Hergest Ridge

First in a series of blog entries out of Iran, its liberal voices seeking a new way to live proud and free from political and religious tyranny.

Your Holiness,

Have you ever fallen in love? Have you ever gazed into the crimson of the wine, when you can still feel the spot where she kissed you on your eyelids? Have you ever danced? Have you ever had Maz Maz dipped in Mast Moseer? Have you ever worn jeans? Do you know what Mum roll-on deodorant is? Have you ever cried at night? How many years did you go to school? Have you ever made abghosht? Have you ever got a barbeque going? Tell me, what is Newton’s Third Law?

How many times has the scent of springtime in Shiraz driven you wild? Have you ever kissed a dog? Have you ever listened to Persian classical music? Or what about rap? Do you ever whistle?

Have you ever kissed her neck? What about behind her ears?

Have you ever downloaded an MP3 from the Internet? Do you ever ask the guy at the kiosk selling cigarettes how he’s doing? Ever walked through town at midnight? Have they ever raided your home and confiscated your books?

Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just can’t remember the color? Have you ever called your mother up from far away and asked her to describe the color of those tiles – at the mention of which you both uncontrollably sob?

Have you ever longed for the windows of your apartment in Tehran?

Christianity is based on the notion that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is what you have to reject to reject Christianity.

You don’t have to prove the universe to be absent of god in the same way you don’t have to prove that Poseidon or Zeus or any of the thousands of other dead gods are absent from the universe. With Christianity it is a textual claim about the veracity of the bible.

Consider what this amounts to: Bible scholars agree that the first gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus. Decades. And of course we don’t have the original manuscripts, we have copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts which have thousands, literally thousands of discrepancies between them, many of which show signs of later interpolation which is to say people have added passages that then became part of the cannon.

There are whole books of the cannon like the Book of Revelation which for hundreds of years were not included because they were deemed false gospel. There are other whole books like the Shepherd of Hermes which you probably haven’t heard of but for centuries it was considered part of the cannon and then was later deemed false gospel. Generations of Christians lived and died being guided by gospel that is now deemed both incomplete and mistaken. Think about that.

This process, this all too human process of cobbling together the supposed authoritative word of god is a very precarious basis to assert the claims of Christianity. But the truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous claims of the miracles of Jesus this would not be good enough, because miracle stories abound even in the 21st century.

The followers of the south Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba ascribe all of the miracles of Jesus to him. He reads minds, he foretells the future, he healed, he raises the dead, he was born of a virgin. Sathya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure. You might not have heard of him, but they had a birthday party for him a few years ago and a million people showed up. There are vast numbers of people who think he is a living god. So Christianity is predicated on the claim that miracle stories exactly of the kind that today’s surrounded person like Sathya Sai Baba become especially credible when you place them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century roman empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as attested to by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek and largely discrepant manuscripts.

We have Sathya Sai Baba’s miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eye witnesses and they don’t even merit an hour on cable television. And yet you put a few miracle stories in an ancient book and half the people on earth think it a legitimate project to organise their life around. Does any one else see a problem with that?

 
“Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”
 
– Richard Fulke Greville

Ingenious experiments have shown that nerve cells, when they grow out from the spinal cord, or from the brain, find their way to their end organ not by following any kind of overall plan but by chemical attraction, rather as a dog sniffs around to find a bitch in season. An early classic experiment by the Nobel-Prize-winning embryologist Roger Sperry illustrates the principle perfectly.

Sperry and a colleague took a tadpole and removed a tiny square of skin from the back. They removed another square, the same size, from the belly. They then regrafted the two squares, but each in the other’s place: the belly skin was grafted on the back, and the back skin on the belly.

When the tadpole grew up into a frog, the result was rather pretty, as experiments in embryology often are: there was a neat postage stamp of white belly skin in the middle of the dark, mottled back, and another neat postage stamp of dark mottled skin in the middle of the white belly. And now for the point of the story. Normally, if you tickle a frog on its back with a bristle, the frog will wipe the place with a foot, as if deterring an irritating fly. But when Sperry tickled his experimental frog on the white ‘postage stamp’ on its back, it wiped its belly! And when Sperry tickled it on the dark postage stamp on its belly, the frog wiped its back.

What happens in normal embryonic development, according to Sperry’s interpretation, is that axons (long ‘wires’, each one a narrow, tubular extension of a single nerve cell) grow questingly, out from the spinal cord, sniffing like a dog for belly skin. Other axons grow out from the spinal cord, sniffing like a dog for belly skin. And normally this gives the right result: tickles on the back feel as though they are on the back, while tickles on the belly feel as though they are on the belly. But in Sperry’s experimental frog, some of the nerve cells sniffing out belly skin found the postage stamp of belly skin grafted on the back, presumably because it smelled right. And vice versa.

People who believe in some sort of tabula rasa theory – whereby we are all born with a blank sheet for a mind, and fill it in by experience – must be surprised at Sperry’s result. They would expect that frogs would learn from experience to feel their way around their own skin, associating the right sensations with the right places on the skin. Instead, it seems that each nerve cell in the spinal cord is labelled, say, a belly nerve cell or a back nerve cell, even before it makes contact with the appropriate skin. It will later find its designated target pixel of skin, wherever it may be. If a fly were to crawl up the length of its back, Sperry’s frog would presumably experience the illusion that the fly suddenly leaped from the back to belly, crawled a little further, then instantaneously leaped on the back again.

Experiments like this led Sperry to formulate his ‘chemo-affinity’ hypothesis, according to which the nervous system wires itself up not by following an overall blueprint but by each individual axon seeking out end organs with which it has a particular chemical affinity.

 
There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land.
They said “Let us pray,” and we dutifully shut our eyes.
When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.
 
Desmond M. Tutu

What do WalMart, BestBuy, Procter & Gamble, and Travelocity have in common? Come to think of it, too much – forget I asked. But there is one thing I’d like for them and their likes to continue doing, and that’s pulling advertising money out from propaganda aired on FoxNews. (If this dream turns reality, FoxNews as a whole will go off air and the stupefied Under 50IQ Paranoiacs-R-Us will be left to wonder the streets, thus increasing their chances of getting killed by a speeding vehicle.)

Reports suggest that the list of companies requesting their advertisements not be part of Glenn Beck’s Duckspeak has now reached 20. (Source: The Huffington Post)

Even God is pleased; using angels’ blood He signed a self-imposed Cease to Kill Kittens, normally executed by the Almighty at a 1:1 ratio for each act of human masturbation. (Since the Reforms of ’79, acts of ape and chimp masturbation do not result in kitten executions. Ever since, humans have tried and failed to work out a similar deal with God, leaving many to feel shame and guilt over simply being human.)

The cease is valid on all days a new company pulls its advertising from FoxNews, a gesture which outraged the Mice Consortium, but to which the K9 Units responded with an enthusiastic wag of the tail.

1. What in your opinion is the biggest misconception about atheism?
Atheism is probably the most useless word – it says absolutely nothing. Understand that, and you just might grasp your neighbourhood atheist.

Atheism is a negation of theism. It tells you absolutely nothing about what I believe. Yet time and time again, theists lump atheists together under one umbrella of “the belief in non belief.” It’s absurd.

There is no belief in the non-belief of something. You make a case for an invisible god in the room, and somehow think that me not going along with the idea is a whole new belief system? Then you’re misusing the word belief. You’re rendering it useless to the point where it does not help identify any group in a meaningful way. You’re doing what religion does best – mudding the water. Making everything so blurry, no one knows the facts, and each is left to proclaim their own “truth.”

2. Do you think there is extra-terrestrial or extra-universal intelligence?
Yes. Has it visited us on earth? No, probably not. Basis? Drake Equation. I suggest you look into it when you get a chance.

3. What in your opinion is the poorest argument for religion and why?
Religion has no good arguments, not a single one. But if I could rid the planet of just one, I’d like for everyone to recognise that religions do not make us moral beings. When you read Deutronomy 22 and are told to stone the woman who’s not a virgin on her wedding night, you find no other direct counter verse. You are deciding which verses follow. The moral compass is inside you, but religion is trying to convince you that it was it that gave you this gift. Like hell it did. Pun intended.

4. What would would be your perfect society? Secular? non religious? Anarchic? Why?
Just as there probably is no god, there is nothing that is perfect. For some people the idea of mortality and secularism is hell, and I don’t think I’d find myself enjoying life in a secular society full of stressed out fellow men. I mean you can get the best job position in the world, but if everyone around you is going to pieces, you’re not likely to enjoy your work.

Forget one encompassing solution for everyone. Each to their own, without fear of persecution and imposed creeds. I’d personally be one miserable creature if evidence for god began surfacing. What I enjoy of my life I enjoy because it will end, “and nothing shall be left of me or my ego.” Nothing that is limitless has ever found any value in the hearts of men.

5. If when you die you find god, how would you justify yourself to him?
I will adopt Rick Moen’s Strategy: “In the unlikely event of losing Pascal’s Wager, I intend to saunter into Judgement Day with a bookshelf full of grievances, a flaming sword of my own devising, and a serious attitude problem.”

If despite being blessed with a brain I am told by god that I was to ignore everything it tells me, he is no king of mine. “To his credit, man has for thousands of years worked to fix the botched job god has done.” I don’t know who said that, but I have a feeling we’d see eye to eye.

If there is a god, the only sensible thing to do is to picket his gates – have him give some credit where it is due. No more free-riding. Give us a pat on the back and some perks for putting up with shit like cancer, violence, suffering, and the god damned Conservative, right wing politics.

Amen.