There are no atheists in foxholes, by definition

Pete Hegseth has decreed that there are only 31 religions that will be officially recognized by the US military, in an effort to pare down and streamline the efficiency of their administration. Of the 31, 22 are hair-splitting variants of the Christian cult, which to my mind suggests that there are greater efficiencies to be achieved, if only this policy were administered by someone who doesn’t have Crusader tattoos all over his body, and isn’t a member of Doug Wilson’s white nationalist church.

But surprise, surprise, surprise, guess who is left off the list?

This restructuring of faith codes, which help identify service members as well as the military in planning for appropriated religious coverage to include them, has now excluded minority faith/worldview groups including Atheists, Asatru, Deists, Druids, Eckankar, Heathens, Humanists, Magick, New Age churches, Pagan, Rosicrucianism, Shaman, Spiritualists, Troth, Unitarian Universalists and various Wiccans.

I guess some of the founding fathers of this country, the ones who were Unitarians and deists, wouldn’t get any respect from our modern military. The ones who owned slaves would probably fit right in.

Hey, did I lose my audience with an ancient Gomer Pyle reference? I am old.

Forgive and forget

One of Christianity’s most pernicious and harmful ideas is that a deathbed conversion is sufficient to erase all of your sins (“sin” being one of the worst ideas of all) and get you into heaven, a paradise of joy where you are rejoined with your grandparents and your childhood puppy and you get to eat soft-serve ice cream all day and instantly learn how to play a harp. Well, the details of an eternal life in paradise are left vague, but for sure you will be tormented and in despair for eternity for the sin of being an atheist or failing to obey your parents if you don’t express your love for Jesus. Great crimes can be forgiven if all you do is accept Jesus before you kick the bucket. Adolf Hitler might be burning in hellfire right now, but he could have been saved if, after ordering the murder of six million Jews, he had just let Jesus into his heart before allowing a Russian soldier to blow his brains out.

It’s so easy. They call us atheists hedonists who want to indulge in anti-social behaviors without consequences, but Christians have this bizarre imaginary get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to commit any horror they want, as long as they have good timing and deploy their repentance excuse before they croak.

Let’s make it even easier. There are sects where not only must good Christians practice forgiveness of sins, but they are required to forget that a sin was committed at all, and most importantly they must not penalize anyone for a sin that they have repented. They create a culture of incessant cycles of forgiveness and forgetting, where you can commit horrible acts and not only get into heaven, but remain members in good standing of your church and community.

The abusers and victims all belonged to the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or the OALC, a Scandinavian-rooted revivalist church that teaches its followers that heaven is reserved just for them. To get there, according to current and former members, they must follow a strict doctrine, which emphasizes asking for forgiveness for their sins and says that being forgiven by a fellow church member washes away those sins.

What’s more, the church teaches that once a perpetrator is forgiven, anyone who speaks about the wrongdoing — including the victim — can be accused of harboring an unforgiving heart. Those who have left the church, as well as some who are still with it, say this means the burden of sin shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who refuses to let the matter rest.

The OALC has congregations in the US and Canada, particularly in Minnesota, Wyoming, and Washington state — the headquarters of the church are in Sweden, explaining the geographic distribution of the cult. And the OALC has a problem.

The OALC is full of pedophiles and rapists that can’t be purged from the church, because all a bad actor has to do is ask for forgiveness and not only will he be granted a Christ-like absolution, but everyone in the church is obligated to adopt a kind of communal amnesia and pretend the act never happened. It’s a kind of social experiment: what if people really took the doctrine of forgiveness of sins seriously? Now we know. It creates a haven for vile, rapacious behavior, and the bad actors will thrive. It’s an interesting conundrum that this doctrine, called Laestadianism, leads to an extremely moralistic, close-minded religion that at the same time creates conditions that allow extreme immorality to flourish.

The church’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Minnesota, Wyoming and southern Washington. Families rely heavily on one another socially, financially and spiritually while keeping their distance from what members often call “the world” — outsiders and secular influences viewed as dangerous or corrupting. Even ordinary activities like watching TV and dancing are treated as transgressions that must be confessed. One abuse victim said she felt anxious every time she turned on her car radio, fearing that if she listened to a pop song and died in a crash before asking forgiveness, she could go to hell.

While most of its practitioners live in fear of turning on a radio, some see the church as a playground for pedophilia.

Over 10 years, authorities alleged, Charles Massie had sexually abused at least seven girls. Some of the abuse occurred at his house and some at his businesses, where young girls worked part time. But the vast majority of the abuse occurred at church, according to court documents. Investigators tallied 832 incidents where Massie sat near the girls’ parents, allegedly fondling the girls’ genitals and breasts. One victim, who told the police she was 5 or 6 years old when she was abused by Massie, said that he “raped me with his fingers.”

Wyoming has charged Charles Massie with nine counts of sexual abuse and sexual battery. He is being held in jail in Nebraska, where prosecutors also have charged him in connection with sexual assaults. He has pleaded not guilty in both states. He could not be reached for comment.

When investigators in Moorcroft contacted families of the victims, they learned that the families already knew about the abuse. One had learned of it three years earlier, according to charges. But according to court records, none of them had told the police. Instead, the charges say, the father of some of the victims had told their preacher, David Lindberg, about the abuse in 2024. Charles Massie would later turn himself in, but not for another year.

The fox is in the henhouse, and the culture of the church is to adopt a willful blindness…very convenient for predators.

The Wyoming church isn’t the only one to face accusations that it failed to report abusers. In southwestern Washington in 2017, a jury convicted church member Carsie Tikka of raping a 9-year-old boy. But one woman, who was a member of the church at the time, said that years before he was charged, Tikka had assaulted her stepchildren and the leaders had done nothing to stop him. Instead, Tikka asked her family for forgiveness.

When secular society catches up to these criminals, it does what the church is incapable of doing. Tikka was convicted and sent to prison, but I don’t think he will learn.

Then Tikka illustrated the central problem facing prosecutors and victims alike — a powerful religious culture that prioritizes spiritual absolution over secular justice — with his final, defiant words:

“My sins have been forgiven,” Tikka told the judge. “Have yours?”

The all-powerful lord of the universe, source of all morality, has told him that raping boys was OK. Who are you to disagree with him?

Happy news on the religious front

You may have the impression that Minnesota is chock-full of Scandinavian Lutherans, but that’s not so: German Catholics make up an even larger proportion of the state population. There is a band running east-west in the center of the state that is very Catholic, centered on the city of St Cloud, about an hour west of Minneapolis. This is the Diocese of St Cloud.

The good news is that many Catholics are falling away from the church.

The change is part of the diocese’s plan to consolidate its 131 parishes into just 48, a dramatic reshuffling of religious and community life in this historically Catholic region of central Minnesota.

Church officials say a declining Catholic population, lower Mass attendance and a shortage of priests leave them little choice.

That’s the way I want to see it happening: not blowing up churches, not punishing believers, just a slow, steady, and entirely voluntary departure of believers from the folly of religion. (Although I would like to see an end to religious tax exemptions; we shouldn’t punish people for believing, but we also shouldn’t be rewarding them for it.)

We can simply sit back and wait as religious belief slowly sublimates and eventually disappears. Catholicism is just one subset of fading religions.

The changes also reflect broader religious trends in Minnesota and the U.S.

Across the country, Catholic dioceses are grappling with similar challenges. According to the Pew Research Center, about 40 percent of U.S. Catholics seldom or never attend Mass.

While the population within the St. Cloud Diocese has grown by about 7 percent since 2010, the number of Catholics has fallen from 22 percent to 16 percent, according to diocesan figures. During the same period, Mass attendance has declined by one-third.

Some churches are less than half full on Sundays, Kresky said. At the same time, insurance, maintenance and operating costs continue to rise, she said. And some churches in the diocese are just a few miles or even a few blocks apart.

The churches they have left are all propped up on the benefit of tax exemptions. Let’s accelerate their fade into irrelevance, leaving behind nothing but some interesting empty architecture. Bye-bye!

Fun with knees

I had my medical follow-up this morning, and it was entertaining. We looked at photos from my arthroscopic surgery! That photo to the right is not my knee; my knee was much more scruffy and cluttered with debris, that got scoured out. Everything is healing up just fine, and I have to stick with the PT and build everything back up into a state of normalcy.

Prognosis positive!

This man should just admit that he wants to kill women

I apologize for scaring you all with that dour, nasty visage. That’s Keith Kidwell, a North Carolina state legislator, looking like a giant angry cockroach wearing a skin suit, but I know I shouldn’t pick on his looks. Maybe he’s just sour because he recently lost his primary race, so he’s about to be ousted from the legislature. In revenge, though, he just dropped a stinky dooky on North Carolina, House Bill H1232, which has the absurd title AN ACT TO AMEND THE NORTH CAROLINA CONSTITUTION TO DECLARE THAT A DISTINCT AND SEPARATE HUMAN LIFE BEGINS AT THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION AND SHALL BE HELD INVIOLATE AS AN INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND PROTECTED BY THE LAWS OF THIS STATE FROM THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION UNTIL NATURAL DEATH, SO LONG AS THAT PERSON IS NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE. Let’s take a look at this bill which starts out stupid and bad and quickly evolves into something evil and wicked.

It is a matter of indisputable scientific fact that a distinct and separate human life begins at the moment of fertilization.

This is a bill motivated by traditional, conservative, and religious ideology, so it’s dishonest and hypocritical to claim it’s about indisputable scientific fact. It’s a fact that the conceptus is human, in the broadest possible sense of the word; it’s not an oppossum or a grasshopper. It is not a fact that a conceptus represents a full human life. My right pinky finger is definitely human, but that does not imply it is an autonomous person who must be protected independent of my whole self. This is a common gambit played by the anti-abortion fanatics, equating a cell with the totality of the multicellular being. A zygote, a blastula, a gastrula, a neurula, a pharyngula are all a long way from being a person.

I wish there was a way to educate people on the complexity of development — we are the product of a whole series of radical changes in our morphology, yet there are always these ignorant fools who want to reduce our existence to an array of black-and-white binary changes. You are either a full human or are non-existent. You are a man or a woman, no other options are possible. All life must be flattened to one thing or another. This is a familiar strategem by the life-begins-at-conception absolutists, and this reductionism is not an indisputable scientific fact, it’s an ideological bias.

It’s about to get much worse. Remember from the title of this bill that the right to life only applies to those that are NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE. This is a curious loophole because the bill is trying to define abortion as a capital offense. The state must protect the life of its citizens…

As such, that new human life is recognized by the State as an individual person, entitled to the protection of the laws of this State from the moment of fertilization until the moment of natural death.

…EXCEPT…

Any person who willfully seeks to destroy the life of another person, by any means, at any stage of life, or succeeds in doing so, shall be held accountable for attempted murder or for first degree murder, respectively. Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person.

The effect of this law is that if a woman seeks to get an abortion, she is guilty of attempted murder. If she gets an abortion, she is a murderer. And any person has the right to defend the conceptus with deadly force, which doesn’t make a lot of sense — killing the person trying to get an abortion kills the fetus, too, making you a murderer under this law, on top of being guilty of killing the mother. That last point doesn’t really matter, since the woman doesn’t count as a protected member of society.

Why not just call this law one that declares open season on pregnant women? This is a law that makes murdering abortion doctors a right, which would have been a useful justification for the guy that murdered George Tiller.

I hope that H1232 fails and makes Keith Kidwell’s face look even more nasty and mean. One promising sign is that he had an initial co-sponsor to the bill, Ben Moss, who has since withdrawn his support after considering the implications of a bill that strips the right to live from women who had an abortion, and empowers any citizen who wants to go harlot-hunting.

There will be more stupid laws trying to declare a zygote as a complete adult human being. They’ve been doing this for years.

How would a future anthropologist interpret the graveyard of Everest?

A few days ago, I got sucked into a weird vortex of a YouTube category. I watched ONE (1) video about climbing Mt Everest, and then of course the algorithm started feeding me more and more Everest videos, specifically Everest Disaster videos, and wouldn’t stop. I’m currently going cold turkey on anything about mountain climbing, rejecting every video the system offers me, to try and break the cycle. I’ll probably be offered videos about Everest until I’m 900 years old.

But I did learn a few things, and one of the reasons I kept watching them was a sense of horror. Sure, there were skilled mountaineers who trained and trained and brought deep physical and mental abilities to the mountain, and I have to respect that. Everest has become a carnival attraction for “influencers” and business people who just want the glory of being able to say they climbed the tallest mountain. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to book sherpas to lead them on a grueling march, and to probably carry them to the top and back down again, all so they can gloat on Instagram.

And many of them die for this dubious distinction.

Three out of every 10 expeditions to Annapurna result in a casualty. That rate is slightly lower for Kangchenjunga (29.1%) and lower still for K2 (22.9%). Everest only comes in at sixth place, with a casualty rate of 14.1%.

Of course, that rate is so much lower because so many more people are tempted to climb Everest. Each one, no doubt, a highly motivated individual.

They’re dying, and for what? There are lines, as if this is a Disneyland ride. They stack up on guide ropes, planted by the long-suffering sherpas, and may have to stand and shuffle for hours as the mob is led up, one by one, to the summit. It’s insane.

The whole thing is an extreme test of physiological endurance…and money. They climb above the “death zone,” so called because no human being can survive at such low oxygen concentrations for long. You enter the “death zone,” and you start inevitably dying slowly (or quickly), and what you have to do is get to the summit and down as rapidly as you can, so you can get back down to the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is high enough that your body can repair itself after its exposure to lethal deficiencies of air. Did I already say it’s insane? It’s madness.

People die in this vain endeavor, and their bodies get left on the mountain.

Some of the frozen, dessicated bodies are used as landmarks.

Green Boots, arguably the most famous body on Everest, has been identified as Tsewang Paljor, Head Constable of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), though some think it might be his colleague, Lance Naik (i.e. Lance Corporal) Dorje Morup. Both were members of a three-man ITBP climbing party that perished in the infamous blizzard of May 1996, which also took the lives of five other mountaineers.
…
Some bodies are known landmarks, as Green Boots used to be: “The German” on the second step of the north face route, the “Saluting Man” near the south summit, the “Icefall Body”, in the Khumbu glacier field, and “Sleeping Beauty” on the southeast ridge, until she too was removed from view in 2007.

What a fate. And it’s all in service to a lethal tourism industry, where people are killing themselves to expose themselves to a physical challenge. I’m sorry, but if you tell me you climbed Everest, I’m not going to be impressed — I might just feel pity for your deluded ambitions.

One of the consequences of this wasteful enterprise is a mountain littered with dead bodies, ropes, colorful nylon tents, and stacks of empty oxygen bottles. More people are willing to risk their lives for a photo op than are willing to risk their lives to clean up the horrible mess of debris they leave behind.

That did get me wondering, though. Ötzi was a wonderful discovery of a 5,000 year old corpse of a Copper Age man, with artifacts of his time, that has stirred up a lot of curiosity about what he was doing in the Alps, how he died, how was all his gear used. Why was he climbing those mountains? I’m wondering how future anthropologists in 7000 CE would feel on discovering this treasure trove of a 21st century high-altitude garbage dump/graveyard, and what questions they might ask. Why were all these people in bright nylon clothing up there at 6-8000 meters anyway?

I’d just say they were glory-seeking idiots.

What is music anyway?

Yesterday, I stumbled across this duo, Angine de Poitrine, and they scrambled my brain. I was listening to this weird microtonal math rock played by a couple of people in goofy polka dot costumes. Canadians are a strange people.

Just look at the frets on this guy’s bass. It took a while for my nervous system to rewire itself to recognize this as music, but then I couldn’t listen to anything else for a while.