Reality Check 2: More About Easter

We've had a rather lively discussion on Facebook regarding my last post. In short, there was some question as to origin of certain religious festivals. I proposed -- successfully I think -- that Passover is unique. Then this question was asked of me:

You're right, Passover is it's own thing.
What's your position on Easter; superimposed upon an ancient holiday or whole-cloth Christian?

That's a good question, and before we begin we should remind ourselves of the principle of human nature and remind ourselves of the nature of religion and spirituality. Also, let's keep focused on the discussion of the seasonal holiday... that being fertility rites, such as those for Ishtar or Eostre, or at least something that parallels the Christian observance.

Also, consider that this is a very different question from the one I asked originally... I asked whether Passover was derived from another holiday... here the questioner asks if Easter is superimposed upon another holiday. While acknowledging that I see the switch, I'll address both questions here with respect to Easter.

First, the obvious. 

It's no mystery that Easter very blatantly takes the spotlight from the ancient Jewish holiday of Passover in the Christian calendar,  though the calculation of the date was changed and standardized by the Nicene Council, and though some modern Christians have taken up observance of Passover, as there's nothing in Christianity to preclude it.

Regarding the Last Supper (which became the Eucharist)... while the season of the event was unquestionably that of Passover, there is legitimate doubt as to whether the Last Supper depicts a Passover celebration. Certainly it has little resemblance to the Seder. There are no bitter herbs, etc., and none of the traditional observance. It is reasonable to conclude that the Last Supper was simply a shared meal. In this sense, the Eucharist is not connected to Passover.

Update: My friend Mark points out: "It's hard to argue that the Last Supper wasn't a Passover Seder when the Haggadah hadn't been formalized yet. I'm not sure we have a solid idea of what a Seder looked like at that point in history. Granted, it's similarly hard to argue under those circumstances that the Last Supper *was* a Seder."  Mark's absolutely correct. However, we do know that the symbolism of the Eucharist is not that of the Seder. Whatever connection there might have been is broken. Update 2: Besides, John 19:42 says that Jesus was crucified on the Jews' preparation day, which would argue in favor of a standard meal. There's a healthy controversy on the subject.  

Update 2: Dr. James Tabor provides a convincing argument from scripture that the Last Supper was not a Seder. Given the plain reading of it, I'd now say it's NOT difficult to argue the point that they were separate. You can read Dr. Tabor's article, "The Last Days of Jesus: A Final “Messianic” Meal" at Biblical Archaeology Review.

As the questioner notes himself, Passover is its own thing. Easter draws on Passover for the season and the culture. The entire story of the Christ is essentially Jewish, and draws heavily upon the writings of Old Testament Jewish prophets, notably Isaiah, Zechariah, and the Psalmists. Christian apologists will readily point you to the plethora of prophesies pertaining to every aspect of Jesus' ministry. The evangelists wrote that Jesus himself was aware of these prophesies and declared he had come to fulfill them. So HEAVY borrowing from Judaism is a given, though it really can't even be considered to be "borrowing" at all, as the earliest Christians were themselves Jews. Christianity is not a mystery religion.  ALL of the symbolism of the Passion is fully explained in the gospels, authored by** people who were or who knew witnesses. However accurate these accounts may be, it's not as though they were writing myths about their distant past. There was a teacher named Yeshua (Jesus), and he was crucified. A group of witnesses very strongly believed him to have risen from the dead.

This does raise the question, "since everything is there in Old Testament prophesy and contemporary Jewish practices, why would they need to borrow anything else?" And the answer is, of course, they didn't need to.

Nevertheless, let's dig some more

We've already discussed Ishtar and Eostre. There are secular aspects of Easter that lean heavily on Eostre, but that's normal for the season, explained by human nature, and don't have anything to do with the Christian observance of Easter Sunday. And by the Christian observance, I'm talking about the things you'd see in a church, not in a Wal-mart. That is, a recounting of the Passion, including the Last Supper,  the story of the women finding the empty tomb, Jesus revealing Himself, and his Ascension. None of this has the slightest to do with fertility rites. The closest you can come to this is that his resurrection is a parallel to the "rebirth" of the season. The problem there is that pagan rebirth is cyclical; whereas Jesus promises eternal life. These are fundamentally different concepts. These are the sort of things we must look for when we say that Christianity borrowed this holiday from another religion. (the "superimposed upon" question is a lot easier... you just look for another holiday at the same time and see if Easter stomps on it).

Looking a little beyond the holiday now, other figures "equated" with Jesus are the Egyptian Horus and the Zoroastrian Mithra, though I know of no writers who ever stated that they knew Horus or had dinner with Mithra.

Egypt?

HORUS  is floated as a precursor to Christ because of his death and re-birth. It's claimed that Horus was born of a virgin, though the actual tale is that his mother was a goddess, not a human, and she was impregnated by the phallus of the dismembered god Osiris. Though perhaps a supernatural birth, it's not virgin, and that's really more a discussion appropriate to Christmas, anyway. Commonly, proponents of the Horus "connection" conflate Horus and Osiris in claiming a resurrection. However, Osiris, having been dismembered into 12 pieces and re-assembled by Isis, was not restored to life, but became lord of the underworld.

Regarding Easter, the pertinent question here is, was Horus (or Osiris) connected with some festival involving resurrection or rebirth? In a way... Osiris' rebirth was linked to the annual flooding of the Nile river. This was central to all aspects of Egyptian culture. One big problem with claiming that Easter is a re-packaging of that is, of course, that the Nile floods in August.

It is true that, like the Egyptians, the Jews and Christians teach of an afterlife (as do almost all religions). Most ancient religions, however, teach either of an underworld, or reincarnation followed by another death, or a merging with the godhead; whereas the Judeo-Christian teaching is that of resurrection into a physical, incorruptible human body in a physical world, everlasting life, and retained individuality.

Babylonia?

MITHRA is floated as a precursor to Christ for a long list of reasons...

But first... for those that don't know, Zoroastrianism is a religion that was, prior to Islam, dominant in Persia and which developed around the same time as Judaism. Being further East, it has a particular "Indian flavor". There are still thousands of actively practicing Zoroastrians in the world, which ain't bad for a religion as old as this. Zoroastrianism teaches dualism, but is in some respects similar to Christianity and Judaism in its broad teachings, with some differences. For instance, Zoroastrianism stresses good works: Christianity teaches that salvation is achieved through grace, but that good works are the "fruit of faith". As James writes, "I will show you my faith by my works." Notably, Zoroastrians teach that at the end of days the dead will rise and a savior will renovate the world and the dead will be given immortality in perfect, incorruptible bodies. Sounds pretty similar, right? And Mithra is the Zoroastrian god of covenant, which would seem to perfectly place him as the final judge at the end of days (the "Frashokereti"). Except that Mithra is never identified as that savior, and the final judgement of the Frashokereti will be by ordeal... you'll have to walk across a river of molten metal, and wicked will be burned away.

But we're looking for Easter. There is no Zoroastrian analog to the Easter observance, or to the Passion, or even a Spring festival. The closest would appear to be Mehregan, but that's celebrated in October.

Roman Mithraism?

But that's not really the ONLY source of traditions about Mithra. The ROMAN empire adopted some of the features of Zoroastrianism into cultic practices known as the Mithraic Mysteries, or "Mithraism".  This has a similar relationship to Zoroastrianism as Christianity does to Judaism... you see the line of descent, but the details of the older religion are washed away in practice.

It is from HERE that that "long list of reasons" I spoke of is generally drawn. I'm not going to list or debunk them here, because this is going to be plenty long as it is, and someone else has already done it fairly and well:

So how does all this get us to a precursor to the Christian Easter? It doesn't. Observance of Christ's resurrection was the very first, most central practice of Christianity. It is the core of the religion. The Nicene Council standardized the date, but no one waited for that group before celebrating it... it was celebrated all the time, from the first. Remember that everything about the Christian liturgy is based on the scriptural gospels, and by word of mouth prior to that. All of the events reported there are intended to illustrate the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies. The Messianic movement was THE Big Deal for the Church founders, and this is where they expended their energy.

Mithraism lasted from the 1st through the 4th centuries of the common era. There's nothing said about them prior to Christanity. There is no reason for Christianity to have borrowed from them, and indeed nothing that they could have borrowed that wasn't already in Judaism.

The 800 lb Gorilla?

ISLAM didn't begin until the year 610, with the prophet Mohammed, so no connection is possible. (Here is an Muslim's view of the Middle East before Islam).

Besides, as with Soviet Russia, "You don't step on Islam..."

So WHAT, then?

As we've previously discussed, the Christian festival of Easter doesn't borrow from any pre-existing pagan fertility rite. It is named after the ancient Saxon name of the month. The liturgy has nothing whatsoever to do with fertility, and it is impossible for Easter to fall on the vernal equinox, known to European pagans as Ostara. Therefore it's not derived from those celebrations. However, the trappings of Spring fertility festivals have been grafted on to secular Easter, though that's not the doing of the Church. Eostre is no longer worshiped because her entire religion has been abandoned. Yet this festival survives, though we never celebrate it on the day of Ostara, the vernal equinox. In this sense, Easter replaces Ostara, though it is not superimposed upon it. We continue the celebration of Spring as Anglo-Saxons have before their recorded history.  This coexists with the Christian religious festival. One takes place outside the church; the other inside.

Also, as I mentioned above, there was a Messianic movement in those days before and after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. These messianic beliefs were documented by the Essenes of Qumran. According to Josephus Essenes were common and widespread, and it's reasonable to assume that their beliefs would have been broadly known at that time and place, as the ideas espoused by Jesus most closely resemble theirs. Many would-be "messiahs" showed themselves [pdf], but important to this question at hand, absolutely none of them qualify as having been the subject of an "ancient holiday".

Also, it's pretty obvious that Zoroastrianism and Judaism were informed, if not by the same source, then by similar philosophy. This is to be expected in the same region, at the same time. But the time in question -- as early as the 14th century BCE -- is so far removed that we have no way of determining which was first, or whether they both derive from an even older source, or even if a couple of guys talked it over and went in different directions to flesh out their ideas. But there's no ancient analog to Easter in Zoroastrianism; therefore it's impossible to conclude that Easter was derived from or superimposed on anything from that religion.

We should keep in mind that these earliest of these possible formative dates approach the very beginning of civilization, and there's a limit to how far back the "borrowing" can go. While there is undeniably a common thread to the history of mankind, and every culture is informed by those around it, the idea that all cultures steal from older cultures isn't a terribly realistic one, nor does it make a great deal of sense when we comprehend that -- contradicting the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes -- in all things SOMEBODY had to be first. Certainly in this age of nuclear power and electronics, Big Bang theory and evolutionary biology, we're not so naïve as to believe there's nothing new under the sun.

Conclusion

Whole cloth, though woven with the same thread as used by other religions.

At the same time, I have no problem with it being considered superimposed on both Passover and Eostre.


** Update: originally "authored by"

Reality Check: Is Easter a Hijacked Pagan Holiday?

Happy Easter, folks. It's that time of year when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, you may have seen claims that Easter is "actually" a pagan celebration, usually purported to be that of Ishtar, a Babylonian goddess.

Here's one formulation of that assertion, seen on Facebook:

The original source for this image disappeared
Restored for use under Fair Use for the purpose
of scholarly critique.

and here's another:

Happy Easter. Don't forget the reason for the season; Sex & Fertility.
At least that's what people celebrated before the popes hijacked it.

There are problems with both of these, primarily that they're false. (And in fairness, the second assertion was made jokingly, but I include it here because it succinctly states an attitude that some take seriously. BTW, I'm deliberately not linking to the sources because I'd like to discuss the ideas here and leave personalities out of it)

Ishtar

Let's tackle the "Ishtar" claim first. Easter is called "Easter" in Germanic speaking countries (including England) because it is named for the month in which it most often fell. In Saxon England, this was called "Eostermonath" which in turn was named for a goddess of the dawn called Eostre. This is according to Bede, writing in the 8th century. The resemblance to the word "East" is not accidental... the words share their etymology. 

In other Germanic-speaking countries, this month was named "ostermanoth", or some other variation of that spelling, which in turn was named for the goddess "Ostara". This is according to Jacob Grimm.  

Now, there are some who claim that Bede is not a reliable source, even though he is for any number of other subjects. They claim he made it up.  The first problem with that is that you can count the number of 8th-century English historians on one finger, and he's the sole and earliest source of this etymology... which means that if he did make it up, then everyone else is copying him, and it's a difference that makes no difference. Secondly, in the year 731, when Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People was completed, this may very well have been common knowledge, and we know of no one who bothered to contradict him.  The third problem with that criticism is that Bede's etymology is given weight by the fact that the name of the holiday, and of the month, is similar in Germanic countries, but not those closer to ancient Babylonia. Note that in non-English-speaking Orthodox Christianity the festival is called "Pascha" (from the Hebrew and Aramaic word for "Passover"). If the link to Ishtar were valid, you'd expect it to be stronger, not weaker, in Eastern lands.

Nor is it of any great concern to Christians that the name "Eostre" is associated with the month. Here's an exact parallel:  Americans most commonly refer to the celebration of their country's independence and the establishment of their Republic by the name "Fourth of July". This is named for the month in which it falls, which in turn is named for Julius Caesar, the man who usurped the Republic of Rome and became its dictator. Using the logic of the "Ishtarians", when you celebrate the fourth of July, you're actually paying homage to Julius Caesar and the downfall of Democracy. Obviously this is incorrect. The "Ishtarians" are mistaking a word for a thing, a rather simple mistake.

Fertility

"OK, then," you may say, "whatever they called it, and wherever it was, it was named for a fertility goddess and hijacks a previous pagan celebration of sex and fertility!"

Again,  this is historically inaccurate. As we've already seen, Easter was named for the month, not the goddess. But more than that, it has nothing to do with hijacking an existing pagan holiday.

It replaces a pre-existing JEWISH holiday.

Passover is the commemoration of the deliverance of Jews from the Angel of Death, and from their bondage in Egypt, as recounted in the book of Exodus (called Shemot ("the names") in the Tanakh). This is a movable feast, based on a lunar calendar.  Pagan celebrations of Spring are not. Rather, they are tied to the vernal equinox, based on a solar calendar.

As the Christian Easter is tied in tradition and culture to Judaism, the Passion having fallen on that holiday, Easter is likewise a movable feast. And it's no secret that this is the case. There has never once in history been any credible controversy about the origins of Easter in the Jewish Passover. This is well-documented history. The first Christians were Jews. They didn't have a fertility rite to replace.

So the issue here isn't with the Christian holiday at all. There's nothing in the Christian liturgy about eggs and bunnies. Nothing whatsoever.

It IS true true, however, that many of the secular symbols we now associate with Easter, which were not originally part of the celebration... the bunnies, the eggs, the Springtime flowers... are derived from more ancient pagan practices. However, this is a case of the pagans jumping on and hijacking a Christian holiday, not the other way around.

In other words, you can't blame "the popes"[1] for this one, boys and girls.

And while most Christians indulge in the hiding of Easter eggs and fantasize about the Easter Bunny (just as they put up Yule trees), these are secular activities of Spring which are not for them tied to any religious observance. 

Some Christians prefer to call Easter "Resurrection Day" or "Resurrection Sunday" because of the pagan misconceptions that have been tacked on to the holiday. Far from being usurpers of paganism, they don't want the bunnies and eggs. Others actually have tried to "hijack" the pagan symbolism that has hijacked their holiday. They use a carton of plastic eggs filled with tiny tokens of the Passion and the Resurrection (called "Resurrection Eggs") to illustrate the Biblical story for small children. Both of these are minority practices.

Oh, and another thing...

I've also seen the following claim:

The pagan Easter celebrates happiness and life. The Christian Easter consecrates suffering and death.

Wrong. Dead wrong, if you'll pardon the expression. The Christian Easter celebrates the Resurrection of the body and the defeat of Death. The writer confuses the Passion with the Resurrection. The Passion did not occur on Easter, but days prior. Christians commemorate the Passion so they may appreciate the sacrifice  is necessary to put the achievement of the Resurrection in proper context.  You know those "Resurrection Eggs" I mentioned earlier...? The last one is empty. It symbolizes the empty tomb... there's no death to be found here.

Whether you believe in this or not is immaterial to this discussion... it's simply ignorant, incorrect, and culturally insensitive to characterize Easter as being other than what it is... a festival intended to give thanks for the promise of resurrection and eternal life.

---

[1]   However, the popes did allow it. There's a very nice passage in Thomas Cahill's "Mysteries of the Middle Ages" that relates to the subject. I like Cahill for his uncanny ability to get into the heads of the ancient peoples he describes. We have Pope Gregory I ("Gregory the Great", not the calendar guy) to thank for many of those traditions being in Christianity. Far from being the repressive autocracy associated with later generations of clergy, In the 6th century things were far more open and inclusive. As Cahill describes, Gregory "knew we all need our Christmas cookies or mug of grog or whatever we learned from childhood to associate with happiness if we are to be contented human beings." 

Thus, rather than eliminate such things and alienate the public they were trying to convert, the Catholic priests, knowing that one does not worship the Devil by accident, and under Gregory's observation to Augustine that, "customs are not to be cherished for the sake of a place, but places are to be cherished for what is good about them," just "baptized" the customs a bit, using them as teaching moments for Christianity. From thence forth they were no longer pagan. And the Catholics had some justification for that, for who in his right mind would shun as dangerous pagan rituals those things that God has taken for his own?

The Universe: Living in Space

Here's one I never thought I'd be writing about. The History Channel has presented a science documentary series called "The Universe".  I watch it.... a lot. I'm a subscriber. I was a little surprised to find something questionable enough here to warrant a comment from me. Particularly when it wasn't just an off-hand comment, but a thoroughly thought-out segment. And particularly not when the idea was floated by Dr. Michio Kaku, one of the most successful popularizers of science since the late, lamented Carl Sagan.

Questionable Judgement

The thing that perked my ears was the suggestion that Mars colonists would benefit from asteroid mining. The depiction here basically took the form of deflecting an iron asteroid out of its orbit so that it lands on Mars. Then, of course, the colonists would simply take the iron from it at their leisure.

It's not that the science here is bad. It's pretty sound reasoning as far as it goes. No, it's that the judgement is really, really questionable.

All other difficulties aside (such as coming up with the energy to accurately deflect a rock of that size moving at that prodigious speed), there's the obvious danger factor. An asteroid of the size discussed (about a kilometer across), would land with kinetic force rivaling the most powerful nuclear weapons. Surely you'd want your mine close enough to your colony to make the commute reasonable, but it's a fine needle you'd have to thread to not wipe out your colony with the delivery.

Better Options

It's not like they need to do that. Mars is "The Red Planet" for a reason; that reason being that it's literally covered with rust. Iron oxide. On Earth we reduce that to iron by heating it with carbon. That doesn't exactly work on Mars, as elemental carbon is rare as unicorn farts, but it's still do-able in a couple of ways.

First, Mars does have water, at the poles. Electrolysis of the water would yield hydrogen gas and oxygen (and this makes it a ready source of oxygen for breathing). The hydrogen thus released could be used to smelt iron, as iron oxide combined with hydrogen yields elemental iron plus water (Fe2O3 + 3H2 -> 2Fe + 3H2O). So for the expenditure of some energy you get oxygen to breathe, iron to build with, and you even get your water back! With a bit of work, you might even be able to construct a roving foundry that spits out iron bars and breathable air from the sand it scoops up and recycled water. Fanciful, I know, but it's no more fanciful and it's a lot safer than pelting your colony with giant space bullets.

A second way is to use the carbon dioxide that composes the bulk of the Martian atmosphere. Throw some serious heat at it and it breaks up into carbon monoxide and oxygen. Once again we have oxygen to breathe, and in this case the carbon monoxide reacts with the iron to form elemental iron and more carbon dioxide (Fe2O3 + 3CO -> 2Fe + 3CO2). Since I don't much like carbon monoxide, and it's tricky to separate it from the oxygen so the latter can be used safely, I prefer what I think is the safer hydrogen reaction, above.

Be sure that either of these options is better than dropping an island on your head, so I'm really confused as to why this flight of fancy ever entered the conversation. Despite that bit of puzzling speculation, I still recommend the series and this episode. HERE IT IS.

Junk Science on YouTube

Sometimes I post about "junk science" on the various science channels. I usually leave the Internet alone because it so full of such idiocy that it's hardly worth the effort. Today I came across this piece of work on YouTube, though: a 2006 Russian documentary simply entitled "Water".

I single this film out due to the fact that it actually has pretty high production value and is so entirely sincere in its presentation that you could easily think it was describing legit phenomena. It's not. Yet this bit of dross received three television awards, including one for the best documentary film.

How exactly do you get a "best documentary" award when you begin with statements like this: "No scientist has been able to explain, for example, why water's density increases below the freezing point, and becomes less above freezing." The answer is because that's not what happens. Frozen water's density is less, which is why ice floats. And that's because the shape of the molecules is such that when they join into their characteristic hexagonal crystals, they take up more room than they do when at liquid temperatures. They then rightly state that water expand when frozen, which makes it the more puzzling why this mis-statement wasn't left on the cutting room floor.

Every time you hear the phrase "scientists can't explain" in this film, it's fairly safe to assume that scientists have explained whatever it is they're talking about... minus the stuff that is made-up B.S. Keep in mind that anomalous does not mean mysterious.

Here's a link to unusual properties of water that science can explain: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/the-unusual-properties-of-water-molecules.html
Here's another: http://www.freedrinkingwater.com/resource-water-chemistry.htm
And another: http://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/aboutwater.html

Pity the poor scientists who are quoted in this film. Nobel laureate Kurt Wüthrich is quoted simply as saying that water has been extensively studied and has unusual properties. By pasting in perfectly reasonable statements from perfectly reputable researchers, next to discredited snake-oil salesmen like Masaru Emoto and quack physicians, the filmmaker imply that these scientists support the conclusions of the film as a whole. But what might that be?

That water has memory.

As this is a central proposition of homeopathy, I've heard this magickal line of thought before (although the pretense here is that it was just "discovered". To be fair to homeopaths, even they haven't gone so far as to claim that you can turn water into a super-cure-all entirely by wishful thinking. This crowd has basically increased the profitability of homeopathy by removing the labor of all of that pesky swishing and diluting.)

We're less than seven minutes into the film and already some pretty shoddy thinking has gotten us to this point. For instance... some people were working together in Southeast Asia, supposedly to develop bacteriological weapons. They got sick at a meeting with "symptoms of food poisoning". The water was tested and found to be just plain water. Now a reasonable person would then continue to look elsewhere for a solution -- perhaps some bacteria that produced similar symptoms among these people who work with bacteria -- but these folks conclude that the plain water was poisonous, AND that it wasn't poisonous because it contained poison, but because it simply remembered to be poisonous. Of the investigative "dead-ends" encountered, plain H₂O wasn't one. *sigh*

What follows is a barrage of mixture of fact, speculation, and nonsense presented as fact. For instance, water clusters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cluster) are real. They only last for minute fractions of a second, and they're constantly changing, and don't exhibit the properties claimed here.

Here's some more debunking: http://www.chem1.com/CQ/clusqk.html

Among the claims of this film:

• Salt water can be made fresh by wishing it to be fresh.
• Love "increases water's energy levels".
• Aggressive emotions "reduce the energy".
• You can affect the shape of an ice crystal by saying "thank you" and "excuse me" to the water before freezing it.
• You absorb a liter an a half of water when you take a bath or shower. (that's a little over three pounds... next time you bathe, weigh yourself.)
• Water that flows through pipes is "deformed" so that the "crystals" it contains (in the liquid form, mind you) do not have symmetry or beauty.
• "Devitalized" water will "steal" your "energy".
• Water remembers "violence" that is done to it.
• Water is a giant universal computer that contains "biological programs".

This is punctuated by "mean music" when discussing anything man-made whatsoever, and "nice music" when discussing streams and oceans.

And it just keeps going and going and going and gets worse and worse and worse.... the film claims that water itself burns. (In fact, water does not burn because it's already burnt. "Water" is our name for burnt hydrogen. In order to burn water, you would have to remove the oxygen so that you could then add oxygen. This cannot produce energy, as it would violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). It actually states, "in order to burn anything whatsoever, there must be at least some quantity of water". Half-true misdirection. Water is formed as a result of burning hydrocarbons, but it does not have to be present for the combustion to occur.

This documentary really doesn't have anything to do with science at all. "Like all sculptures that have not been created are present in clay, so the images of all future living organisms were present in water. Water merely brought to life a pre-existing conception," the narrator intones. Once we realize that this film is merely a compendium of every pop-culture speculation of New Age faith, "legitimized" in a matrix of real and pseudo-science, it becomes a rather dull exercise to pick apart the truth from the fiction. Fact-checking is made easy with the knowledge that every statement containing the phrase "modern science" is complete horseshit.

Really, a documentary shouldn't make you do that. It should be educational and informative in its own right; its educational value shouldn't be measured by the amount of effort you're willing to put in to fact-checking each and every sentence.  But if you want to go through that exercise and have an hour and a half to kill, here's the show in its entirety:



I give this one a solid F. It might have gotten a D (for being pretty) if the few bits of real science weren't completely diluted by the useless crap.

Waging War on Truth

I saw this on Facebook today:

It's an... errr... interesting rhetorical device, but it's not exactly what the DOJ said. Prop 8 dealt with gay marriage. The DOJ stated that gays are not inherently inferior parents. But let's set aside for a moment the issue of gay marriage entirely, and deal directly with what this graphic says, and only that.

Let's look at the idea that a child has a "right" to a mother. Remember the TV show "My Three Sons"? Do you think it would be advisable for Mike, Robbie, and Chip to sue their dad, Steven Douglas (Fred MacMurray)? After all, we're talking about a household with two "dads" here. You think not? Don't you remember when Mike left and Ernie was adopted...? The court wouldn't allow it until Uncle Charlie stepped up and was declared "housemother".

That was in the 1960s. In 1960, two men could raise a houseful of children and audiences didn't think twice about it. They watched every week and enjoyed themselves. In the 1960s we insisted that those kids have full-time care, but the courts didn't hold some imagined "right" to ensure that it was one of each sex. Now, fifty years later, have children suddenly gained a right now that they didn't have then? Did fathers somehow lose a right to self-determination that they formerly had, and are now somehow obligated to remarry? Or maybe you think the preceding generation wasn't as decent? These are rhetorical questions: of course children don't have a "right" to a mother... God Himself deprives children of mothers every day.

What about all the other widowers and divorced dads with custody out there? Should we expect a barrage of lawsuits against them? If so, I narrowly dodged a bullet, in that I did re-marry. I do somehow resent the idea that I wasn't a loving, capable parent when it was just me and Will, though. As the parent who got custody, and did so because I was declared by a trained psychiatrist and marriage specialist to be the more capable parent, I'm so very glad that the court in my state did not subscribe to the notion that my ex had a "right" to the child she couldn't properly raise. I find that concept more than a little bit sexist... and so did the court. Children aren't property. It's good for my son that we had a judge that knew that.

Once you know what the DOJ actually said, it takes no imagination to invert the claim in the graphic and say the DOJ is waging a War on Men. That would be every bit as accurate, you know. But I wouldn't apply it to a widow who is doing her best to raise children without a father, as one of my childhood neighbors did. I wouldn't say it to a divorced woman raising children on her own as was my own mother before she re-married. And why was my mother divorced? I was there, and I can tell you that sometimes one parent is better than two, even if the two are man and wife. If you don't believe it I can put you into a room with a bunch of folks who can tell you stories of traditional marriages that will make you cry.

This infographic is just wrong. And if we think about it for five seconds or more, it becomes obvious that it's just so very wrong.

One small thing to add... I know what the author was trying to do, and I'm sure he thought he was being terribly clever. But as those of you readers who are responsible parents already know, when little Billy lies to you, you do not respond with, "Here! Have a cookie! What a clever lie you just told!"

That's because lies aren't clever.

I don't see eye-to-eye with this administration. But I have a very particular fondness for common sense, decency, and fairness; as well as a smattering of respect for the truth. Taking a statement out of context, twisting it to claim that it says something that wasn't said is un-Christian. It isn't fair, decent, or truthful; and it flies in the face of common sense. The fact that it's nonsensical is why I looked up the DOJ's argument. Please... there are enough offensive statements that this government actually makes that we do not have to go making stuff up. And if you want to target the gay marriage issue, fine, do that out in the open, but not with some garbage argument that implies that just because somebody's a man that he can't raise a child. I don't like bigotry, period. I don't like it when they do it, and I don't like it when you do it, even by accident. And I don't even know who you are.

--==//==--

By the way, bigot is an under-used word these days. That's a shame because it's incredibly useful. These days we use words like racist, sexist, homophobic, class-ist, age-ist, weight-ist, etc. There's an "-ism" for everybody, as if the target of a person's unreasoning hatred makes one bit of difference.

Keep it simple. It's BIGOTRY.

North Carolina Blows

The North Carolina DMV wants to suspend my driving privileges. Second problem is, because of reciprocation, SOUTH Carolina will suspend my license unless I clear up the issue in NC (At least they're giving me 60 days notice).

Problem is, I haven't lived in NC for over 13 years. They know that. I know they know it because I discussed the matter with a NC DMV rep this morning. Here's the 411:

My "NC driving privileges" were revoked for "failure to appear" in 2001. Notice it wasn't my driver's license that was revoked, since I don't have an NC driver's license.

So my question was "failure to appear for what?? I assure you I've never mastered invisibility." Her reply was that I was ticketed in 2001 for speeding in a work zone. I told her I remember that ticket; I remember it because I was ticketed for traveling less than 5 mph over the limit... and furthermore, I PAID IT. She said, yes, she knows I paid it. According to her, I "complied with the conditions of the violation", but I failed to appear on the court date. As I'd plead guilty and paid restitution, any further appearance should have been completely unnecessary. Note that I did not fail to appear at the courthouse. I did that to pay the ticket. I failed to appear on the court date,  So the judge revoked my driving privileges.

Secretly. 

In 2001. 

And they're just now getting around to telling me.

Response: my ghast is flabbered. Why did I bother to show up at a courthouse and pay a ticket if they were going to ignore that and revoke privileges anyway? And why was I not told when I paid it that I had no choice but to show up on the date and time listed, no just pleading guilty and paying the fine as you can do in 48 other states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands?? And why was I never notified that said revocation had occurred???

Chirping crickets. So I asked what it would take to clear it up, mentally prepared for the inevitable extortion. She didn't disappoint: "$100". Okay, fine, whatever... it would cost more to have a lawyer listen to me bitch. So I asked if she could take that payment over the phone, mentally prepared for the inevitable retardation. She didn't disappoint: "No."

BUT, she cheerfully explained, theres this number I can call so that a third party company could take that payment for a small processing fee. Uh-huh. Somebody has a nephew.

I called the number. It's answered like this: "Hello". I give the case number. Bubba don't know jack about no case numbers. So I tell him the issue, and Bubba says yes, he can process that for me. Basically he takes my info, then goes to the courthouse with a $100 bill and pays my fee. This is for the meager sum of $37. So he charges my card for $137 and assures me that it will be paid by noon today, and it would be a couple of days later for the violation to be "cleared from the Federal registry."

In the meantime, the South Carolina DMV is expecting me to arrive at my local office with a letter stating that the issue is cleared, so I expect North Carolina has more merriment up their sleeves.

UPDATE: I called back the NC DMV about that letter, and the good news is that Bubba was true to his word and paid the fee. Concerning the letter, the NC DMV rep said, "We don't issue no letters. You won't need no letters. South Carolina knows that. They only told you that 'cause you aren't cleared yet."  We'll see.

--==//==--

Here's my take on the subject. North Carolina needs some money. And they find easy targets for money in the form of people who live elsewhere who can be bled on whatever pretext they can dream up.

This is not the first run-in I've had with the North Carolina government. Previously they've sucked my bank account dry for "back taxes" on money that was not earned in North Carolina. I live in SOUTH Carolina, and did business in both states. North Carolina wanted to tax all of it.... not just the portion that was earned in NC, but the entirety of the income amount listed on my Federal return... and they did because (and only because) they could. No recourse.

In 1999 a Greensboro policewoman rear-ended my car. She did it because she had just come from the garage where they'd installed her new on-board computer, and she was watching that instead of the brake lights of my car stopped at the intersection ahead of her. It's actually a good thing for someone else that she plowed into me, because if I hadn't been there, she'd have careened through that red light, causing heavy damage to multiple cars in lunch-hour traffic. It looks like you're being busted for drugs if you're ever in an accident with one of them, as they'll send out two more cars and a police captain. I offered to simply exchange insurance information as you would do in any accident, but no... that's when I found out that police cars in NC are UNINSURED... they say they are "self-insured", but when they do not pay their bills, that makes them liars in that regard. North Carolina wanted me to get the repair work done first, on my dime, and then present them with a receipt. Not a bill... a receipt. Here's how insurance works... when you're at fault, you pay for the damage you caused. The cost of that damage is evaluated by a trained insurance adjuster. What the NC Police have is not insurance, because they don't do that. Nor would they accept my insurance company's figure. To get it fixed in NC instead of back home in SC obviously means I'd've been stuck in NC with no car while it was being fixed, because they don't pay for loaners, either.

And this latest fee... accepting a credit card over the phone is so trivial that I myself can do it using my cell phone to process the charge. YOU could be set up to accept payment by phone in 10 minutes flat armed with nothing more than the knowledge that you can Google the means to do it. The little podunk town where I live can take payments by phone. Yet NC manages to fail, so that they may refer business to nephew Bubba, who'll take care of that for you. Yay, Bubba.

People of NC, I love you lots. But you elect and employ idiots. There is no way in Hell I would ever live there again, nor visit voluntarily, nor do business with anyone there. Not one penny. Not for vacation, not for business, not on a dare, not if I were drunk or senseless. If I ever contract Alzheimer's, the last thing I will remember on my deathbed is "stay the Hell out of North Carolina". Nor would I suggest anyone I know ever do business there for any reason whatsoever. North Carolina blows, sucks, AND bites.

But George Washington says...

"People can, as they will have the advantage of experience on their side, decide with as much propriety on the alteration(s) and amendment(s) which are necessary." "I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or posess more virtue, than those who will come after us." --George Washington, 1787

Now, this is a lovely quote, and the Constitution has been amended many times on this very principle. Indeed, it was barely out the door before the Bill of Rights added the first ten amendments. Even the repeal of an amendment has happened, so we can take it as generally agreed that not every amendment is a good idea, even though the vast majority of people thought so at the time.

It amuses me to no end, though, when people take this very general statement as some form of "proof" or "evidence" that their own specific position is correct. It's positively funny when they fall into logical fallacy and suggest that they themselves (rather than their opponents, or some third party ignored by both sides) must therefore be the ones possessed of more wisdom and virtue than the founding fathers.

Let's be clear. George Washington didn't know you or the rest of your generation. Any reasonable man could completely change his mind due to experience; we can only guess at what the result would be were President Washington to visit this century. The only thing that's certain is that this is not a magic prophecy endorsing your position, whatever it might be.

So... nice try. Nevertheless, the arguments still have to be made and evaluated on their own virtues; and if the Constitution is amended, it must be done through established means. And that means clearing a very high bar. It's absolutely intended to pose an inconvenience to those with the hubris to shove their ideology down your throat. Even when we've passed a bad amendment such as the 18th (Prohibition), the repeal has to clear the very same high bar (the 21st amendment did so).

The Constitution is absolutely intended to trump every law and edict, because the rights within are considered basic, and all of them have cleared that very high bar that mere laws and decrees (styled as "Executive Orders") have not. So anytime you imagine yourself or your chosen White Knight to be smarter or wiser than those who came before, and decry the fact that it is so very difficult impose your genius on the world due to this roadblock of a dusty old document, remember that your parents and grandparents managed to have the civil discourse and patience necessary to clear the high bar that your own argument has not even faced. Then it's time to perhaps re-evaluate your approach, as well as your opinion of yourself.

--==//==--

Note: I've been presented with this quote a number of times, from different sources, and was reminded of it today. If you've PERSONALLY SPOKEN to me on this subject, then this post may be for you.

Another Note: For some time now I've found myself posting rather long missives on Facebook and ignoring my blog. I'm going to stop that.