Robert's Rambles

''Criminality is the responsibility of the victim alone''

2011-08-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

Britain jails victims of violent crimes if they have defended themselves. Here's the Prime Minister slipping up and speaking the truth, as quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/cameron-backs-plan-to-evict-convicted-rioters-20110811-1iow8.html#ixzz1V0SfTkzc

It took me two reads of the passage to realize that it was a slip-up; the eye expects "perpetrator" in such a sentence, and I only reacted a second later to what I had actually seen. God bless the Queen...

Normal Washing-Machine Operation

2011-07-23T12:38:00.001-07:00

One of life's really deep questions is, "Why be normal?"

Think about it. Is there any good reason--just give me one good reason!--ever to be normal? And if there were one, what is normal? Is it politically correct? Is it average? Is it what people expect of you? If so, why should you ever want to be any of the above? Be yourself, for Heaven's sake!

What I wrote above is just some idealistic crap, really. It's what the new washing machine said to confuse me when I was ranting at it for using so little water that the dirty clothes hardly get wet at all. That's the fashion, you see: a modern washing machine has a computer in it that's programmed to save water. At the expense of cleanliness, I say. Somebody has spent months of their life thinking up a way to pretend that the clothes are being washed, so as to be able to slap an "A" on the machine for water economy. Meanwhile, the poor machine rolls a ball of semi-moist fabric around its innards, hoping against hope that, at the end of the program, they'll smell so much of fabric softener that the person using the machine will think the clothes are now clean.

That isn't the way it used to be. Our previous washing machine--bought before they started putting computers in them and at a time when people understood that you need a certain amount of water to get things clean--filled the drum halfway up the front-loading glass door, and then turned the dirty clothes around and around under the most convincing splashing. It didn't take any effort to trust that the result would be good, and good it was. Now that's what I call normal clothes washing.

And then this fancy new washing machine comes back at me with all this politically correct hogwash. It even hinted that I'd get on somebody's blacklist for holding un-ecological views. But I'm not afraid of a washing machine.

See, my better half is smarter than any embedded computer. She bought this great big coffee pot; I'm sure it holds at least five liters. We don't make coffee in it; we fill up the washing machine with it. Right after the machine has dribbled its computer-optimized sprinkle of wash-water on the laundry, I fill up the coffee pot at least three times over and pour the water into the detergent box. Then the water again goes halfway up the glass door as it's supposed to, where you can see the suds, and the clothes splash as they turn. That's what I call normal.

The new washing machine doesn't like me. They forgot to put a Plan B into its program for what to do if there's more water in the wash cycle than the "A" rating requires, and so the machine just sits there and has to wash the load the old way. It's degrading, the machine says, and threatens to report me to the thought police.

Just let it. When the jack-booted thugs break down my front door, I'll have the perfect defense at the ready.

I'll say, "Why be normal?"

Finns Cleaning Up in the Gulf of Mexico

2010-11-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Every week, I read a Finnish newsletter for engineers and economists called Tekniikka & Talous (translated Technology and Economy). In the latest issue (November 5, 2010) there's an article on the participation of Finns in the cleanup of the oil spill from the explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the company the paper reports on is based in my home town of Porvoo on the south coast of Finland, how can I help but present an English translation of the article here?

When the Porvoo Boys Cleaned up the American Oil Spill

By Veli-Matti Jalovaara

The Porvoo company Lamor delivered about 60 per cent of the oil cleanup equipment used in the area of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The preparedness for this operation didn't exist in all of the USA. It existed in Finland.

When the BP oil drilling platform Deepwater Horizon suffered an explosion in April, BP contacted Lamor.

"Three days later we were in Louisiana. We established a command center of our own in Kenner near New Orleans, next to the airport," says the president of Lamor, Fred Larsen.

Working on scenarios, the Lamor people realized that the area had a large potential fleet of ships that could be utilized for the cleanup operation. The small fishing and shrimping boats there were already equipped with trawling booms. These could quickly be hooked to oil spill containment booms. Each boat would tow an oil skimmer that would pump the recovered oil into a floating tank also towed behind the ship. Thus they introduced a new concept into oil spill abatement. (See Lamor's pages on the operation.)

"There were about 500 boats available for the operation. We also got the task of training 1,500 fishermen. They were a colorful crowd. All of them weren't quite literate, but once they got out to sea, things started happening. They know that part of the ocean so well that the concept became a success," Larsen reminisces.

Lamor first flew the equipment from their stores in Finland to the States, and then also from Dubai and Oman. The existing equipment was nowhere near enough, so they had to start up new production in a hurry. Lamor has about 60 staff in Finland, but the company doesn't produce its equipment itself. Their production network consists of some 200 suppliers, and in spite of the summer vacation season they accepted the job fast.

As new equipment was delivered, Finnair flew it from Helsinki to New York, from where it was taken by truck to Louisiana. About 200 miles of oil containment booms were also delivered mainly by air.

At the peak, a total of 38,000 people took part in the operations in the disaster area. At the present time, most of the activities have ceased. All of Lamor's equipment used in the Gulf of Mexico has been cleaned, serviced, and put back into storage.

Not a lot of oil has been detected on the surface of the water anymore. The rest of the oil spill is, however, still somewhere, and it could rise to the surface, say, if the temperature of the sea water rises.

"The oil that floated got cleaned up pretty well," Fred Larsen says. "Only a small proportion of the oil made it to shore."

Business has by no means come to a standstill after the Gulf of Mexico operation. Worldwide, there are 5 to 7 oil spills every day, when smaller accidents are included.

Box:

Everything depends on the brush

Lamor's inventions are based on brushes. The company got its first brush-related patent in 1982.

Lamor's brushes are durable--and yellow. Yellow is the theme color of the company, but it also has practical significance. It's easy to see from the yellow brushes how well they are picking up the oil.

As the brush picks up the oil, the water has the time to run off between the bristles. As a result, nearly pure oil goes into the pump scoop.

According to Lamor, its competitors' products suck up a significant amount of water along with the oil. This way, the ships collecting the oil fill up sooner, making the work inefficient.

Lightly clad women, pacts with the devil, and democratic elections cause earthquakes

2010-04-20T11:33:00.000-07:00

Here's more from the imbeciles who let us know why there are earthquakes. An Iranian cleric says that women in revealing clothing cause them. That's a par with Pat Robertson's intelligence level: the Haiti quake was caused by a pact with the devil and the latest one in Chile by the democratic election of Salvador Allende for president. The latter act, of course, was so outrageous that America had to have him murdered and replaced with good old Agusto Pinochet. Funny how the earthquake happened anyway: one would think that the poor Chileans had done their penance under Pinochet's murderous kleptocracy.

Counterterrorism in shambles

2010-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

Please read this article.

Replying to Pat Robertson on Haiti

2010-01-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

This is too good to pass up. Quoting from NPR's news blog The Two-Way:

The 'Devil' Writes Pat Robertson A Letter

6:03 pm

January 15, 2010

By Frank James

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a letter from Satan to evangelist Pat Robertson, responding to his comment that Haiti's persistent troubles, including the earthquake, are due to a pact the nation made with Mephistopheles.

Actually, it wasn't Satan who wrote the letter but Lilly Coyle of Minneapolis writing in the persona of the hellish one.

I think she got it down pretty well. What say you?

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

Now, that's the right thing to say. Myself, I bombed out altogether with this post on CBS News' Crimesider blog:

It's the likes of Pat Robertson that led the witch hunts some centuries ago. The Medieval Warm Period ended and the Little Ice Age began, and harvests started failing. The people in those days had no access to world news and couldn't know that the climate was changing. But they had clerics and leaders like Pat Robertson who saw their chance to increase their takings by finding scapegoats. So the famine was God's punishment for this particular village because they suffered iniquity in their midst. All that was needed was finding the culprit--normally a woman either with some valuable knowledge about healing, or with a mean streak or a temper, whose husband was happy to trade her in for a newer model. And off to the stake she went.

The idea that every setback or disaster must be a punishment from the gods is a superstition much older than the Dark Ages. It's a pagan idea that's well documented in history. In the name of a faith that's all about a loving God, parasites like Robertson keep feeding the naive and the gullible this heathen crap, and the checks keep on coming.

In effect, he's saying that the Haitian slaves shouldn't have wanted their liberty, but should have suffered on and stayed under the French yoke. By the same token, America should forget about the Revolution and the Civil War, and go back to being slave owners under the benevolent rule of the British monarch. Then, perhaps, there wouldn't be any more hurricanes, or what?

Good on ya, Lily Coyle!

Doomsaying and conspiracy theory

2010-01-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago, to the day, I posted a comment on the Year 2000 discussion board of the UN Development Programme, with copies to the International Year 2000 Cooperation Center and other interested parties, that I thought to reproduce here. This was in response to a thank-you note from the Yugoslav government, followed by a comment from Leon Kappelman, a professor at the University of North Texas who had been active in the work leading up to the successful transition of the world's computer systems to the current millennium. (Hi, Leon!)

Y2K generated by far the largest number of conspiracy theories in the history of the Internet. Today, we have the end of the world in 2012, the collapse of the US dollar, civil war and the disintegration of the US, RFID chips as the Mark of the Beast, a Muslim Antichrist, and what have you, but volume-wise, they don't compare. Even the 9/11 truth movement pales in comparison with Y2K. People actually moved to the hills and expected civilized society to end. The lessons from Y2K make interesting reading even now.

To quote:

Y2K was a special challenge, because its worldwide complexity exceeded our human capability accurately to predict its consequences. However, it was well known in advance, and there was ample time to prepare. Hence, all went well: no systemic failures occurred. A lot of money was spent, and, clearly, it was well spent. It's also clear that unless the effort had been made, there could have been systemic failures, which would have been bad.

Some isolated Y2K glitches have appeared, as could be expected. Due to the nature of the systems involved, such problems will keep surfacing for some time to come. This is normal and can be handled. IT staff and engineers do this for a living. If our tools break, we fix them. What we avoided was an avalanche of problems all at once, which would have exceeded our capability to fix them.

An interesting thought is whether we've learned anything about doomsaying in the process. Most of the doomsayers have gone quiet, perhaps preparing for Leap Day or the next New Year's. Those with a wider reputation to salvage are now doing their explaining thing. Next time around, I believe we can look out for the following characteristics so as not to lose too much time and effort on dealing with them:

All the doomsayers had something to sell, and public apprehension increased their sales. The goods included the message itself, consulting services, their own writings, emergency supplies, and worthless pieces of land. It's to be hoped that those who bought will find a way to profit from their investment.
Doomsaying, by its nature, looks at a trend and extrapolates it linearily until a disaster scenario is found. In real life, everything goes in cycles. When a dubious trend has continued long enough, common sense kicks in, and resources are applied to correct it. But meanwhile, somebody gets rich on describing the havoc we were headed for.
Most of the criticism of the perceived inaction in the non-English-speaking part of the world came from the United States. There's a correlation between the lack of language skills of English-speakers and the failure to understand the actual effort expended elsewhere. Further, as even the CIA admitted by way of explaining its own misjudgment, Americans tend to project their own society and infrastructure on everybody else, ignoring the fact that no other country is as dependent on money and technology as the US.
Some doomsayers strongly touted the domino theory, multiplying the likelihood for interconnected systems to cause a compounded failure even where the risks to individual systems were low. This theory assumes that the world is run by an incomprehensible, uncontrollable web of robots where any glitch will snowball into a major failure. Reality is different: most IT systems deliver their results to humans who can see if they are wrong. People do the work; the systems are their tools, and can be fixed if they break. Interdependent systems were subject to intensified integration testing. Embedded systems were replaced if there was reason to believe that they were doing something date-dependent.
Nevertheless, the doomsayers did us a great service: we got more money and resources for the work than we'd have got without them. So congratulations and thanks to them, too!

Leon responded and said that (lack of) responsiveness to new data should be added to the list of characteristics of doomsayers. (Thanks, Leon!)

Today's conspiracy theorists and doomsayers seem no different from those of the run-up to Y2K. Guns, MREs, emergency supplies, and land in the boondocks are still being pushed ahead of December 21, 2012. The US dollar will collapse; it's been the same story for a long time--at least since the first oil crisis in the late 1970s. I think that those who push this idea are trying to drive down the dollar so they or their backers can buy up American assets cheap. Wake up--the national debt is still small compared with the resources of the US. The world won't end on a date known in advance. Well over a billion Muslims want nothing more than to live in peace with everybody; the fundamentalists on all sides are just helping drive up the defense budgets and enrich the arms makers. Even Rudy Giuliani admitted, albeit inadvertently, that 9/11 was an inside job, not a terrorist attack. The world is still going its regular way and the rich are getting richer. Read my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century and find out where we'll be going from here!

Happy New Year!

Boston Globe: Why Fundamentalism Will Fail

2009-11-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

There's an article on Fundamentalism in yesterday's Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/08/why_fundamentalism_will_fail/#

It begins thus:

IN 1910, A COHORT of ultra-conservative American Protestants drew up a list of non-negotiable beliefs they insisted any genuine Christian must subscribe to. They published these “fundamentals” in a series of widely distributed pamphlets over the next five years. Their catalog featured doctrines such as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Christ, and his imminent second coming. The cornerstone, though, was a belief in the literal inerrancy of every syllable of the Bible, including in matters of geology, paleontology, and secular history. They called these beliefs fundamentals, and proudly styled themselves “fundamentalists” - true believers who feared that liberal movements like the social gospel and openness to other faiths were eroding the foundation of their religion.

And ends like this:

But a tectonic shift in religion is underway, and the fundamentalist moment is ending. A new and promising chapter in the long story of human faith is beginning. Its untidiness often reminds me of the exuberant earliest years of Christianity. Maturity comes with time. Future historians may look back on the 20th century as a time when something called “fundamentalism” interrupted, but only briefly, the age-old human search for a way to live in the face of mystery, and to envision what Martin Luther King called a “beloved community.”

An interesting read.

The author comes very close to a statement from my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century:

“If you want to know what’s divine in the different Christian denominations, look at what they have in common. The differences between them are mostly human invention for human purposes, and have been put there with the specific objective of dividing and conquering, to provide leaders with loyal and committed followers.”

Moral Coercion: Tool of Fundamentalism of No Matter Which Faith

2009-10-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times there's an article by David Rohde, the Times reporter held captive by the Taliban in Pakistan for seven months. A passage that struck me goes as follows: Citing the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, he said it was every Muslim’s duty to try to stop others from sinning. If one person in a village commits a sin, those who witness it and do not stop him will also be punished by God.

American Evangelicals subscribe to the same belief in their unrelenting quest to save their countrymen and women through legislation seen as intolerant by the mainstream. Where this leap of logic originates is a mystery to me: They preach that salvation is dependent on a contrite heart and a personal commitment to Jesus, yet they expend all this energy to create a state where sin is impossible because it's illegal, because the wherewithals for committing it, such as abortion clinics, don't even exist, and because your betters are watching you.

So somebody please inform me: why this state of war with Muslims when your goals as Fundamentalists are identical? Prevent others from sinning, repress women, oppose science and reason, rule the country by undemocratic means. An alliance would serve everybody better, and would set you clearly apart in your own camp.

What's Jesus supposed to do with people who have never been tempted because Fundamentalists have made sin impossible? Last I checked He was looking specifically for sinners, so He must have some use for their talents and experiences. His comment on those holier than thou was: "The healthy don't need a doctor."

Reality Check for Readers of the Left Behind Series

2009-10-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a blog entry that struck me as politics, not faith. I wrote a response to it, then went on to think that this black-and-white political balderdash is what 60 million people must have got out of reading my competition, the Left Behind series. This said with the reservation that I haven't read the books myself; I wanted no influence from them while I was writing my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century, and afterwards, having read several reviews, I haven't had the inclination.

If I had a way to reach out to those sadly mislead people, I'd love for them to read Walkabout. Maybe some of them could be set right.

How about this: pretribulationalism at its best!

PS: Here's a minister who speaks the truth: http://www.kencollins.com/default.php. He corrects my errors, too, for the benefit of those of my readers who have taken notice of them.

Church Members Demand Complacency

2009-09-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Lutheran Church in Finland, my home country, conducted a poll of its members to find out what people expect of the church. Let me give you some background: In Finland, like in the other Scandinavian countries, the Lutheran Church is a majority religion. Just a couple of hundred years ago, by royal decree, everybody had to belong to it and attend its services, and it was a capital crime to leave it. Even today, the Lutheran church enjoys a solid social position and receives its funding from the Tax Office, which bills all taxpayers that belong to the church an extra 1 percent in income tax to maintain the church.

So what do these people of the mainstream expect of their church? Integrity and concern for the poor. Plus a message that emphasizes joy of life and contentment. They want to be told that life is fine as it is, that they've arrived and that they're satisfied. That's the extent of it.

What's missing from this picture? Any reference to the Christian faith or to salvation. Any concern for the state of their souls. Any kind of connection to the divine. Any interest in the Word of God.

Finland (and, I suppose, the other Scandinavian countries, as well) considers itself a Christian country, but by common consent, nobody is expected to bring up religion in any discussions. That's the job of the church; we leave all those things to the proper authorities. One of our foremost concerns in our relations with each other is not to interfere in anybody's life or business. So when I walk past somebody who has collapsed on the street, I pride myself on leaving the person to run his or her own life, and on having left all action to the ambulance crew that, no doubt, is on its way. My assumption that someone else must have called the emergency number is, of course, a little suspect because everybody else also thinks it's none of their business.

I was quite a bit taken aback some time ago, when my friend and former minister in DC, Lee, asked if my wife and I run Bible studies in our home. I had it hard to explain to him that you don't do that here. The church takes care of such things to the extent it deems necessary. Presuming to step on its turf would be scandalous and nobody would come.

So I think I'll continue to interact with my American Christian friends. God bless you all!

A Global Currency and a World Government: Two End Times Fallacies

2009-08-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

Myths arise, get repeated, and are suddenly believed to be true. Among American End Times conspiracy theorists, two popular myths are that The Powers That Be (usually the Illuminati or some other scary fairy-tale group) are preparing for the US dollar to be replaced by a global currency, and that the same Powers are preparing to implement a One World Government that will destroy American independence. These myths are pure BS.

The truth is that the Mark of the Beast of Revelation 13 is described as an identifier for a universal, mandatory electronic payment system with legal tender status in every country. This has nothing to do with a fictive global currency. Countries can’t be converted to a stable currency just like that. Ecuador tried to use the dollar and had to give it up. Argentina tried to tie the peso to the dollar and had to give it up. Slovenia needed years of belt-tightening and sacrifice to join the euro, and half a dozen other countries in East and Central Europe that would love to join, can’t.

Even if the great powers and the international financial institutions were to replace the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a basket of currencies in order to have more stability, that wouldn’t carry over into a new retail currency for citizens anywhere. Russian President Medvedev’s coin at the G8 was just a showpiece: a new international reserve currency would be a mere construct like the IMF’s Special Drawing Right.

The only serious effects of replacing the dollar with a reserve currency basket would be felt in America and China because those countries have this incestuous relationship involving the dollar and the US deficits. Elsewhere, you could simply expect the additional stability everyone is asking for. A payment identifier that will replace plastic cards as well as cash and checks needs no new currency anywhere; it only needs testing and introducing the same way as any other new technology.

The other big thing our conspiracy theorists are looking for is a One World Government based on the United Nations. They'll be looking for a very long time. The Book of Revelation doesn't talk about a bureaucracy running the world; it predicts a personality cult of one leader who has just one notable sidekick. This means a leader with a media personality never seen before, who will have the ability to render national and international bureaucracies irrelevant and ineffective. Huge, momentous changes in the way we're governed will take place world-wide in just a few months; the whole debacle will take just seven years. Nothing based on the UN could get anything done that fast. Our leader will also work hand-in-glove with big, transnational business to ensure his ascendancy over national governments and international organizations, which is another assurance of quick, effective action.

There’s a detailed discussion on the Mark of the Beast and the Beast himself in my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century. It places the dreaded Mark in the framework of real bank automation and the Beast in the true perspective of how propaganda actually works.

Why Will So Few People Go to Heaven?

2009-07-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

The question isn't mine; it was posed by Jeff Fenske in his blog entry The Boot Camp Factor. I came upon this post the other day and wrote a reply. Since then I've had an interesting interchange of ideas with Jeff, and I'd like to recommend reading his blogs--he has several, and the links are displayed in his various entries under this particular post.

We got into discussing the failure of churches to come clean on the many passages in the New Testament that deal with what kind of behavior God expects of Christians, and how easy it is to backslide and lose one's salvation. I'll reproduce my last entry here. Jeff wrote a fine reply to it, which I'll leave to the reader to go and find via the link above.

Quote:

Jeff,

What you have against you is the crowd preaching a “marshmallow God”, along with the whole setup pushing moralistic-therapeutic deism. Plus many more.

I’m in agreement with your findings. There’s a fine distinction, though, that I’d like to emphasize–you may have seen it in the text you read from Walkabout.

If you start reading about all those horrible acts in the Bible and decide that you’re not going to commit them, but you haven’t done anything about your attitudes, you’re still just trying to earn your ticket to heaven through works. Committing yourself to Jesus with all your bridges burned, on the other hand, includes a change in your attitudes, which leads to an active desire to live your life according to his example and his expectations.

I recently added this to my manuscript to emphasize the importance of attitude:

It’s like treating symptoms without doing anything about the underlying disease: all that’s certain is that the patient will keep returning, and that a lot of money will be changing hands. Or, from the individual’s point of view, it’s like trying to stop smoking without really wanting to. This is the well-tested business model of religion since the early Catholic Church and even long before that. No denomination has been able to improve on it, so they all teach he same thing: do this, don’t do that.

The concept of a business model for the church is introduced earlier in the book, in chapter 23:

“It’s scary to think of persecutions, though,” I ventured.
Oliver agreed.
“Yes, it’s a frightening prospect. However, it could also be a blessing of sorts. The Christian church retains its original form and purpose only for as long as it’s being persecuted. Look at the early church: it remained undivided and true to the apostles’ teachings, and it became the majority religion in the pagan Roman empire because the heathens could see that Christians, living their faith, had something infinitely more valuable and emboldening than what they themselves had. The persecutions targeted church leaders more than other Christians, and only the brave, compassionate, and selfless became leaders and teachers.
“We still have this situation in places like parts of Africa and Asia, and Christians from there put all of us who live securely and comfortably to shame. As soon as it’s safe to belong to some religion or denomination, it becomes part of the peace-of-mind industry, and its ranks of leaders fill up with politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, just like any other organization. The death-defying evangelists are beatified, sacrificed to martyrdom, sidelined, or forgotten, as needed, and the original gospel is relegated to pre-sales work and to draw crowds on big holidays, where it’s always proved its worth.
“From that point onward, clergy simply become peddlers of guilt.”
“That’s a rather sweeping statement,” I observed. “How about a bit of commentary?”
“A code of behavior, even an onerous one, and the supervision needed to maintain it, can be sold for money, as long as the promised reward is attractive enough. Just look at the martial arts, as an example. On the other hand, who’s going to pay you for advertising a free gift? Well, that’s obvious from any marketing campaign: only the giver of the gift. So preaching salvation as a free gift by the grace of God and the blood of Jesus requires living on faith, something professional church leaders and clergy aren’t very good at.”
“Some would take offense at such a direct comparison between religion and business,” I noted.
“Hypocrisy, by its nature, is defensive,” Oliver confirmed. “But the parallel is accurate. Clergy are in the business of evaluating people’s actions and outward appearances, and selling a cure, much like the weight loss industry.
“In an officially accepted church, the objective of a preacher is no longer to share a message at any cost to himself, but to make a living, preferably in a comfortable manner. Although such a priest or pastor liberally claims the same authority Jesus gave his apostles when he first sent them out to preach, he isn’t prepared to live on faith as they had to do.
“So if you’re a people person in need of a job, and you chance upon a belief system, led by amateurs, emerging out of struggles and persecutions, this is what you do. You take its original message of faith—ancient mythology, the Gospel of Jesus, the revelations of Mohammed, the writings of Marx and Engels, whatever—and transform it into something entirely different: a code of conduct, against which you can gauge people’s performance. Since you can’t supervise every person yourself, the code has to be uncompromising and emotional enough to lend itself to both rueful self-criticism by the individual and callous monitoring by others. In effect, you take a message of joy, victory, and triumph, and turn it into one of obligation, guilt, and condemnation by the holier-than-thou crowd.
“To make the scheme fly, you have to come up with just the proper mix of euphoria over belonging to the in-group with remorse over one’s inevitable failings. When you’ve got this right, you also have to cater to births, marriages, deaths, and other rites of passage, plus provide a regular supply of holidays and celebrations according to the seasons. It’s always a good idea to take over the feasts of the old order and rename them after your own saints and potentates; this tends to keep the people happy through the transition.
“Now you’ve created a lucrative profession that provides peace of mind for all involved. By offering the worldly authority your services, you may be able to attain a local monopoly and set your prices as you see fit. Better still, you may even be given the right to raise your revenue as taxes. All that now remains is cobbling together a suitably biased and fuzzy interpretation of the original myth or gospel, so you can explain away its overly simplistic aspects, such as the Greatest Commandment in Mt. 22:35-39.”
“George Orwell comes to mind,” I interjected. “‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’”
“The examples are endless,” Oliver noted. “But back to belief systems: an established religion is more concerned with a solid social position than with changing lives. It makes both membership and salvation contingent on partaking in rituals and paying tithes, while the early church had no such conditions. It persecutes those who leave it and murders its competitors, whether heathens or heretics. It transfers holiness from the object of worship to the organization and its leaders. It dilutes faith in God with faith in the church, and strives to convince you that this faith is all you need. Though St. Paul says clearly that love is greater than faith, such a church will teach you little about love, least of all by example. Learning to act out of unconditional love will qualify you for the Kingdom of God all on its own; there’s no billable contribution by the church in that.
“St. Paul, in I Cor. 1:10-15, wrote a strongly worded condemnation of divisions among the faithful, based on following different authorities. Nevertheless, this kind of church invariably throws up barricades between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ so dissent can be demonized as treason. Belonging to the church, joining its interest groups, taking part in its activities, and paying your dues become the focal points of a religion that’s concerned more with fundraising than with saving souls. No wonder so many find it impossible to accept such churches and their authority over people’s lives.
“Those who teach or practice this kind of religion fall under Christ’s denunciation in Mt. 6:1-17: they have had their reward. If persecutions come, they won’t be affected. But the rest of us may again get an opportunity to show what it means to live one’s faith.”

Another objection I have to focusing only on all these rules at the expense of the Greatest Commandment is that you’ll end up reading your own character and temperament into all this, and you may start thinking that people from entirely different cultural backgrounds must be automatically excluded. Take a lot of people around the Mediterranean, for example: Honor and vengeance have a prominent place in their lives, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a person willing to turn the other cheek. So do we assume that God has rejected all these people because they don’t fit our formula? I don’t think so. With God all things remain possible, and preempting God’s choice of candidates for Heaven isn’t our business, anyway.

I’m learning a lot quickly from you, Jeff. Keep up the good work!

Best,

Robert

Comment by Robert Hoge — July 27, 2009 @ 11:51 am

Unquote

Plan B: What RFID Chips Can't Do But a Barcode Can

2009-07-16T05:12:00.000-07:00

Kim Kincher recently sent me an article on invisible bar codes that proved very valuable to me. It brought home to me the most essential question I should have been asking myself already 15 years ago when I started drafting the chapters on the Mark in my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century. The question concerns Plan B, the backup system. What do you do when your customers have only one way of paying, and your scanner doesn't pick up their code, or the power just went, or you're a Suk merchant in the Sahara where electricity is still a century away?

With the current chip hysteria in the US, Plan B is what proves that the Mark can't and won't be a chip. Just like during the Y2K period, American pundits still distinguish themselves by thinking that the rest of the world lives just like them, awash with funds and high technology. Maybe in the US, you don't need to worry so much about how to trade without the primary payment system. Elsewhere, you do. And only 5 per cent of the world's people live in the States.

Bankers outside the US would never commit a blunder like introducing a mandatory payment system with legal tender status that would be totally dependent on high technology and a steady power supply. They have always allowed for graceful degradation, and even in a largely cashless, checkless environment like Finland (where I live), there's always the option of manual backup. If your card is unreadable, it can be imprinted, or the data can be copied down by hand. And so on. I may think slowly, but I'm a Finnish bank automation veteran, and I know my colleagues!

The UPC/EAN code, on which the Mark of the Beast in Walkabout is based, provides precisely that kind of manual backup--something I hadn't thought of until I read the article Kim sent. The other night, it finally dawned on me, and I added the following to Gregory's discussion with Andy in chapter 15:

“What about a backup system?” I inquired. “With cash and imprintable plastic cards, and with checks, you can always complete a transaction manually, if you lose power or if something isn’t machine-readable. How do you sell stuff where there’s no electricity?”

Andy had this one figured out, too. “Every shop will have a simple battery-powered blacklight as a backup, or as the main system where there’s no automation. In ultraviolet light, you can read off the code in clear, just like you can read it in regular light on every product package if the scanner doesn’t pick it up. Nothing like manual backup!”

That settles the issue of what the chip is for: identification and surveillance. The Mark of the Beast, on the other hand, according to Rev. 13:17, is a payment system identifier, and a chip won't work there.

The poor are becoming dependent on money

2009-07-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

Today I heard a snippet of reporting on the BBC World Service to the effect that there are now an increasing number of supermarkets in Bangladesh. A local was enthusing about all the foreign products you can buy.

Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest countries. A large proportion of her citizens have traditionally grown and raised their own food and made it on very little money. Now, supermarkets are opening up and, no doubt, mean to do enough business to turn a profit. My conclusion, on a very superficial level, is that the self-sufficiency of the people of Bangladesh must be going down. Thus, even the poorest of Earth's inhabitants can, in principle, be blackmailed by denying them the use of money if they fail to comply with the expectations of those in power.

This is one of the key preconditions for the ability of the Beast successfully to demand worship from the marked. When your self-sufficiency has been lost, you'll do what is required so you can continue buying your food. Only when this piece of blackmail will work everywhere, even in the poorest countries where people used to be self-sufficient, can we expect to see Rev. 13:17 fulfilled world-wide. As long as its fulfillment is limited to richer parts, the Beast isn't here yet.

Read my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century for a deeper analysis of the Mark of the Beast.

What Is The Difference Between A Religion And A Cult?

2009-06-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

That was a question in the forum Religion-N-Spirituality on June 4, 2009. I added the following reply to those already there:

Gregory Greene says:
June 4, 2009 at 9:34 am

Religious leaders charge you for mediating between you and the gods. Cult leaders charge more and promise you power on top of divine access. Neither will willingly let you go once they’ve got your cash flow going.

Then there’s faith, like the Christian faith. It works without leaders and costs nothing.

The whole thing is explained in my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century.

Unclean Spirits?

2009-06-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

In the Web forum Religion-N-Spirituality there was an entry under the heading Do You Recall In The Bible Where Jesus Was Casting Out Unclean Spirits?, and I responded like this:

Gregory Greene says:
May 31, 2009 at 11:58 am

Jesus had a way of going along with the culture and beliefs of his time. If we’re to believe the Bible–and this whole discussion is useless if we don’t give it any credence–Jesus had the ability to heal the sick. I’ve come to think that he preferred to use the terminology that his contemporaries understood over talking down to them with his, presumably, omniscient knowledge of what was really going on. We have a prime example of this in John 9:3 where Jesus simply says that neither the man born blind nor his parents had sinned, rather than trying to teach the people that shit happens and that it has nothing to do with anybody’s sinning.

Likewise, I’ve come to think, the driving out of demons was a matter of healing those with mental problems. Even physical illness, such as hypoglycemia, can cause irrational behavior, but in those days, if I’m not entirely mistaken, mental problems weren’t seen as illness but were always ascribed to demons. Jesus may have chosen to save time and energy by using the existing terminology rather than trying to introduce medical knowledge that humanity wasn’t going to be ready for until 1,900 years later. Neither would the Gospel authors have had any knowledge of the true ways he human mind can go wrong, and would have composed their accounts from the assumption that demons must have been involved.

The reason I think the above is plausible is precisely the way the clergy has persisted in scaring us with demons for those 1,900 years and counting, and keeps drawing on our gullibility even today when all the knowledge about personality disorders, temperament, and mental illness is available, in an evident effort to make themselves and their rituals indispensable. Clergy, unfortunately, have to make a living on our need for spiritual security, and no true demon-chaser would therefore admit the possibility that my reasoning above could be correct.

If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of mind control, read my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century.

Eroticism and faith?

2009-05-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a reply I posted to a question I found in the blog Religion-N-Spirituality titled What Is The Relationship Between Erotic Desire And Spirituality? under my pen name Gregory Greene.

I’ve found it an interesting exercise to compare Hindu mythology with that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Krishna sports with lovely milkmaids and the Kama Sutra is part of religion–in brief, Indian culture includes sex in its religious traditions. By contrast, in the Middle East and Europe, people have always felt so guilty about their sexuality that they insist that their saints must be celibate and that celibacy is so difficult that it must imply sainthood. To people with this basic cultural mindset, it would be impossible to imagine that Jesus could have been anything other than celibate, and any suggestion to the contrary is automatically labeled blasphemy without any historical reference: the emotional imperative is enough.

We know that Christian traditionalists will come back at the above with a Bible quote to the effect that Jesus didn’t sin. Again, we have a circular argument: Sex (outside monogamous marriage) is, axiomatically, sinful, and since Jesus didn’t sin, he can’t have had sex. My point is that the selection of texts admitted into the current Bible was made by men who subscribed to the dogma of sainthood requiring celibacy; thus, the Bible, by definition, cannot give any information as to whether Jesus married and/or had sex or not.

Arguments from Christian traditionalists are made further suspect by their tendency to pick and choose what they want to use from the Bible and what they can arbitrarily ignore. In this case, monogamy suits their modern sense of morality, and we are supposed to believe that it’s a Biblical ideal. Yet, Rahab the harlot became a heroine to the Israelites of Joshua’s day; Israel’s kings had large harems of both wives and concubines; regular men in both Old and New Testamental times often had several wives; Mary Magdalene, another harlot, became one of Jesus’ closest friends. St. Paul found it necessary to require that a bishop be the husband of one wife, presumably so he’d have a sensible amount of time and energy to devote to his spiritual task.

Characteristically, the requirement of celibacy for clergy was introduced by the Catholic Church centuries after St. Paul and without any Biblical basis whatsoever. I think it was a desperate attempt at addressing some of the corruption and debauchery practiced by the churchmen of the time, perhaps in the hope that official celibacy would induce the public to attribute at least a little bit of sainthood to the priests and the monks, whose true lifestyle often was not very saintly.

My own take on this matter turns the argument on its head: I believe that prudishness is not a virtue. This statement doesn’t say that promiscuity is virtuous, it says that judging others for their apparent interest in sex doesn’t make the person doing the judging a good person. In my book I deliberately include some sex scenes between the lead characters in order to put across my point that Laura, as a real woman, has the God-given right to play her husband as a real woman does, and still end up in Paradise with the other saints. If the reader feels shocked at this, tough.

2009-05-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

Today, I posted the following in response to a blog entry I found quite good.

Political involvement in the hope of curing the country's moral ills comes at a price: right-wing politicians will dole out conservative legislation only in return for free rein in turning over a growing proportion of the tax revenue to big business via the defense and homeland security budgets. Moreover, coercing the population into living more morally doesn't save their souls. Only the grace of God and the blood of Jesus do. To win people's hearts and help them turn to Jesus for salvation, Christians need to live and share their faith, not turn people away with their self-righteousness and their demands for a legislated morality that suits them, while curtailing everybody else's civil rights.

To each one of us, the only evil that matters at all is the evil in our own hearts. That's the evil that stands between us and God. Someone who would rally us against outside evils is, by definition, a politician vying for access to our pocketbooks.

Not one good act has yet saved a person's soul, nor has one evil act omitted done so. Churches that imply otherwise are looking for revenue, not salvation. Why are people turning against Christianity rather than rejoining it in defense against encroachment by alien belief systems? Because Christian churches no longer present a public image of faith, hope, and love. Because Christians that actually live the Christian faith in public are no longer in evidence. Mainstream churches offer entertainment according to the public's local preferences: either intolerant moral coercion--do as I say or I'll make you--or moralistic-therapeutic deism--everybody just be nice to each other and all's well.

This will get worse before it gets better. The factor that will provide change is persecution of true believers. That's how we'll know that the End Times are here: people will witness to their faith, pray for their persecutors, and go to their deaths with the vision of God on their faces. On nationwide TV, this sight will bring more souls to Christ than any amount of televangelism. This is how the early church spread, only the venue then was the circuses where Christians were fed to the lions.

Read all about it in my free e-book, Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century.

2009-04-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

Jon Meacham recently published an article titled The End of Christian America in Newsweek. A hue and cry has arisen among the Christian Right due to his findings that the percentage of Americans who publicly identify themselves as Christians has dropped.

The Christian church has never grown as fast as it grew in the Roman empire before 323AD when Christianity was declared the state cult. As long as Christians were persecuted, they taught and lived their faith. This faith is what makes Christianity attractive.

The Christianity Newsweek found declining is something else: The Christian Right aims for social respectability, political hegemony, and moral coercion--the same ambitions the Pharisees had in Christ's time, roundly denounced by him. The mainstream churches provide social clubs for their members and teach something a recent author called moralistic-therapeutic deism.

Many points on the agenda of the American Christian Right are the same as those of the Taleban in Afghanistan: suppression of women’s rights, opposition to the dissemination of scientific knowledge, imposition of their own religious code of conduct on everyone in the country. None of this serves to spread the gospel, as it turns everyone who could be reached against those who would rob them of their freedom of choice, and everything they stand for.

As fewer people publicly identify with Christianity, this reflects their disillusion with what today's churches offer and with the estrangement of church leaders and church teaching from the realities the public lives under, whether they want to or not. When morality becomes the only issue churches care about, love takes the backseat, and disenchantment follows.

I'd like to offer a more detailed analysis of the problems Christianity is facing in the form of a free e-book, Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century.

2009-04-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Somebody has uncovered a classified document put out by The Office of Homeland Security entitled:

Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate fueling resurgence in radicalization and recruitment.

It mentions, along with the usual suspects, Christians looking for the End Times and gun owners concerned for their Second Amendment rights. So why does the Obama administration need to look anew for domestic security threats? You'd think that the Bush administration had discovered them already.

Let’s see: what is the government spending all these trillions on? Less and less on health, education, and consumer protection. More and more on defense and homeland security, and, of course, lately, on replacing the mickey-mouse money of the rich with real tax-payers' money. Why? The budgets for defense and homeland security go mostly to procurements from big business. Those for the well-being of the citizens go more to salaries and aid to individuals, only indirectly generating profits for business, and the wrong business, at that.

So how do you ensure that Congress will keep on raising the defense and homeland security budgets? You find threats. Remember the Cold War? It was a credible threat, and the budget for countering that threat was high and never questioned Then the Soviet Union fell, and Congress started talking about cutting the defense budget. Bush the elder had installed old Saddam in Iraq while head of the CIA, and he called on Saddam to return the favor. Within a few weeks of the news of the defense budget cut initiative, Saddam invaded Kuwait, and there was a credible threat again. The defense budget stayed high.

Bill Clinton had focused on the economy and towards the end of his presidency, the shares of the defense industry were at an all-time low. Bush the younger was installed as President with instructions from neo-con think tanks to provide a new Pearl Harbor. Soon the old business associates of the Bush family, the Bin Laden family, provided just that on 9-11-01. The defense budget skyrocketed and the shares of the defense industry followed suit. Need I add that the Bush family is well invested in defense? That Dick Cheney’s Halliburton started getting no-bid contracts by the bucketful? Pretty transparent.

You’d think that Obama would renew the focus on the economy, seeing that somehow, someone will have to repay the loans Dubya took to make the next generation pay for his looting. But Obama didn’t get elected without the support of big business either; nobody has since Jack Kennedy. (Kennedy got shot the day before he was to sign the order to withdraw from Vietnam.) Obama will have to repay the favors to big business just like his predecessors, and he, too, will have to keep finding threats. Now it’s right-wingers, gun owners, and veterans. Under Bush it was left-wingers and war critics. Under Clinton, it was militias and paramilitary gun-toters. Somebody will always have to carry the can, and the rich will keep getting richer.

Read my free e-book Walkabout: The History of a Brief Century. This stuff is easier to explain when there’s more room to tell the story.

Bearded Man

2007-11-20T03:35:00.000-08:00

Oh where oh where is my bearded man, I have hacked into his account and decided to write something in my self defense. Yes, I am a difficult wife, who wouldn't be when your husband's head is why up in the clouds of boxed thinking. Living this far north there are practical things to do and with the age of workers who want full compensation even for cutting down a tree, it's cheaper to use electricity, so I asked him to chop down a tree! You would think I want to pull his toenails out. Have to go now, I see him coming in. Bye.Bye.