Gateway to Heaven

Today is not one my best of days. I just found out that I am to be burned at the stake. As if that were not depressing enough, this is a special kind of indestructible stake, and anything that is bound to it is also indestructible, so it would seem I have eternal agony in my near future. My conservative friend informed me that this is the penalty for not believing Jesus is my savoir. There is good news:  if I choose to believe, and if I do not otherwise annoy his deity, I can live eternally in a place he calls heaven. That doesn’t sound too bad!

He had a very thick book that was supposed to help me earn heaven. He quickly realized that I would require some assistance when I explained to him that I cannot choose to believe something I do not believe. You cannot decide that you will convince yourself of something just because you wished you could. If humans had that power, most of us would believe we were truly happy, that work is not work, but a pleasure, that our vices are unpleasant, that sugar and grease tasted like dust and motor oil, that spinach and spirulina were a pleasing as pizza and ice cream. He informed me that the reason I had not committed to his God was because I didn’t understand Him well enough. Always open to a challenge, I embraced his book, and with it the promise of Christian Faith and eternal life.

Now this book rivaled War and Peace in size and entertainment. I will not go into the graphic details of its author’s insanity, but I will try to summarize it. He represented the God I am supposed to accept, as an angry Being, jealous and aggressive, and very defensive. This God made a list of Ten Commandments (I think they used a decimal system in this book and ten was a nice round number. In order to come up with exactly ten, the Author had to get creative, but He made it work). The technique he used was a not a new one. The Greek Procrustes (q.v.) invented it, as I understand things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes).  Apparently God’s commandments are directed primarily toward people. I think this is because we could never make anything less than a person understand Jesus, which means that nothing other than a person can get into Heaven. Now, God himself, is not a person and He is already there, which is the loophole He used to get in, as he routinely violates these Ten Commandments Himself.  They are so important to understanding how He wants us to live, that I feel I should go over each one. I can use context clues to figure out what they really mean, as it is often unclear. My friend tells me that ignorance of the law is no excuse for violating it. I thought it was about as good of an excuse as one could ever have, but I guess not. While trying to comprehend this legal code, I used a translation. However, if you want to read it in the Original Elizabethan and not just rely on a translation, start with Exodus 20, where God spake. He actually spake the commandments twice, perhaps to make sure they were heard. I don’t know of other passages in the book merited reiteration. More on that later.

1.   In the first commandment, He announces who He is and informs me that He brought me out of Egypt. I did not realize this, but I do appreciate it, as I like America much better.  He then asserts himself as top God: “You shall have no other God’s before me.” I have since learned that God speaks Elizabethan English, but I mostly intend to stick with a more modern dialect, as I think God will understand that I only have history in Egypt and America, so it does not make sense to force me into a foreign way of speaking while trying to get my wits around the odd thing that He is. A simple survey of the commandments alone suggests that He is supposed to be the highest god in my god chain. It would seem, at least based on this reading, that other gods are OK, so long as I queue them up behind Him. I assume he can override any ruling they make, and may be willing to do so if I appeal a mandate of a lower god as unjust or not in accordance with His commandments. I must confess that at this point in time, I am little disturbed by these Ten Commandments, as I know His book contains other laws also. I think He thought up more, but only after the original ten were already engraved (and probably circulated too), so He never officially amended the original ten to be twenty.

2.   The second commandment says something like this:  “Do not make sculptures. If you violate this piece of the commandment, then do not worship the sculpture I instructed you not to make.” That seems like two commandments, but I admit they are related. I decided that compound commandments were OK, since I know about the ten limit, I am spared the danger of thinking He made a mistake so early in the composition. He would not like me thinking He makes mistakes. I don’t think the passage makes it clear if paintings are OK, so some other artists may also be out of compliance. It seemed confusing, the second piece of this commandment. After much research, I resorted to translations of the original King James text (instead of the text itself) to resolve the issue. The King James Version said not to construct a “graven image,” which is just a clunky way of saying “sculpture.”  However some editions translated that to this: “Do not make an idol.” By combining the meaning of the original Elizabethan with its translation, I came to realize that building a god and creating a sculpture for artistic purposes is really the same thing. If you sculpt something for the beauty of the art, you never know when some rapscallion is going to happen upon it and worship it.

If you are faint-hearted, stop reading here, because the next thing may seem quite barbaric and may make it difficult for you to believe in the loving kindness of my friend’s God. Remember, if you do not accept Him, you will be eternally tortured. It is possible that “accept,” does not mean “submit to His will,” but perhaps means, accept that He is what my friend thinks He is. My friend has not explicitly stated that these are the real conditions, but there is subtext that seems to point in that direction. This may mean that you must accept that He is omnipotent, omniscient, and yes, all good and all loving, with infinite mercy and kindness. If you are having any trouble with this at all, then DO NOT read any further. What am I going to tell you next, will make that level of acceptance impossible.

The next thing God did: He threatened me! He not only threatened me, but he threatened my son, whom I have not conceived yet, Preston, and he also threatened my great grandson! God explained how He feels intimidated by other gods (and I think he meant sculptures in this case). God is not stupid. I am sure He realized that artworks are inanimate objects, but they were modeled after REAL living fish, calves, donkeys, Lions, etc. He announced that he, the Lord my God, is a jealous God! I already knew that. I saw Him act out on a number of occasions before I unearthed the text of the Ten Commandments from its hiding place. Surprisingly, Commandments are buried deep inside His book. You do not encounter a single one until you may have already violated a good many of them. It would have been better if he had started with the Ten, and then used a literary strategy, like: “To tell you why these commandments exist, we must go back in time, so here is how it all began.”

Anyway, if I made sculptures in direct opposition to the commandment, then God warned me: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” Well, there is really not much one can do to service a sculpture other than to dust it occasionally. I can leave them dusty if it will earn me heaven. If I do worship one of my sculptures, He will visit my iniquity upon my children “unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I am not sure if He means that only my children that hate Him will get punished for my action or all of them. And, if He means that only the hating children get punished, it further implies that if I don’t make sculptures, then perhaps the rest my children can hate Him without consequence, otherwise, no point in saying they will get punished for my act if they are already queued up for punishment for their emotions of hate. So, maybe only the non-hating children get punished, but that is not what He said. Neither of these choices makes sense, so I must conclude that He really means that if I make a sculpture and then bow down before it, all of my children could be punished, regardless of their feelings about the Punisher. I must also conclude that he only said: “Of those who hate me” out of bitterness, and that this is just His emotions running amuck, which he just warned me about with His jealousy clause. I will pray tonight that he learns to reign in His emotional outbursts before I get to heaven.

3.   The third commandment is not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain. I am pretty sure that He means His name, and that if you are worshiping a sculpture, you can use the sculpture’s name with impunity. I am not sure exactly what it means to take a name in vain. I think it may mean do not use it unless you need it to reference Him, and definitely do not use it to reference a sculpture. I think I have broken this commandment several times since I started reading my friend’s book, but I am sure He will recognize the extenuating fact of the inaccessibility of the commandments to a searching novice who reads His book sequentially, lest he miss any important detail. He should have placed the more relevant stuff at the front.

4.   The fourth commandment is pretty simple. Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. He has not said how many people can forget it and it still remain holy. I know much of the world does not even know about it, though, so I am willing and able to do my part. I remember that it is Friday or Sunday. I hope that is good enough. I think it may start Friday evening and go through Saturday day sometimes, so I am not sure it is even a day, technically. It is probably 24 hours. I think one group of people thought it was Saturday and another Sunday, as I recall. I know it is near the weekend. With all this confusion, I suspect humans are keeping three days holy. I hope that’s ok. The wicked days still outnumber the holy ones, which must be pleasing to my friend’s God, even if He had hoped for a greater spread. (I know it’s confusing, but I have to work it out. It is very important. God may execute me, as He did that poor fellow mentioned in Numbers if I forget about the Sabbath: Numbers 15:32-36).

5.   “Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long on the land which the Lord is giving you.” That reason seems a little Machiavellian. Let me paraphrase to make the commandment more clear: “Be good to your parents so I don’t have to kill you.” And, if you comply, you can boast to your parents that you treat them honorably, not because you feel it in your heart, but because you may be executed if you do not. Your parents will read the Bible and their hearts will sing: “Ah, we have a good son.”

6.   “You shall not murder.” I think this is a good commandment, which we should follow without exception. Understand that even if you are a goose, God is not a gander. Nowhere in this commandment does God say what do to do if He instructs you to violate Commandment Number Six. In Isaiah 14:21, He commands: “Prepare a place to slaughter his children for the sins of their ancestors; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.” I am not sure what I would do. I would probably pray that He remember the commandments, but obviously, if He forgot about the sixth commandment, I would have to comply with His orders. If, hearing my prayer, He did not reconsider His orders, I would pray a second time that He forget the commandments.

There is a strong implication of guilt by association here, which may repulse your desire to accept my friend’s God, which in turn will keep you out of heaven. However, you must embrace that concept, for it has lots of precedent. Very early on we learned that this is how the universe works. From the story of Adam and Eve’s crime causing the rest of humanity to suffer, to the story of children being consumed by wild animals to punish parents in Leviticus 26, to the story of Jesus being crucified for my sins in the Gospels, it is a theme. Guilt by association is fair, a fact continually reinforced in the teachings of God. The recurring incidence of otherwise innocent children being painfully put to death by God for the acts of their fathers serves as incontrovertible proof of this non intuitive reality.

Still, since some murder is OK, a better commandment would have been: "That shalt not murder except for when it is ok, such as when a father commits a sin and I need you to murder his baby for it."

7.   In the seventh commandment, we are warned against committing adultery. My wife already will not let me commit it, so for me, it is not a current barrier to heaven. However, I would like to note how unfair it is that God would punish someone whose wife does permit adultery and not punish me. The adulterer in that case, commits adultery because he has the opportunity and desire. If I also would commit adultery given the opportunity, then am I not just as guilty of evil as my friend? Is it the willingness to act evil or the act itself that concerns my friend’s God. If it is only the act, then my friend’s God is not a fair God. It is not fair to punish one person more harshly than another because one person was able to fulfill his aspirations to commit a sin better than another. I am going to give my friend’s God the benefit of the doubt and say this command really means: “Thou shalt not be willing to commit adultery,” and for the sake of expediency, I will temporarily take on faith that this command is reasonable and that adultery is always wrong.

8.   “You shall not steal.” Ohhh, that’s a good one. Murder, which God commands frequently, is the stealing of a life. We have the same quandary with this commandment as we had with the sixth one.

9.   “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Ok, will not do. Keep in mind that your neighbor usually referred to a member of your camp. The Lord usually ordered the extermination of any camp that was in the way of His chosen camps, and to this end, false witness would have probably been OK. Remember that when God says your neighbor, He means just that. Perhaps also your neighbor’s neighbor and his neighbor’s neighbor, but probably not his neighbor’s neighbor ‘s neighbor. It is probably ok to not bear false witness against those who are so distant they could not possibly be my neighbor, so I may bear false witness when there is no doubt about the status of a victim of my lies.

10.  Commandment number ten says I cannot covet my neighbors stuff. I have a real problem with this. I cannot choose to covet or not to covet. Surely God realizes that what a person “wants” is an emotion that is beyond his control. Had he reworded the commandment to read: “Thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s stuff, just because you covet it” He could have removed it altogether and pushed one of his compound commandments down to the number ten slot. This commandment is not fair and I do not get to decide if I follow it. I think I will pray for guidance.

After a careful reading of the Ten Commandments, I walked away with lots of thoughts running through my head.

First, there are more than ten. He lumped them together to stay faithful to His decimal system. I am going to ignore that fact because I would hate to go to Hell quibbling over an accounting issue.

Second, if I remove the commandments that are unclear, contradictory or hypocritical, there are only a few left, and I think I can commit to those going forward. Un-fortunately none of His main commandments mentioned anything about accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I know the U.S. constitution was drafted with no direct mention of “taxation without representation,” as a violation of one’s rights, and yet, it is still an unfair thing to do and could easily be used as a rallying cry for cessation. I currently have no children, but I still pay independent school district tax. See what happens when we forget a commandment?

God is asking a lot. He wants me to ignore the contradictions and just plain nonsense in the commandments and accept Him and them. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental deal-breaking problem here. While considering the pros and cons of trying to accept Jesus into my heart, I suddenly realized that my friend’s God’s promise is a ruse! I cannot get into heaven, even if I comply with all His crazy demands. The problem is I love my sister. She will never accept Christ as her lord and savior. She will not discuss religion at all, so I cannot convince her with my friend’s book. She simply has no interest. I will always love her, and I could never live in a place where there is only happiness, knowing that she was in eternal agony. I cannot enjoy heaven while knowing that God has two big rooms, one he calls heaven and one hell, and the wall between them is the only thing separating misery from bliss. I would be miserable, and if I understand my friend correctly, there is no misery in heaven. I think misery breeds more misery and is probably grounds for expulsion. Heaven would not be heaven for me, unless God took my compassion, and the pain that accompanies it, away.

If God changed me thus, removed my compassion for humanity and my love for my sister, then I would no longer be me. If I were someone who could be joyous while someone I love and cherish struggles in eternal agony, then I would think nothing like the person I am now thinks. It would be a spiritual lobotomy! If you “change” enough of something, it becomes something else. Plutarch put it best when he described the destruction of the Ship of Theseus, which happened by slowly replacing every damaged plank, until the original ship had been replaced. If my friend’s God’s promise is for my soul’s pieces to be remade, plank by plank, into a different eternal creature who can merrily enjoy the condition of eternal damnation of a loved one, so long as I am safe, then I do not want to will my spiritual parts for this purpose. 

If I am one that must follow the Ten Commandments as laid out and demonstrated by my friend’s benevolent God, which include examples of His doctrine of Guilt by Association, which He embodied in the crucifixion and torture of His innocent son to pay for the sins of others, it is impossible me to enter heaven. I cannot embrace that and at once remain who I am. The reward would go to someone else, the barbarian I would become; and God’s promise to rework me into a sociopath who can then live blissfully in His heaven seems deceitful, as I cannot experience the promise.

I am not wise enough to join the rest of the sheep in my friend’s God’s fold and close my eyes to the suffering He not only allows, but demands. Either my friend is mistaken or God cannot permit me to enter His heaven, so the whole promise is a trick. My friend’s God’s heaven seems much too much like my current venue, only eternal, with no hope of change. My friend also described Hell and if I do not embrace his Lord, he sees nothing that would stop me from getting there. He could be right. Perhaps he and I will meet, him in his heaven, and I in my hell, one a place of eternal bliss, the other, eternal agony; two names for the same location, as his heaven feels a little like hell to me.

Earl's God

“Their gods are wood and stone, but our God cannot be destroyed.” As a boy, in fifth grade Bible study, I read these words and they remain with me always as a testament that my God is the final answer. It was the first time I realized that one god could be better than another. Clearly, my God was less vulnerable than these pagan idols, which could easily be destroyed by the ravaging acts of iconoclastic armies. To execute my god, you would minimally have to exterminate everyone with a memory of His existence. A god made of nothing; it’s brilliant: a god with a surface harder than diamonds. A devoted iconoclast, of course, will always find a way.

If our God is given dimension and substance by our thoughts, then it is the thoughts themselves that the conquering armies must ravage. As a young man, I enlisted my time in support of this cause. Though I have softened my position later in life, I am not sure I was ever discharged from the army, as the call to destroy still cries from within me. I was a fool to enlist.

I once asked my brother, who was deeply religious and brighter than I even on his dimmest day, if he believed that God could do all things. “All things that are possible,” he responded. He preemptively answered my attack. I had intended to ensnare him in the philosophical trap invented by Blaise Pascal: “God is not all-powerful, as He cannot build a wall He cannot jump.” Today I would never borrow such a ruse, not even from Mr. Pascal, whom I admire immensely. While Pascal may have thought it was illogical to assume the All–Mighty’s omnipotence, his conundrum offers no evidence to support his theory. To say that a being’s power is limited because even the being himself is incapable of circumventing it is not a very good argument against his absolute power. The thing that He cannot do is nonsensical, and only impossible for that reason. It is like one kid telling another that his dad can win a fight with anyone: “Oh, yeah, what about with your dad?”

I used to exterminate regularly, but it has been awhile. I have a spider living in the corner of one of my bathrooms. He is a bit of an obstacle. I have to dust around him to avoid disturbing him and I am careful not to spray anything toxic near his ramshackle home. I think he is a daddy long legs, but I do not call him that to his face, as it somehow seems base. His more proper designation is pholcus phalangoides, and though that sounds really dignified, I just call him Earl.

If Earl were a little more aware, he would realize that there is nothing that I cannot do. From my brilliant production of written words with the mere tap of plastic keys on my laptop, to my magical extermination sprays that seem to come out of nowhere and smite his cousins when they displease me, it would seem that I am god; and an omnipotent god at that. Earl would be wrong about my powers. While I am infinitely more capable than he is, I cannot secrete silk. Moreover, no matter how hard I try, I cannot perform the simple task of thinking like a spider. I can never know what it means to be Earl, to feel what he feels, to experience the world through eight eyes, and his philosophically sleeping mind.

I was surprised to learn that in making his webs, Earl does not use a uniform silk. He is a very meticulous artisan, and far more clever than I used to think. The silk he weaves has many different textures and a variety of fibers, each with its purpose. I am not even scientific enough to distinguish one silken thread from another, a feat he makes look effortless. This spider has a horrible god. Moreover, Earl is a bit of a genius when it comes to the production and use of silk.

My God, the real God, is completely invisible to Earl. I can see Him, mostly through the lens of legend and the swash of rumors. He also co-authored some books, which once were scrolls, whose foundations started out as rocks. My God has a network of ghost-writers and has been producing literature for some time now. Unlike Earl, I see my God through the things He creates. His living creations and written words tell me of His existence. His missionaries point to the paper work He left scattered about and they show me marvelous things, like Earl, and explain that I cannot make a spider, nor can any man, so my God did it. Before I learned of God, I thought Earl was created by other daddy long legs, but it turns out that daddy long legs and their ancestors could not have always existed. I later learned that everything in the universe must have a beginning, so something must have started daddy long legs off; these spiders were caused to come into existence, which means, by definition, that they must have a Causer, and that causer is my God. My God has no causer, which seems like a violation of the rule, but it’s really OK, as He has no beginning.  

As Earl’s god, I am proud to be part of the divine chain. Earl is in there too. If moths were more aware of my spider’s exploits, and had a vocabulary sufficient to allow it, they would probably pray to him. Poseiden used water, Vulcan (Hephaestus) used Fire, Earl uses silk to maintain his divinity.  As we look up this divine chain we find creatures that are increasingly capable, until finally, all the way at the top, we find My God, the uncaused Causer of it all, who needs to pray to no one, who answers to no one. Everything is His way and there is nothing any creature in the universe can do about it.

I wonder if my God realizes His true power, or if He gets confused, and like the lower gods in the chain, prays. What if He imploringly lifts His hands to empty ether and beseeches it for greater understanding? What if this futile act makes Him sense more intimacy with the nothingness in which He imagines an ineffable life-form? How foolish that would be. I guess His spiritual life shouldn’t really concern me when all that really matters is that my God can do anything; He is indestructible; He is the final answer. One thing still bothers me, though: He is not wood, not stone, not really any other corporeal material either, and so I worry that maybe He has trouble secreting silk.

The Martian Fallacy

I must reluctantly admit that the Martians are more clever than we ever realized. With their wisdom and their technology and their secrecy, they have avoided any real detection by humans who hunger to detect them. The search for red planet extra-terrestrials has always been frustrated by the great distance between their world and ours, and even with our wisdom and our technology and our contempt for their secrecy, we have not even come close. Or, should I say: we had not come close.

Enter July 30, 2010: Scientists have discovered Nili Fossae rocks on Mars.
These rocks have properties that are virtually identical to rocks in the Pilbara region of northwest Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth was found. They could easily be remnants of the earliest Martian hideouts.

Fred Hoyle’s Boeing-747 analogy asks this question: A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces needed to build a Boeing-747. They are scattered in a state of utter disarray. A tornado blows through the yard. What are the odds that once the storm passes it will have unexpectedly assembled a fully functional 747? Hoyle argued that mathematically, creation by the process of evolution was a less probable scenario than this.

If any creationists out there are reading, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking I am suggesting that since life exists on Mars, Hoyle’s Boeing 747 may have accidentally been assembled twice! The idea is absurd. Miracles do not happen twice. I am not saying that at all, my creationist friends. I am simply suggesting that tiny Martians may be hiding out in Nili Fossae rocks.

With this newly discovered confirmation about the probability of living Martians, I think it is reasonable to hypothesize that they have visited Earth, and that they didn’t like it and left. They must have been appalled at what they found. Perhaps fearing that our ideas would seep into their culture and mess them up also, they wanted to ensure that as our technologically grew, we would never find them.

I imagine they check up on us frequently. One of the sneakiest ways to accomplish this would be from a very large distance. All they have to do to know what humans think is to visit the websites of Earthling opinion makers. Martians mostly frequent liberal and conservative websites, I suspect, as that is where the largest communities of opinion live.

As soon as I read about the Martian hideout, I decided it would be beneficial to try to retrace their probable route. A hypothesis was not really needed for this experiment, as I was attempting to solve a mystery, with no theory in place to simplify my quest. I did not want to ask if something was there, then test for it. I wanted to fight my way through the thickets and discover whatever was hidden under it all, the way I imagine a pioneering Martian would. I needed a well-defined mission that would announce its completion in a manageable timeframe.

So, said I, success will be in answering this question:

Why do the Martians think humans aren’t worth knowing?

Of course, there is a hypothesis wrapped in the question, but not one I intended to confirm.

I visited conservative blogs first as I already knew that conservatives spoke with greater force and more certainty, which is one of the primary strategies they use to cultivate credibility.

The first thing that struck me is how racist the democrats are. I found repeated examples posted on Republican blog sites of Democratic bigotry, racism and general intolerance, which is antithetical to their published doctrine and tacitly adds hypocrisy to their list of offenses. Often the sites included media, which demonstrated first-hand what the site claimed. I assumed that they were taking things out of context, and sometimes they were, However, most of the time, the evidence was genuine and astonishing. Peering through Martian goggles, I found democrats to be despicably racist, bigoted, closed-minded and utterly hypocritical in diverse ways. They also lie a lot. In fact, about half the videos I saw were of liberals caught contradicting statements that they themselves had recently made. Usually they were tailoring their speech to a specific argument or to a specific audience; and they apparently did not realize that someone would do a side by side comparison of the things they say with the things they said. I think they thought side-by-side comparisons compare different things to each other, not your word to your words, and they were unaware that you could use them this other way. I also learned that democrats are socialists, which doesn’t mean what you think. It means they support a movement toward totalitarianism.

Then, I went to the liberal blogs, expecting to see more of the same, as the disunited democrats turned on each other, but I was astonished to find that Republicans lie also, and that they are bigoted and racist, and uncaring: very very uncaring. Their mask their actual beliefs with words like “entitlement” and “big government.” It turns out that when they say entitlement, they really mean that government should take from those in need what little they have and divvy it up among the Republicans; and when they say big government, they are really saying one of two things: they want social and economic anarchy or more commonly, they think the government should be run by whoever has the greatest assets; or a simpler way to say it is that they want the government to be owned by the republicans running the largest corporations. Of course, they would never express it this way, as the lower class Earthlings would riot, so instead they call these corporate republicans “the private sector.” They also endorse, and engage in the acts of, picking on victims of debilitating disease or mental illness and poking fun at those in need. They are a very mean people.

I only investigated the general region called The United States. While it not the biggest place, it did have the largest samples of hypocrisy and intolerance, often cleverly clothed in cloaks of righteousness. The mission was a success. As a Martian, I learned that humans are cruel, deceitful, selfish and a tubful of other horrible adjectives I am not taking the time to list individually. I found little goodness in their midst.

I am not a Martian, and I am not guilty of their charges. I would like to repudiate Marty’s findings. Marty is the name I have given to the investigating Martian representative, since he hasn’t the courage to introduce himself.

Marty, you can judge my people by our mores, and I cannot quibble with that, though when you judge me by the mores of my people, we have a quarrel. However, you cannot rightfully charge the human race with the most report-worthy of egregious behavior you find among us. In the discipline of logic, we Earthlings call this a Composition Fallacy. The examples you cite, in no way strengthen your argument. They serve to entertain you in their absurdity, and to slowly cultivate your bigotry, and they have no other reasonable function. Since Martians probably don’t know about fallacies, they can commit them with impunity on Mars; but you are an Earthling today, and as we say: “When in Rome…”

Your allegation is an incorrectly structured syllogism: John Doe and JMyste are human. John Doe is a Racist. JMyste is a Racist. Sounds silly when you put it that way, Marty, doesn’t it? If you make a claim that the humans are racist, and then show an example of a human acting racist to support it, then you are guilty of a Composition Fallacy. I declare that your guilt exempts me from the burden of your findings.

It is easy for you to seek out the worst examples of human behavior and to state in exasperation: “There those humans go again.”

At the risk of veering away from the topic, I also want to point out that humans are very intricate and have extremely complicated belief systems. Everything we think stands atop mountains of other ideas. You do not see the mountain. You only see its peak, which formed late, and with little intellectual intervention from us.  It was the obvious conclusion to an unthinkably large set of theories we examined carefully and embraced slowly. It is the conclusions you often challenge, but they are nothing more than the rational product of the fundamental assumptions on which they stand.

“There those humans go again.”  Who I am should never be resolved into the worst examples of my behavior you can find. Moreover, who I am should never be determined by the most reprehensible set of acts you can unearth in other humans. If you seek evil in me, you will find it. If you search from outside me, and call what you discover me, you will have a bigger sample, and detect it more easily. If you learn that I am a liberal, you need seek no further than your conservative blog to expose me for the sorry human that I am.

I may be all the things you judge me to be, but based on your evidence, you will never know. And as I practice reasoning the way you taught me, it seems that Martians may be little green Rock-dwellers on a barren planet, the color of blood, which can only sustain intelligent life when a miraculous set of coincidences happens twice in a row.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I have no reason to believe I will keep it up. I currently intend to alert no one of its existence. I wonder what that means? Will it be a repository for my own thoughts that no one other that I will ever see? Will I contribute to it on occasion or abandon it?

If you know the answer, please do tell.

J