Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Two views of life on Earth

I’m struck by the wildly diverse views of life on Earth held by two books I’ve been reading lately. This is something that should strike any reader of religious scripture the moment he or she ventures out into the world of scientific literature. The two views of our place in the universe couldn’t be more different. The first is from the Qur’an:

“Have you not observed how God causes water to descend from the sky, making it flow as springs on the ground, then through it causes crops of diverse colors to sprout forth, then the crops dry out and you see them yellowing, then He turns all into stubble?” (trans. T. Khalidi)

The passage from the Qur’an is milder, less hectoring in tone than others I’ve mentioned on this blog. Don’t let that fool you. It’s buttressed by the same repetitive threats of hellfire and eternal pain for the unbeliever. You never have to go more than a paragraph from where you are to find them. In the Qur’an, there is a familiar omnipotent, benevolent (well, not really) and omniscient being who gets very offended when his little creations don’t blindly submit to his greatness. The fact that they don’t actually have to do anything in particular, behave in any particularly righteous way, abstain from noxious behaviour is telling here. It seems all that is expected of them is faith. That appears to me to be the entirety of the Qur’anic message. If you don’t have faith, if you live a perfectly good life by any other standard but deny the revelation of this book, you are destined for an eternity of punishment. And if you do have faith, and you happen as well to be a murderer, a liar and philanderer you will be rewarded with delectable fruits in heaven. The second is from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot:

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.“

The contrast here is clear enough. 

I still haven’t finished reading the Qur’an

I started blogging about the Qur’an last year, and I’m still reading it. I haven’t dedicated it much time, really, although I do intend to finish it one day. In fact, I’m almost there. At times I’ll read a sura on the toilet, other times over breakfast. The truth is that it’s pretty boring, the poetry is mediocre, the wisdom juvenile and the threatening tone cloying.

Take this example, from “Arrayed in Ranks”:

“Is this a better welcome or the tree of Zaqqum, which We set
as an ordeal for the wicked?
It is a tree which grows in the pit of hell, with fruit like heads of demons.
They shall eat from it and fill their bellies;
Then, in addition, they shall have a scalding drink,
Then will they be returned to hell.” (trans. T. Khalidi)

That’s really spooky, I suppose, if you’ve been raised to believe in an omnipotent being whose arch-enemy is the unbeliever. More than any other religious scripture that I’ve read, the Qur’an relishes in this kind of gratuitous punishment for – as they are quaintly called – “wrongdoers.” But the wrongdoers aren’t people who murder, enslave, mistreat others, lie and steal  – as one may suppose – but rather they are those who simply don’t believe. “All they can expect is a single Scream, which shall sieze them while they dispute…” Ah, disputation, the enemy of God! 

“You shall surely taste of the most painful torment,” it reminds us. That kids are taught to memorize this nonsense, often in place of actual education, is tragic.

#Deathers

Well apparently the Osama “deather” meme has become a full-blown conspiracy theory in record time. The idea is not so much that Osama bin Laden is still alive but that he was killed years ago (some say as early as 2002) and kept in hiding – on ice, I’ve read – for some obscure purpose.

Has that purpose been revealed? Clearly, Obama is using it to put the “birther” business behind him and get re-elected in 2012. But that would also imply that the Obama administration and the Bush administration are in cahoots, working together in the cultivation of the Greatest Conspiracy Ever. This notion was echoed by noted truther Giulietto Chiesa, who called Obama a “neocon” on Italian television last night.

It’s slightly exhilarating to watch the weeds of conpiracy theory sprout up literally overnight. Before I’d even heard the news that Osama was dead, Twitter was brimming with announcements of the new manifestation of “birtherism”, tagged #deather/s. “Show us the birth certificate” was the new “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber” and is now “Show us the photos/corpse of Osama bin Laden.”

Of course no photos would ever be enough (they could be faked), no cadaver would ever be that of the real Osama, and how could we trust the “experts” even if they told us that his DNA matched? So the White House is – very wisely, in my opinion – brushing the whole business aside by refusing to go there.

Because the truth about conspiracy theorists is that they never stop when evidence is shown to them; they never say, “Alright, we were mistaken. Now that you’ve shown us adequate proof of X we’ve accepted your narrative.” That never happens. Conspiracy theorists are not skeptics, though they love to think of themselves as such. Skepticism is after truth through supporting evidence, while conspiracy theorists are after “truth” despite evidence to the contrary. The more you give them, the stronger the conspiracy becomes. Their minds are already made up.

Osama meets the Flying Spaghetti Monster

We all meet the maker we deserve.

Goodbye, motherfucker

New York is alive and well in 2011.

On Sept. 11, 2001 I was living with my then-girlfriend and our Greek puppy in Brooklyn. After the surreal horror of the day, the black smoke billowing up from the burning ruins of the World Trade Center and darkening the horizion, we decided it might be best to be in the company of fellow Brooklynites. So we went to a local bar to have a beer and…well, what do you do in such a situation?

Mostly everyone just sat around sipping drinks. It seemed like we were afraid to even talk. But talk about what? What had just happened was beyond the ken of our ability to even grasp what was going on (who knew the next blast wasn’t just around the corner?). This was the beginning of something, or the end of something, or both at the same time. We were confused, frightened, shocked. But we were together.

I’m not rejoicing at the death of Osama bin Laden. I’m not sure I like seeing all-night party people in the streets of Manhattan celebrating his removal from life on Earth with face paint and banners, as if it were a sports victory. But I do understand the elevated emotions at knowing we got him. That he wasn’t eliminated in a drone operation, but by the firearm of a US soldier in hand to hand combat. There’s something primitive in this, I admit. But one enjoys pausing on the last thought to fly through bin Laden’s brain before he met his demise. A novel or a poem will surely be written about it one day. And I doubt very much it was “Allahu Akhbar.”

Goodbye, motherfucker.

I’ll be glad I archived this one day

Here’s a poem I wrote about the Sept. 11th murders the week after they happened. I was living in New York at the time.

I’m an upside-down pony!

At times on this blog I use my modest super powers to poke some fun at “the world’s oldest science”, astrology. That’s because it’s a bunch of silliness masquerading as science, sounding ever-more sciency to keep up with actual scientific advances. It’s mirror in the world of medicine would seem to be homeopathy.

I’m glad that Rebecca Watson has finally put a stake in the heart of this sciency-sounding pseudoscience. She’s brilliant (and now we’re the same sign, Upside-Down Pony!) Wait, maybe I’m Peanut-Butter Jar now, or Homeopathic Striking-Board…but who can keep track of such stuff without a proper knowledge of fancy-sounding words? Ahh!

Nostalgia for the “old atheism”

Hemant Mehta has an interesting find today: it’s more proof that the atheists of old were no friendlier than the gnus of today to the religious establishments of their time. In fact, it’s the kind of refrain one hears a lot these days. The “new atheists” are in-your-face, rude, militant, nasty, overreacting…you get the picture. You might even begin to think that atheists weren’t ever like that before (assuming this is even true), that they were mild-mannered, accomodating and – yes – perhaps even a bit melancholy that they lacked the “gift of faith.” The Italian film director Nanni Moretti said that very thing just last night on television while promoting his new film, Habemus Papam. There went my dinner, all over the screen.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of unbelief knows that our predecessors in atheism were rarely such a sad-faced bunch. Names like Robert G. Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, Baron d’Holbach and many more were completely fine with their atheism. And they were pretty much as outspoken as Richard Dawkins or P.Z. Myers is today, only they lacked the immediacy of Twitter to broadcast their message. Technology may be the only difference worth noting between then and now.

So the next time you hear nostalgia for the “old atheism”, inquire what is meant. You’ll likely find that your interlocutor is: a) unaware of the history of atheism; or, b) just spouting nonsense. Or both.

Running down the hallways naked

Steven Novella was recently on the Dr. Oz show. He had been fairly critical of Oz earlier this month on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, so I was surprised to see him invited. Novella’s post-mortem is here. It’s a great read.

Jay Novella said something that keeps cracking me up on that podcast, though, and I’d like to share it with those who aren’t SGU addicts like me. Here it is:

“[Oz] is like the classic rock star guy who just got into the good band and he’s all happy and enthusiastic and he’s getting up early to practice his riffs…and then you zoom out and zoom back in…about six months later and he’s doing coke, he’s running up and down the hallways naked, Jack Daniels every night…”

And you can just see Oz running up and down the halls with a big check signed by Oprah Winfrey. What a load of nonsense this man is peddling.

Is Rome a Nazi lager?

An unnamed artist thinks Rome is a modern-day Nazi death camp, apparently. He even put up a sign in the Pigneto neighborhood saying so.

Like any self-deprecating artist he began to backpeddle as soon as he was accused of anti-Semitism. That’s not what he meant, at all. His apparent reasoning is that the neighborhood in which his sign appeared is a neighborhood of immigrants. Immigrants are oppressed. Hence the analogy to Nazi oppression of the Jews, forced labor and, well, extermination. If you’re finding this a bit far-fetched a comparison, I’m not sure the artist is much help in explaining his position.

Why did you need to use [the gate at Auschwitz] to make your point?

My installation is different…I used different materials. They used iron [at Auschwitz] and I used industrial pipes. Even the fonts are different! And mine is in English.

Oh, that makes sense now. It was written in English because that’s the language of immigrants. (Certainly not because the media would pick up on it and make him an overnight enfant-terrible. No, not that!) And certainly he meant no disregard to the actual people who were murdered in Auschwitz and other Nazi death-camps for the sole crime of being Jewish. Why on earth would people be so upset at his ingenious artistic rendering of immigrant suffering? Why do people accuse him of that most damnable of prejudices? Can’t they read his universal proletariat message loud and clear?

Ah, the plight of the misunderstood genius! Or has Auschwitz become the new crucifixion?