the end of conspiracy theories: the bubble bursts

Based on observations described in the Gates-Musk paradox and the Great Reset Self-Deception, conspiracy theorists are not concerned with dangers to the public and are not concerned with conspirators. Their priority is creating a fictionalized world contrary to the familiar real world, a fiction that confirms their distrust of reality and information. Their fictions attach to Bill Gates because his philanthropy is remote, coordinated, unemotional, stable, well-supported -- so attributing evil intent endorses the theorist's distrust of reality. Their theories do not attach to Musk because, as an idiosyncratic, unstable, independent and erratic self-promoter, he's not in the least remote or suggestive of secrecy. 

So here's a prediction. The Trump administration will undermine the interest in conspiracy theories as reality becomes darker and more malign. The real world of real danger will crowd out the paranoid world of distrust. Fewer distrustful citizens will grasp for unrealities when real dangers are in front of them. Maybe Americans will get real. 

Probably not.  

social media and the lost rite of passage: against Haidt

"You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were."

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff."

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was."

-- Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)

Jon Haidt has been on a long crusade against social media arguing that it distracts from social contact. His data are largely correlations between psychological stats and increases in phone use. He argues, very likely correctly, that the phone use is causal. But causal relations don't identify the explanation. It could be that in-person contact is essential, as he maintains. But it could be that phone use encourages young people to measure themselves by unrealistic standards of social presentation. Or maybe we're missing something else. I want to observe what I think is a radical change in development, the rite of passage, a feature of cultures across the world and across time. 

What I most remember of high school culture was that we all knew at all times what in the culture at large, and especially pop culture, was hip, cool, genuine and authentic, and what was fake marketing, wannabe, lame trying to be hip, in Holden Caulfield's expression, phony. We seemed to have an instinct for perceiving the transparency of effort compared with the real thing-of-the-moment, instant recognition of what was mimicry-a-moment-too-late versus innovative grasp of the cultural now and the talent to create the new. 

This keen, clear and absolute perception was, of course, a collective one. A cultural moment is a shared perception, and it's the sharing that makes it momentary. Like the hipster effect, the appearance of authenticity lasts only as long as it's new and different and different from previous kinds of difference (see "where the future is behind you"), so it's got to have a grasp of the cultural moment while bringing it into a new one. The standard of genuineness in high school is not merely high, it's as high as possible at all times. 

Maybe because it's so brutally high a standard, adolescents, at least back in my day, rejected sentimentality as a weakening of standards. We could detect the smell of saccharine instantly. There's just no room for dwelling on emotions in this cut-throat competitive market of fashion. 

In all of this, adolescence rejected the adult world of lame mimicry, bad taste and inability to recognize the genuinely new. For my generation it led us all to protest the Viet Nam War and adult conformity. The generation immediately following mine plunged into Punk, which made of this a political attack on all of the adult system, its economics, its class oppression, its blind acceptance of every evil of modernity and stability. 

All of these perceptions and rejections -- what Salinger so uniquely portrayed in his character's objection to "phonies" -- all depend on childhood's freedom from having to adjust to the responsibilities and obligations of making one's way in the working world, that world of selling out one's principles to work with other sell-outs from other cultural moments and from other social backgrounds, working with fellow adults who don't share your music, your politics, your adolescent cultural moment. 

The transition from a culture where your cohort supports your most minute sensibilities and perceptions to a culture where that support is entirely lost, where your principles and tastes must be compromised -- and compromise was exactly what the purity and absoluteness of adolescent culture most rejected -- that transition in the age of social media, seems to have been lost. 

When friends my age complain that the young are not just all looking down at their phones but have their ears plugged with buds, I wonder whether those young adults have merely found a way to preserve the purity of their adolescent standards, tastes, values and meaning. 

TV in the 1960's was a kind of babysitter and social and cultural engagement. but it wasn't interactive beyond changing the channel among few options -- 2,4,5,7,9,11 and later 13. Social media is vastly more interactive. There's something strange about everyone assuming that social media isn't social. It's obviously social, it's just that it looks like it's excluding the in-person. It's visible presentation is anti-social. But once you look into what's on the phone, oh, that's not just social, it's also interactively informational. Hasn't anyone noticed that gamers are incredibly sharp and fast and brilliant at dealing with the world? 

Most recently, social media is blamed on fertility decline. It's not that couples are having fewer children, it's that there are fewer couples and that's because people prefer to stay at home with the internet and games and movies than connect in person. But couldn't it be that they are too connected -- too connected with their clique, that adolescent support group with its finger on the cultural pulse? 

If I had such a support group, I too would put on ear buds and shut out the rest of the world too. Who wants to socialize with people you don't identify with and who aren't hip enough to get your identity? 

incoherence of the gnomiad: the wellness paradox, living in the now, predictive mind and the purpose of life

A older friend tells me proudly that he drank a six pack for breakfast. He's living in the now, he says. And he does seem happier than usual, though in my experience of him that's not a high bar. He advised me that worrying about longevity is a mistake. I disagree, but I can see from his perspective health advice is a case of true but wrong. But it's also a case of the questions you ask determine the answers you get. 

His choice reminded me of Li Bo (I see it's now Li Bai, according to Wikipedia, the arbiter of truth) the great Tang poet who extolled the virtues of drunkenness. Wine was for him the entrance to the mystical vast room of nature, even of the universe itself and key to its secret essence. The poet who, legend says, drowned while reaching to grasp the moon's reflection in the water. The great Li Bo who reached the boundaries of life and mind as no one else more. 

My friend is also the parent of a single child who's finished his premed undergrad work at Duke, now living with his girlfriend back in North Carolina. My friend is an empty-nester. He has no ambitions that I know of, no goals, now that his son has set himself up for his future. 

He seemed to me to be an ideal dad. He home schooled his son for several years, and whenever I saw him, he was with his son playing ball or hanging out together. He seemed much happier then. 

I wonder about this "living in the now" as a prescription of how to live best. Is it a means to perceive the world aright without our distractions of plans and worries? An escape from predictive mind, that focus on survival and avoidance of surprise? Or a wellness prescription to free oneself of stress and lower one's blood pressure and protect the kidneys? Or is it a kind of hedonism of the moment? We all must die, so enjoy the moment. That's not a health prescription, unless it's "don't worry yourself and you will be healthier to appreciate the now until you die". How is this living in the now not a bit suicidal? 

If you push that nihilism all the way, then there's no point in our narrow predictive mind worries but also no point in shedding them. What great value is there in experiencing nature as it really is outside our self-preservation drives? It all seems misguided and empty-headed. After all, all our emotions -- including joy and engagement -- are given to us by natural selection as useful to our survival. Why pervert them to impractical uselessness? Why not employ them to their rightful purpose, survival? Is there no joy in defeating the grim reaper another day?

But most striking to me is the implication that there's no purpose in such a life-in-the-now. Ever since I was little -- five or six -- I've had a great ambition. I wanted to understand the world and ideas. Over time, that became understanding the systems of the world -- society, economies, language, the mind -- and the history of ideas, of philosophies. And now I am moved by honor: I desperately want to collect what I have learnt over my experience and give an account of myself. To me, that's the purpose of being here. Humans alone in this universe, so far as we know, can understand and symbolize the universe itself. If you are not contributing to that knowledge and sharing it, I say you're underachieving. 

And it's for that reason I worry about longevity. Will I have the time to complete my task of writing this blog? I'm happy to sacrifice "living in the now" for the work that I have. I'm really not interested in the now. I'm focused on my goal. The meaning of life is engaging so deeply with something outside oneself so that you forget life and yourself entirely. 

If I had no ambition, maybe I'd want to "live in the now". But I don't want to be without ambition. Life doesn't end with death. Your account of yourself remains. You have work to do. 

debt, negative integer theory, and real wealth

"Suppose there's a bus with exactly ten people inside it. Twelve people get out of the bus. How many people do you have to put back in the bus so nobody's in it?

 -- translated punchline of a joke from the German online platform Quora

I still laugh at this punchline. Maybe it's because when I first read it, I couldn't understand it at all, or I couldn't believe what I was reading. I had to Google translate it to believe it, and that made the absurdity of it all the more ridiculous. For context: the punchline is the last ditch attempt of a grade school teacher trying to explain negative numbers. "Suppose you subtract 3 from 2, what does that add up to?" -- add up to leaves the students puzzled, as is "Take 2 away from 1, what's the sum?" -- sum? -- so the punchline above is intended as a "concrete" example using real-world objects to render the abstract idea easier to grasp. And there it stands in all its glory. 

It still makes me laugh. 

Math is not real in the way the real world is real. It's an axiomatic system, a sometimes useful fiction. But it's used a lot to describe economies, and economies are as real a thing as can be, with real impacts on real people. And math is used not just by economists. Ordinary people measure their own wealth with numbers for income, taxes, rent, mortgages. 

Still, in some deep way, people can't be numbered negatively, and values either, and yet maybe the great beauty of economics is that it can give a number for a value, called a price. That's what hooked me on economics. A price is mere number, a thing of utter abstraction, yet it reflects, at least on the demand side, a human value, an emotion and desire, even a threshold of sacrifice and a relation to everything else you might want, and not just an emotion and desire but a quantification of a thing so human nothing can be more so. 

Words are like this too. They express meanings. We all take them for granted, but they are truly magical, traversing the physical and intellectual and abstract and even spiritual worlds. Their physical properties belong to a structure -- semiology -- unlike any other science of cause-effect, material and formal causes (explained in what dogs are not saying). For a semanticist, it's endlessly intriguing -- ideas or meanings, whatever they are, constrained into physical sound sequences. 

And the same magic occurs with price. Its structure belongs not to the thing, but to the entire structure of supply, demand, production, labor, social hierarchy and property which engages government as well. That's so complex and interrelated that it's in the most literal sense, incomprehensible, like magic -- an emergent property born of the unaccountable complexity of many laws, many bodies, many dynamics and pressures. As mentioned in the post on fungible and non fungible fictions, religions pale against the magic of price traversing numbers with values in world of social complexity. 

But a lot of these numbers fail to express much of anything. GDP, income, even wealth are typically used to measure economies and participants. Like the German joke, they apply where they shouldn't. 

What is real wealth? Your smartphone. indoor plumbing, hot water, electricity, your fridge and your electric lights, having more shoes than you can wear. Not to be too Stephen Pinkerish, real wealth is all the stuff you want and buy. It can't be measured by income. Elon Musk's real wealth can't be measured in billions of dollars. It can be measured by the number of his children, how seriously other people take his stupid ideas, how engaged he is in his projects, and how much power he wields. That's real wealth. The billions are a bit like one word in a book. It plays a role, but it's not to be mistaken for the book itself. Similarly GDP. It's an abstract sum of a lotta lotta lotta real economic activity. Unlike a price, it doesn't reflect any human desire or real wealth. It masks the human element. It's really a measure of growth. Useful for investors and for comparing other macro sums like aggregate national land value relative to GDP or military spending relative to GDP or tax revenues relative to GDP. But not even US GDP compared with China's. For that we need GDP Purchasing Power Parity, the invention of which measure is an admission that GDP is kinda lame info. 

A friend worries that AI will create unimaginable wealth for its owners and immiserate the rest of us. But without consumers, no wealth. The deal with wealth creation is, the consumer expresses a desire, capital rushes to supply it for a price (this is just how Smith describes it as I recall), the consumer gets what it wants -- real wealth -- and the capitalist gets unimaginable financial wealth. The only real wealth that comes from such extremes of financial wealth, aside from a tenth private jet of minimal marginal value, is the power over government and other influences. That's real. But wholesale immiseration of the consumer seems like the end of wealth. The consumer has got to be able to buy, and more the merrier for the ownership class. 

There are dangers of catering to a luxury market, leaving crumbs for the bottom, but as long as the bottom is fat and broad, volume will still attract capital from somewhere.

Unless the techlords crowd out any competition. In a monopoly of technofeudalism, enshitification ensues. The questions are: how far can the techlords abuse the consumer; can they satisfy a large enough comfortable class to maintain stability in the social order, while ever more marginalizing the downscale? We already live in a bifurcated economy -- one for the haves and another that struggles by. When will the tech lords become so enrichificated that they no longer have to extort yet more riches from the consumer? In a cut-throat market too competitive to see the long view, never.

the universal uselessness of youtube and the charlatan's check

Fame and fortune: that's the lure of being a Youtuber. It costs nothing to have a channel. To create content, all you need is a camera and a microphone, and if you have a channel, you must already have either a phone or a computer, and both of these have cameras and microphones. YouTube offers fame and fortune -- for free! And whom do you think this incentive attracts? 

Every possible charlatan. 

Since YouTube is full of inaccurate, misleading information, including scams, charlatanism and all sorts of propaganda, there's only one way to tell whether a YouTube is useful and accurate, and that's if you already understand the material. But if you already understand the material, YouTube will be useless to you. Therefore, there can be no useful information on Youtube. : )

But there's plenty of dangerous information, given that watchers believe what they want to believe and don't understand. 

There is, however, a market correction in the ecology of youtube. I call it the Charlatan's Check. It used to be that the snake oil salesman traveled from one small town to the next, never staying long enough for the disappointed buyers to catch up with him and tar and feather him. But in the ecology of YouTube, the charlatan is stuck in place with his deceptions. He's gotta step up his game, otherwise he might lose his audience. 

This doesn't always result in good research or better advice, but it does strengthen the value of the performance. One radio health influencer used to rely largely on (justifiable) distrust of Big Pharma. But to keep up his market profile, over time he added lots of research. His new game consists of identifying a beneficial chemical present in a food -- citing scientific journals for support -- then another chemical in another food, and another and another until he's listed dozens of foods that you absolutely need to consume every day, more than you could eat in a day let alone afford to buy. What he doesn't mention, is that all these foods all have all these chemicals, so you could just buy and eat any one of them to gain all the benefits. It's a clever mountebanks scam. After listing a couple of dozen absolutely necessary foods -- all supported by science -- he offers his unique supplement containing everything you need in a spoonful of green dust. 

That's the Charlatan's Check. Notice he's given you lots of scientific information. That's an upgrade in his game. Expect upgrades also of propaganda and scamming. Another feature: scammers often endorse an analysis that the audience already knows and believes. Hearing this, the audience immediately feels confirmed in its beliefs and trusts the scammer all the more. 

Despite all this misinformation and gullibility, we still believe that democracy is a viable political system, that citizens are capable of making wise choices based on good information. The empirical fact is that democracy plays into polarization, and polarization plays into identity, not rational policy. And it's the character of my side bias (including confirmation bias) that no one ever truly believes she or he is biased. We always believe we're right, not biased. If we thought we were biased, we wouldn't believe what we believe. 

Can we change our bias? Only superficially when learning that some belief we held turns out to have consequences contrary to our more deeply held bias. Our deepest biases are who we are, our bias is us. Lose your bias, and you lose who you are. Get used to it. But maybe we should rethink democracy. 

difference: syntax vs semantics

Among Hegel fans and post modernists I hear this misconception about identity and difference: a thing is defined by what it is not, and therefore every identity is essentially its opposite. Their conclusion: A is ~A.

Now, it's one of the simplest proofs in logic that if a theory contains a contradiction like both A and ~A are true, it's easy to prove everything and anything (see the proof at the bottom). Assuming both A and ~A are false won't help the post modernists out of this consequence since "everything is false" is a liar paradox -- true if false, false if true -- so its negation "something is true" (not everything is false) must be true, even if "something is true" were the only truth.

Let all that aside. I want to point out that semantically, the members of A and ~A are mutually exclusive. They are different individuals. This is the difference between syntax and semantics. One is an axiomatic system, the other is a world of things or observable patterns that can be culled together as properties aka categories or similarities, whether inhering in reality or merely cognized (see information faster than light and reality versus science, math and thought).

Even the set of all things can be defined by ~A, the empty set since everything includes everything except nothing. (Yet notice that this isn't even so of symbols and language which can represent nothing.) Syntax is a bit like the laws of physics which don't in themselves distinguish the direction of time, except for the intersection of entropy and probability. Syntax alone doesn't distinguish the properties of the members of the set denoted by its symbols. Only semantics does, as it looks at the things, independently of their place in the axiomatic system being applied. To say that a thing is what it is not - because it is defined by what it isn't -- is just another post modernist gloss, in this case a lack of understanding of the logical difference between logical syntax and semantics. Once again, linguistics - a science, I hasten to add, not a piece of masturbatory philosophy - linguistic science clarifies the misunderstandings of the glib.

Post modernism targets a straw man of science, as if science were a body of knowledge and not a process -- an ongoing investigation into data including exploration and questioning of its own theories. Science begins -- only a beginning -- with defining categories of things and their properties. Say, start with biological organisms: explore and learn about that until you get to viruses and you realize that the categorical definitions don't work perfectly and need tweaking or deeper insight. One day whales are fish, then we discover they're mammals. That's a meaningful, useful and productive exploration of the category and its excluded Other. To say that there's no meaning misses the point. The meaning in science is quite substantial, but it's conditional and hypothetical. This is a tough position: it implies that what you understand today and live with and by, will be false some day in the future. That's the real aporia of history, not the synchronic aporia touted by post modernists.

Synchronic meanings -- meanings relative to a specific time and social structure of other meanings -- provide a useful, productive system for action and understanding, if we're always aware that at the margins its categories are vague, and only conditionally probable, not absolutely true. Without the synchronic system, there's no movement in any direction. I suppose there could be random drift, and random drift happens even within a synchronic categorical system, and pursuing the process of investigation has its own failures -- trendy but bad ideas, misleading paradigms. Sometimes drift is necessary just to open up new ideas. Post modernism seems to me to be one of these misdirected paradigms. It's clever, and its cleverness attracts the respect-seekers (look how clever am I!), but not much more value than that. Scientific questioning, when not used as a bludgeon, seems vastly more productive. Just look at the sciences and its favorite child technology. What has post modernism done for us? Lots of academic self-congratulations, publications and positions, not much knowledge. Questioning our assumptions? Sorry, that's what science is all about.

Here's the proof that if A and ~A are both true, everything must be true:

1. Premises: A, ~A are both true.

2. Since A is true according to (1) then "A or B" is true. 3. If ~A is true, then A is false. (Law of contradictories). 4. So if "A or B" is true by (2), and A is false by (3), then B must be true.

why call it intelligent design when it seems unintelligible and unintelligent? and a note on the incoherence of heaven

Category: spirituality?!?

I grew up with no religion, so please be patient with my puzzlement. 

I'm no atheist -- I have no beliefs one way or another about supernatural beings since I don't understand what a supernatural being would be like and, most likely, I would not recognize one if it started communicating with me. I wouldn't know it from an alien, a genie, a devil-in-disguise, some evil entity that insists on being worshipped, or a magical racketeer who promises good things if I light candles to it and pray, a fantast who threatens me with imaginary punishments and is willing to save me from them on the condition that I believe that he's actually god, or just a phantom of my crazy imagination....So I'm not an atheist. I just don't know what to make of people's beliefs about the supernatural. 

And I actually like religions, or some religions. They've got mystery and mysticism, beauty and glory, pageantry and morality, great stories, and often a long and colorful account explaining what we're here for and why we die etc. and even humor (a camel passing through the eye of a needle -- was that one hump or two?), and lots and lots of great art and music. But the doctrines -- that's where I get flummoxed. 

I'm not fond of critics who take pot shots at religious doctrine. It's such a cheap and easy target. They're like bullies. Non believers should treat religious doctrines delicately. Religions are important to their adherents. Let's have some -- well if not respect, some polite diplomacy and human fellow-feeling appreciation. Judgement is never illuminating or educational. I grant that Hitchens did clever and entertaining work raising the moral and social downsides of religion, and Dawkins really just feels that believers are limiting themselves and would benefit from the wider and wilder imagination of the sciences. But Harris? Bully.

Studying religions anthropologically, you find that the theological doctrines are mostly not what's important to the adherents. A religion is more a community identity and normative practice than a theology. Anthropologists seem to agree on this. Adherents are more concerned about proper behavior, ancestors' disapproval, spirits and ghosts, punishments and fears. I get the sense that the only people who really care about whether God exists are the atheists. For them, it's existential -- if God exists, then no more atheist!

It seems to me that for an atheist, the first question should be not whether the god exists, but why should humans ever be able know the god? Does it want you to know about it, and if it does, why isn't it obvious to everyone? 

Btw, the answer can't be "its existence is obvious already by the argument from creation" because the argument from creation proves God doesn't exist: the premise is that everything that exists must have a cause, the universe exists, therefore something must have caused the universe. If that causer exists, then it must have a cause (ad infinitum). And if it doesn't have a cause, by the premise, it doesn't exist. Taking it logically and seriously, the argument from creation proves that God does not exist. So its existence is not obvious at all. And if it doesn't want us to know it, why are we making up so many stories about it from place to place, time to time? 

I'd venture a probability contrary to Pascal's Wager: no matter what you believe about deities, none of it matters at all. It's all beyond knowledge.  Here's another one: there are so many gods and religions, the likelihood that any one of them is real is extremely small, and believing in any one risks the wrath of the real one, so you're better off pleading ignorance. Besides, how could anyone know the supernatural? 

Aside from the god theology, among the oddest religious beliefs are intelligent design and the afterlife, two notions that seem most puzzling, or, to be less euphemistic, incoherent. 

I get the design part of "intelligent design" but the design doesn't seem intelligent or even intelligible, so why is it called "intelligent"? My goal is not to defame but rather to suggest that religion should embrace the sciences, not reject them. Religion would be much more beautiful and convincing and spiritually valuable if it did. I want to show that religion trying to play science leads to blasphemy.  I'm going to be plain, now, because there really is a blasphemy problem here that needs to be confronted. 

Is there something intelligent in having buttholes throughout the animal kingdom? And constant pissing and crapping across the beauty of nature? Is that some deep mystery like the mystery of existence, of the universe, like why there's something and not nothing? The great butthole mystery? I don't mean to be irreverent. On the contrary, anyone who attributes the ubiquity of the butthole to the deity is surely beyond irreverent. It's more like blasphemy. Yes, I fully agree that it is a mystery, a mystery indeed, given an omnipotent creator with such a propensity for the butthole. It's an unintelligible propensity. This so-called intelligent design raises more questions than it answers, and this question in particular can only have absurd and embarrassing answers. Maybe it's our fault. If we celebrated and worshipped the butthole, maybe it would make more sense to us. After all, de gustibus non est disputandem, there's nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so. We've been neglecting the sacrament of holy crap. 

I must be missing something. I find it incomprehensible that anyone could believe in so-called intelligent design and believe that it is intelligent, since it's so unintelligible and uninformative. It's often observed that members of a community are expected to subscribe to absurdities as a way of indicating solidarity and trustworthiness -- if you'll say anything for the group, you can be relied upon by the group. But surely they don't expect outsiders to believe this in-group willful nonsense? But they do -- that's part of the solidarity and trust. What a mess of a species we are, playing social games not just with habits, norms, dress and such rites, but even with information and knowledge. That's crazy. Maybe AIs can do a better job at being a cognitive species. 

Natural selection, on the other hand, gives us this extraordinary explanation of the how and why of all things butthole. And it provides an appearance of intent or goal without actually intending or having a goal. That is, it gives us the sense of guidance, value and merit without any intelligence at all. It not only explains the pervasiveness of the butthole, but also why we don't find it aesthetic (surely even butthole lovers don't find them pretty). Isn't that the beauty of natural selection? The world appears intelligent without intended design or intelligence? It's kind of amazing, almost miraculous. 

So much for so-called "intelligent" design. It explains nothing, and raises unanswerable questions, blasphemous questions! Not even an atheist would accept "God loves buttholes". Religionists have got to have a better answer. 

Please notice that it's not the atheist who raises the butthole problem. It's the intelligent design advocate who raises it. That guy is a blasphemer!  It's the intelligent design advocate who believes God loves buttholes. I firmly believe that no god with any dignity would create a world of buttholes. And please don't misunderstand me -- the problem is not buttholes, it's that intelligent design raises more questions than it answers, including this embarrassing blasphemy. The answer to the butthole question is answered by Darwin. So if you believe in God, why reject Darwin when he's got your way out of "God created the butthole" problem? Why aren't the religionists grateful to the 19th century English taxonomist? 

What about the afterlife? Now, if natural selection gives us all our emotions & drives to support our survival and replication, what exactly happens in the afterlife? If all the emotions are driving us to survive, once we've unsurvived, what are these emotions for? Is heaven a state of non emotion, like the long sleep of the Lutherans? Or is it perpetual bliss like crack without the hangover down? Is crack-high now the ultimate goal? 

Apparently so. In heaven we marvel and adore the greatness and beauty of the deity's design and love. Now, here the butthole problem is the least of it. I mean, I can imagine icons of buttholes, the adoration of the hole, the mystery, replete with incense, holy water and a veil of gauze. It's a lot harder to do all that with the problem of evil and "nature red in tooth and claw". 

I can see why people want to believe in heaven. We all want to bring back dead loves. But it makes no sense. Do we meet them again as they died -- bombed to bits by Israeli ADF -- or at some choice moment of the past? Their choice or ours? Sounds so much like wishful thinking you'd almost want to conclude that this whole afterlife thing is just that: wishful thinking. Ya think?

It seems to be characteristic of humans that we think only so far as we want something -- like confirmation bias -- and once we've got the idea or evidence we're looking for, thinking abruptly stops there. 

A young friend asked me about the stories of the dying who, as they faded off from the world and into the infinite, saw their dead relatives, and remembered this when they were resuscitated. Well, what do you think you'd have in your mind's eye as you fade to death if you believe in the afterlife populated with your most indelible memories, namely your dead relatives? There isn't even a mystery here. 

It's all beautiful and gratifying and hopeful and inspiring and loving and joyous ... as long as you don't think too hard. Maybe we shouldn't think so hard. Maybe life will be better if I believe that my favorite cousin is still out there somewhere watching me write about him. (It actually makes me sadder -- because that happy wishful thought is followed immediately by disappointment that actually, he's nowhere and most especially, not here and I can't even tell him so, I'm alone with that knowledge unable to share.) I even have my own version of a heaven I'd be willing to pass eternity in: As You Like It's Forest or Arden, a crew of random fellow travelers thrown together with an uncertain future and lots of problems to solve. As long as the problems keep coming, and the exiles too, I'd be engaged and rapt maybe forever with good company. And it would make perfect sense that no one there would be annoying or stupid or disrespectful. Kinda like Peter Pan's Lost Boys or a band of hunter-gatherers, but with lots to read and tools for scientific research. 

Again, I do like some religions a lot -- the mystery, the ritual, the pageantry, the music, the art and architecture, the inspiration, the glory and grandiosity. I'm an admirer of all those dynamics. It's just the doctrines that don't cut it, and when people take those seriously, or promote them, that's when I lose patience.