Oh god, Skepticon

Jebus, it’s only the first night. Rebecca Watson, Bailey’s, Amanda Marcotte, Red Stag, Vic Stenger, some random ale. I seem to have outlasted everyone else tonight, but I can’t keep this up the next couple of nights.

This. Is. SKEPTICON.

I confess. It was pretty funny watching Vic Stenger trying to stagger out of the party room. And it was a wild conversation about the role of chance in physics and biology. You ought to be here.

I think I better curl up and get some sleep now. Let’s see when I regain consciousness tomorrow. I might have to stand toe-to-toe with Richard Carrier and Rebecca Watson tomorrow night, and that will be rough.

I have staggered back from Mexico

So, yay, my plane arrived safely in Minneapolis last night at 1am, and then we had to drive to Morris for three hours, in the snow. Guess how much sleep I got last night? And now I have to scurry off to teach a class about something or other, I don’t know what. I’ve spent the last few hazy hours getting ready to teach.

You don’t really expect a new post here yet, do you? I haven’t even bothered with breakfast yet.

Later.

Mexico is a weird, weird, weird place

Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.

We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.

The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through, forcing everyone to move off to the side to allow them to pass. They were chanting and pounding drums and waving censers about, so the whole group was wreathed in a fog of incense.

When we finally got to the plaza in front of the three basilicas (an original one, a later, larger one, and the newest, which is a huge modern building designed to accommodate the crowds), it was filled with Aztecs dancing, and all you could hear were these loud, throbbing drums. I captured a few minutes of my struggle through the mob of pilgrims, surrounded by circular spaces taken over by whirling Aztec dancers; the sound capabilities of my recorder were overwhelmed by the noise, so the roaring you hear below is the sound of the drums. You’ll just have to imagine this rhythmic cacaophony that you could feel vibrating up through your bones.

The modern basilic itself is completely open along the sides facing the plaza, so we had the pleasure of hearing a loudly amplified Catholic mass with pagan drums pounding throughout. And yes, you could see Aztec headdresses scattered throughout the crowd.

In the smaller, oldest church, they also carry out the Mass, and here’s a mother and child in Mexican Catholic formal wear, on their knees. We saw several other people making a slow crawl across the plaza on their knees, including a couple of young children with their parents hovering about (on their feet, though), as the kids made the painful trudge. I guess it makes your prayers more potent if you do them on bleeding knees.

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The syncretism is fascinating, and so far Mexico has been a delight, rich in character and history, and I’ve got to come back and spend more time here. But that religion is so fluid and flexible and complex doesn’t make it right, and the obsessive, fanatical weirdness of this unique version of Catholicism is the product of its unfamiliarity; if you step back and look at it with eyes unfilmed by tradition, every religious ceremony looks this bizarre, and every religion thrives on hope built on despair…and some try to maximize the suffering to reinforce devotion. At least the modern Aztecs draw the line before raising obsidian knives and chopping out hearts nowadays; they seemed to be having more fun than the bloody kneed Catholics.

I’m going to be in Springfield, Missouri next weekend. The weirdness bar has been raised pretty high right now, and the Assemblies of God are looking rather drab and colorless in comparison.

Hello from Mexico City!

I have arrived after a long, long series of flights, and have already experienced wonderful Mexican hospitality and Negro Modelo, many thanks to the gang from Masa Critica, so all is right in the world. It’s not too late to show up, you can register at the door, just come on out to the Hotel Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico and join us at 8 tomorrow morning for Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo. There will be live internet streaming of some of the talks, so let’s hope more of the Spanish-speaking world takes advantage of this event, too.

La fe NO mueve montañas, la ciencia sí!

Mexico has atheists!

And I’ll be meeting some of them tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll see a few people from Ateísmo desde México at Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo, and more…I actually get to spend a few days in Mexico City. I hope they’ll forgive the fact that I don’t have a lick of Spanish, which is a bit embarrassing nowadays…I should probably sign up for a few classes here at UMM sometime.

It’s not too late to get yourself to the big city for a great meeting.

Oh, and look: there’s a poll! I can guess what it’s saying.

Vas a asistir al Coloquio: ¿Cómo te identificas?

Librepensador(a)
17%
Creyente
4%
Deista
2%
Panteista
1%
Raeliano(a), Cientólogo(a), New Age…
6%
Agnóstico(a)
13%
Ateo(a)
58%

The question of hell

From the depths of the endless thread, Owlmirror asks an interesting and provocative question, so I thought I’d toss it up top for everyone to take a stab at it.

At what age were you taught about Hell? Was it described as a place of eternal torture, or just being apart from God? Was it taught in a way that you thought was serious, or might there have been some skepticism in the teacher? Were you specifically told that you yourself were in danger of going there unless you met the exacting standards of your religion? Were you told that everyone who did not believe as you were taught was doomed to hell?

Richard Dawkins describes a young girl who was traumatized by the thought that all her friends who were not of the same religion as herself were doomed to hell. I was just wondering about the sequence of when young children are taught about the “stick” of Hell, to go with the corresponding “carrot” of Heaven, in different religions and religious subcultures, and in what contexts.

I’ve known people who had Hell drilled into their heads from an early age, and I know of many sects that preach hellfire, and I know the concept has deep historical resonance (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and all that), but it was never brought up that I recall in the church I attended, and definitely never threatened by anyone in my family. It was a generic cussword, and I had the general idea from popular culture of what it was all supposed to be about — flames, pitchforks, devils — but really, my image of it was mostly the product of Hot Stuff the Little Devil and such frivolities.

The first time I learned anyone took it seriously was probably in my early teens, when I vividly recall being accosted by a wild-haired screechy old lady who intercepted me as I was walking down the street and ranted at me about the Lake of Fire and an eternity of torment unless I got down on my knees and accepted Jesus into my heart right now. It was scary, all right, but it wasn’t the idea of hell that had me worried — it was that this deranged woman was unbalanced enough to be threatening kids with it.

So no, I never in my life took the threat of hell at all seriously. How about you?

There will be blood on this day

Two salient facts:

  • We no longer have any cats. The kids all moved out, and to our shock and surprise, they took their pets with them. I guess we raised them responsibly after all.

  • Temperatures here in the soon-to-be great white north have dropped into the freezing range lately, and are likely to stay there. And lower.

Any of you who have lived in this part of the country knows what happens next: the wildlife all tries to move indoors, and without large roving carnivores about, the rodents have been having a carnival. They’ve been banging the pots all night and frolicking on the countertops, and that means I have to act.

It is Halloween, and there shall be a reaping. I’ve got a pile of traps to set up, the swift savage ones that smash skulls and necks (most emphatically not the cruel slow glue traps), and I’m anticipating a ghoulish evening of hearing snap-snap-snap all night long, and cleaning up bodies in between handing out candy at the door. Let’s all hope I don’t get my jobs of dispensing things into buckets mixed up.

Remembrances of books past

Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children’s book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old.

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That’s the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features “218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR”, with maps of their distribution and short descriptions of their habitat and life histories. I remember reading that from cover to cover, practically memorizing it, and going on long walks out into the fields and forests around my home, looking for the elusive Boreal Red-Backed Vole or the dens of the Hoary Bat, or using it to try to identify the shredded carcasses of road kill.

Now with hindsight I realize it’s a rather awful little book, simultaneously too thin on information for each species to be really useful, and far too limited in breadth to be helpful in actually appreciating diversity, but I have to appreciate it for being an early provocateur, telling me that there was more to the life around me than people, my dog, and the lettuces and corn growing in the nearby fields. So thank you Drs Zim and Hoffmeister! I had to buy the rather ragged copy on sale at the library today as a nod to my early years.

I also had to buy it as an act of expiation. I sinned in my youth, and it curiously still nags at me. I checked the book out of the library when I was 10, and I didn’t return it. I kept it hidden away in my bedroom for a long, long time, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket when I went out, so I just…kinda…kept it. The library sent out all kinds of late notices and my parents kept nagging me to find the damned overdue book, while I just willfully pretended I didn’t know where it was, and they eventually had to just pay to replace it (so I’m pretty sure the Library Police aren’t still trying to hunt me down). I was so bad.

When I look back on my childhood and recollect the naughty things I did, I have to say that my appropriation of that shallow little book is at the top of my list of criminal acts, and I still do feel a bit guilty about it. But now I have my very own copy, openly and rightfully paid for! It’s not as if I’ll ever actually use it, but it’s sweet how holding it now brings me back to the edges of old ponds, hiking the steep flanks on the west side of the Green River Valley, wandering half-lost through silent forests, and that time I climbed up the side of an abandoned gravel pit to startle a grouse at the top who almost sent me plummeting backwards to my likely death when he puffed up and flew right at me.

Which led me to check out the Golden Guide to Birds, which was another story…