, I found the most compelling argument against Christianity to be the take-a-step-back argument. It's easy to dismiss Mormonism or Scientology as crazy because, well, they sound crazy. But imagine someone telling you the story of Jesus in a vacuum. Imagine that you didn't already believe it.

Does it sound any less crazy?

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Blasphemy Week Part III: A Crisis of Faith

This is the third part of an on-going series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

A Crisis of Faith

I entered college determined to be a better Christian than I had been in high school. Emboldened and bereft of my support group, I dug in.

I started by studying apologetics. Then, I dedicated myself to the notion that the Bible was the literal word of God. I got swept up in eschatology and "creation science." I also ostracized myself from my peers and became a homophobic, anti-intellectual, reactionary prick. I became the kind of person I hate most (or, perhaps more accurately, I've come to most hate the kind of person that I used to be). Seriously, if I were to meet a version of myself from ten years ago, one of us would get punched in the face. But that's who I was, and I sold my brand of belief to everyone I knew, including my then-girlfriend and my then-best-friend, as the be-all, end-all solution to everyone's problems.

Only it didn't work. God didn't solve anyone's problems. It made no one's lives better--it actually made things worse in several cases. Furthermore, part of the reason it wasn't fixing anyone's lives is because I was frequently the one making people's lives worse!!! I had unwittingly wounded or pissed off nearly everyone I knew, and I had thoroughly embarrassed myself doing it--and I went on for the better part of a year like this. Over time, as I slowly realized what was happening, my rock-solid faith began to crumble.

The eschatology thing didn't help at all--maybe it was the whole end-of-the-world craze with the pending millennium, or maybe the popularity of the Left Behind series, but I had come to believe that the end of the world was imminent and I suddenly became much more interested in losing my virginity before I died than in actually following God's word. This was an odd revelation to me at the time, but it's not insignificant. A big part of Christianity is sexual repression, which doesn't jibe well with our biological need to breed. But at the time all I was aware of was that I was physiologically incapable of not pursuing sex, even though I knew God wanted me to be pure until marriage. The paradox was eye-opening, but it wasn't the worst.

The biggest blow to my faith came when I actually started studying the Bible.

Read that sentence again.

Here's what happened: I took an "Intro to Bible" class in college. I expected it to be a breeze--you see, we'd already been introduced. A breeze, it was not. The professor very generously gave me a C (the only C, incidentally, of my entire college career) because I was a know-it-all Bible-thumping fundie who couldn't reconcile the fact that my belief system was utterly divorced from the divine text that it was supposedly based upon. I can say this without irony or reservation: if you believe that the Bible is the literal, infallible word of God, you have obviously never read it.

Read that sentence again, too, if you need to.

All of these hit within a year of each other. Through the fog of events I could discern one important fact: everything I had believed to be true was, in some capacity, wrong. And I found myself in a state of limbo--on the one hand, I couldn't intellectually believe anymore, at least not in the same way. On the other hand, I didn't know how to live without belief. It was terrifying and fascinating all at once, and the only way I could accept it was by telling myself that God had pointed me at this conclusion and that he must have done so for a reason. I just couldn't figure out what that reason might be.

So I did what most normal people do every day--I put faith on the back burner and went about the business of living my life. I went to chapel service every week and was active in the Chapel Council, but I kept God more or less out of my day to day living. Again, like most normal people do. I wanted the Bible to be true, but I was having an increasingly difficult time finding the truth in it.

So I let it slide, for the time being.

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Blasphemy Week Part II: Growing Up God

This is the second part in an ongoing series about my conversion to atheism. To start at the beginning, follow this link.

Growing Up God

I was raised as a Christian and was baptized at the age of 9. I wore Christian T-shirts; I was active in the youth group; I can still recite the 10 Commandments. I tithed when I could; I didn't curse or use phrases like "Oh my God". I was devout and fervent. In high school, I accepted the Creation story, believing the Earth to be only about 6,000 years old. I refused to date non-Christians. I led Bible-studies. I went to Christian conferences and retreats where I "experienced" God. I strongly considered a career in ministry. I prayed daily, I witnessed to others, and I believed without shame or apology. When I left high school, people told me that I would be a shining example of God's love to the world, which I took as the highest possible compliment.

I was, in short, the perfect teenage Christian.

This is not to say that I was exempt from the foibles and turbulence of being, you know, a teenager. I had an odd affinity for shock-humor (which I retain), a hefty sense of intellectual pride, and myriad insecurities. Also, I was lonely and awkward, prone to depression, and had some weird Daddy issues (not the Daddy-doesn't-love-me variety, more like the Daddy-doesn't-understand-me and also Daddy-doesn't-believe-in-God-and-is-going-to-Hell issues). Add to all this the over-developed sex drive of any teenage boy and my own personal flavor of strangeness, and things start to get a little weird.

For example, I knew that masturbation was "sinful". And yet, I was a teenage boy; I "sinned" all the damned time. Because I felt guilty about that, I routinely promised God that I would... ahem... resist the urge, and I broke that promise just as routinely. I started superimposing God's retribution onto the world around me. At the tender of age of, I dunno, 14-ish, I was convinced that my inability to resist the urge to masturbate had ultimately resulted in the brain-cancer death of my aunt's first husband. That's fucked-up, right? At 14 (or so), I, me personally, was wracked with guilt over the cancer-death of my uncle. I didn't know how to face my aunt.

But wait, it gets weirder.

I had heard stories about people asking for signs from God when they didn't know what to do. So I tried it: shuffle a deck of cards, pray to God for guidance, and ask a yes-or-no question, using red cards for "yes" and black cards for "no". When the answers started conflicting, I arrived at the only natural conclusion: that I had somehow mis-dialed and was having a conversation with Satan (a conclusion that the cards confirmed for me).

So, in addition to being the perfect Christian teen, I was also a perfectly normal teen: awkward and horny and deeply, deeply troubled. You see, Christianity was supposed to me guidelines and goals and the promise of a more meaningful life and a joyous afterlife. That's the covenant we make when we get dunked in the water, and I believed in it with all my heart. So why did things keep going wrong?

At the end of the day, I was irrevocably human, and like all humans, I overcompensate for my own perceived shortcomings. When I went to college, my reaction to my own failure was to transform into a full-fledged fundamentalist.

So when I fell, I fell hard.

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Blasphemy Week Part I: Introduction

A few months ago I had a conversion experience: I went from being ambiguously anti-religious to an out-and-out atheist. I haven't felt the need to go into the details (in the spirit of living-and-letting-live), but I've been asked about it by a few people. Their inquiries, along with events in the news (notably the murder of George Tiller) have outed me, as it were and compelled me to tell the tale.

This essay was originally going to be a single entry, but after composing a heavily abridged draft I still had a piece that was uncomfortably long. I've broken it up and expanded some bits and added other bits and I will be posting it all this week (I'll also be updating links throughout the week as well) in an event that I have irreverently dubbed "Blasphemy Week". In spite of the titular levity, the general tone will remain serious and I must implore you not to think of any of this as a personal attack. My wife is a non-Christian theist, my mother is a practicing Christian, and I have several friends (and readers) of various levels of devotion, and there will likely be something in here to offend all of you. I apologize in advance.

Here is the itinerary: Part II will be an overview of my upbringing in as a Christian. Part III will detail the events that caused me to first seriously question my faith. Part IV will be a discussion of the quirks of the Church and the Bible. Part V will go into the nature of God and my quest for spiritual fulfillment. Part VI will attempt to answer the question "what's wrong with believing?". Part VII will be a discussion of agnosticism.

Since the rest of the week will be about the road to here, I would like to set aside a few paragraphs in Part I to actually talk about where "here" is. This, then, is what I believe:

I believe that around the middle of the first century, CE, Saul of Tarsus, later known as the Apostle Paul, founded a mystery cult around a fictitious person named Jesus whom he described as a son of god and divine intercessor (standard stuff for 1st century mystery cults). This cult grew in popularity and split into many sects. One sect grew by synthesizing itself with other mystical traditions (most notably Judaism) to form a seemingly ancient religion, and that this became the early Christian church. The church became a political entity during the decline of the Roman Empire and was finally codified in the 4th century, paving the way for it to became one of the dominant institutions of the Western world.

Taking a step back from Christianity, I am convinced that there is no god and that anything we attribute to a god or gods is better explained by science. I think that our tendency towards belief in god is an unfortunate byproduct of our cognitive development: notably our ability to understand that the future exists and is uncertain combined with an inability to accept the uncertainty of the future, as well as our fear of dying. I believe that faith is the enemy of reason, and that religion and spirituality ultimately poison society.

To find out why, keep reading.

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E3 09 (Hut!)

Lot's of gaming news this week, with E3 going on and all, and some of it I even care about. Tons of new games for the Wii, but the first big announcement (for me) didn't come from a console at all. Valve is releasing Left 4 Dead 2 this November, roughly a year after the original came out. As last night was a LAN party where we played Left 4 Dead (1), I think it's safe to say that my friends and are I substantially pumped about this.

Okay, big announcements for the Wii were:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - just the like the first, add Yoshi, increase the difficultly curve. Not coming out until 2010 because of...

New Super Mario Bros. Wii - a 2D platformer with 4-player co-op. The hands-on people have all given it the same treatment: "I was a little underwhelmed going in, but dammit is it ever fun."

The Legend of Zelda Wii - not this year. This franchise is subject to notoriously lengthy development cycles, so we'll just have to be sated with Spirit Tracks for the DS this fall. They promised to try and have a playable build of the next installment for E3 '10, meaning it might easily be 2011 before we get a genuine Zelda title for Wii.

Sin and Punishment 2 - haven't decided if I'm going to care about this one or not. We'll see soon enough.

Wii Sports Resort - new sports, new peripheral, good fun to be had by all. With Mii's.

Wii Fit Plus - streamlined the process a little, new balance games, the ability to generate workouts to target areas of the body. At least you don't have to get an updated Balance Board.

Wii Vitality Sensor - gimme a break already.

Metroid: Other M - kind of a strange title, but whatever. It appears to be a 2.5-D 3rd-person platformer Metroid game. This was a big reveal at the end of their press conference and has generated a great deal of buzz, although it's not due out until 2010. I particularly liked Penny Arcade's treatment.

There's lots of other random and 3rd-party stuff also being announced, but those were the big ones from Nintendo. It's worth noting that none of these include the still-a-mystery larger-than-life 1st-party title that Retro Studios is developing for a holiday '09 release. The one they told Gamespot to save extra shelf space for. We can eliminate a few options from the list, clearly it's not Metroid or Zelda (unless they're lying to us about Zelda... which I wouldn't put past anyone). Pikmin 3, MarioKart Wii 2, Starfox Wii, Donkey Kong Wii, and Super Smash Bros Brawl 2 are all potentials, but my vote is still Kid Icarus.

Microsoft and Sony, meanwhile, both demo'd motion control... things... for the Xbox 360 and PS3, respectively. Sony's seems to be an update of the defunct Six-Axis (Jesus, remember when they were consistantly ahead of the curve?). But Microsoft has introduced a controller-less control scheme. I like that they're innovating, but... it seems like all the things we complain about the Wiimote--namely the loose, gimmicky, exhaustively waggle-intensive controls--raised to the power of ten.

As ever, I look forward to being proven wrong.

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Ringtones and Twitter and Facebook, Oh My

So I got internet turned on for my new phone, which enabled me to start downloading ringtones. And the big fun of this is the ability to assign them to specific people. I realize that this is old hat for everyone except, wel... me... but I'm still jones'd about it.

Default: Beck - Cellphone's Dead. Mostly for irony, but it's a pretty cool tune too.

I've assigned my old ringtone, E-Pro, to Evan, since that's one of the occasional nicknames I have for him. The tough one to figure out is Abby. I'd love something that is equal parts sentimental and not-sucky. Best I can find is Frou Frou's Let Go, which just doesn't quite achieve what I want. There's tons of stuff I can download, but what? Go With The Flow by QOTSA? Gnarls Barkley's Going On? The theme from Super Mario Bros?

Must consider.

Nevermind. Just figured it out. Clocks. Done and done.

Other fun services that I now have include IM access. This is a tremendous boon, since I have a number of friends on IM but I hate the app so much that I'm hardly ever online. The two things I was really hoping to use are unavailable to me: Google maps and Bank of America. My phone doens't run Javascript (at least not very well), so Maps is out, and BOA just doesn't support my phone model.

Damn you, BOA.

Syncing to Twitter is pretty easy. Facebook works, but is less than ideal. Google Calender doesn't sync, but I can send updates via SMS easily enough. I was hoping to integrate RememberTheMilk, which doesn't so much work, but it apparently integrates with Twitter, and it does have a mobile interface that's sloppy but functional.

I can access Digg, but I won't ever try that again. The sites linked to from that page are over-taxed as it is, and trying to browse through a single-tab HTML-only browser with the equivalent of a dail-up connection--not happening. At all.

So, it's a mixed bag. I've got unlimited data and SMS, so I'm not going to accidentally bankrupt myself. And yes, I've double-checked. I don't have all the access I'd hoped for, but then, this was a step-towards smart-phone-itude to see if I liked it or not. And so far I do, enough to upgrade to a more current model when my contract finally comes due. In March.

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A Dancing Nancy is a British Dancing Queen

Hey, we've made it to the D's, which started out with a truly mediocre tune called D.W. Washburn by The Monkees.  It has now been excised from the iPod.  The first big block is the Dance's, which I've expanded to include derivatives ("dancing", etc).  Kick it off with:

• Van Halen - Dance the Night Away
• Jason Webley - Dance While The Sky Crashes Down (one of the ultimate drinking songs)
• Peter Brown - Dance With Me
• The Wonders - Dance With Me Tonight
• Jonathan Coulton - Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance (album and demo versions)
• Ace of Base - Dancer in a Daydream
• David Bowie - Dancing In the Streets
• Dave Matthews Band - Dancing Nancies (album and live versions)
• ABBA - Dancing Queen
• Tora Tora - Dancing With a Gypsy
  

After that we get a brief haitus in the form of a song called Dandelions, two songs called Dangerous, Dani California and Daniel.

Finally we finish with a couple of classical pieces from Claude Debussy (he was French, but I've decided "danse" is close enough): Danse Profane (Unholy Dance) and Danse Sacree (Sacred Dance).

DOW in the Mouth

Big changes in the DOW this week: the index has dropped GM and Citigroup and replaced them with Travelers and Cisco.  That's right, an auto manufacturer and a lender have been replaced by an auto insurer and a tech-firm that actually builds hardware.

Signs of a changing economy.

One of my favorite factoids is that the income of GM was, at one point, higher than the GDP of all but 8 countries in the world.  That's a ton of money--dare I say it: a shit-ton of money (an English shit-ton, not a metric shit-ton).

It's kind of funny, because banking and cars are two industries that fill a never-ending need.  People (especially Americans) are always going to need cars.  And they're always going to need loans to pay for them.  And yet a recession is wiping out major players in each field.  Is this the end of car-buying as we know it?

No.  But I think it may be the end of conglomeration as we know it.  I think we're going to start seeing more small businesses and fewer titans.  And, frankly, I would love to see smaller car manufacturers start to make good--although I have no idea how that's supposed to come about.  I think back to the Tucker, though--an innovative car by an American startup that was bullied out of the marketplace by the big players.  But now it seems the bullies have chased themselves off the playground.  Time for the regular kids to play.

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They Were Originally Going to Call it "Binge"

Microsoft's Bing launched today.  And...

It's not bad.  It's fast, it's easy to use, it returns relavent search results.  The interface is a bit busy for my taste, but it's not nearly as distracting as Yahoo.  Also, I can't find any official source that says that the name actually stands for "But it's not Google", so I'll let that slide.  For now.

If you think of it as a Google-killer, then it's a bit underwhelming.  It has not immediate advantages over the beloved G.  But if you think of it as a much-needed upgrade to MSN search, then it is a leaps-and-bounds success.

The lesson: don't worry about beating anyone.  Just try to be the best you can.

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Ugh

Three weeks of crash development start today. If I miss a few posts... sorry. Also, I may be quite brief.

Spent yesterday helping my brother-in-law and his family get moved into their new place. Sooooooooorrrrrrrrre.

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