dwasifar’s daily gripe

At least for me, it has, in a certain limited way.

Some years back I decided to rip my entire CD collection, which numbered upwards of a thousand, to mp3 files.  (This took me a solid week to do, with two machines running.)  The goal of this was to have easy random access to the tracks for burning CDs for the car or whatnot.

What I didn’t expect was how much the ease of access would change my listening habits.

At first nothing changed very much.  I used the computer files in the intended way - burning discs for the car and such - and if I wanted to hear, say, the Beatles, I would pull a Beatles CD off the shelf and play it.  But eventually I started upgrading the technology.  First I got a media streamer for the stereo in my bedroom, enabling me to play the tracks on that stereo over a network connection.  Then another media streamer for the main stereo in the family room.  After that I decided to build a file server to sit on my home network and host these things, so I wouldn’t have to be running my desktop all the time.  It sits in the basement, running Linux, and serves up music files to the media streamers and to any other computer on the network.  All the mp3 files are organized in a folder structure by artist and album title, and all the tags are regularized.  By the time I moved into my new house two years ago, I had become so accustomed to accessing music this way that I rarely played an actual CD any more, so I did not install shelving for them in the new house.  They are stored in boxes in the basement.  If I get a new CD, it gets used once - to rip it to mp3s - and then joins the others in storage.  If I want to listen to music, I use the media streamer on the stereo, or music player software on my computer, or I burn discs to play in the car and give them away (or throw them away) when I’m done with them.

This has fundamentally changed the way I listen.

It’s rare that I sit down and listen to an album the whole way through any more.  The act of putting in a CD to play it encouraged you to listen to the whole thing.  But with every track in the collection available with just a few button presses or mouse clicks, there’s nothing to push you in that direction.  If I get a new CD I might listen to it all the way through, once or twice, either on the streamer or in the car.  But I don’t always.  Either way it then goes to join the random pool, which is increasingly how I listen to things.  If I’m in the mood for jazz, I’m as likely to set the streamer on Genre:Jazz and select “shuffle” as I am to actually pick some specific album - and if I do pick a specific album to play, it’s usually from a fairly abbreviated list of favorites.  But mostly it’s random.  The car discs are even more random; I usually burn randomly-generated discs without regard to genre.  It’s like having a commercial-free radio station that just plays things from my own collection - except that on this radio station you can skip tracks.  I find myself skipping tracks a lot.

The disturbing thing to me about this is that I don’t feel engaged with the music any more.  I’ve made it too easy.  I took the effort out of selecting and listening to music, and now I find that there is nothing holding me to it when it plays.  There are a lot of things in my collection that come up on random play that I just can’t identify.  Who am I listening to?  Where did I get this music?  I used to be able to answer that question for everything on my CD shelf.  I could tell you the artist, the album, usually the year and track number, and most of the time I could even tell you where and when I bought it.  Not now.  Too much stuff, too easily acquired, and therefore too easily glossed over and forgotten.  I’ve become the Veruca Salt of mp3s.

I think there are a lot of Verucas out there.  iPods and file sharing and online music distribution have made playlists the paradigm for listening, not albums.  When I was growing up, there was even more effort involved in obtaining and playing music, and you felt like it was special because of it.  To get a new album required effort - a trip to the store, browsing big racks full of 12″ albums - then carefully setting it on the turntable, cleaning it, putting the needle down, flipping the record over.  If you wanted to listen to just one song, you had to have a steady hand and a good eye for the band between the tracks.  That’s all gone.  Music flows like free restaurant coffee now, and people value it just about as much, which I think is one reason the record companies are dying.  They can’t convince people that sharing something as ubiquitous as music should be thought of as theft.  (Other reasons include that they have no reason to live any more now that the internet exists, and that they are vicious evil bastards who are trying to legislate their own continued profit by buying congressmen.  But I digress; these are things for another post.)

The point is that by making it effortless, we reduce how much we value it.  This may be why the aforementioned bastards can get away with selling so much obviously valueless crap.  And I’m not about to reverse all the technological changes I’ve made for my own use.  I don’t even know if I’m right about the cause of all of this.  Maybe I’ve just outgrown my earlier love of music.

But maybe not.

This is another essay from our friend Hugo Grinebiter.  It’s a bit long for a single blog entry, so only the introductory pages are posted here; if you want to read the rest of the article, links are provided at the bottom.

The world refuses to satisfy our desires, including the desire not to suffer their consequences. There are two things we can do about this: change the world or change our desires. It is incautiously assumed that these two methods are technology and religion respectively. This is an error, because religion is technology, and by no means always technology for entering an afterlife. Sometimes it is technology for changing our own desires, but more often technology for changing this sublunary world to satisfy those desires just as they are.

Christians frequently ask atheists what comfort they derive from their unbelief. Thus they reveal their own core conviction, namely that you believe only in order to get something, rather than because you are convinced that it happens to be true.

As well as distinguishing between changing our desires and changing the world, we may distinguish between technologies that work and technologies that don’t. This gives us a four-cell matrix. In the first cell, technologies for changing our desires that work; in the second cell, technologies that don’t; in the third cell, technologies for changing the world that work; in the fourth cell, technologies that don’t.

The second pair of cells contains technologies for power, technologies for health, technologies for economic acquisition, technologies for social status and technologies for emotional satisfaction. It may be objected that emotional satisfaction belongs in the first pair of cells, but as long as the desire to experience particular emotions is taken for granted and the sole question is how to satisfy them, it belongs in the second pair. Another error is over-focusing on sexual repression and so treating religion and desire as inherent opposites, for we have many non-sexual desires to which religion gives free rein.

Many people have observed that the mystical tendencies within the major religions are remarkably similar, however different the esoteric paraphernalia may be. This is because these schools all cultivate the same bio-feedback techniques for achieving goals in “inner space”, whereas the theologies and “social-space” institutions of the competing parent religions make little or no difference to the neural architecture of the human brain. Whatever mystics may say about prayer being listening to God, awareness of the divine presence, and so on and so forth, the fact remains that the word means, in English and some other languages, asking. For most believers, it means asking God for worldly health, wealth and happiness.

There are four basic modes of rogatory prayer: for Protestants, asking God directly; for Catholics, asking the saints and other officials of the heavenly bureaucracy to pull strings; for all religions, bribery and dickering – that is offering animal sacrifices, candles, good deeds or renunciation of innocent pleasures; and for charismatic Christians, sorcery. This last requires some explanation. Mainstream churches believe in asking God for what you want but also in accepting the answer No. Some, however, teach that if you ask for something in the Name of Jesus, then God is obliged to give it to you. Your verbal operation is thus coercive of the Deity. In theory, you are so sanctified that you will not claim what you are not supposed to have; in practice, you claim what you want, and whenever the technology fails, you blame either yourself for lack of faith or else your fellow-churchmen for being sinful and thus preventing God from “working”. For not only can God be coerced, but He appears also remarkably easy to put off His game.

Power Technology

Medical Technology

Economic Technology

Social Status Technology

Emotional Technology

Full article on one page

Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently.  Partly it is time constraints, and partly it’s because the state of things right now has me so gloomy that I don’t really feel like writing.

In the meantime, here’s a link to a blog with a story I think people should hear:

Measure of a man

And here’s the original link to the Norwegian newspaper story: Mary - betalte reisen til Norge

I’ll be back later this week with another massive missive from Hugo Grinebiter.

I am not an economist, nor a politician.  That said, I had a thought about something that might have averted, or at least tempered, the current financial meltdown.  It’s too late for it now, but perhaps if it had been done before the meltdown it could have helped.

Consider that the meltdown was precipitated by a wave of foreclosures of subprime mortgages, and that the foreclosures were mostly the result of adjustable rate mortgages adjusting upward.  Everyone could see this coming when the prime rate headed up.  I remember seeing the warnings.

So, rather than wait until everything melted down and then trying to patch it up with huge infusions of tax money, wouldn’t it have been more sensible for the government to freeze the rates on ARMs before the wave of foreclosures could hit?

I know, that would have interfered with private contracts.  But bailing out Wall Street with tax dollars is pretty intrusive on private finances too.  This way the costs would have been much lower; the real estate market could have come down gradually instead of crashing, and it would have given us some breathing room to establish better rules for how the financial markets operate instead of just waiting for a collapse.  And what costs were incurred would have been placed squarely in the laps of those who created the problem: the subprime lenders.  Looked at another way, the government could have prevented the camel’s-back-straw of exploitive profit-taking that eventually became the trigger for the meltdown.

Of course, there could easily have been other triggers later - a credit-card meltdown, for example.  And there would have been no point in doing this without an immediate return to responsible practices afterward - which is unlikely under our corporate-owned government.  But still, it’s an interesting thing to think about, even if only in sad retrospect.

Here’s a letter I wrote to Acura, which I post here so you can see the awful sacrifices and tribulations that make up my daily life.

Acura Client Services
1919 Torrance Blvd
Torrance CA 90501-2746

I own a 2005 Acura TL. It is my third Honda product, my first Acura, and probably my favorite car ever – and that puts it up against some stiff competition. (For example, before the TL I owned a 2000 BMW M5, and right now the TL sits in my garage next to a Sky Redline.) It’s just a great car all around; there’s hardly a thing about it that is not perfect or close to perfect. The dealer experience has been similarly excellent over the course of ownership. It’s been as good an ownership experience as I could ask for.

Yet sometime in the next year or two I will buy a new car, and at that point, if things remain as they are today, you will lose me to Audi or Infiniti or some similar make.

You may ask, why? And the answer is: because Acura’s new offerings drop me through the cracks.

The new TL is rather larger than I’d like, but I might still consider it if it were not missing a pedal. I was dismayed to learn that it is not offered with a manual transmission - by which I mean three pedals and a stick shift. Paddle shifters and auto-sticks are for people too lazy to learn to use a clutch.

The new TSX, meanwhile, has grown to almost the size of the previous TL, still offers a manual, and would be a good choice… if it didn’t mean leaving over 50 horsepower behind. Where’s the V6?

I have problems understanding why Acura would suddenly abandon the customer who wants a performance-oriented “driver’s car.” The previous TL seemed to have been designed by people who understood that kind of driver, especially the excellent Type-S. If I were in the market today, I would snatch up one of those right now before they’re gone. Unfortunately I am not, and by this time next year, if I want an Acura that suits me I will only find them on used car lots.

The Audi A5 offers a manual with a V6. So do the Infiniti G35 and G37. Even the Cadillac CTS offers them (though one gets the impression that it was a grudging afterthought). Apparently there is still a market. Why isn’t Acura interested in it?

Sincerely,

Dwasifar

I’ve been following the election news with a mixture of trepidation and cynical resignation.  Are we going to get the miracle president who turns America around and puts us on the right track?  No.  I don’t actually think such a thing is possible.  It would be like trying to pull a U-turn on a rollercoaster.  And in any case, the statesmen are eliminated early from these things, modern TV-driven dumbed-down politics being what they are.  So I’m left with the usual slim pickings.  In alphabetical order:

• Bob Barr, Libertarian
• John McCain, Republican
• Ralph Nader, Independent
• Barack Obama, Democrat

I know there are others, but these are the only ones I’d think about supporting.  Let’s have a closer look.

Bob Barr. I’ve cast my vote for Libertarian candidates before, just on principle, even though they have about the same chance of winning any election as they do of levitating my house.  But lately the flaws of laissez-faire when it comes to Corporate America have become glaringly apparent.  For years now the playing field has been tilted toward big business and against the consumer.  Rampant collusion, price fixing, the gutting of consumer protections, exploitive and usurious credit practices, revision of copyright law to ensure corporate revenue in perpetuity instead of protecting individual creators.  The current financial meltdown was caused by irresponsible financial corporations building huge house-of-cards portfolios on top of mountains of exploitive debt, with regulators looking the other way.  The Libertarian policy would have let this happen much faster, and the strict Libertarian solution would be to allow the global economy to crash hard.  So though I still agree with the Libertarians on personal freedom issues, I don’t think I want one in charge of money policy.

John McCain. Let’s see.  We’ve had eight years of a delusional megalomaniac in the office, who thinks Jesus made him president and has been busy breaking down the checks and balances of our political system to concentrate power dangerously in his hands, while at the same time pissing away American moral capital through stupid, belligerent, dangerous foreign policy.  Mr. McCain explicitly offers us four more years of the same policies.  And in case you don’t think he’s serious about it, well, he picked a Pentecostal for a running mate, just to appeal to that kind of voter who thinks eight years of Christian Dominionist expansionism is not enough to satisfy their apocalyptic end-of-days God-wants-war vision.  Our European allies already think Americans are stupid and ignorant, and our government reckless and aggressive.  Do we really want to give them four more years of evidence?

Ralph Nader. I could almost vote for this guy.  I know, he’s Mister Gloom and Doom, but no one else is standing up for consumer protection right now.  He has correctly identified the problem with corporate ownership of Congress, and he’s the only one saying so.  But I suspect he’s so allergic to Business that he would basically just shut down the economy for our own good.  It’s moot because he has no chance of ever getting elected dogcatcher, let alone president.  Even a “message” vote would be wasted - no one would hear that message except people who are already sending it themselves.

Barack Obama. Darling of the media, now that Hillary’s out of the way.  It was entertaining watching them try to decide who to plump for.  Who’s more PC - a white woman or a black man?  (Mixed race, actually, but to the media he’s black because you sell more TV commercials that way.)  I have grave doubts about Mr. Obama’s qualifications for the office, and throughout the campaign his plans and promises have seemed a little vague and skimpy on details.  He reminds me of Jimmy Carter, another Donald Duck Democrat who got elected more or less by default while the Republicans were trying to scrape shit off their shoes.  (A Donald Duck candidate is someone who gets in because the incumbent has screwed up so badly that the other party could run Donald Duck and get him elected.)  But, in his favor, he is charismatic, seems honorable and decent (note I say “seems” - it’s hard to tell for sure, because he is a politician after all), and most importantly he represents a sharp break from Bush policies.  If we have a chance of reversing the damage to our international reputation, we need to send that message by explicitly repudiating an extension of Bush doctrines.  If we have a chance of reversing the damage to our constitutional checks and balances, I think Obama is it; not necessarily because he will explicitly restore them, but because I don’t think he will be a strong enough president to maintain the assault on them.  In short, I think we could use another Jimmy Carter right now; an upstanding, decent, and largely ineffective president, to give everyone who has suffered eight years of assault from a devious and effective administration a four-year breather to catch their balance.

So, I guess I am supporting Obama.  Is he the right guy?  Probably not.  Will he get elected?  No.  There are too many people who wouldn’t vote for a black man even if he were Jesus.  But if I’m wrong, and he does get in, we might have a better chance of recovering what little prestige and influence might still be salvageable.  And who knows, maybe the people might actually get a little voice in running things.  Farfetched, I know, but as the Obama campaign says, “hope.”

Today we have a column written by Hugo Grinebiter (pronounced green-a-beeter).  He’s offered us his views on the American political scene, with the benefit of distance and detachment.  We get Robert Burns’ wish, to see oursels as ithers see us.  And it’s not pretty.  Here’s Hugo’s essay, “Red Meat.”

RED MEAT

As a card-carrying evil-liberal-socialist-pinko-atheistic-communist-terrorist-loving-faggot, that is to say, a literate and even educated Old European, I have been asked to say something about our view of your upcoming presidential election.

Let us begin with a metaphor. The Palin Bounce is attributed to her appeal to “red-meat” Republicans. What does this mean? Republicans who are not vegetarians? Hardly, since that is almost all of them. Republicans who consider that only those who eat red meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner are proper human beings? More plausible, but still not the whole story.

A clue is afforded by another use of the metaphor, namely when an audience, crowd or demographic is thrown “red meat”. And what kinds of policy position are described in this feeding-time-at-the zoo image? I think we shall find that they will not include reversing climate change, alleviating poverty, providing universal health-care, peacefully settling ancient conflicts or making foreign friends. “Red meat” does not mean making nice to enemies, allies or anyone else; it means that the candidate is promising emotionally satisfying nastiness at the expense of, including but not limited to the following: the environment, due process, science, foreigners, migrants, gays, sexually active unmarried women, non-fundamentalist-Christians, the poor and so forth. The candidate is thus contracting with the voters to channel their hostilities and hatreds onto suitable objects, at least symbolically. Red meat is what you toss to predators, and the candidate who does so is vowing to be a predator on behalf of voters who would like to be predators themselves, but lack the power. Red meat is the dismembered bodies of good causes.

A related metaphor is the “pit-bull”. Here the question is not what it means, but why anyone would want to resemble an animal whose breeding, sale and exchange has been forbidden in the UK since 1991, because it was (allegedly) genetically programmed for irrational viciousness. It is hard to imagine a British politician, outside of the far-right fringe, revelling in such a comparison. A combative one might like to be termed a “bruiser”, but the pit-bull terrier is associated with folk memories of savaged children. A “mother-of-five pit-bull” thus strikes Britons as a rather peculiar combination – with or without the lipstick.

In the UK the Tories were long marginalized as “the mean-spirited party”, seen as having nothing to offer except nastiness to vulnerable groups, until David Cameron pulled them back to the centre; in the US, on the other hand, the 2004 election was won not by a move to the centre but by a galvanising of the Republican base. American politics appear increasingly to be dominated by overbidding, not of promises or even pork, but of “feel-good” aggressiveness.

Although they have nothing to do with Palin specifically, it is worth recalling two related red-meat clichés: “bombing so-and-so back to the Stone Age” and “making the rubble bounce”. Neither phrase refers to counterforce military operations in the spirit of Clausewitz, but rather to what in World War I the Kaiser called “Schreckligkeit” and what in World War II was called “terror-bombing”. Indeed, the American expressions go further still, and suggest genocide, leaving nothing alive. The rest of the world suspects that the red-meaters believe in diplomacy only when force has failed; destruction seems not to be a necessary means to some honourable end, but rather an end in itself, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Those who blame CNN for turning the initial phase of the last two Gulf wars into a laser-light show have entirely missed the point; the media were merely broadcasting the entertainment that various Administrations had devised for the gratification of the populace. Liberals worried about the dead and maimed civilians, but the red-meat demographic was grateful for the free cruise-missile rock concert that flattered its vanity and slaked its thirst for foreign blood. The Coliseum show was laid on for all the voters who had not personally killed anyone but would sure like to; for all the voters who wanted to partake of the American Dream of blowing away the Bad Guys. In production now: “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”.

Small European nations are content to go about their business without a continual frenzy of mortal peril, holy war and eschatological fantasy. The red-meat demographic cannot; it must always be locked in a life-and-death struggle with the forces of Evil, never doubting for a minute that America is God’s chosen country, so that all its geopolitical opponents become the enemies of God. By casting their ballots for a gung-ho candidate, voters can mystically partake of the nature of St. Michael, the commander-in-chief of the heavenly host. Such a contract raises their self-esteem, which is fallaciously assumed to be a good thing.

Democrats and commentators who talk about policy issues and about meeting ordinary people’s material needs have not, therefore, understood the nature of the game. Rational self-interest is only one of the three possible foundations for politics. More important than economic benefits, and far more important than intellectual conviction, is the satisfaction of ordinary people’s less attractive emotional needs, so that they will fail to notice or care about the satisfaction of rich people’s less attractive economic needs at their expense.

It is doubtful whether even economic meltdown will distract Republican voters from the horror of other people’s sexual practices. Turkeys will continue to vote for Thanksgiving.

Hugo Grinebiter

For all you people who have been breathlessly waiting for a FAQ page (and you know who you are, because I certainly don’t), here it is. Enjoy.

I want to return for a moment to something from the previous post about In God We Trust USA.  You’ll recall they said this:

Think about what these atheists are really saying. ‘Imagine No Mother Theresa?’ ‘Imagine No Martin Luther King, Jr.?’

Let’s put aside for the moment their attempt to make it look like an evil conspiracy of atheists wants to send christians to death camps, and look instead at another implied but unproven insinuation.  In this statement, the zealots implicitly claim that good and moral acts are linked with being religious.  I’ll leave out Mother Teresa here, because her so-called benevolence doesn’t bear close examination, and concentrate on the better of the two, Martin Luther King, Jr.

What you are implicitly expected to believe here is that King’s passion for civil rights was a direct result of his religious convictions - that it was Jesus who made him stand up and demand fairness and tolerance.

To which I say, well, there’s a first time for everything.

Doesn’t it seem funny to you that it took almost two thousand years of Christianity for Jesus to get through to one guy the idea that civil rights for all humans might be a good thing?  I imagine it took that long because you have to figure out a way to disregard all the parts in the bible (both old and new testaments) where it says slavery is just a peachy idea.

Christianity was on board with slavery for most of its history, and it was on board with institutional racism too, pretty much until King stood up and made them all look foolish by pointing out their pious hypocrisy.  So it’s pretty offensive for IGWTUSA or any other zealots to claim moral ownership of the idea of civil rights just because King was a minister.  From where I sit, he wasn’t a visionary because he was a christian; he was one in spite of it.

In God We Trust USA wants you to think that without christians, there would be no one to speak up for justice.  Actually, without Christianity, there’d be a lot less impediment to it.  I wonder what their position is on gay rights?  Show of hands, please: who thinks they’re for it?  No, no, we can’t have justice for gay people, because Jesus hates sodomites.  Of course, before King, there were quite a lot of professional faithmongers who said exactly the same thing about those uppity nigras.  Funny that IGWTUSA is not naming any of those guys when they try to make you think Christianity is the sole fountainhead of love and tolerance.

Looking within religion for moral enlightenment is like trying to find a diamond ring by dredging the sewers.  You might actually find one if you keep dredging for long enough, but most of what you find will simply be shit; and if you do find what you’re looking for, you know it’s only there by accident.

Dumb question, I know.  There are probably a hundred perfectly obvious reasons.  Not good reasons, but convincing to them.  But then there are the people at In God We Trust USA, who have started a billboard campaign to smear atheists.  The billboards purport to be an answer to the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s innocuous “Imagine No Religion” billboards.  They show a little boy saluting a flag, with the caption “Why do atheists hate America?” and their website address.  Click here to see it.

If you follow that link, it contains this brilliantly heavy-handed piece of smear-by-implied-association:

The nation’s largest atheist group wants you to imagine a world without the Pledge of Allegiance, without faith, without patriotism, and without America as we know it.  However, In God We Trust is standing up to them with a new advertising campaign that exposes how much the radical Atheist movement hates America and everything our nation stands for.

Why does this particular atheist group seem to want to banish people of faith?  Our sign doesn’t say, ‘Imagine No Atheists.’ All we want is a public debate. We want the atheists to defend some of the Anti-American statements they’ve made. Not only that, but we would like to know how ‘Imagine No Religion’ is different than ‘Imagine No Christians’ or ‘Imagine No Jews’? Think about what these atheists are really saying. ‘Imagine No Mother Theresa?’ ‘Imagine No Martin Luther King, Jr.?’  I guess that’s the kind of world in which these atheists think we would all be better off living.  We disagree, and we think most Americans feel the same way.

Note here how “patriotism” and “America as we know it” are lumped in with faith and the Pledge of Allegiance.  Of course there’s no rationale given for this; it is assumed that the reader already agrees that atheists cannot be patriots or value America, so apparently no proof is necessary.  But that’s not the main offense.  The devious part comes in when they implicitly equate a philosophical attack on the idea of religion with a physical attack on the people who hold these ideas.  They don’t come right out and say that atheists want to set up an Auschwitz for christians and jews, of course; that would be visibly ridiculous.  But by subtly implying it, they make the connection in people’s minds in a much more insidious way.

The piece says this: “Our sign doesn’t say ‘Imagine no atheists.’”  To which I would respond, that’s true, but then the other sign doesn’t say “Imagine no religious people.”  If they were honest, the hypothetical comparison would be to a sign that said “Imagine no atheism” - which is a lot less offensive, but of course their point here is to paint atheists as offensive, so they’re not going to be satisfied with honesty when a good smear is so much more effective.  This is no surprise, though; zealots preach a good game about honesty and truth but they don’t seem to practice it consistently.  Deceit for Jesus has always been okay, and if they get a personal bump-up out of it in the process, so much the better; it’s probably a reward from Jesus.

Really, though, if you want the best analogue to “Imagine no religion” that would convey to the religious how we really feel, it would probably be something like “Imagine no schizophrenia” or “Imagine no psychoses.”

For the record, atheists probably appreciate America more than anyone else, because in America the law protects us against would-be theocrats like In God We Trust USA, who would gladly set up a christian Taliban in the USA given half a chance.  As to their claim that atheists want to do away with “America as we know it,” I invite you to read their site and ask yourself this: if they so love America as we know it, then how come they want to change so many things about it?  Like, for example, the Constitution?  Atheists are not agitating for a constitutional amendment specifically recognizing their beliefs, but In God We Trust USA is. Apparently those changes don’t count, hm?

Regarding the Pledge: I’m not happy with it, but it’s not because it says “under god”; it’s the whole darned thing that bothers me.  It boils down to a promise to obey the government, which if I remember correctly was exactly the problem that we seceded from England over.  “My country right or wrong” is probably the most unAmerican sentiment I can imagine.  People have fought and died for our right to think for ourselves, and I have a hard time imagining that the collectivist mentality expressed by the pledge is the best way to promote that.  Most people don’t know that the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written by a socialist, with the intent of promoting the socialist ideal of loyalty to the state.  (Francis Bellamy, a leader of the Christian Socialist movement.  He was the cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of the socialist utopian novel Looking Backward.  Google them.  It’s an interesting read.)  But it doesn’t surprise me that religious zealots would approve of that kind of blind obedience to authority.  It’s how they live anyway, and they can’t stand the idea that anyone would want to not submit to control, whether it is from their imaginary sky man or the all-too-real government.

Finally, as to their claim that they “just want atheists to answer for their anti-American statements,” I’d like similar answers from them.  Wanting to amend the constitution to marginalize your philosophical opponents is about as anti-American as it comes.  But if you read the website, you’ll see that there’s not really a lot of interest in fairness.  There is a lot of interest in making atheists look like the devil and not much else.  I’m actually a little flattered that atheists, still the most maligned and least influential minority in America, are considered so much of a threat by the zealots that it drives them to such hysteria.

The problem is that people believe their crap.  Of course, in America, we’re still free to stand up and say it’s crap.  For the moment.