Hail to the Beauty Queen?

Over the last eight years, and especially the last four, comedians around the country have been blessed with joke manna from heaven because of the presence of our blundering and absurdly clueless president. George W. Bush has spewed forth a treasure trove of priceless verbal gaffs that show not only his incredible lack of command of the English language, but just how out of touch he really is with reality.

So, although it will be a blissful day for the country at large when, next January 20, he is finally replaced in office by the next president, it could be a downer for the comedians and late-night talk show hosts who won’t have Pres. Bush to kick around anymore.

But wait. There might be another Bushite waiting in the wings. If, heaven forbid, McCain wins his bid for the presidency, Sarah Palin will be right there with him. She will undoubtedly supply the comedy industry with the fodder it needs to carry on the Bush legacy as the hapless man in the White House, except that she would only be the vice-president. Well, that didn’t stop the jokesters from having a field day when Dan Quayle was in office.

And who knows, with an aging John McCain as president, it might be only a matter of time before the beauty queen from Alaska gets to sit behind the big desk.

But beyond giving a shot in the arm to comedy, there is not one single other reason to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket next month. If you care more about the economy than late night laughs, if you believe universal health care is of greater national interest than jokes about our leaders, or if you care more about getting us out of the dreaded war in Iraq than giving David Letterman and Jay Leno a bottomless barrel of Palin jokes, then I suggest voting for the Obama-Biden ticket instead.

On the other hand, if your biggest quest in life is to be entertained and if you really want to spend your late nights rolling on the floor in laughter at what a goofball politician had to say, then you might want to consider putting Palin in as VP.

Here is a preview of some coming attractions if she actually makes it to Washington:

“They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.” Did they move Afghanistan to Canada?

Or how about this one? When she was asked how McCain has pushed for more regulations during his terms as senator, Palin replied, “I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you.”

When she was mayor, she said, “I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't.”

And, of course, Palin harkens back to the Jimmy Carter years with her relentless pronunciation of “nucular” instead of nuclear. At least Carter realized his lack of verbal expertise and eventually corrected himself.

Of course, if she does become vice-president, she’ll have to figure out what to do with her time, at least according to her own understanding of the position. “As for that VP talk all the time, I'll tell you, I still can't answer that question until somebody answers for me, What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” she said in an interview.

Even if John McCain were a 45-year-old body builder I would have trouble putting him in office knowing that someone like Palin is next in line for the most important leadership role in the world. But McCain is an elderly man with a history of cancer. Do we really want to risk that he’ll survive for four years?

I cringe at the thought of hearing Hail to the Chief played for Palin, knowing it really should be retitled, Hail to the Queen; beauty queen that is. But at least she would be the first beauty queen in history to actually be in a position of bringing on world peace. Too bad the mix of her religious fundamentalism and a high political position would be more likely to bring on Armageddon. I’m sure that would please her just as much, seeing as how her church prays for the end of the world on a regular basis.

Whatever Your Beliefs, You are Dead Wrong

People who have read my columns and blog entries through the years, or maybe who have just read my archives recently, know that I talk a lot about religion. But if you read some of my earlier posts and compare them with my most recent ones you will think that I vacillate on the subject of religion a bit.

Most of my columns have questioned religion, and more specifically, they have questioned certain belief systems within religion. When religion conflicts with science, for example, I always come out on the side of truth, that is to say, science.

I have often, in the past, called myself a Christian. That’s because in the past, I was one. But looking back, even in the days when I attended church service on a regular basis, I was always lukewarm with regards to my religion.

My beliefs over the years have evolved. Although I’ve always accepted the proofs and evidence of science, I didn’t really question that God existed or that Jesus was a real person who died on the cross for our sins. I didn’t even question that he was resurrected.

Later, I began to question much of what the bible has to say, and not just the Book of Genesis. As my beliefs have evolved, I have come to realize what I should have realized way back in college, that all religion is not only nonsense, it is the most dangerous concept that humankind has ever invented.

I feel embarrassed by the fact that it has taken me 55 years of living to discover what seems so obvious I should have been able to figure it out as a teenager. And that simply proves one of the points I now try to make, that religion is so ingrained in society, so ubiquitous, so pervasive, and so utterly woven into the fabric of modern life, that we don’t even notice how stupid it really is until we unravel it.

People who know that they know annoy me, because I know that they don’t know. How do I know? Because nobody can know. Even those who claim to know will admit that the reason they know is because of faith. You cannot know something by faith; you can only believe it. And as everyone will surely admit, believing is not always the same as knowing.

But here is what I do know: The one thing that all people of faith have in common is that they are all dead wrong. I can make that statement with complete and utter surety. How? Because it is logical.

Take, for example, the number of different religions in the world. There are dozens, and that’s just the main ones. Now take any one of the mainstream religions, like Christianity. It is broken down into myriad different denominations and sects. There are Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox followers. Within the Protestant wing, there are Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and so on. And within most of those denominations, like the Baptists, there are sects, such as the Southern Baptists, Separate Baptists, Independent Baptists, and who knows how many others. And within each of those sects there are individuals who don’t necessarily go along with every single point of every sermon their preachers preach.

So if you amplify the major religions into their many sects and finally down to the individual, there may be millions of different religious beliefs. Still, for the sake of making my point, let’s assume that there is a god and that religion is the road to salvation. Which one? They all pretty much believe that theirs is the road to take. But there are far more possible alternatives to a reality that includes God than there are beliefs about God, even with millions of beliefs. There are, in fact, an infinite number of different possible realities that include God.

One possibility is that God wants us all to be baptized by immersion. Another possibility is that sprinkling will do. A third possibility is that no baptism is just fine. There is a possible reality in which God answers prayers and yet another one in which he doesn’t involve himself with us at all.

So when someone confronts me with the notion that my disbelief might be wrong and that if it is, I will suffer eternal consequences, I tell them that there is no default consequence to being wrong. Because nobody knows which one of the infinite God-centric universes is real.

There are those who say the bible gives us all the answers we need. But again, which bible? There’s a perception that there is only one bible, but in reality there isn’t even that. There are the Protestant bibles such as the King James Version, the New King James Version, the New International Version and so on. There is the Catholic bible. There is the Koran. There is the Torah.

Then there is the possibility that the real universe has no god at all. And if that is the case, it doesn’t matter what one believes, because belief will make no difference to a soul that doesn’t exist.

So getting back to my original point, I don’t know the answer to the god question, but I’m 100 percent certain that nobody of faith knows the answer either. So whatever they believe is wrong. The only real difference is that those who believe as I do, are willing to admit we don’t know. Those who have faith in a religion are not.

So I choose no religion, and the reason is clear. Religion has done nothing but harm society. Yes, some churches help the downtrodden and feed the poor. Some churches have outreach programs that help their communities. Some send money to disaster relief efforts. But all those things can be accomplished without religion. We can have non-sectarian missions to do every one of those things.

Some say religion gives them personal comfort, and that’s fine. But people can achieve personal comfort and deep satisfaction through meditation or by other means that don’t involve invoking the supernatural.

God might very well exist. I don’t have enough knowledge to say conclusively that he doesn’t. But nobody else in the world possesses so much more knowledge than I that they can say conclusively that he does, which means those who say God exists or that their religion is the only one that will get you to heaven are resting their case on faith alone. And we all should know that believing something doesn’t make it so. Neither does wishing for it.

What I can say for sure is that religion has been and will continue to be detrimental to society. It has caused more wars than any other single entity. It has held back the progress of science for centuries and is still doing so today. It has resulted in the deaths of babies by parents who refused to seek medical care because of their beliefs. It has resulted in children in school choosing to ignore the teachings of science. It has resulted in a society that is repressive to women, homosexuals, and even heterosexuals who choose to have sex before they are married. Religion is both repressive and oppressive in almost all of its forms and iterations.

A belief in the tenets of any religion means checking your logical mind at the gate. It means giving in to superstition instead of taking charge of one’s own life and mind. It means ignoring one’s common sense in favor of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

The bottom line is this. If there is a god, nobody knows what he wants of us, if anything; so why bother trying. If there isn’t a god, it doesn’t matter anyway. So regardless of the existence of God, religion doesn’t matter. And if it doesn’t matter, why participate in something that is so divisive, so silly, and so utterly dangerous to our species when we can live a better life, and one that is equally as moral, by jettisoning the baggage of religion once and for all.

It is past time that we, as modern human beings with great minds, finally slough off the dead weight of religion that has been dragging us down for eons and start to take charge of our lives and our own species. If we don’t we may not have a species left to protect much longer. Religion will have killed us all. And God may not be there to save us. And if he is, why would he want to. We did it to ourselves.

It's the Return of My Favorite Season: Fall

I think most people have their favorite seasons, at least those who live in parts of the country that actually have seasons. Summer is probably the favorite of most because of its many weather-related advantages: no coats, no wind chill, and no snow. Plus there are summer vacations, swimming, picnics, baseball, and boating.

Students and teachers enjoy the summer because they don’t have to go to school. It is generally a time of greater relaxation and fun in the sun.

I like summer, too. But it’s not my favorite season. Until fairly recently, it was my least favorite season. That’s because I deplore the extreme heat and humidity that often accompany the dog days of summer.

My favorite season is the one we just entered, autumn. I also once enjoyed wintertime, but not so much anymore. Winter, once my second favorite season behind fall, is now my least favorite. As I’ve grown older I’ve begun to realize that I can’t stand being cold anymore. I never did actually enjoy being cold, but I could live with it. I liked the snow. And I liked the coziness of winter. But I got over it.

Autumn is a season that most people either love or hate. Those who hate it often relate it to death or dying as the leaves wilt and fall from the trees and the grass turns brown. It’s a sign that winter, most people’s least favorite season, is just around the corner. So fall becomes a harbinger of the cold, dreary days ahead.

For me, though, I find autumn delightful. It is full of vibrant colors. It has one of my childhood’s favorite holidays, Halloween. It’s a time when the hot, humid days of summer are finally behind us and the cool, crisp, clear autumn air fills our days. It is harvest season, a time when we drink apple cider and have pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving is also an autumn holiday. It’s a time of family gatherings and that warm, homey feeling one gets when surrounded by kith and kin.

It reminds me of trips to Brown County when I was a child, with the gorgeous display of nature’s colors against a backdrop of towering hills and deep river valleys. Autumn picnics are the best. You get to take in the beauty of nature while not being bothered by the steamy heat that characterized the summer just past.

Autumn is also a time for seasonal decorations. It starts with the pumpkins, gourds, and jack-o-lanterns of October. Then you move on to the cornucopias and cardboard cutouts of turkeys and pilgrims for November. Most of the Christmas season is still officially in the fall, too.

But then, following the holidays of autumn and early winter come the bleak, cold days of mid-winter. It is then when I start looking forward to spring. Spring was never my favorite season, mainly because it marked the end of my once-beloved wintertime, but also because of the violent weather.

But after many years of realizing that I really didn’t like winter all that much, and that violent weather is always spotty and not often as bad as predicted, I started rethinking my dislike of springtime.

At any rate, it’s fall now. We are near the beginning of my favorite three months of the year, October, November, and December. So, even though my freedom of summer is over, as a schoolteacher, I plan to enjoy the brisk autumn air and take in the scenery as I prepare for that first seasonal tradition of handing out sugary treats to young strangers who come knocking on my door.

Have a cup of hot cider and enjoy the season.

McCain Shows His True Stripes

I had waited impatiently for the first debate between the two presidential nominees. Then the news came that McCain was backing out, ostensibly to rush back to Washington where he was desperately needed to help fix the looming economic crisis. In addition, McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign until the crisis had been averted.

Obama had called McCain to suggest that they get together to develop a non-partisan united statement on the economic crisis. McCain agreed, but then later in the day unilaterally decided he would forgo the debate and suspend his campaign, inviting Obama to do the same.

Obama rightly responded that Americans needed to hear from their candidates more than ever during this crisis, saying it would be a mistake to cancel or postpone the debate. Public opinion was quick to mount against McCain’s stance. The public doesn’t want their candidates to go into hiding, especially during a crisis.

Criticism of McCain reached an apex after he canceled his appearance on Late Night with David Letterman at the last minute. Letterman spent the first twenty minutes of his show last Wednesday lambasting McCain for backing out of his commitment and for halting his campaign.

After praising McCain as a war hero, Letterman delivered a relentless series of jabs at the Republican presidential nominee, saying that he wasn’t acting like the McCain he knew. Letterman also suggested that maybe McCain could put his vice-presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, on the campaign trail in his place.

To top it off, Letterman caught McCain in a lie when at the very moment McCain was supposed to be taping Letterman’s show he was actually getting makeup applied for an appearance with an interview with Katie Couric. Letterman told his producers to show a live feed of McCain interviewing with Couric. “I’ve got a question for you,” Letterman lampooned. “Ya want a ride to the airport?” He was referring to McCain’s excuse for pulling out as a guest, saying he had to rush back to Washington because of the economic crisis. He not only didn’t rush back that day, he didn’t leave until the following morning.

On Friday, McCain was having second thoughts about pulling out of the debate. He at first said his campaign would be halted, he would not debate, and he wouldn’t even leave Washington until the crisis was over. The crisis was far from being over when McCain changed his mind and decided to debate after all. Maybe he just decided that he had made a strategic error.

When the first debate was over, it was clear to me that McCain was the weaker debater. Although he made some of his points, he didn’t rattle Obama on national security or foreign policy issues. Obama, in fact, seemed to have a better handle on foreign policy matters than McCain. And that is supposed to be McCain’s strong point.

A national poll after the debate indicated that Obama and McCain virtually tied on the foreign policy topic, but Obama was a clear and decisive winner on the home front. He continues to outpace McCain on economic issues. Obama presented a clear view of how he would handle the financial crisis as president while McCain continued to relate anecdotes about things that have happened to him in the past, the distant past.

Although pundits generally agreed that the debate was a tie or a slight Obama victory, the first debate and the McCain fiasco leading up to it should bring into focus who really is better prepared to be the leader of the free world. McCain showed himself to be ill-prepared, a vacillator, and even a liar in the days before the debate. And he failed to redeem himself when he finally did show up to talk.

Churches Sometimes must Apologize for Ignorance

The pilgrims who settled this country in 1620 were a conservative sect of the Church of England. The church’s members are known as Anglicans, and it was the official state religion of England at the time the pilgrims came to America to start their own country.

Religious conservatives in America today lament the notion that we have become a depraved country, where sinful sex is everywhere and has even become socially acceptable. The other view, however, and the one that is more close to reality is that Americans, as a whole, tend to be repressive on matters of sex and science.

There is a commercial currently running on TV where a family visits a beach in Spain, only to find out it is a nude beach. One of the actors places his hand in a strategic location to mask the nude body of a female sunbather while the little girl of the family asks her mom, “Why is everybody naked?”

It is meant to be comical. But it highlights how differently our lives have been influenced by our puritanical history from the way modern Europeans have matured without such conservative influences in their history.

At the same time, whenever the mainstream European-based religions have gotten it wrong in the past, they have often stepped up and admitted their mistakes and even apologized to the great men of science that initially gave the church headaches, even if their apologies have often come centuries late.

The latest example is the Church of England’s apology to Charles Darwin. The Rev. Malcolm Brown, who heads the church’s public affairs department, said that Anglicans owe Darwin an apology for the way they condemned him following the release of his master work of science, On the Origin of Species in 1859.

The Church of England said it agreed with Brown’s position, although it did not constitute an official church apology. That’s probably because the church never officially condemned Darwin, although its leaders of the day did take every opportunity to make fun of him and his theory of Natural Selection.

This is certainly not the first time a major church has had to say oops. In 1992 the Catholic Church made an official apology to Galileo for arresting him and forcing him to recant his ideas that the earth revolved around the sun. The bible clearly implies that all celestial objects revolve around the earth. And Galileo said that the bible, on that account, was clearly wrong. Three hundred years later, the Catholic Church officially agreed.

Other “oops moments” in church history include the 2006 apology by the Anglican Church for its roll in the slave trade and the clarification in 1996 by the Pope of the Catholic Church’s view on evolution. The Pope, at the time, said that the Church did not oppose the theory of evolution as outlined by Darwin. The Pope said our species may have evolved, but our spirit was given to us by God.

Over the centuries, great thinkers and progressive men and women of science have had to cower in fear of publishing their ideas because of religious oppression. Johan Kepler, the man who discovered how planets orbit the sun in elliptical paths, is another example. He didn’t publish his discovery until he was on his death bed for fear he would be persecuted by an intransigent church.

Andrew Darwin, Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson said that posthumous church apologies are useless. “When an apology is made after 200 years, it's not so much to right a wrong, but to make the person or organization making the apology feel better,” he told the Daily Mall newspaper.

He’s right in a way. But I still think some good can come out of it. It shows young people who have been unfortunate enough to be raised in a fundamentalist church environment that religious leaders can, and often do, get it wrong. The moral to this story is that we all need to think for ourselves instead of blindly following what we have been taught all our lives by religious propagandists.

Crashing Things Together is Fun and Educational

It’s in our nature. We humans often get a kick out of crashing things into each other. I remember watching Demolition Derby on TV when I was young. It was fascinating to watch drivers crash cars into each other on purpose until only one was left running.

And remember when David Letterman used to throw things off the top of a tall building just to see how they would smash upon impact with the ground.

Imagine shooting two bullets directly at each other from high-powered rifles. What would happen to the bullets when they hit each other in mid-air? The collision would take place so quickly and the bullets are so small, that the actual impact would probably be anticlimactic. But if you placed a high-speed video camera at the impact site, you could slow down the collision and watch in awe as the bullets annihilated each other.

Ordinary matter doesn’t really seem ordinary when looked at up close. I mean really up close. For example, more than 99 percent of the mass of any atom is located in a tightly-packed, tiny center called the nucleus. The two heaviest particles that make up an atom, protons and neutrons, are located there. Electrons are, by contrast, featherweights that whirl around the nucleus. So most of the atom is nothing but space.

If you were to scale up the size of an atom so that its nucleus was the size of a pea, and if you placed that pea in the center of the 50 yard line of a football field, the first ring of electrons would be located out along the uppermost seats in the nosebleed section. Even with binoculars, the closest electrons could not see their own nucleus.

So in our hypothetical rifle bullet collision, despite the fact that the bullets would be deformed beyond recognition and probably fragmented into tiny bits, none of the atomic nuclei in any of the atoms of the lead in those bullets would be affected in the least. The entire reaction would be handled by the outer rings of electrons, far away from the nucleus.

Inside the nucleus of every atom reside one or more tiny particles called protons. They carry a positive electric charge and were thought for many years to be an indivisible building block of the atom. Protons were assumed to be solid particles that could not be broken down into anything else.

But in the 1930s, physicists began shooting atomic nuclei at each other at high speeds just to see what would happen. Amazingly, the protons in them broke apart into new particles. Protons were not indivisible. They were made of other, smaller, particles. Scientists have been playing demolition derby with subatomic particles ever since.

The latest and greatest (and most expensive) atom smashing toy of the nuclear physicists was recently completed in Europe. It is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Hadrons are a family of subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. It came on line last week.

Within a year, it will be up to full power and scientists will start shooting protons at each other at a speed as close to the speed of light as they can get. The speed of light is the theoretical speed limit of matter. Nothing can go that fast because to do so would require an infinite amount of energy. But the protons in the LHC will be moving pretty close to that speed.

Scientists hope that, by looking at the debris left over when the protons collide, they can find some of the elusive particles that are predicted to exist but haven’t yet been found. At the energies that will be used to crash two protons together in the LHC, the scientists will be recreating the environment that existed within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. So the LHC is something like a time machine for subatomic particles.

What they discover from these collisions will probably produce more questions than answers. But scientists are fairly certain the results will lead them closer to an understanding of the ultimate question. How was the universe created?

See, crashing things together can be both fun and educational.

God Save Us from Palin

When John McCain picked Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate, I thought he had lost it. It was obviously a desperate attempt to reinvigorate his floundering campaign. Some compared it to a Hail Mary pass in football. The play almost never works, but when it does, it could be a game changer.

Whether or not McCain’s Hail Mary will work still remains to be seen. It has certainly reenergized the Republican base of evangelical Christians, who were always lukewarm to McCain himself. But if he’s hoping to win over women voters who backed Clinton, the ploy may backfire. Clinton supporters are smart enough to see through it.

Regardless of the reasons he picked Palin, the possibility that McCain’s campaign might actually have a shot at victory has me worried. Although vice-presidents typically hold very little power of their own, they at least have the ear of the president. And if something happened to McCain while serving, Palin would actually become the president. That should be enough to make anyone nervous.

This woman is spooky. She scares me half to death, not because she’s a bulldog or because she speaks her mind or because she may be a maverick. Those things I can deal with. It’s her ideology that scares me.

George W. Bush has been the worst president in our history, and that’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of professional historians who know all about American history. But Palin might just be farther to the right than he is. Consider some of the things she has said just since she has been Governor of Alaska.

She told ministry students from a church school that troops were sent to Iraq “on a task that is from God.”

And that’s not all. She claims to be doing God’s will in governing Alaska, particularly in building a natural gas pipeline. “God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said.

In talking about building roads and buying new police cars, she invoked the will of God and told people it couldn’t happen unless they prayed for it. “But really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God,” Palin said.

Now, obviously, these words and her sentiment might please the bible thumpers. But they should frighten everyone else, including mainstream Christians. Here we have a woman who wants to be a heartbeat away from an aging president and who believes that her policy decisions on everything from the economy to energy and foreign policy have been mandated by God.

Palin told the ministry students that she would work to implement God’s will from the governor’s office. And God’s will was to build gas pipelines and to send young Americans to fight the war in Iraq. And she called on all Alaskans to pray for God’s will to be implemented. “That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan,” she said.

That brings forth an obvious question. How does she know what God’s will is? And if it really is God’s will, why do we have to pray for it to be implemented? We are in Iraq because of Bush’s perception of what God’s will is. Now Palin wants to carry on God’s will at the side of McCain for the next four years.

Not since the Divine Right of kings back in the Middle Ages has a leader given over governance of a country to his narrow view of what God wants. Bush has done that, and Palin wants to continue his legacy, bringing our country even closer to a theocracy.

Never mind the Constitution or separation of church and state or freedom of religion. Never mind that we are supposed to have freedom of choice in this country. We don’t now and really never did, but we have far less freedom of choice under Bush than we did under previous presidents and we will have even less with McCain and Palin.

Personal freedom is very important to me. We, as Americans, ought to have the private right to do whatever we want, as long as it does not infringe upon others’ rights to do the same thing. But with Bush, and with McCain and Palin, we will have the personal freedoms only to do what they believe is God’s will. Seems we may be coming full circle to the days when the king knew best, because he obtained that knowledge from the Almighty.

May God help us.