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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Atheism beyond a reasonable doubt.


Should an atheist debate theists, be concerned with religion, or with what religious people think and do?


Yes, I think we should. Because that religious people think and do effects everyone, including the non-believers.


In East Germany 88.20% of their population describe themselves as atheists.

There is a fast drop in percentage after the East Germans.


Slovenia 29.80%
Russia 27.30%
Israel 25.60%
Netherlands 24.10%
Hungary 23.30%
Norway 14.90%
Britain 14.00%
West Germany 12.10%
New Zealand 11.50%


In the United States the percentage varies between 2 % and 9%


Question:

Don’t these percentages indicate that in every country on earth the number of people who don’t believe in God are always in the minority?


Yes.


Don’t we need to believe in God to live with hope?


The answer might be yes, but if you have hope in something that does not exist, isn’t that deceptive, false hope? Is living in hope so important that even false hope is better than the truth?


But can you prove that God does not exist?


No. Theists and atheists are both embracing a conclusion based on faith. I have faith that there is no God, that life is just an interesting quirk of chemistry and evolution, and the theists believe that some higher power just spoke everything into existence.


I don’t think the data is there to prove one belief is absolutely, indisputably, irrefutable true. In my opinion there are indicators gleened from science that indicate that there are chemical, natural explanations for the existence of life and the universe.


A creator. . . would have had to be present right at the start of the universe. The whole message of evolution is that complexity and intelligence and all the things that would go with being a creative force come late, they come as a consequence of hundreds of millions of years of natural selection. There was no intelligence early on in the universe. ~Richard Dawkins in an interview by Sheena McDonald of the BBC


I tend to buy the Dawkins idea, but it is not provable. Dawkins’s idea fits with what I understand of the theory of evolution, and there are so many reasons to believe in evolution to fill many thousand of pages.

Interesting it would only take one single fact to bring down the entire theory of evolution, and there have been thousands of fundamentalist Christians, some of them with science backgrounds, who have focused mightily on disproving the theory, and, so far, the only reason anyone has to reject evolution is that it doesn’t fit with their theistic beliefs.


The case for theism is almost totally without any facts.


"Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system."--Baron d'Holbach, Common Sense (1772)


People believe because they can’t explain stuff that happens, and the psychology of human beings demands that there be some explanation. People take things that happen to them, and lay over that the template of their faith, and if the template encases their anecdotal experience they go, “See, there is the proof! I dropped the storm window, my little girl was under the ladder, I called out, ‘Lord save my child!’, and God caused that window to miss my child and her life was saved."


There is no doubt that the parent who prays and is lucky enough for the outcome to match their prayer feels that their faith has been confirmed, but if you spend any time around the ER you know that there have been a lot of prayers that resulted in horrendous injuries and painful, ugly death.


Why, I wonder, does God cure diseases that people may or may not have, but he never grows a leg back on an amputee.


Go to eBay and you can find the face of Jesus on a burrito and the Madonna on the side of a slice of toast. There are people who really take these things as evidence of God sending us food messages I suppose.


When I was growing up, I remember being exposed to Greek Mythology, and sometimes those myths resembled, to some degree, the stories I was taught in Sunday school and from the pulpit. My family mocked and ridiculed the myths. I saw a conflict. I think now that the existence of the Judeo-Christian/Islamic God is just as improbable as the existence of Zeus his gang of god-pals on Mount Olympus. I have the same amount of evidence for the existence of Yahweh, Jehovah, or Allah as I have for Zeus—which is nothing, none, zero, zilch.


The debate over the existence or non-existence of God is settled, at least for me, in a way similar to how a criminal trial is settled. In a trial, no matter how good the evidence, we can never hope to have guilt beyond all doubt. The best we can ever hope for is to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I can’t prove God does not exist, beyond all doubt, but I believe my doubt is reasonable.

Touring the Parthenon and the Erechteion

He was on tour in Greece and the tour guide was taking the bus load of Americans to see the Parthenon. The tour guide explained that the Parthenon was perhaps the most impressive of all the Ancient Greek temples, dedicated to the goddess Athena the armed warrior goddess, who appears in Greek mythology as a helper of many heroes, including Odysseus (remember studying the Odyssey in school?), Jason, and Hercules.
The tour guide also showed the crowd a smaller, slightly better preserved temple just down the hill from the Parthenon, and this little temple was called the Erechtheion named after the son of Athena, Erichthonius.

"What was the story behind these two temples?" he asked. "Are they connected in some way?"
"Why yes," said the tour guide, a beautiful dark complexioned woman, dressed in a manner that was both conservative and unmistakably attractive.

The Parthenon was created to honor Athena, who, in Classical Greek myths was not only a warrior goddess, but she was also depicted as someone who never took to herself a consort (or lover) and thus she was known as Athena the Virgin. The word virgin, in Greek was parthenos. You can easily see the connection between the word parthenos and the name of the temple, Parthenon."

"But, if Athena was known as "Athena the Virgin" then how did she come to have a son?" he asked.

"Good question," replied the guide. "It may be more accurate for us to describe Erichthonius as the adoptive child of Athena. The story of the birth of Erichthonius goes like this" Another god, Hephaestus, looked on Athena, lusted after her, and attempted to rape the goddess. Being both a committed virgin and a warrior goddess Athena resisted and the two struggled. In the heat of this struggle, the two fell upon a rug of pure lamb's wool, and Hephaestus, having an erection, had a premature emission, his semen fell into the pure lamb's wool, and out of that wool sprang the child Erichtonius. "

He couldn't help but notice the similarity between the words erection and Erichthonius, but he felt ill at ease with all his fellow travelers locking eyes on him, still, he felt he had to ask.

"Pardon me," he interrupted, "but do the people of Greece still believe in things like warrior goddesses and miraculous births of a god springing from pure lambs wool?"

He could tell immediately that he had offended his tour guide.

"Of course not! We are members of the Greek Orthodox Church and we believe only in the Lord Jesus Christ born of the blessed virgin Mary."

God and Thinking 4 Things At Once!



I have been taught about God all of my life. I have tried to believe in God for many years in my life. In all that time there are three traits of God that almost every believer seems to accept.

1. God is all powerful.

Omnipotent

Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26

2. God is all knowing, and everywhere at once.

Omniscient

"Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account" Hebrews 4:13.

3. God is love.

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8


These are all wonderful traits, and it makes God a very attractive concept, or believed in higher power, but these traits don’t make God real. Santa has similar traits. Santa may not claim to have created everything, but he can be everywhere at once, (delivering presents to everyone on the same night) and is all knowing (he has everyone’s name in a book, and knows what we want for Christmas AND like God he has a naughty list). Santa is sort of omnipotent, in that he can fly, go down chimneys, and can carry and deliver gifts to every human on earth all on a single night, which makes him pretty darn strong. Obviously, this giving character of Santa must be all loving.
OK, I will admit that the God I was taught about as a child has more power than Santa, but still, for, apparently most folks, an attractive story.

These three traits of God are just great for a deity. I can hold all three thoughts in my mind at the same time: God is everywhere, knows everything, is all powerful, and is all loving. There is a fourth concept that muddies the water for me:

4. EVIL exists.

Once I add this thought into the mix of God’s traits I find that I can no longer hold all four concepts in my mind at the same time.

  • If God is all powerful, all knowing, everywhere, and pure love, then why does evil exist?
  • If God is pure love, but not all powerful, then yes, evil could easily exist.
  • If God is all powerful, everywhere, but not pure love, then yes, evil could easily exist.
  • If God is all love, all powerful, but he just can’t be everywhere at once, then yes, evil could easily exist.

I just can’t wrap my brain around the thought that God could be all powerful, all knowing, if He is everywhere at once, and if God is pure love, why would He allow evil to exist?

Some tell me, that is the answer. God’s power is limited, but only by His will.

But if God has the power to prevent evil, but chooses not to use that will, then God is allowing evil to exist, and that doesn’t seem too much like pure love to me.

I remember sitting in a hospital with a father, as his young son died in a room near by. This father asked me why God would allow something like this to happen.

What is the answer to this grieving father?

Should I say, “God has the power to save your child, but he is not to do it because his WILL has limited His power to save your son.”

When you question the existence of God you get a lot of people upset with you. Some statistics show that only 9 percent of the American population considers themselves to be skeptical of God, and only 2 percent are firm and admitted atheists. It isn't the number of non-believers that causes Christians to feel so threatened, it is this: Believers fear the non-existence of God more than they fear God Himself.

The War Inside of Me


I cannot succeed in my outer life, unless I can stop the war going on inside me.
A drawing by tex norman
Life is Snottie and Amazing

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Quotations on Poverty


What every black American knows, and whites should try to imagine, is how it feels to have unfavorable – and unfair – identity imposed on you every waking hour. --Unknown

White teachers brought their white values into the school—values that negated my world entirely. The message was subtle, but it was clear to me: everyone I respected and loved was considered ignorant, irresponsible, and good-for-nothing.
--Carl Upchurch, Convicted in the Womb.

Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

. . . education is essential to any movement toward freedom. Even in our most desperate hours – during slavery – we understood one fundamental truth: that we must become educated to make progress in this culture.
Carl Upchurch, Convicted in the Womb

We saw that in the working-class families about half of all feedback was affirmative among family members when the child was 13 to 18 months old. . . . In the professional families. . . more than 80% of the feedback to the 13 to 18 month old child was affirmative . . . .Almost 80% of the welfare parents’ feedback to their 13 to 18 month old children was negative. . . . A consistent and pervasive negative Feedback Tone was the model for the children of how families work together. Given the strong relationship shown in the longitudinal data between the prevalence of prohibitions in the first years of life and lowered child accomplishments, lasting still at age 9, the prespects for the next generation of welfare children seem bleak.
Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. (p. 204) Baltimore: Paul H Brookes

If someone were to devise a machine that could measure hatred – a Hatenometer – I’d bet all my wooden nickels that more hatred exists between bosses and employees than between blacks and whites. . . Of all the hating I’ve done in my life – and I’ve done my share – ninety-nine percent of it was directed at rich white people, most of them my bosses . . . I had been born into a class where I was on the RECEIVING end of decisions. I flippin’ had no CONTROL over anyone else’s life and master of my own was compromised by the need to work a full-time job.
Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto

. . . in order to move from poverty to middle class . . . one must trade off some relationships for achievement at least for a period of time. To do this, one needs emotional resources and stamina. . . . Emotional resources and stamina allow the individual to live with feelings other than those in the emotional memory bank. This allowance provides the individual the opportunity to seek options and examine other possiblilities.
Bridges out of Poverty
by Ruby Payne, Philip DeVol, and Terie Smith

The wise . . . mentor knows that being aware of what is not known is important in order to begin to learn. To attain true knowledge and wisdom, we must remain open and empty, allowing ideas from other people to rush in. To be empty, to recognize how little we know, is to be abundant.
Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch, Mentoring: The TAO of Giving and Receiving Wisdom.

Crank is to coffee what sexual homicide is to a goodnight kiss. It’s the black sheep of the speed family. Also called crystal meth, zip, or monster, crank is the rocket fuel for sputtering workers. Although supposedly a recreational drug—a fun thing—crank’s usually taken to facilitate work performance. It treats your bloodstream as an assembly line and pushes up the production quota. . . Crank is a homemade biohazardous brain-scalder produced by white outlaw chemists acting in the entrepreneurial tradition of their moonshining ancestors. . . They disseminated illicit vitality to millions of (biker gangs and long-haul truckers) who couldn’t afford to be tired.
--Jim Goad, The redneck Manifesto

The importance of entertainment, humor, and personality: When one can only survive, then any respite from the survival struggle is important. Entertainment brings respite. Individual personality is what one brings to the setting because money is not brought. The ability to entertain, tell stories, and be funny are valued.
Bridges out of Poverty by Ruby Payne, Philip DeVol, and Terie Smith

Self-image, episodic memory, fatalistic attitude, and lack of motivation make it difficult to see the need to change.
Bridges out of Poverty by Ruby Payne, Philip DeVol, and Terie Smith

Remembering my mentor


King Odysseus, leaving for war, asked his friend Mentor, to look after his young son. A mentor is someone who helps another learn the ways of the world – or specific tasks. . . . Many successful people are open to sharing with a protégé. . .
Bridges out of Poverty by Ruby Payne, Philip DeVol, and Terie Smith


I was born of a defective egg, I guess, because I came out of the womb hypersensitive, selfish, and sort of a dim bulb. My father had his own problems, which drove him to move constantly. I went to 33 schools before I graduated from High School. I was terrible in school both with my grades and my behavior. I felt alone, unloved, unimportant, unwanted, in the way, ugly, stupid, worthless, sinful, and having no hope or future.


In 1966 our family moved to Kansas and I was old enough then to get a driver's license. I was able, by age rights, to have a little more autonomy. I could leave the house alone. I could go by myself to the school play, or a band concert. Before I had never been to school events of the evening. In that little town of Huffington, Kansas, I got my first real friend, Flip Fieldson, and through Phil I was introduced to a guy at a local Huffington Bible Camp. [I changes some names here, not to protect Mr. Belvedere, because he is dead, but to protect Mr. Belvedere's family, I guess.]


Richard Belvedere was a 50-something CEO of the Huffington Bible Camp and preacher for a tiny group of believers that called their church the Gospel Chapel. Mr. Belevedere took me under his wing. He encouraged me to write. He set up poetry readings and invited me to bring my poems to read. Richard Belvedere became the man who cared about me, my mentor. He seemed to genuinely care about me. He took a lot of time to talk with me, share books with me, and was perhaps the most important man in my life.


One summer I was invited to stay, free of charge, for one of the summer camps they held at the Bible Camp. I woke up in the night with Mr. Belvedere kissing my face, and touching me. We were in a room filled with bunkbeds and sleeping boys, so when I started making noise in resisting he stopped and went away.


There was a second incident where he made a move towards me, sexually. I was kissed on and grouped, and I was a young boy and he was a grown older man, but still I was able to resist him, and told him it was not to happen again, and that he had to resist these feelings he had.


I also learned that everyone who cares about me, wants something from me. I grew to distrust the whole mentor concept. No one really cares about me. I exist to serve the pleasures of others. I'm too fat and ugly to be a boy toy for anyone, so now they want me to give them stuff, do their work, or at least get out of their way.


I'm still alone. I am still a defective egg, a dim bulb, hypersensitive, and submerged in self-pity. I would like to, but I am sure I can't blame it all on my mentor.


The transportational power of poetry




I read this quote in a book called Bridges Out of Poverty:

Carl Upchurch was in solitary at Lewisburg, Ohio when he found a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets wedged under the short leg of a table. “I won’t pretend that Shakespeare and I immediately connected,” writes Upchurch. “I must have read those damn sonnets twenty times before they started to make sense . Even then, comprehension came slowly – first a word, then a phrase, and finally a whole poem. Those sonnets began to take hold of me, transported me out of the gray world into a world I had never, ever imagined.

It seems almost strange that a black guy in prison, in contemporary times, would be changed by the sonnets of Shakespeare. Of course, he had to be in solitary confinement with nothing else to do to be in that place where you are willing to read stuff that it takes work to read. He was so bored that he had no choice but to read what he had to read, and then reread it, and reread it again.

It is the secret of how to read poetry, I think. Read it. Re-read it. Read it some more.

In this way poetry has the potential of changing our life, and transporting us out of the gray of our current life into a brighter, better life.

Of course, since it was Shakespeare that this guy read, we can assume that it is not just any poetry that can do this. It has to be great poetry.

But that is just an assumption.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Hauling Aunt Pansy


Keno came asking me this favor. He wanted me to tag along with him to Lamar, a petite little town in Eastern Oklahoma. I say petite meaning little, not petite meaning cute, because one thing Lamar isn’t and is cute. My memory of Lamar is that it was like a teeny-tiny pimple on the bumpy butt of the Sooner State. I’d not been out that way in a couple of years, but didn’t figure the passage of time would’ve improved Lamar too awful much.


“What’d you lose in Lamar?” I asked Keno.


“I didn’t lose anything in Lamar,” Keno said, “but I’ve got to go down there. My mama’s people are from down there, the Duggan side. My mama’s great Aunt Pansy just passed. They need somebody to go down there and haul her body back to Holdenville to get’er embalmed.”


Well, my jaw just about fell off my face.


“You want me to help you haul your dead aunt from Lamar to Holdenville?”

“This ain’t exactly my idea of fun either, Romy. But my mama’s already told ’em that I’d be happy to do this little chore for ’em, so I have to do it. Besides, if you come along I got us a little surprise benefits. I figured, if I have to go, it’d be more bearable if you was with me.”


That was actually a fairly nice thing for him to be saying to me, it really was. And like I say, I didn’t have anything better to do. But it just seemed like I had to ask questions before agreeing to anything, even stuff I was already wanting and willing to do.


“Why don’t your daddy do this chore?” I asked.


“Damn it, Romy, you know my daddy’s pulling a six month-er on a drilling rig up in Alaska.”

He was right. I did know it, but I’d forgotten. I should’ve just said okay right then, but I had to know the what-s and why-s of what we were doing.

“How come the old gal has to be hauled to Holdenville?”

“Holdenville’s the closest place to get her embalmed. You know they don’t have facilities for that kind of stuff in Lamar.”

I did knew it, too. Lamar is two blocks long and surrounded by peanut fields, pastureland, and wild wooded acres filled with Red Oak, Sycamores, and Cottonwood trees. Here and there, you’d see a stand of yellow pines -- but that was unnatural stuff. The only reason the pine was there at all was ‘cause some OSU extension agent had talked a few farmer folk into planting stands of pine to serve as a wind break. The dust bowel days are still etched in the minds of all us Okies, even those of us unborn at the time the dust flew. Seems like all us Okies have a collective memory of when Nature stomped Oklahoma into ground under its angry heel and let the litter of humanity fly with the constant wind.

First, there’d been a draught, followed by years of relentless wind that sandblasted the fields and pasture lands into nothing and blew half of the population all the way to California where we survived as underpaid fruit pickers. If planting a stand of pine could fend off a similar future fate, then why not.

The reason Lamar existed was so farm folk would have a place sort of close where they could buy bread, milk, seed, and feed. Lamar was nothing to me, and even though I had nothing better to do and didn’t give a rat’s ass what I did do so long as it was something else, I still couldn’t for the life of me think why I’d want to go to Lamar.

So I asked him, “How come they feel they got to embalm the lady in the first place?”

Now that was a perfectly logical question. In the backwoods of Eastern Oklahoma, it wasn’t unusual at all for country folk to grab a shovel and bury dead relatives on their on land without regard to legal restrictions.

“It was my great Aunt Pansy’s final wish that she get embalmed,” Keno said, getting frustrated with me. “So now her kin folk have to get her embalmed ‘cause they promised that they would.”
“I got to tell you, Keno, that this is a pretty peculiar chore you’re proposing.”

“Hell, you don’t have to tell me.”

“Don’t any of those Lamar folk have a truck?”

"Well, of course they got a trucks, for God’s sake. They’re farming folk, for Christ’s sake. Ever’body and their dog’s got a truck down there. If you got balls you gotta have a truck.”

“Well then?”

“Well then, nothing!” Keno was getting extra aggravated with me. “My Uncle Clearance’s truck’s got a busted head. He’s got no money to fix it just now. So --”

I guess Keno could see what I was fixing to ask next ‘cause he cut me off at the proverbial verbal pass, so to speak.

“And don’t ask why they aren’t getting a neighbor to help ’em. These are not the kind of folk that’ll ask non-family folk for help hauling their dead folk around. And besides that, they can’t be farting around trying to figure out the logistics for getting this job done. Every hour Aunt Pansy ain’t embalmed puts her an hour closer to the big stink. We’ve got to get Aunt Pansy done, and we’ve got to get it done quick.”

“I get what you’re getting at, I guess,” I said, “but let me ask you this, and please, Keno, don’t take it bad, but is your mama as wacky as the rest of her family?”

“My mama’s all right, mostly,” he said, “but that family she’s sprung from is cram-jammed full of Boo Raddly rejects.”

“I’m not trying to get out of nothing, Keno, I’m really not,” I said, “but doesn’t the funeral home have a hearse or something to use for jobs like this?”

“Look, Romy, my mama’s people are poor. These funeral guys charge out the wazoo for hauling a body even one way. You add the cost of a round-trip trip, and then add to that the cost of draining Aunt Pansy and refilling her with formaldehyde, and all of a sudden you’ve spend more than you got to spend. Even if they could’ve handled the cost, they’d still be reluctant to pay it. Paying other folks to do stuff they could do for themselves just doesn’t make sense to ‘em. Hell, if those Duggan’s’ had an idea of how to embalm a body, they’d do Aunt Pansy themselves. So, are you going to go with me or are we going to stand around flapping our gums all day?”

I should’ve stopped right then, but the oddness of it all just kept my questions coming.

“Well, jeez, Keno, how’s this done? What are we supposed to do, set her between us and belt her in?”

“Don’t be so fuckin’ stupid,” Keno said.

“Well we’re not going to strap her on the hood of your truck like she was a lung shot deer, so what is the procedure for something like this?”

“Damn it, Romy, it’ll be okay, O.K.? My Uncle Clarence built Aunt Pansy’s coffin. He starting building it a few days before she passed, when they were pretty sure she wasn’t going to make it. Uncle Clarence is good with wood. Aunt Pansy’s sister, lined the insides of the box with foam-rubber and pink satin. They told my mama all about it on the phone last night. They’ll do all the actual handling of the body. We won’t even have to touch her. They’ll but her in the box before we get there. All we’ve got to do is slide the casket into the back of my daddy’s truck and haul her up to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home in Holdenville. We’ll have three or four hours to mess around Holdenville, and then we’ll haul her back to Lamar and let ’em lay the old gal to her final and eternal rest.”

When I said nothing to that little speech, I could see the frustration level kick up a notch.

“I’ve got to do this,” Keno said. “You don’t. What I’m asking is, will you go with me? If I’m putting, too much on you, then don’t go! Just say, no. But stop making me beg and explain, ‘cause by the time I answer all your questions Aunt Pansy will’ve swelled up and popped.”

Finally, I just said what I knew I was going to say before he’d even started asking me.

“Sounds fun.”

We were two hours getting to Lamar, but that was mostly because Keno was driving slow. He took his daddy’s new blue Ford pickup for two reasons: One, because Keno’s truck had no heater and his daddy’s truck did. It was October and Oklahoma was already getting frosty. Reason two, was that his daddy’s truck had a long bed. Hauling a coffin just seemed like something that might require a long bed. We weren’t wrong.

Being out from under the eyes of meddling adults was a freedom not to be wasted. Before we got out of Wewoka proper, we’d bought ourselves a twelve pack of Miller High Life, the Champagne of bottle beer. We were both under age, but if you know the right person that ain’t no obstacle. And in Wewoka everybody knows everybody.

Taking the back roads toward Lamar gave us the time and the leisure to
savor each bottle. Even though I was drug up in the Church of Christ’s Gospel and Blood, which is a tee totaling religion, it wasn’t like I’d never imbibe before. The fact is this: I was getting into the habit of self-medicated my melancholia with heavy doses of Miller High Life on a daily basis

The Duggans’s domicile consisted of a white framed clapboard house in sore need of paint; so sore in need of paint that it looked positively tender. Summer had blistered the paint’s topcoat pretty bad. A house can get sunburned just like a person can. And just like sun burnt people, houses peel. At a glance, you could see that the Duggan house was once painted a Pepto-Bismol pink, which made me feel like I was needing a dose of Pepto-Bismol in the worst way.

Some of the Duggan folk came out to meet us. Notice I said meet and not greet. Mostly, they hung back and looked at us. I should say they looked at me. They looked at me like I had a big booger hanging out one nose hole. I was the stranger in this bunch. I was the one who didn’t fit; who didn’t belong. Keno was kin, but me they didn’t know and there was this automatic distrust toward outsiders.

Out of the house came two men, four females, and a bony boy about our age. Now I hate to say this, ‘cause Keno is one of my very best friends, and these people were relatives of his and all, but they all look like extras from a cheap remake of The Grapes of Wrath. The whole bunch looked like extra’s from that dang Deliverance movie. No lie!

These people were living breathing Okie-clichés. The boy, Keno’s cousin, Bart, wore these green-bibbed overalls without a shirt. The girls wore no make up, (which was sinful), they had long hair tucked up under their bonnets like big balls of yarn (cutting female hair was sinful), and all of them were wearing long cotton dresses, plain and faded like their futures. One of the girls had big boobs, I could tell, but that plus was canceled out by one wondering eye. The Duggan men needed to’ve shaved about a week back. One of the men had these little stuff stain-lines coming off the corners of his mouth. It looked to me like he’d fallen asleep with a lip full of Skoal and while he was knocking out Zs the spit dribbled out like sorghum. You could see syrupy nicotine tracks running down his face, then down his neck, and finally disappearing behind the collar of a sweatshirt.

As soon as we pulled in, I could see the new made casket resting on a couple of weather worn sawhorses in front of their house. Keno’s Uncle Clarence had built a nice box. It was well made, but, to me, it looked more like a packing crate than a casket.

“Howdy, Keno,” his Uncle Clarence said.

“Howdy, Uncle Clarence,” Keno said.

Keno didn’t seem like he was fixing to introduce me, so I figured I had to introduce my own self.

“Howdy, Mr. Duggan,” I said to him. “My name is Romy Tea Gardner. Keno and me are best buddies.”

“Nice to meet you, Romy,” said his uncle. “I want to thank you boys for coming down to do this little chore for us.”

“No problem,” Keno said.

“Maggie and the women folk’ve washed and dressed her. We just now got her in the box, and screwed the lid down tight. Aunt Pansy’s packed and ready to go.”

Then nobody said nothing.

Once it was clear his Uncle Clarence was finished talking, a kind of comfortless quiet settled over us all, like an itchy wool blanket. We found ourselves just standing ‘round, scratching, kicking stones, and listening to the wind seeking to shake loose the last few leaves of summer.

I saw this older woman come out on the porch wearing a Pentecostal styled dress. It was long sleeved, cotton dress, they kind of cotton that’s always on sale at Wal-Mart. It had a high collar, and was buttoned up way past modesty. On her head was a once white bonnet. She step out of the house to stand there on the porch surveying our group with sad eyes. I figuring she was the dead woman’s sister, maybe. Grief seemed to annoy her features like strands of a spider web that’s broke loose from its moorings, and wavering in the wind.

“Well,” Keno’s uncle finally said, “if you’re going do this for us, you’d best get busy and do it. Dark’ll be here in an hour, and Pansy ain’t getting any fresher.”

So, the Duggan men took hold of the coffin, and hoisted it over to the blue Ford, and slid her in the back. That’s when I noticed that even a long bed truck wasn’t long enough to accommodate that homemade coffin. I figure either Aunt Panzy was over seven feet tall, or ole man Duggan built without botherin’ to measure. We’d have to leave the tailgate down. It wasn’t a problem, not really, it was just odd. With the tailgate down the truck accommodated the length of the box nicely.

Before we left, Keno walked over and said some stuff real quiet in his Uncle Clearance’s ear. His Uncle Clarence called Bart over and said something in that boy’s big ole floppy ear. Bart went to nodding, and then said something back to Keno that I couldn’t hear. The Duggan boy pointed out toward the road we’d come in on just moments before.

We’d been there not even thirty minutes, and we were already pulling out and heading to Holdenville. The brevity of the visit told me that this Duggan clan cared most about getting done what had to get done.

Our only function was to drive two hours, load up Aunt Pansy, get her to Baker Brother so she could get preserved, and then getting her back to Lamar for a home burial. These were no non-sense folk, that was simple and plain to see.

“We got one stop to make,” Keno says as he slide behind the wheel, “then I figured we’d go back the way we came.”

“You’re driving,” I said. “I got nothing to do, and all night to do it in.”

I’d’ve thought Keno’d want to get back to Holdenville quicker since his Aunt was spoiling in the back and that coffin wasn’t no Tupperware dish. But if Keno wanted to go back, the same way we’d came down, well, I figured, what’s it to me? It was already sort of cold in Oklahoma, so that’d slow the old lady’s putrefaction. I was surprised, however, when Keno’s first stop was less than a hundred yards from the front door of the Duggans’s farmhouse. We were just barely out of sight when Keno shut down his ride and fired up a Kool.

“What’re we doing?” I asked. I was curious, but just barely so.

“You’ll see,” he said.

I sat back and looked up. Above us was a canopy of nearly bare branches that looked like brittle black-boned fingers intertwined over our heads. When I looked down, I saw a carpet of leaves looking to me like God’d spilled out a heavenly sized box of Wheaties. The leaves looked just like parched, dry flakes without the milk.

A zoned out for a half second or so, when sounds caused me to coming back to myself. There was the snap of a twig, then a kind of crushing cadence. It sounded like somebody’d stuck his hands in a big ole sack of potato chips and just started punching and crunching ’em in a kind of regular rhythm. Boney Bart was walking out of the wood carrying a cardboard box.

“Howdy Bart,” Keno said as the kid got to the truck.

“Howdy back at ’ya,” says Bart. “How much was you guys wanting?” No small talk for these folk. Even this boy was all business. Keno looked over at me.

“You thirsty?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, not knowing what thirsty had to do with the price of peaches.

“My daddy said, you bein’ family and all, that I shouldn’t make it more than five dollars a quart.”

“Sounds fair to me. Sound fair to you, Romy?”

“More than fair,” I said, still a bit baffled by what was going on.

“Give us two,” Keno told ’em.

Keno fished in his jeans pulling out a wad of bills, ones mostly. He thumbed through the roll and peeled off a couple of fives, which he handed over to boney Bart.

“Here you go, Keno,” says the boy, and he handed through the window two mason jars filled to the lids with clear liquid.

“Thanks a bunch, cuz,” Keno said, and he put the jars in my lap, and fired up the Ford. I never realized before, but Keno was sort of a no nonsense kind of guy himself. Apple trees make apples, I guess.

What he’d bought us was moonshine. I’d never tasted moonshine before, but then I’d never hauled a dead body before neither, and I was doing that, so I figured, why not, you know?

“Why didn’t we just buy this while we was back there standing in the yard?” I asked him.

“‘Cause my Aunt Maggie don’t know he’s moonshining. At least, if she does know,” Keno explained to me, “the two of them have this unspoken agreement to pretend they don’t know. So Uncle Clarence can’t very well be doing business right in front of her, now can he?”

Hypocrisy sticks on religious folk, like stink on shit. There’re hypocrites everywhere, and everywhere it smells all the way up to high heaven. I swear that if there is a God I figured he smells it most of all. Hypocrites probably make God gag and choke. But, who knows? Maybe booze is no big deal to the big guy. Obviously, it didn’t bother me enough not to drink it when it was available. I guess the stench in God’s nostrils comes just as much from me as from anybody else.

Taking the back roads toward Holdenville now made sense. We were consuming some of the strongest homemade hooch distilled in the entire State of Oklahoma. The Duggans had themselves a distillery hidden in the woods somewhere ‘round their place. I should’ve figured out about that still. The signs were all there. When there’s a still near abouts, one of the first things you’ll find is moonshine stumps. Moonshiners don’t bother to cut good size trees ‘cause these small distillery operations only require a small steady fire. All they got for cooking the corn is a small fire box. Big logs would have to be split and that’s way too much work for a moonshiner. Also, moonshiners, being a lazy lot, seldom bother cutting tree down low to the ground. That’s because it is a lot easier to cut a tree down starting about two feet from the ground. Cutting a tree level with the ground means you gotta to get down on your knees and grind the tree off without good leverage, which, again, is way too much work. So if you find a scattering of stumps, all of them thin, and about knee high, you can bet your left nut that somewhere close by somebody’s cooking cracked corn mash and distilling it into moonshine whiskey.

“They use cracked corn, called yellow mash,” Keno explained . “It’s sold all over this country for chicken feed. Even the term, chicken feed, means somethin’ that is cheap, and almost worthless. But my Uncle Clarence as got a recipe that’ll turn chicken feed into liquid gold.”

“You had this stuff before?”

“Once,” Keno told me. “There was this time daddy took me fishing and he brought along a jar of this joy juice. Daddy told me once that Clarence use to use cracked wheat mash for his brew. Instead of corn whiskey he called it whole wheat whiskey.”

“Wooo-weee,” I said when I took my first gulp. “This stuff burns all the way to down to my heels.”

“It burns all right,” Keno agreed. “Daddy says Uncle Clarence puts pulverized pepper in with his mash.”

“I don’t know if I can drink this, without mixing it with a Coke or something.” I wasn’t kidding either.

“Don’t let it beat you,” Keno said. He was driving with one hand and swigging with the other. There was fire burning in his eyes already.

“There’s a reason the Indian’s called it firewater. It’ll burn at first. Keep sipping this hooch and pretty soon, it’ll make you feel like your tongue’s turned into a softball bat. Keep with it and in no time you’ll be swimming in it and think it’s mother’s milk.”

I couldn’t imagine swimming in mother’s milk, and it didn’t sound so seemly to me, but, in general, what Keno was saying was right. Sort of. In just a little while, I couldn’t even taste the stuff, which was the way I wanted it. I mean it, why would anybody drink any kind of alcohol unless they were aiming for inebriation. If it was taste I was after, I’d rather’ve had a Dr. Pepper. I mean, the point of drinking booze was to get a buzz.


Five miles out of Lamar I was crocked like a pot and simmering in my own juice. When we pulled in to the Baker Brother’s Funeral Home neither one of us was thinking too clear, and neither one of us cared. I was numb, dumb, and liking it. That is, I liked it ‘til we crawled out of that truck and I found out what I found out next.

We clambered out of the cab, and the both of us turned to looked at the coffin. Well, we were baffled by what we weren’t seeing, I kid you not. The casket wasn’t there. ou could’ve knocked us both over with a green twig, no lie. Eventually what I figured was this: As Keno got sloshed, he got to driving wilder. The wilder he drove, the quicker he took the curves. The quicker he took the curves, the more he got to spinning and sliding and throwing gravel behind his tires like it was birdshot. I figured his Aunt Pansy must’ve slid out on one of them curves.

There was nothing left to do, but to head back the way we’d came, looking for a long wooden box laying in the road.

We’d farted around going and coming, so by the time we’d finally got to Holdenville is was well after eight. It was October, which meant that by eight o’clock it was already black as a Bible’s back, and cold enough to pucker the nipples on a brass monkey.

There was nothin’ left to do, but go look for Aunt Pansy. As we drove, we took turns chew on each other’s ass.

“You drive like baboon-brained moron,” I said. I felt fairly comfortable with my criticism since he was driving and I riding.

“Listen, butt-wad,” Keno came back at me, “I asked you to keep an eye on my Aunt Pansy.”

“You did not!”

“I did, too! How in the hell could you fail to notice when a great big ole casket fell off the back of this truck?”

“You didn’t notice it either, you’ll notice!”

It was just the mature kind of conversation you’d expect from a couple whacky drunk punks like us.

The blue Ford aimed its lights ahead, as our eyes searching for a big wooden box. Eventually, our quibbling dulled, drooped, and diminished. We just ran out of steam. Once the bickering cease there was, nothing left between us, but a churning frustration filling the cab with the ambiance of anger. We just pud-puded along in silence for another five minutes or so. When we’d both endured about all the quiet we could tolerate, a calmer, quieter Keno said to me, “I sure do hope Aunt Pansy’s box didn’t bust open when it hit the road.”

“If the coffin broke open,” I said, “what’s to keep the coons from having themselves a Pansy buffet?”

“Jesus, Romy,” Keno said grimacing at his own mental images, “why’d you have to say something like that?”

It was insensitive, I’ll admit, but it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t think what I thought on purpose. And how could anybody think what I’d just thought and not say it? It just wasn’t possible to stifle such thoughts without risking an explosion in your brain stem.

“Sorry,” I said, “I just thought it. I didn’t know I was going to think it.”

“Well, I think you should think more carefully. You think too damn hard about shit, and pretty soon everything around you’ll stink like a cracked septic tank.”

I guess even Keno had a touch of the poet in him.

We were almost all the ways back to Lamar, still not seeing a single sign of a casket anywhere, when flashing lights lit up the dark behind us. Well, I just about had the diarrhea, right then and there. Keno and I were, both of us, still lit up like a couple of Christmas trees, which is not the kind of condition you want to be in when a cop pulls you over, and that’s a truth you could print on the front page of the Wewoka Daily Times.

My only comfort was that at least I wasn’t the one driving.

Keno pulled over.

“Should we get out?” he asked me, “or should we wait ‘til he comes up to the window?”

“Let’s get out,” I told him. “It smells like Bud Davey’s Bar in here. Maybe in the night air he won’t get a whiff of us.”

We got out carefully, trying to walk like sober persons. The only problem I had was I couldn’t remember how sober people walked. I walked like somebody’d put slices of bologna in each one of my shoes.

This big ole barrel-chested cop was already out of his car and walking towards us. He had on one of those big ole wide brimmed hats, with a wide flat brim. The guy was backlit by the headlights of his cursor, which helped him to see us a bunch better than it helped us to see him.

“You boys are out awful late,” he says. I notice he’d rested one hand on his service revolver, and he’d unsnapped the hoster.

“Is it late?” Keno asked. I wanted to kick him hard enough to put another crack in his ass. Not knowing what time it was probably just confirm in this cop’s mind that we weren’t exactly teetotalers.

“It’s nearing eleven o’clock,” said the cop. “I see from your tag you’re not from Hardee County.”

“Nope,” I said, hoping I was talking less suspiciously than Keno.

“We’re both of us from Wewoka. Over in Seminole County.”

“You don’t say. You boys mind telling me what you’re doing so far from home, and so close to my town, this late at night? “

“What town?” Keno asked. I wish he hadn’t sounded so surprised, ‘cause sober guys would probably know what towns they were close to, but I have to say, I was wondering the same dog-gone thing. What city was this cop referring to? I had no idea. I mean, I didn’t see a single sign of a city anywhere around us.

“You boys are almost to Bolivia.”

“Bolivia?” both of us said together ‘cause we were, both of us, dumbfounded.

“Bolivia, Oklahoma,” said the cop by way of explanation.

I didn’t even know there was a Bolivia in Oklahoma.

“We’re looking for something we think we might’ve lost,” I said.

“It might’ve fallen off the back of our truck several hours back,” Keno chimed in.

“You boys had something fall off your truck and you didn’t notice?”

We had to nod yeah.

“Was this something small, or was it something big,” asked the cop.

I moved so I could see his nametag. His name of Eaton. Officer Eaton.

“It was something big,” Keno said.

Eaton just sort of popped his eyebrows a little.

“Something big fell off the back of your truck?”

We nodded yeah.

“And you didn’t notice?”

We nodded yeah again.

“And you didn’t go looking for this big thing for several hours, is that right?”

How are you supposed to answer a question like that? What I noticed was there was just the tiniest change in the cop’s face. It was just enough of a change for me to figure out that something we’d just said was fitting in with something else in his big ole boney head.

“This thing you lost off the back of your truck -- is it valuable?”

“No,” Keno said and then realized that he’d just said Aunt Pansy wasn’t valuable which he might’ve thought, but knew it was a wicked thing to actually say, so he corrected himself in about one half of one second. “I mean yes!”

“Which is it son? With, or without value?”

“If it was without value would we be out here freezing our asses off looking for it?” I said. It was a stupid thing for me to say. My only explanation for such stupidity is that I was drunk, and cold

“I believe I need to see your driver’s license,” Officer Eaton said.

He was oozing that cop calm they’re all trained to emit. Keno handed the man his license.

Eaton turned to me and said, “Yours too.”

“Mine?” I said. “But I wasn’t driving?”

“Just hand me your license, son.”

I dug through my billfold and pulled out my license. I hated the picture of me on the license ‘cause it looked just like me which is pretty damn depressing.

The cop moved closer to the nose of his cruiser and held the license in the wash of clarity coming from the headlights. He had this kind of radio on his left pectoral. He talked into his shoulder and then I heard a squawky reply that I couldn’t make out. Then he came back over to us.

“Which one of you is Jerome and which one is Kenneth?”

“I’m Kenneth,” Keno said. He didn’t bother to tell this law enforcement troglodyte that he went by Keno.

“I’m Jerome,” I said. “Everybody calls me Romy.”

“Well, Kenneth. Well, Romy. I guess you boys ’ve been drinking a lot of beer tonight?”

I was trying to come up with a response that would fix things, but Officer Eaton just turned on the heels of his boots and headed up towards Keno’s daddy’s truck. He was back moments later with the mason jars. I could see there was still about an inch in one of the jars.

“This here’s moonshine?”

I wish I’d been wise enough not to say what I said next.

“I told you we wasn’t drinking beer.”

I got another blast from ole laser eyes.

“Where’d you boy’s get moonshine?”

Without missing a beat, Keno spoke up. I figure he was aiming to protect his Uncle Clearance’s manufacturing site. “We bought it off a nigger,” he said.

“Don’t be using the N-word ‘round me, boy! There’re black folk around here that’d cut your nuts off shove ‘em up your nose for using the N-word. What if you want a run for President someday? That kind of phraseology can ruin your life.

“Now tell me this, where is the black gentleman you bought this stuff off of?”

“We never seen him before,” Keno said, “and we’ll never see him again.”

Well, we got us an escorted trip into Bolivia with exclusive reservations at the elegant Bolivia City Jail. It was more of a holding cell than a jail.

They held you in this little cell ‘til you could be transported to the county jail which was more like a real jail.

We got interrogated first. For that, they separated us, and questioned each of us for the longest time. Eventually, one of cracked. I said it was Keno that cracked first. He said it was me. I guess we both cracked. How ever it happened we both them all about how we came to be hauling Aunt Pansy to Holdenville for embalming and how she must’ve slide out the back of the truck on our way there.

“I was afraid that it was somethin’ like that,” Eaton says to me.

“How so?” I asked him.

“We got a call earlier this evening. Seems this old man and his boys were out feeding their cows when they came upon this long box. According to the boys, they thought a crate like rifles was shipped in, or some shit like that. So, they slide the box in the back of their truck, took it home with them, and unloaded it in their barn. The old man used a power drill with a Phillips bit and unscrewed the lid. When he look inside and saw a dead body inside it shocked him so bad he had a heart attack and died right there on the spot.”

So, that’s how Keno and me came to kill a man.

We weren’t charged with killing any body, but both of us felt like that’s what we’d done. We were arrested, me for public drunk, Keno for DUI. We spent a night in jail and the next morning Keno’s mama came down and bailed us out.

Considering the circumstances, she was amazingly unpissed. I think we’d’ve handled it better if she had been pissed off. What she did, instead, was cry. That is the way it was the whole time we were with her. She cried and whimpered, and kept saying, “I can’t believe what you boys have done. I can’t believe it.” Or she’d just look at Keno with amazement and say, “Where did I go wrong?”

I felt powerfully bad, I really did. I also felt powerfully hung over. The spit in my mouth felt like rubber glue. My head was throbbing like a strobe light at a rock concert. Keno looked green. I hoped I didn’t look as sick as he looked to me.

After getting out of jail, we had to head over to the Bolivia IGA. The police had hauled Aunt Pansy to the IGA and got the store manager to open up and allowing them to store Aunt Pansy in their meat locker.

When we picked up that coffin, I saw that the box was scuffed up, but it still seemed as solid as steel. There was not even the slightest wiggle in ole Clearance’s workmanship. What I felt most fortunate about was not having to go out to that farm and face those folk whose daddy’d keeled over when he saw Aunt Pansy.

We finally did finish the chore. With Keno’s mama following us the whole way, we got Keno’s Aunt Pansy embalmed and back to Lamar and we helped put her in the ground. It was a hard service to get through, partly because of guilt and mostly because of being hung over.

We stood around while Clarence, who didn’t seem so religious, said the words of the old gal.

“We’re here to bury our sister in Christ, Pansy Duggan. We lay her down to her final rest here in the family plot. She sleeps among the loved ones that’ve gone on before her. You know,” he went on to say, “grave yards like this one are quiet places. They’re far from the stresses and commotion of our daily life. These are peaceful places. Nothing much goes on here. But it won’t always be so. Someday, graveyards are going to be busy places. Someday Christ will return, and when he does the dead in Christ will rise first, and the rest of us. On that day, graveyards will no longer be quiet places. Then they’ll be the busiest of places. For even though we die, we believe that in Christ, we will live forever. A-men.”

“Amen,” we all said.

We stayed around, Keno and me, after most ever’body else’d left to help shovel in dirt on top of Aunt Pansy. It was the least we could do after screwing up as bad as we did.

My head was throbbing and my guts were churning as I started the final chore of covering ole Aunt Pansy over with earth. Before I’d pushed in five shovels full, I was sweating like racehorse.

“Well,” Keno says, and I looked over and saw that he was soaked in lathering sweat, “we’ll remember this for the rest of our lives.”

But for me remembering was not important. What was important was making sense out of all this. I was shoveling in the red dirt and wondering if I’d ever make sense out all this.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Proposition 8: Rights Robbed by Voting


What California voters did with Proposition 8 has taken away a right that had previously existed: gay marriage. The issue of gay marriage is apparently very threatening to some people. Some are clearly homophobic, and for these people there is little to be done. For others the objection is based primarily on religious beliefs. Some political leaders, in an attempt to have it both ways, in an effort to calm the concerns of religious fundamentalists, while dangling a carrot in front of gay citizens, have advocated something called Civil Union.

What is Marriage?

While marriage is a formal committed relationship between two people who take commitment vows to love one another from that point forward. The opponents of Proposition 8 would want me to add that the marriage commitment is not between two people, but between a man and a woman, and, until recently that is true. For many, marriage is a religious sacrament, and those who place a religious slant on this topic do so because the commitment vows are made not just between the couple, but also with the community and before God.

What some miss is that marriage is also, and perhaps primarily a legal status. When you are married you have entered into a legal relationship subject to the laws of the land. Marriage is not just a private matter, or you could just privately dissolve that relationship. There would be no need for divorce. Married couples can be a unit and buy property jointly. This means that they share the debt, they share the ownership, and should they seek to end their relationship the governments through the legal system will determine that the rights of all parties are considered and that the division of property is completed in accordance with law. Marriage is also a legal state that is recognized not only all over this country, but also all over the world.

What is a Civil Union?

A Civil Unions is both a concept, and actually exist in a handful of places like the state of Vermont. The idea of a Civil Union was to provide gay couples the same legal rights as married couples, without having to actually call that status marriage. There are a number of problems with Civil Unions, as far as the gay couples are concerned:

The protections of a Civil Union do not extend beyond the border of the state where it exists (such as Vermont) so that if a civil union couple moved to Oklahoma they would no longer have the legal rights they had in Vermont regarding joint ownership of property, being able to be on their partner's health insurance, etc. No federal protections are included with a Civil Union. Civil Unions may offer some of the same rights as marriage, but only on a state level.

To those liberal fundamentalists feel that by allowing Civil Unions they have given homosexual couples the legal protections of marriage while protecting the sanctity of marriage as it has traditionally been defined. In essence, some feel that if they are liberal enough to permit Civil Unions they have set up a separate category of committed relationship that is different from but equal to marriage.

Separate Not Equal

If something has to be separate it is obviously not equal.

When I was a kid there were separate but equal water fountains. The water was the same, so wouldn't a colored water fountain be equal to and the same as a white water fountain? In my past I recall there was a city pool for whites and a separate pool for blacks. Isn't that equal? That is actually the point: if the water is the same, then why must there be separation? The separation is necessary because the people being segregated are viewed as being not like us, not as good as us, not equal to us. If we have the same rights and deserve the same treatment, then the rights and the treatment will be the same, there will be no separation of any kind.
I remember as a kid having to cut a cookie in half and share it with my brother. If I got to cut the cookie, my half tended to be a little bigger. If we learned one thing from separate but equal as it was applied to black and white people is that it was the white people who did the separating, and the facilities were rarely ever anything close to being equal.

The colored restrooms were dirty and substandard. The colored water fountain was not cooled water, and it came from a brass faucet not from a chrome state of the art spigot. The colored school had the old, outdated text books, the white school discarded desks, and on and on it goes.
The concept of equal rights is something that should not be compromised by custom, majority vote, or religious convictions. The only equality is equality. You can't separate out anything and still say it is equal.

The Tyranny of Democracy

I do support Civil Unions for one reason and one reason only: because we live with something called the tyranny of democracy. As long as people can vote the majority can supplant the efforts of minority groups to have equality. Civil Unions can become a baby step toward marriage open and available to all regardless of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. We should not have to take baby steps toward equality, but baby steps are better than back peddling.

California's Rights Robbery
The problem with California's Proposition 8 is that it is not a baby step toward equality. The equality in marriage was already legal there. In California the people were not working toward equal rights, there they had rights that were taken away by the tyranny of the majority vote. Proposition 8 was a ploy to rob people of rights they already had, and that may have been legal, but it was far from ethical, and millions of miles from being fair.

A Liberal Looks at the Bible and Pro-Choice


If you are a fundamentalist Christian then you believe that the Bible is written by God, that men, moved by the Holy Spirit, put down on paper the words God wanted on paper, and therefore, every word of the Bible comes from God, that the Bible is the Word of God. People that hold such beliefs tend to use the Bible as a reference guide. If you have a question, and you want to please God, you look in the reference book, and follow the directions.

When it comes to abortion, the Bible says nothing directly. This sort of thing happens all the time. There were no airplanes at the time of biblical composition, so can you ride on a plane? There was no electricity, so is it OK for believers to flip on a light?

Most of us don't worry so much about these issues because they don't bother us and we can assume that they don't bother God. I say most of us, because the Amish don't find tractors in the Bible and so they use animals of labor and a drag plow, but most of us only turn to the Biblical Reference Book when we are afraid some issue might be displeasing to God.

Actually, most of those turning to the Bible already have an opinion and they are looking for "proof-text" to support their opinion. This is done with topics like gay marriage, the death penalty, and abortion. But if you have no clear text to prove the position you want to take, then what do you do?

There is actually an area of study and scholarship dedicated to how to interpret the Bible, called Hermeneutics. The word Hermeneutics was created out of a Greek mythological reference to Hermes, the messenger of the gods. It seems like an odd place for Christian theologians to get a word, but it does fit. Hermeneutics is the study of how one can interpret the messages of God in a manner that insures you will have the proper interpretation.

One Hermeneutic rule is that when you can't find a directly applicable passage you find similar, related passages that can be compared. Here is how a Hermeneutic thinker might approach the subject of abortion: If the Bible says nothing about abortion, does it say anything about unborn babies, accidental miscarriages, and that sort of thing? The answer is yes.

Let's consider one common passage often applied to this abortion subject: Exodus 21:22-25 (Today's New International Version)

22 "If people are fighting and a pregnant woman is hit and gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

I have to say this passage is not a great fit for the topic of abortion. For one reason, the passage is not really clear. Another Hermeneutic rule is to consider a passage within its context, and not to consider a sentence or phrase in isolation. For example, in the Genesis story, the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil she would not die. If you take that part in isolation the passage would be saying something that, in context, turns out to be a lie. It was not true. The context of the Exodus passage is a long discussion of how punishments are applied. Throughout the chapter the writer is listing situations, and then listing the type of punishments to be applied to those infractions.

In Exodus 21:22-25 the infraction has to do with what should happen if two guys are fighting and a pregnant woman is injured. What some think the passage says is that if the woman is injured, the inadvertent assailant must be punished in a manner that is equal to the crime. The perpetrator is to receive the very same wound he caused the woman: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc. If the woman dies, then the punishment is suppose to be a life for a life and the man who caused the woman's death is to die. This is sometimes referred to as the lex talionis [or the life for life principle] On the other hand, if the woman miscarries then the perpetrators are suppose to be fined whatever the husband demands.

There remains some wiggle room in the interpretation because the passage is a translation, and some will argue that the Hebrew word for miscarry might not be properly translated. Perhaps it is not miscarrying, but premature delivery being addressed by the passage.

The passage might imply that the Bible, and therefore God, values the life of an already born person over the life of a not yet born person. You just have to use the word might here because the passage is not about abortion, it is being applied to a concept, and we may have it right, and we may not have it right. All we can say is it is at least possible that God values people after birth a little more than people before birth.

I am a former fundamentalist, but I am one no longer. I don't view the Bible as a reference book, and I am not searching for outer reassurances that God and I are OK with one another. God may value a born person a little more than an unborn person, but regardless of God's position on this, I do value a born person a little more than one not yet born. The closer a person gets to birth the more value I place on that person. But there is never a point when I have feel the unborn have zero value. The value is there, and it starts at conception. The loss of life, including the life of an unborn person is still a tragic thing. I am pro-choice, and I am not an advocate of abortion. Maybe this sounds crazy to you, but I would say that MOST pro-choice activists do not like abortion, or want more abortions to take place.

Consider another biblical passage: Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 NIV

1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build. . .

At least for me, I always see abortion as killing. I don't like it, but, as in the Ecclesiastes passage, there are times when there is a time for death, and for killing. If there are times when killing and death occur it is never a good thing. However, I grew up when abortion was illegal. On TV shows like Doctor Kildare and Ben Casey they had shows where young women, pregnant and facing great stress and difficulty sought out illegal abortions and died. The loss of life, and the complications experienced by survivors of illegal abortions drove millions of Americans to advocate for legal abortion.

The advocacy for abortion in those pre-Roe days grew out of a generally accepted notion that the life of a young woman was worth just a little more than the life of some fetal tissue. The motive of those early abortion supporters was to make abortion safe, legal and, at least for many of us, rare. I support the right of a woman to choose whether or not to bear a child. I would prefer that we spend money and PR to advocate for and provide sex education and access to contraception. I know that the fundamentalists draw away from contraception and sex ed because they fear it is going to encourage young people to have sex.

I think hormones encourage young people to have sex. I think there is an evolutionary urge in the brains of humans to perpetuate our species via reproduction. Having had sex before, I remember that it is somewhat pleasant, and something, once experienced is not only enjoyed, but it is something you would love to re-experience. People have sex. People will continue to have sex even when there are negative consequences.

Hell, the male cat has barbs on its penis and when it mates it causes physical pain to the females, and yet, when in heat, the female cat can't wait to be mounted.

I want abortion to be rarely used, and a last resort, but I just don't want desperate young women to risk and lose their life to abort a pregnancy. If God is love, then I believe God would not want to deny desperate people a safe choice. The key here is the word desperate. When you are desperate you do what you have to do, take incredible risks and nothing is going to stop you if you are desperate enough.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Unappealin' Palin




Now that the Republicans have lost the White House they are attacking Sarah Palin. Republicans, FROM INSIDE THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN, have leaked to the press that Palin did not know Africa is a continent and instead thinking the whole thing is a single country. Palin was said to have no clue as to which countries made up NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Republican insiders are leaking stories to make Sarah look stupid. She may be stupid. I think all of us are stupid on some subject areas. I feel sorry for Governor Palin.

Palin may have said that she thought Africa was a country and maybe she didn’t get the difference between a continent and a country, but at least once, in the mad harridness of the campaign, someone asked Obama about how many states he had visited and he said he thought he’d been to all 57. If you haven’t been THAT busy, THAT tired, and surrounded by insistant, rude, constant, strange questioners you would say some stupid stuff from time to time.

Don’t get me wrong. I am relieved that Palin is not our VP elect, but I still hesitate to mock Palin’s ignorance, especially since my own moutain of ignorance requires one to strap on oxygen tanks to approach the summit, but then, I was not a VP candidate to a guy who was 72, and has had 3 previous cancer occurances. While I hesitate to mock ignorance, I also don’t celebrate ignorance. I do not advocate for anti-intellectualism. Palin didn’t ask to be on the world stage, she was asked. Yeah, she accepted, and that was a foolish thing to do if you sensed you just weren’t up to the big leagues, but who says she sensed that? If she is as ignorant as some are saying, then she may have had no clue how daunting the job was going to be. If there is real oops I stepped in the poopy going on, it should be with the McCain campaign staffers who pushed and pulled Palin on to the world stage without having her audition for the part. It seems to me that this blame shifting to Palin is more a stain on McCain than on Palin.

Had they properly vetted her, Republican staffers would have found that while most law enforcement agencies and municipals in Alaska absorbed the costs of a rape kit, when investigating that crime, in the city of Wasilla rape victims had to pay for their own forensic tests and this was the practice while Sarah Palin was mayor. They would have found that Palin had a religious explanation for global warming that let polluters off the hook. They might have discovered that she had no clear idea of what the job of VP was, nor did she have a basic understanding of the content of the US Constitution. They would have discovered that she had a shocking lack of knowledge regarding geography, and political current events. Had the Republican staffers of the McCain campaign looked into Palin just a little closer they would have found that she shoots from the hip, that she doesn’t like to prepare, that she was anti-intellectual, that her experience dealing with the press, and high pressure situations were lacked a general knowledge of civics.

The saddest part of all this is that these leaks about what a Diva, Wack-o, air-headed, wildly spending Wasilla hillbilly Palin is coming not from me, not from Democrats, but from staffers inside the McCain campaign. The Palin Bashing IS being reported by the media, and Palin is upset by the media, but the media is not making up these stories. The media is reporting statements coming out of Palin handlers, and McCain staffers high up and inside of the McCain campaign.

If Palin were a car then she may have been a lemon, but the McCain staffers who bought her, never checked the engine, didn’t bother with a test drive, and never kicked the tires. Hadn’t anyone ever heard the old saying, “You can’t tell a book by it’s cover?” If you don’t check, you sometimes get something you didn’t expect to get. If that happens it is not the fault of the book, or the auto-lemon, or the unprepared VP candidate, it is the fault of the folks that failed to check.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

I Feel Sorry For You: Our Intolerance


I start my new job today, so my daily writing on my blog and in Search Wrap may be less frequent. Just briefly, what I want to comment on this morning about the election of Barack Obama, and tolerance. On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said he was thrilled for Democrats, but that he wanted the Democrats to be equally as thrilled when evangelicals get excited and involved in changing the country via politics. Joe was offended that some pundits said when the Religious Right Republicans took control of this country it was equal to Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalists.

Well, I do see some, a few, a tiny, short, minuscule list of traits that are similar between Christian fundamentalists and any fundamentalists. This does not, in anyway, mean that I think the majority of Christian fundamentalists are like Al Qaeda.

In a political campaign there are things said in the heat of the debate that should not have been said, were not meant, or should not have been meant. Lies get told by all sides. This is, in part, the fault of the name at the head of the ticket, but not totally. There are so many cooks tossing stuff into the pot that the broth is going to taste funny at the end.
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Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding. ~Mohandas Gandhi

Here is what I wish: I wish we could have different opinions and not name call, or hate, or insult, or mock, ridicule, denigrate, sully, slur, or attack people who have different opinions. I have people that read my opinion and reply back, “I feel sorry for you, if you believe that!” That is a negative remark against me, not my opinion.

There are millions of reasons why people come to the opinions they cling to, and take the positions they cling to, and it is too shallow a response to say, “I’m sorry for you because you don’t have the same opinion I have.” If you want to pity the lack of my logic, then comment on the shallowness of the position, or the lack of supporting data, or the thinness of my rationale. Attack ideas, but not people.
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Of course, even by attacking intolerance, I may, perhaps, show a lack of tolerance. Consider the words of George Santayana:
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Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it. ~George Santayana

I hear opinions all the time that I could not disagree with more. I don’t pity those I disagree with, I am puzzled, perplexed, bewildered, baffled, taken aback, and I find the position off putting. What I would hope is that when people have odd, or shocking opinions that they would fallow the stating of their opinion with rationale. I would hope that those who are stunned by the seeming illogic of the opinion would consider the rationale. At that point, either accept or reject the rationale (not the person) and if you find the rationale unpersuasive that you would counter with a statement of your differing opinion, followed by a presentation of the rationale that lead you to your opinion.

Tolerance of the freedom of opinion and freedom of expression is what makes Americans a great people. When we sully and insult, intimidate or attack one another for having different views we stain the flag, and hold our system up for the world to ridicule.

If you don’t share my opinion, well, I’m sorry. I won’t be sorry for you. I will be sorry for me, because I want to live in a country, and in a world where there is tolerance, and where a discussion of diverse rationale leads us all closer to solutions needed to address our shared problems.
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I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Obama, Sexual Intercourse and the Psychology of Disappointment


It is important to realize that there is a predictable psychological response that almost always follows getting what you want: disappointment, and regret. It often occurs after we have built something up in our minds, dreamed, our dreams, imagined how great it was going to be IF ONLY, waited with the patience of a little kid expecting a bike for Christmas. We use various phrases to describe this phenomena, such as: buyer’s remorse, the let down, the honeymoon is over.

It is certainly true that by Wednesday, November 5, 2008 nearly half of the voters will be disappointed. What some may not realize that by November 5, 2010 it is likely that 2/3rds of the voters will be disappointed, wishing they had voted for the other guy, wishing Hillary had won, and on and on it will go.

This is a pattern of emotional behavior that is not isolated to elections, and it is inevitable that it will be experienced by lots of people who voted for the winner.

For many, the first time they have sex is one of the more dramatic times that they experience this Psychology of Regret. There really was no way to dodge this disappointment bullet when it comes to sex. Most of us build it up so great in our minds that there is nothing possible that would meet the level of ecstasy we were anticipating.
In my own case I can remember being in a bad car crash and as the car was tumbling over one, two, three times, and I was flopping around inside like a rag doll in a clothes drier, what I was praying was this: God don’t let me die before I get to have sexual intercourse.

Our hormones make us want sex so much that when it finally happens, it rarely, and maybe never equals what we anticipated.


This same phenomena applies to this year’s election.

For one thing, at least for me, and a few million others, this election has been so interesting, so exciting, so all consuming that (I and) we have become election junkies, addicted to the adrenaline rush of hourly campaign news. Without the hyper-reporting of campaign speeches, gaffs, controversial associations, “worse persons in the world” coverage and conservative-liberal mudslinging, and the yammering on of pundit debates what are we going to do? A withdrawal is inevitable, and all withdrawal is unpleasant, and is the perfect example of “let down.”

I believe Obama will win, but I also feel that it is still possible, by morning, that McCain could be our President elect. Regardless of who wins, I expect most of us to be engulfed in regret and disappointment in the days, weeks, and months that will follow this election. I also feel that the “let down” will be even greater should Obama be our President. After all, if Obama wins he will be the first African American to be President, so any unexpected current event, and every decision objected to by anyone is likely going to be blamed on his race. If the race thing isn’t central to our disappointment then all that Democrat,/liberal/socialist/Marxist labeling will be the reason Obama can’t turn water in to win, walk on water, fix the economy, provide National Health care, and eliminate taxes.

If disappointment is inevitable then what are all of us future disappointment victims to do?

  • Expect it. It is coming, so don’t over react to it.
  • Become an activist. The best way to fill the election action vacuum is to be a participant the political process that follows. For most folks, the “first time” they have sex is disappointing, they don't just stop having sex. Instead, they take a greater interest in the whole sexual experience. Most people work harder to contributing their part to make the whole sex thing good for both parties.

When we get disappointed with the political process we need to ask ourselves if there is something we can do to contribute to the process, and make the whole thing enjoyable for all of us.

There is an old democracy joke that fits well here.

Democracy is like sex. When it is good it is very, very good. When it is bad. . . it is still pretty damn good.