He no go to Meatland!

This pretty well sums up organized religion. Follow my set of arbitrary rules for a theoretical reward that may or may not exist, and anyone that questions it gets kicked out.

Sometime it's necessary to kick out the questioner, as they seek not knowledge and understanding but chaos and disruption of the community. Usually, though, kicking out the questioner is the issue single most responsible for everything that goes wrong with religion.

Ask questions; there will still be meat.

Myths We Want To Believe

Cracked.com has a post "4 Reoccurring Myths We Apparently Really Want To Believe" that examines some of the more persistent internet rumors and the reasons they have endured. The author is mostly speculating (but probably fairly accurate) about what type of socially unacceptable needs get met by, for example, watching videos of rich people behaving badly.

Amusing, possibly accurate. My favorite part, though, is the ending:

If you ever run into a news story that gets you physically excited, make sure to take a step back and ask why you want it to be true so bad, and see if it's clouding your judgment.

People are frequently reluctant to ask the question, "Why do I believe this?" I'm not talking about major, big-B "Belief", such as belief in God or reincarnation, but the smaller, day-to-day beliefs that we cling to even in the face of other evidence.

"Crime may pay in the short run, but it'll lead to a bad end."

"Study hard in school and you'll get a good job after college."

"Michael Bay is capable of making a great movie."

Big-B Belief tends to be made of many smaller beliefs. in many ways, that makes it worse. It's easy to deal with one potentially non-rational choice, but having to assess and assimilate hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller individual beliefs is daunting. It's easy to believe in big Beliefs like "The government shall not obstruct free speech," or "Thou shall not kill." It gets more difficult when looking at specific cases.

When it gets to the level of these details, it is important to determine not only what you believe but why you believe it. Did you examine the evidence and decide this is the most rational stance, or is it because of a bad experience you had in college? I won't argue that one is better grounds than the other, but it is important to understand for yourself. You may find some of your tightly held beliefs don't actually match your values, if you look closely enough.

If Moses Had The Internet

Happy Passover!



My favorite part is the background music. If they had only posted that, it would have been enough.

:)

Oboist? Really?

Check out these fun charts on Three Jews, Four Opinions:

The online comic strip xkcd sometimes includes funny charts and graphs showing the number of google hits for variations of a phrase or sentence. For example, "x bottles of beer on the wall" shows a spike at x=100. I figured I would try a few Jewish themed ones just for fun.

Gone.

(This is a response to the Girls Read Comics Too list of Most Memorable Moments of Marvel Women)

My introduction to the X-Men was a trade of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Not a bad place to get started, all things considered. It permanently colored my perception of what the X-Men specifically, super heroes more broadly, and comic books in general were all about: what type of stories could be told, the scope, power, and visceral impact they could have; story told both in the illustrations and the text; how to take a story from grand scale to small to big again; and how to find personal moments in scenes of mass chaos.

In the middle of all this was tucked a new character; a young, Jewish girl from the Chicago suburbs, one Kitty Pryde. As a young, Jewish boy from the Chicago suburbs, she had a great impact on me. I was probably a bit younger than her character was supposed to be at the time, but it was still close enough that I saw a lot of that and many future stories through her eyes. She was permanently set as one of my favorite characters, and I would often judge the writing of a new series or storyline by how they handled her character. If they got her right, the creative team probably knew what they were doing; if not, it probably wasn't worth my $1.25 to read the next issue.

She and Colossus were my Lois and Clark; the couple that was meant to be together, that just fit, that represented romance and hope. Granted, mostly because she wanted him, and what my girl wanted my girl got! Still, they are quite the matched pair. She the short Jewish girl who becomes insubstantial and walks through walls, and he the tall Russian boy who becomes solid and knocks walls down. (The Russian/Jewish dichotomy was also a big point both because I am descended from Russian Jews and because in the 80's when I discovered the book Russian antisemitism was a major topic in the Jewish community.)

Then, time passed; characters grew apart. Kitty and Pitor parted ways. She went to England to join Excalibur, which became my new favorite book. He stayed with the X-Men and...died. Unexpected and sad, but I could cope. Especially since by that point bad writers and storylines had ruined the character, keeping the steel shell while hollowing out the man within.

Kitty moved on, and so did I.

Then Joss Whedon took his turn with the X-Men.

If you haven't already read his run on Astonishing X-Men, it's highly worth it. The worst criticism I ever heard of the series was, "The second story arc wasn't as good as the first." Which is roughly equivalent to, "The silver medalist ran slightly slower than the gold medalist."

But back to Kitty.

The big surprise in the first story arc, after months of teasing about the re-resurrection of Jean Grey, was the reveal that Colossus was back. It had seemed he was to be that rarest of rare things - a comic book character that actually stayed dead! - so this was a truly shocking reveal. Kitty phased through a mile of alien metal to find him in a small cell. The reunion scene was...touching. I'm a big, tough man who spends his free time punching inanimate objects and hitting my friends with sticks, so obviously I didn't cry when I read it. But I could see whereas someone slightly less tough than me might have.

What followed was a beautiful depiction of a renewed and growing relationship. They fought. They reconciled. They had sex. They fought more, and had sex while still fighting. In other words, they acted like two people who love each other but are working on some complex relationship issues.

Flash forward to the last storyline, "Unstoppable".

I love authors that can set up plot lines early and subtly, throwing a ball in the air and letting it hang, only to have it drop down years later into the bucket it seemed they put on the floor at random. And sure enough, here was Kitty, phasing through a mile of alien metal to become trapped in a small cell. Only this cell was a 10-mile long bullet headed straight towards Earth!

It was ok; the team would save her. Plus on Earth all the mightiest heroes had gathered to form a plan.

And then...no. Her friends couldn't reach her in time. No one in Marvel's stable of power players could stop the bullet or get her out. Emma Frost, reaching out to Kitty telepathically, offers to make her last moments "comfortable".

"Nah," Kitty tells her, "I'm gonna see this through."

And then, where heroes, demigods, and Wolverine had failed, Kitty whispers a prayer for strength and phases the bullet through the entire earth.

Imagine that scenario for a second. The defining test of a hero is often held to be the moment when they face death - not in the abstract, but in the heart-stopping, last-breath, gun-to-the-head kind of way - and offer themselves as sacrifice to save the day. I don't know how the "my life vs. the entire planet" dynamic changes things, but to face your final moment and see your duty through without flinching is heroic no matter the case.

But Kitty didn't face death. Not directly, not immediately. She rode in an inert chunk of metal - no radiation, chemicals, or electrical malfunctions to end her suffering - with no food or water and limited air, that was moving at high speed through the vacuum of space.


Kitty's smart; definately a brains-over-brawn character, if not at Iron Man/Mr. Fantastic levels, and she'd studied. There was nothing to slow the bullet down, not until it hit something big. And given the size of space, it was likely she would starve or suffocate well before that happened.

Death. Alone. In the cold. Slow and unpleasant. Likely her body would never be found.

But that wasn't her most heroic moment.

That came a few pages earlier when her team couldn't find a way to reach and stop the bullet, and she chose to phase into it to find a way.

She chose to ride that bullet, determined to find a way to beat it, and she didn't stop until she did.

If you'll excuse me now, I have to go re-read the Dark Phoenix Saga, and meet again this young woman who would one day ride a bullet to the stars.

Moses bringing the Tablets down from Sinai

The Old Testament fire & brimstone is nothing compared to Steve Job's EULA.

[h/t Cracked]

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Badass Bible Verses

Been trying to get myself back into the blogging habit. The upcoming Holy Days were providing much inspiration, but clearly no where near as much as this:

The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses

I particularly love their commentary on Deuteronomy 25:11-12.

I'm inspired to respond comment on each of these verses individually; we'll see if I can fit it in around Rosh Hashana choir practice and being a newlywed.

Game Theory Visualized

I wonder if Zach realizes how often he gets cited, positively, on a blog about religion, and if he'd feel he was doing something wrong if he did know.

Best explanation of Game Theory I've ever seen:



I'm not the first, and neither is Zach, to suggest this, but it's unfortunate how often religion gets forced into the position of being a juvenile form of social control. We need that type of guidance and limitation when we're young ("Alcohol is bad!", "If you go outside without a jacket you'll get sick!", "Vote Republican or the terrorists will win!"), but hopefully most of us outgrow it.

Ironically, I blame nostalgia. There are people that are just plain not intelligent enough to grasp more complex social contracts and interpretations of religion, but fortunately (and sadly) that's not most people. Even those with below-average intelligence can learn to grasp ideas like, "This is not always true, but it's a convenient way to teach." I think most people just want to keep their religion the way it was when they were kids.

I think the biggest problems people have with religion start because we continue to experience religion and the divine (however you define it) as we did when we were children. This is damaging to individuals in the short term and societies in the long term. An entire culture based around powerful-but-distant-daddy-issues is not a healthy one.

Miracles

My feeling about miracles has always been that they're not about some seemingly impossible thing happening, they're about the right thing happening at the right time. In the story above, the "miracle" is not that David was able to kill Goliath (to paraphrase Salvatore, a rock through the head ends life quite naturally), but that when someone was needed to defeat Goliath, David was there.

Similarly, I've never had a problem with the attempts to scientifically re-explain the Exodus; if anything, I think they make the story cooler. A God that can reach down and smite pharaoh or part the seas? Interesting. But one that causes volcanic eruptions on the other side of the ocean in order to set off some Goldberg-esque series of events that would lead to our freedom? Neat! Besides, I think all evidence supports the idea that God would never take the simple and direct route when some unnecessarily difficult method was available.

The miracle was not that it happened, but that it happened at the right time, when we needed it.

Of course, this raises the question: on all those other occasions when we needed a miracle and nothing happened, where was God?