A reader named Guy Monty posted the following on "The True Meanings of
Christmas, Part II". I want to respond to it in detail, because I think
it is a good example of delusional atheism. Guy's comments are in
italics.

Although I am not affiliated with any group,
movement, or cadre, I am an atheist. From what I have witnessed and
learned in 44 years here on planet Earth, I have to agree that religion
is stupid, offensive and that it does actively erode man's quality of
life. Why? Because it requires one to accept things for which there is
no evidence, as if there is. As soon as one sets foot on that path, the
mind is left open to all kinds of nonsense. This can manifest itself in
a fairly benign form of delusion (crystal and faerie worshipers for
instance), but it is delusion nonetheless. Any creature which chooses
to allow fantasy to take the decision making reigns, is a creature
which will eventually get itself into trouble. With social animals such
as humans, this inevitably leads to getting ones fellows into trouble
as well. The moment when your argument against atheism fails, is when
you assume that atheism is some form of dogma, theology, or even an
ideology. It's not. It simply means that one does not believe in a
deity.

Ready Guy? Here goes...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

So, Christmas.

In almost every sermon in almost every
Christian church each December, speakers encourage their listeners to
remember "the true meaning of Christmas".

But there is no "true meaning of Christmas" in any objective sense. The closest thing we have to that are the facts of history:

Despite
the holiness attrributed by Christians to this celebration, the fact is
that there is no virtually no feature of Christmas which has a
Christian, as oppposed to a pagan, provenance, other than the idea of
it as a celebration of the birth of the supposed founder of
Christianity. "Christmas" is a thoroughly pagan celebration with some
Christiany mythology imported in - the equivalent of giving some new
"Christian" name to the old Roman drinking festivals called the
bacchanalia, and then claiming that "Christianalia" is henceforth
"really" a celebration of Jesus's first miracle (turning water into
wine at the wedding in Cana). Nothing's changed; it's just that some
mythology was retroactively inserted, and a new label stuck on top of
the thing.

The tree, the gift-giving, the merrymaking, the
foods, the holly, the lights, the charitable activity, the yule
log...all these beloved features and more of Christmas existed in
European winter celebrations (Roman Saturnalia and New Year, German and
Scandinavian solstice celebrations, etc.) long before it ever occurred
to Christians to start celebrating the birth of their religion's
supposed founder sometime in the latter part of the 4th century A.D. In
fact, it was the almost thoroughly pagan character of Christmas which,
historically, motivated devout British and American Christians (the
Puritans) to oppose Christmas for many years. In the 17th
century in Boston, the Puritans even succeeded in legally banning
Christmas for a few years altogether. A contemporary Christian might
take theological issue with the Puritan view that Christmas, as but a
thinly veiled pagan winter festival, is blasphemous; but they could
never take issue with the historical basis of that judgment. It is just
a matter of fact.

This all makes the ongoing fuss from
Christians about "the world trying to take Christ out of Christmas"
seem even sillier. They've got some nerve, don't they? Cynical
politicians and party-loving Christians in a former age hijack a winter
celebration spanning back innumerable centuries, which never had
anything to do with a Jewish religious reformer which certain
superstitious fanatics took to worshipping, and now their descendants
complain that pagans are trying to hijack the "Christian" holiday of Christmas? AND, they complain about it when they themselves are still enjoying all the pagan features of that celebration?

Like
I said, some nerve. The Puritans had a point: if Christians are serious
about making Christmas as Christian as possible, they should stop
mixing it into a pagan Winter Solstice celebration in December, and
start celebrating it sometime in spring, which is when almost all
scholars now believe Josh Josephson was born. AND, they should reject
Christmas trees, holly boughs, mistletoe, gift-giving, Santa Claus
visits, etc. They should reject every last feature of current Christmas
celebrations which has a pagan provenance (basically all of them), and
redo Christmas from the ground up. But...they'll never do that, so I
can't take any of their complaints about the de-Christianizing of
Christmas seriously. Just by celebrating it as they do, they themselves
support a "deChristianized Christmas" nearly as much as any pagan.

Even more ignorant is the Christian fuss over the usage of the abbreviation "Xmas" for Christmas. It was, after all, educated devout Christians who started abbreviating "Christmas" in this way, hundreds of years ago. And no wonder - the "X" comes from the Greek letter X (which we transliterate as kh- or ch-), which is the first letter in the common Greek word Χριστός (christos), which we anglicize as "Christ".

"X" is Christ's initial,
for Pete's sake. Evangelical Christians drive around with bumper
stickers that say, "WWJD?", for "What Would Jesus Do?". "J" here is the
initial for "Jesus" - in English. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, "X" is the initial for "christos". So Christians - why get upset over a Greek initial, but not an English initial? Another bizarre thing - Christians drive around with fish stickers on their car. But the fish represents an acronym, with
each letter of the Greek word for fish (ΙΧΘΥΣ, or "ichthys") standing
for the phrase "Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ": "Jesus Christ, God's
Son, Savior".

So, Christians drive around with a Christian fish
symbol on their back window, which only exists because the letter "X"
is in the word "i(ch)thys" and also is the first letter in the word
"Christos". But when they see a sign that says, "Merry Xmas" - the
exact same initial - they see it as "an assault on Christianity"...Not
sure how that makes any sense.

On the other hand...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

Wally Oppal, pompous buffoon and British Columbia's current
Attorney General, has finally caved in to the hysterical demands of
illiberal ideologues and charged two of BC's Mormon fundamentalist men with polygamy.
Words cannot express how I loathe this sort of thing, and I don't even
know where to begin in trying...everything about it is totally wrong.
It is totally outrageous.

Where to begin?

First...

Click here to finish reading this blog

Under Illinois law, the governor has the legal authority to appoint a
new senator in the case of a vacated seat. So to fill Barack Obama's
seat, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris. Yet
Senate Democrats today refused to allow Burris to take his seat.

The
argument seems to be that because Blagojevich is under suspicion of
having tried to sell the Senate seat, no candidate he appoints should
be seated. This is ridiculous. Blagojevich may very well be corrupt and
guilty, but he has not been found guilty and is still serving
as governor. More importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that
Burris has in any way purchased his seat.

This whole episode has
been a farce, right from Patrick Fitzgerald's ham-fisted (if not
unethical) handling of the whole case, to the Democrats's preference
for public image over fairness and the presumption of innocence. Good
on Dianne Feinstein for publicly voicing her disagreement with her
party's leaders. I think that's the first thing she's ever done that I
agree with...!

Click here to comment on this blog (link goes to tbachman.blogspot.com)

For many decades, at least in the West, the most prevalent view of
man/woman romantic love has been that it is a very recent invention,
emerging along with the code of chivalry sometime in the Middle Ages,
being most forcefully introduced into modern consciousness by the Swiss
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 18th century.

I first heard this as an undergradate years ago, in a political
philosophy class funnily enough, and have since heard or read it
numerous times. The last time was only a few weeks ago, in an
Intellectual History class at the University of Victoria...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

Something happened when I was twelve. It changed my life, but sometimes I'm not sure it should have.

You
see...I was very curious and read constantly. I also was totally into
sports: baseball, football, and while soccer wasn't very popular in
those days, I liked playing at school, and was thrilled one day when I
heard my PE teacher introduce me to some kids as one of the best soccer
players he'd ever had (those days are over - I stopped playing after we
moved back to Canada, and I'm pretty lousy now as a result).

It's
not that I wasn't into music: I listened to music constantly, too. It's
just that it wasn't an exclusive obsession. I was into loads of
different things.

But as it happened, one day when I was in the
seventh grade, Mr. Bertrand, the band teacher, approached me in the
hallway (this was down in Lynden, Washington). He invited me to join
the concert band and play the baritone.

"I don't know how to play the baritone", I said.

"It's easy. Come and try. There's no pressure, and we need the people. And I know you have a good ear".

Prior
to this, I'd had a beginning guitar class with Mr. Bertrand. (Our big
hit was "Silver Bells"). Maybe he thought my guitar playing was
alright. Or maybe it was just his desperation...

I say that
because I heard rumours afterwards that a bunch of the concert band had
quit due to Mr. Bertrand's bad temper. I heard once that he'd even
thrown his baton at one of the kids in a fit of rage. I do know that a
lot of kids joined around the time I did, so maybe it was true.

But
I never saw any of that from Mr. Bertrand. In guitar class he'd been
pretty cool - if we were good, he would sometimes put on The Who's "Who
Are You?" at top volume for the last few minutes of class, which always
sent all the boys into an air-guitar playing frenzy, and got all the
girls dancing. This, I think, was fairly daring given that Lynden was a
small, extremely conservative, extremely Christian, farming town.
Especially daring given the "F" word in the song! In concert band he
was the same. Cool guy.

Anyway, I showed up at concert band
one day, fairly nervous. Mr. Bertrand got me set up with a baritone,
showed me how to blow into it, and then gave me an instruction book
with the fingerings for each note. I brought it home each day to
practice, and pretty soon I was alright.

Now what made this
pretty cool for me was that Mr. Bertrand was fairly ambitious - one of
the pieces he wanted all of his twelve year olds to play was a piece by
Tchaikovsky which, if I remember right, was called "March Entracte",
though I've never been able to find it listed anywhere since (I presume
it was a segment from some larger piece). Another piece was an
arrangement of Haydn melodies. This sort of approach was right up my
alley. Why fool around with mediocre pieces written by nobodies, when
we could learn how to play some of the greatest music ever composed?
Yeah baby!

This started my band career...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

So, if we are Christians, but then come to see that there is just no
more reason to believe the claims at the heart of Christianity than the
claims at the heart of Hinduism or Sufism, what about Christmas? What
about Christianity in general?

There seems to be three main
options. I'll call them Strategic Commitment (SC), Anti-Christian
Animus (ACA), and Skeptical Stoicism (SkS).

In the Strategic
Commitment option, you recognize at least that there is something
fundamentally awry at the heart of Christianity, something outlandish
which cannot and should not be taken as literally true...but you decide
not to let it bother you, because all sorts of other valuable things
are built on, or emanate out of, continuing commitment to it. So, as
one of my evangelical Christian friends said when I pressed him on a
few of these things, "In the end, it doesn't really matter to me if
it's true or not. My family is happy, I feel happy when I go to church
with them, my kids have lots of nice friends in our church, so it just
doesn't matter". My friend - who attends church every Sunday - told me
he never reads the Bible for just that reason.

I am a huge fan of Dostoyevsky, though I can't say I'm any sort of expert...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

Christmas used to mean something different to me than it does now.

You
see, I once believed devoutly that for human beings to avoid eternal
torment (just by virtue of having been born), we had to torture and
murder God/God's son, and then in commemoration, had to symbolically
eat his flesh and drink his blood. Christmas was the day we celebrated
the birth of our victim.

Of course, I didn't use this
language. Like other believers, I employed a wide variety of
self-deception techniques (like euphemisms) to shield my conscious mind
from the grotesque, and I might say, truly profane, nature of the story
I had based my life on. But at its core, the story is just as I have
written it above.

Anyway, I now believe something different. It goes like this...

Click here to read the rest of this blog.

Yes, there are soccer players of incredible skill. Some of the highlights are fantastic. But overall, soccer as a sport sucks.

It sucks, okay? You have to go back to the days of Georgie Best (who I watch on the classic games channel on the satellite dish) to find anything like tolerable games.

Okay, I need to be more specific. Here's why it sucks.

1.) The referreeing is wildly inconsistent/poor, probably because there's one guy - ONE guy! - on a giant pitch trying to keep an eye on 22 guys all by himself. Impossible. No wonder there's so much diving - when you're thirty feet away, a dive looks exactly like a trip. How many games have we seen, especially in World Cups, decided on some dubious penalty shot call? I mean, the England-Argentina semi-final game at the '86 World Cup is probably the best game of the last thirty years - and the first goal in that game was the result of a totally blown call by the ref. Maradona punches the ball into the net with his chubby little hand, and it stands?! What the...?

And by the way - does pro soccer have video replay yet? I don't think they do. And if they don't...SHOCKING! They won't put an extra ref on; they won't introduce video replay even though your average soccer game contains more dives than the dolphin show at Sea World...than a Greg Louganis birthday party...oh wait - more dives than downtown Detroit. What is up with the FIFA referree people?

When the universal soccer strategy seems to be, "get into the penalty area and then fall down and roll around clutching your ankle", why not do something? That leads me to the second reason why it sucks.

2.) Soccer players are, with almost no exceptions, total babies. That reminds me of a little joke: What's the difference between soccer and rugby? Soccer players spend 90 minutes pretending they're hurt, and rugby players spend 80 minutes pretending they're not.

The rolling around, the clutching, the diving, the theatrics, the pouting and arguing when the ref doesn't fall for their bogus dives...you'd think these guys just had a shiv jammed into their left gerbil with all the waterworks...it is embarrassing! And the best is, after rolling around for two minutes clutching their leg like its being sawn off in a World War I medic's tent, they magically get back up and - "all better!" - take their free or penalty kick. Magic! Or else...no, it couldn't be...it couldn't be acting, could it?

3.) Not enough scoring, and not enough good, genuine scoring chances. For that, they'd need to throw two or three more balls out on the pitch, which of course, would turn it into a different game altogether.

Anyway, there has to be some explanation for the popularity of soccer around the world (alcohol?) which does not posit that it is exciting to watch, because where it is not infuriating for its manifest unfairness, it's as boring as watching grass grow.

I mentioned rugby above.

I think it can safely be said that if any rugby player were ever caught taking the sorts of pathetic dives that soccer players attempt literally in every game, that his own teammates would probably kick the crap out of him. That's one reason why rugby's a better sport than soccer - it's a sport, not a theatrical performance. Soccer players increasingly look like they've graduated from the Bob Fosse school of choreography, just completed the Stanislavsky method acting course or something...

Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerating? I just looked on YouTube for a video illustration of what I'm talking about. Check this out. And note, these clips are not extraordinary at all. One can find similar dramatic excursions in any game, and the higher up the league, the worse it gets. This is why it's more entertaining watching your 13 year old play than watching Premier League schmucks - your thirteen year old, at least not the ones around here, aren't faking when they go down.

Anyway, I have no reason to doubt that soccer was once a great game, back in the days, I imagine, of Matt Busby, Pele, Jackie Charlton, Georgie. Now, it is not so much a sport as an alternately boring and infuriating theatrical performance by prima donna metrosexuals who wouldn't last four seconds on a rugby pitch, yet who strut around like they've just descended from Valhalla.

Soccer - so 90's.

Rugby - so the future. I hope anyway.

Out,

T.

People

No, strike that

Some people get to a point in life where they come to believe that the percentage of angels and demons, geniuses and blockheads, and the normal bell-shaped distribution in between, is about the same in every field, in every club, in every everything.

Take me, for instance. I used to think prosecutors were the good guys. Now I don't think they're any better on the whole, in terms of competence (the OJ trial convinced me of that) or more importantly, virtue, than defense attorneys. Certainly, once becomes familiar with enough cases in which prosecutors fight against the judicial consideration of rock-solid evidence which exonerates a wrongly convicted man, it just becomes impossible to feel sympathy with "sides" in general.

I guess what I'm saying is, there was a time when I probably would have regarded, without much thought, Chicago-based federal super-prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as a hero. His behaviour in the Scooter Libby and Conrad Black cases, however, pretty much blew it for me. (And by the way, former Hollinger honcho and book-fixer David Radler, who cut a plea with Fitzgerald, tonight is sitting at home in Vancouver drinking warm cocoa and getting ready for Hannukah, while Conrad Black - whose guilt, such as it may be, to my mind is still unproven - is sitting in a penitentiary, as he will be for the next five years). Anyway, Fitzgerald's behaviour now with the Governor Blagojevich case is the last straw - it shows him to be a man far more interested in fame, scoring points at a personal level against his targets, and in everyone knowing what an "ass-kicking macho man" he is, than getting the job done right.

Getting the job done right, in the Blagojevich case, would have entailed, I think (could be wrong), actually waiting until the guy takes a bribe. You know? Wait till the guy takes the bribe, document that, and then you charge both him and the new Senator for paying the bribe. Bingo, you just two giant fish.

Instead, Fitzgerald gets a bunch of phone conversations on tape where Blagojevich talks about getting something back for a Senate appointment, then BOOM! - he calls another one of his big one-man-show Emmy caliber "Iiiiiiiiit's.....the Patrick Fitzgerald Show!" press conferences, worked up the indignation, called Blagojevich all sorts of names, talked about how outraged Abraham Lincoln, for Pete's sake, would have been...Like, I'm sick of this guy's drama queen theatrics. Enough already. Shut the hell up and do your ***xxxx job, you frigging publicity hound. (Can you believe he actually signed up to be on a radio game show last summer?) He's probably jeopardized the integrity of the case now by prejudicing pretty much every potential juror in the city. Even if he manages to get a conviction, there will now always be that taint.

Anyway, quite beyond the shamefulness of Fitzgerald using the court system as a platform for his rock star pretensions, he has now broken the code of ethics for prosecutors a number of times, and should be officially reprimanded. Victoria Toensing wrote an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on just that, and I think she's spot-on.

For the sake of the integrity of the American justice system, I think it's time for Fitzgerald to make his choice: be an ethical prosecutor, or quit law altogether and get your own "shouting head" talkshow on MSNBC.

Somehow, I think I know which one he'd choose...