Thursday 29th May 2003
Update: Comcast got us back online in only three hours, instead of 'sometime next week', and only owe me $450 at the moment.
Hopefully, this won't be too TimeSensitive, since I can't actually upload it at the moment.
In other news, Hunter got The Idiot of the Month Contest uploaded; vote when you get a chance, and watch for idiotic comments throughout June to submit to the messageboard for next month's contest.Just as I was about to write this about something entirely else, the cablemodem suddenly puked on me. Apparently, according to Comcast [whose adverts are still going on about how much better we're going to like them over AT&T--as if we had a choice in the matter], there are a few modem blackouts in our area. Which apparently translates to the state of Colorado. The 'droid on staff at four in the morning thinks he can get someone out here to look at my modem sometime next week. Which sounds great, since the problem is going to end up being on their end.
Comcast, being new to this, may not yet be aware that my modem is nothing but a direct line to their building. If the problem were on my end, the cable would be out too. It's not. Which is why I'm paying more attention to Jerry Springer than this right now.
Okay. Springer's over. Let's move on.
As some of the regulars may already know from other sources, I finally got a couple of 'mormon missionaries' yesterday. I've been waiting for that. It took them a year to find me. If their deity exists, it must have been trying to protect them.
I don't know why it never occurred to me to film them. It just didn't. If they come back, I'll do it next time. Unless I forget again.
It began as I was dealing with a number of imbeciles in the chatroom. There was this sudden knock on the door. Not the sheepish sort of knock I get from the twits who come round to fail to fix anything around here; more enthusiastic, stacatto, and arrhythmic: det-det det-det-det dede-det-det. And then the doorbell a couple of times, since my door hasn't got cymbals. So I went over to find out what, exactly, was wrong.
Mostly because the sort of people I actually know would knock that way. But not during the day. The people I know, knowing me back, wouldn't come here during the day unless they were on fire. Either way, whoever was knocking on the door was about to die. The only question was whether they were aware of it.
So I opened the door. And a couple of kids halfway dressed in cheap suits were standing there. Black Dockers, white shirts with short sleeves, clipon ties, and nametags. The sort of look which gets you kicked out of a high school band for looking too geeky. I figured they were from Safeway, or something.
Mormon missionaries. Coming round to clue me in on the existence of christ.
And it never occurred to me to sprint four metres to the west to grab the DVC.
I was pretty tired, since it was daytime and all. But I went ahead and talked to them. They told me they were mormon missionaries; I told them I was a professional atheist. They asked what that meant; I told them. I write books on the idiocy of theology. My education spans evolutionary biological fields. I know more about the bible than anyone else in my zipcode. In point of fact: deities don't exist.
We spent the next couple of minutes working out the Abbot and Costello routine on beliefs. I don't believe in evolution; I don't believe in the big bang; I don't believe in anything at all--I'm a nullifidian. I accept that which is proved factual, through the scientific method, based on evidence, subjected to peer review, and catalogued for later use. I don't believe in deities. No real reason, except that they haven't been proved to exist. By the same token, I don't believe in unicorns, even though they're depicted as real in the bible.
That much worked out, they moved into the minutia of their religion.
First, they asked what I knew about mormonism. To be honest: not a lot. All I know about mormons is that someone told me they pretend that the messiah is currently living on PlanetX with Marvin the Martian, waiting for the kaboom. Apparently, that was disinformation.
Instead, I learned, the mormons were the first homosapiens to reach North America. They got here, found the Egyptian MadLibs, decoded them into English, and turned them into the Book of Mormon.
At this point, I asked for a bit of clarification.
The first homosapiens, we know from geological evidence, reached North America fifty thousand years before the reported life of christ. They didn't speak English; they clicked and whistled. And, from personal experience, I can tell you that decoding heiroglyphics is no more deital a task than reverse engineering a computer programme; anyone with a brain can find the patterns and remaster a text into something useful; the crytogrammes I do as a hobby are about that complex. If it takes a fucking deity to do that, then bow down and repent; at least I'm visible.
So we worked out the story so far. The first mormons to reach North America were mormons, and they possessed the amazing ability to decrypt images into words, as seen before only on Sesame Street. Good.
Having worked out that homosapiens might be a little smarter in general than any given specific homosapien observing them, we moved back to deities.
Now that the mormon deities are no longer required to take apart the Enigma Code, what are they good for?
The answer may surprise you.
The mormons, if nothing else, have worked out that the overwhelming majority of christians are idiots. They've read enough of the bible to ascertain that the deities depicted therein were physical, biological organisms. Y'shua bin Yehoshua nee Panteras was a carbonbased homosapien, of course; but so, it appears, was Yhvh.
So. We know now the molecular composition of deities. Something I've been trying to find out for years. Carbonbased lifeforms. We shouldn't have any trouble getting a DNA sample from this omnipresent creature.
There's a slight catch, of course. Because, while carbonbased and manlike, these deities are 'perfect'. You can cut them, but they won't bleed. 'But who'd want to cut Jesus?'
I would. I'm a scientist. I wanna see what happens.
So we talked a bit more about the physical attributes of Kal-el the deity here. In the end, they conceded that their deity was flatly impossible. But that's okay; because, whether the deities in the bible are real or not, the bible has some great oneliners to absorb into your ethical base.
You know. Like I Timothy 2.12: 'But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.'
And Luke 19.27: 'But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.'
And Psalms 137.9 [I think] where we learn that happiness is the result of dashing kids against rocks.
Now...I can see where bashing kids against rocks might be fun. It's a lot of work, but it's good stress relief, too. But...wouldn't most people have a problem with this sort of morality? Isn't this the sort of thing most people label arbitrarily as Evil?
The answer, of course, is that morality, being subjective, can be whatever you think is best. Which is why so many christians end up looking so dumb. Pat Robertson comes to mind. He's decided that the biblical sin of being gay is still an issue, even though the sister sin of cutting your hair has been abolished by narrowing the 613 commandments of the Old Testament down to the basic Top Ten List, none of which mentions being gay at all.
So. Are the ten commandments, at least, good morals. No.
Having no deities before Yhvh is fine with me. I have no deities at all. The odds against getting one which isn't Yhvh are...well, ther are millions of deities out there, so I suppose the odds are pretty good. But I'm still not going to pretend that these things exist; give me evidence, and I'll accept that they're out there.
But then we get into commandments against coveting things. What moron thought this one up? Avarice leads to progress. You see that your neighbour has bought a Porsche; you decide that you'd like to have a Porsche; you come up with a way to get one. I need an extra $175,000; I need a Porsche 911. Avarice allows us to grow. Commanding against avarice will not only fail, it'll make the deity telling you Thou Shalt Not Covet look like a fucking idiot.
So. Are there elements of the bible I like? Sure. I'm a big fan of smashing kids against rocks. I'm not a big fan of sitting around with nothing cool because I'm not allowed to want to buy anything. I'll take the bible as long as I don't have to take all of it. Which, of course, is the same attitude the christians have. The difference is that I'm willing to admit that the whole book is fictional; it just happens to have a coupe of interesting ideas in it.
Then again: most books are like that.
Morality can come from books. But getting morals from a single book--especially when that single book also contains morals contradicting the ones you happen to like--is a bit lazy. Smash kids against rocks, but thou shalt not murder, but thou shalt slay thine enemies before your deity. The basic synopsis of the bible is do whatever you like; something in here will let you feel okay about it.
So. Deities don't exist in fact. And the bible is badly-written fiction. So what does that leave?
The Book of Mormon.
At this point, I'm a bit out of my element. Because I've never read this thing. But that's okay: I can hit mormon.org and order a free copy. I managed to to that before Comcast cut out on me.
The mormons' book report on the Book of Mormon was that it contains more morals to pick and choose from. It has no evidence of deities, of course; we're still all agreed that deities don't factually exist. But it's got a few neat ideas to consider and possibly download into your morals.dat for later use. Fine by me.
Which brings us--in the conversation--back to deities. Because the Book of Mormon, while having no evidence of deities, at least will show me what this deity would be like if it existed.
And this is where things get neat.
The mormon deities--and there are three of them--a panel of deital engineers who made the universe in their pluralised image--are a bit less fickle than the other christian deities with the same names. For example, granting that there's no evidence of afterlives, and that the energy used to process thoughts and emotions [none of which lasts more than a couple of seconds on the outside] evaporates as heat and not as souls, and granting that Near Death Experiences only occur in the fourteen percent of people whose chemistry allows for them, which we ascertained my faking NDEs in gravitational gryos, the afterlives we have no evidence of are never bad. Pascal's Wager in mormonity is: believing in these deities will turn you into a superhuman yet subdeital creature in your next life; failing to believe will turn you into a superhuman yet subdeital creature in your next life, which will be better than being a normal human in this one, but not as good as being a superhuman who believed in deities before it died.
The mormonic version of Pascal's Wager is one of those claw machines where you have to win something eventually; the only question is whether you happened to get the exact toy you were after.
This begs one, final, utterly important question.
If coveting is a bad thing, then why would you be able to covet those who believed in deities as you sit there being a mere superhuman immortal in your next life?
Apparently, there's no good answer for that one. Except that the ten commandments pretty well suck after all.
So. That's the rap. That's what came out of an hour of taking apart their religon. Deities don't factually exist; the bible is not the best source for morals; failing to believe makes you a superhuman immortal. Am I interested?
Of course I am. Knowing all this, I'm in a pretty big rush to fail to believe in the mormon deities. Before this, I'd been counting on Ecclesiastes 9.10, in which we learn that there's simply no life after death at all. Hearing that I get to be from Krypton by failing to believe is even better news. Of all the deities I don't believe in, this one's my new favourite.
I'm not sure whether it's a paradox to believe that failing to believe in these deities makes you Superman after death. It might be. If so, it's not the first. The whole concept of deities relies on paradoxes. I had to explain that to these guys. You can't be omniscient [id est: knowing that you're about to cross the street] while being omnipotent [id est: declining to cross the street, despite your destiny]. It's one or the other. You're either clueless or impotent. I'll be crossing the street; unless I don't; in which case I was wrong about crossing the street.
So. I don't buy it. Maybe it's because I'm a scientist and I'm too used to figuring out how things really work instead of pretending that any given mystery is the action of deities. Maybe it's because I'm a novelist and I'm too used to catching plotholes large enough to drive a deity through. Maybe it's because I'm part of a divine plan in which I'm meant to remain atheistic. Who knows. The net result is that I'm not the right kind of guy to believe in this shit. I'm not one of the five to ten percent who actually have temporal lobe epilepsy--a soft schizophrenia which interrupts the reasoning process by telling the brain to believe whatever it hears; and I'm not one of the sixty percent who pick a religion out of peer pressure and play along. I can accept that it's societally polite to be a christian, or a muslim, or a hindi, or whatever; I just don't actually give a damn. If my atheism is upsetting to a christian, then that christian's faith is fragile enough that it's going to break eventually, whether it ever meets me or not. Not my problem.
By the same token, I don't fuck around and tell kids that Santa really exists, either. Honesty is antithetical to tact. If my honesty insults you, just realise that your idiocy insults me. I guess it's a moral thing: I don't defraud people just to make them smile.
I'm not sure where I got that one. It probably wasn't the bible.
Anyway: that's pretty much the story. Not that you get to read it right away. Hunter's been on the phone to Comcast, talking to a bunch of morons who still can't figure out that the problem is on their end. They're thinking they can rush out here by Saturday to confirm that the problem is on their end. Mostly because they overheard me when I told Hunter I was charging them $150 an hour starting at four in the morning today until the problem is fixed. If I have to call them and tell them that myself, I kick over to the consulting rate of $300 an hour. Which would be bad. The twits getting this information make $300 a week. Because they're fucking idiots making minimum wage at Comcast. Sixty hours of downtime here is a year's salary for them. They do not want to make that happen.
Oh yeah and. How are these two things related? Hunter's neat idea.
For years, I've been conscientiously objecting to the idea of AudioBooks. But I'm starting to realise that I'm overestimating people by holding out. Hunter wants to see News of the Stoopid in .mp3 [or something like it] as well. Something I was semiconsciously bearing in mind while I was getting the mormons to giggle at the idiocy of their religion.
If you can get a mormon to laugh at itself just by speaking, then there's potential.
So I'm thinking more about it. And I'll probably do it. I'll just add a little verbal disclaimer to the beginning telling the listener that they're missing out on various images and charts in the AudioBook version; if they want to get the full effect, the best advise is to LEARN TO FUCKING READ.
Morals only work if you can abandon them once they begin to suck. Which is the basic idea behind Damnitology.
Which the mormons I talked to for an hour are extremely interested in learning more about now.
More later....
--Gremlin