The one about mistakes

Here is today's email from the department I work in:

Dear teachers,

At first, I want to apologize to you about contract that you signed. I made a mistake again. Before as I know we have to get a signature from president, but it has been changed from this year. We need to get a signature from the chairman of the board. And Chairman said he want to get a contract in Korean, too.

So I want you to sign 4 contract. 2 - English version, 2 - Korean version After I get a signature from the chairman, I will give you yours. Second, you signed the contract before, we will destroy. But if you want to destroy, you could bring. We have your contract that you already signed before. Again, I am really sorry for this inconvenience. I will try to be more professional. I hope see you soon in the Lounge. Have a lovely weekend.

Sincerely,

[name withheld]

Our contract period begins on March 1st every year... every single year, the same date (our lowly status as faux-assistant profs makes us ineligible for multiple-year contracts). We are notified in mid-December if we are not going to be offered a new contract for the coming year. Those who are going to be offered a contract are not told anything one way or the other. I suppose it works, but what if they make a mistake... "again" ?

Since we are just now getting our contracts, what was that "contract" I took to the immigration office to get my visa a month or so ago? Hurried explanation from the office: that was just a generic contract to show the government. Great. Being a foreigner in a strange land and deceiving the government doesn't instill much confidence in me, but what if that's why they do it? Keep the foreigners off their balance. Make sure they're in a constant state of borderline confusion. And who signs what? Shouldn't that be known by the people who are drawing these papers up? Which contract is the legal one, the English or the Korean? My first contract here a few years ago, I discovered a discrepancy between the English and the Korean versions (which they fixed in favor of the English version).

When you come to Korea, there is a period, a grace period, I suppose, where the newbie expat is learning so much that he/she lets a lot of stuff slide to focus on basic survival skills. After the expat gets her/his feet solidly on the ground and is used to the landscape, then the bizarro world of Korea becomes the elephant in the room we kind of felt before but never looked at too closely. We complain about the nutty and incongruous behavior here, but then we learn that nobody likes to hear us complain, not even other complaining expats! And complaining does absolutely no good.

So we live with it. We live with the haphazard, slapdash way they do everything, from legal contracts and immigration law to painting the rusted out aluminum siding on the general store. We live (and sometimes die) with the reckless and irresponsible mania that passes for driving here. We tolerate the constant noise. We learn to ignore the thousands of children over the years who point at us on the sidewalk and scream "America person!" in Korean and run to their mothers' sides.

I'm not ranting about this email specifically. This email is simply another manifestation in a long string demonstrating what a fish out of water most of us expats are in this land. We were raised to try, try as best we can, to get and keep our ducks in a line, plan ahead so as not to make someone else's life a living hell for no reason, to drive politely and safely, to lower our voices in public places, to not stare at people who look different and certainly not yell out and point. (It's not polite to point, remember?)

Fourteen years of this, and what have I learned? I guess it's patience. Without patience, someone would have died by now.

The one with a cat's eye

Several years ago, before my believer friends stopped trying to reconvert me, I was in a conversation about religion and atheism. Of course, there are hardly any believers who really know what atheism is beyond the rhetoric spewed out of their not-so-friendly neighborhood pulpits. Consequently, when you have a conversation about this subject with a religious person, you have to set the vocabulary parameters before you can proceed. Atheism is simply the following: “There is no demonstrable evidence that any gods exist.” That's all. If you were to produce evidence, the atheist would change his mind. It's that simple. The believers deride that by saying 'the evidence is all around us.' You can even find a passage from the letters of Paul in the New Testament that agrees with that statement, so it's not a new idea. However, it is a reckless idea all the same.

When I look around me, I see a marvelous world full of life, a huge magnificent universe full of physics to boggle the mind, but I do not see anything that demonstrates whether a god, or gods, did any of it. A believer will ask, “How else could it be?” a question that a wise person cannot answer. The believer will foolishly take the atheist's inability to answer the question as tacit consent that a god produced everything we see around us. A wise person cannot jump to that conclusion, however. It doesn't follow that because nobody knows exactly how something happened that your guess is necessarily correct. Your guess might be wrong. An atheist is quite willing to say that a god or gods might very well exist; we just don't have any evidence of that. Conversely, a believer is quite unwilling to say that a god might not exist. It is here that any conversation with a believer will begin to fall apart. The atheist is expected to be yielding and open, but the believer is not. Maybe with that in mind you can understand the frustration that atheists express when trying to talk to believers about this subject. The believers say these “new” atheists are angry, when in fact it is the double standard believers apply to the two sides that create significant aggravation on the part of atheists.

For me, a universe without any gods is neither good nor bad. If there are gods or a god or a great intelligent force, so be it. Apparently whatever is out there, if it is out there, is unconcerned with us, so neither belief nor disbelief merits you anything. I live my life in the reality of the observable universe, not what I wish or hope there to be to satisfy my need for some “deeper meaning” to it all. So what if there's no meaning to life beyond living it? How could that knowledge possibly harm you? So there is no over-arching Lord of the Heavens to praise and worship. So what? What could be more awe inspiring than to know for a fact that every living thing on earth descended from one solitary cell billions of years ago? I can look at the lemon tree growing in my living room, my cat, hear a bird out the window, and taste the mold growing on my cheddar cheese and know for a demonstrable fact that all these manifestations of life are related to me, intimately. We all have a common ancestor, a fact proven over and again by genetic science and simple biological principles. Did a god start that first cell? I don't know, but why out of all the wonderfully natural elements that have arisen in this vast universe would this solitary item need the touch of divinity upon it when nothing else does?

Belief in gods, or even a single god, doesn't make you a better person in and of itself. The group you share belief with is what makes you who you are as a believer, not the belief itself. Lack of belief doesn't make you innately good or bad either. Neither you nor I know exactly how the universe started, and if there was a reason, we haven't the slightest clue what that reason might be. Therefore, it is only wise to default to atheism since there is no demonstrable reason to believe any gods exist. With atheism as the default position, there is no need to try to force others to adopt religious doctrines and dogmas as public policy since such doctrines and dogmas are tacitly meaningless. There is no reason for religious groups to expect and receive favors from the government since the government is designed to serve all citizens equally, believers and unbelievers alike. There is no reason to pin our national or planetary hopes for the future on ancient religious literature since the bible is ludicrously in error on more topics than I have time to list, and the quran is nothing more than the incoherent ramblings of a self-proclaimed prophet. I live quite contentedly in the default position, because it is the only one that makes sense. What is, is. What is not, is not. There is nothing beyond these two propositions as far as we know.  Live with it.

Photo: Nasa Hubble, Cat's Eye Nebula, as it was about 3000 years ago.

The one about abortion

In Western culture, abortion was generally permitted within the first 40-90 days of pregnancy until the christian cult came to dominate and abortion was pretty much outlawed based on the christian belief that inception is when a human soul is bestowed upon the fetus. Hence, any deliberate termination of the fetus is technically murder according to this doctrine. Of course, there were times and places of leniency with this rule, but it has remained doctrine since the earliest days of the christ cult whether or not is has always been enforced to the letter.  

The doctrine does not hinge specifically on the bible, though throughout the centuries, christians have used biblical passages and stories as backdrop to the doctrine. Notably these are the pregnancy of John the Baptist's mother, Elizabeth, the pregnancy of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and certain poetic passages from the Hebrew scriptures which mention gestation in the womb.

The fact that the bible is completely silent on the matter of abortion is of little account when it comes to the position of the Roman church on this subject. The church has always maintained the position that God reveals truths in many ways, not just in the scriptures, so it isn't surprising that God has revealed that abortion is always wrong but never said so in the bible. But what about the protestant heterodoxy? That whole movement came into being under the banner that the bible was the sole source of faith and practice, yet they, too, claim abortion is wrong even though the scriptures neither confirm nor deny it. Therein lies something difficult for the protestants to answer. The best you're going to get from them is a long and winding trip through philosophical Disneyland where there are several allusions to the bible, but nothing concrete from its pages. However, even if the bible had mentioned abortion, it would only be valid if the bible were a legitimate source of information about the world and the nature of life.

The christians' first unsubstantiated statement is the linchpin to their whole belief system about abortion: humans have souls. But there is no proof of that; it's just a belief. It's in the bible, but as I say, there is nothing that validates the bible as a legitimate source of knowledge or counsel. The authority of the bible is itself simply a chosen belief. But don't get me wrong. I do not care in the least whether you accept the bible or not. Believe the bible to your heart's content! Enjoy the poetry and revel in the exciting stories! Find your inspiration for life in its pages! It doesn't bother me one bit.  You are as free to believe as I am free not to.

The current mania of the christians to strong-arm their abortion philosophy on all of us is based on three beliefs that have absolutely no foundation. The first is, of course, people have souls.  The second is that God invests a soul on the zygote at inception, and the third is that the bible is true or at least mostly true.  Not a single one of these ideas can be corroborated by facts or observations.  If you want to force your religion, or even part of your religion, on others who don't believe in it, you'd better have a little more going for you than wild-eyed claims about ethereal elements and literary fiction. People have been killed at the hands of christians because of these unvalidated propositions. Now they are on the brink of wresting power unto themselves to enforce their cockeyed fantasies as law.

Abortion is obviously an issue, and it's a serious matter, but it is not a black and white debate where opinions fall neatly on one of two sides. When the church, both the evangelicals and the traditional church, create the false impression that there are only two sides of the abortion debate, they are simply doing that to lend the appearance of credibility to their unfounded assumptions. Creating a false dilemma is an old trick, but it only works on people who have abandoned logical and reasoned thinking. There are many facets to the question of abortion, not just two. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, which is a sin, but apparently not a bad enough sin to avoid.

Nobody is saying the christians have no right to their opinion on abortion. What I'm saying is that christians have no right to claim that all other opinions must be exterminated because they don't accept the idea that humans have souls and the bible is true. If you believe that humans have souls, that God imparts souls at inception, and that the bible is true, so be it. I can't make you see reason. But as soon as you cross over the line and attempt to compel others by force to adopt your unjustified philosophy, then don't be surprised at the opposition you encounter.   Free people do not willingly surrender their freedom to tyrants.  And don't be surprised if some of the opposition comes from those who actually believe the same as you do about abortion, but will not support your attempts to subvert American liberty under the influence of religious fervor.  If freedom isn't for all, then it's for none.

The one with conflict

During a recent segment of Glenn Beck's Bozo the Clown hour, he called in an "antichrist expert" to talk about where the current political situation in the world fits in to God's final countdown to the end of the world.  Beck and his "expert" often referred to the return of christ, and that just makes me plain old disappointed in Man's progress, and a little annoyed, if truth be told.  Anyone who has seriously looked into the subject of Jesus of Nazareth reaches no honest conclusion other than the Jesus of the New Testament is a mythic figure; there isn't the slightest shred of history behind the Jesus mythology.  Jesus as a flesh-and-blood figure was created to make christian principles more accessible to the uninformed masses and to place the salvific christ sacrifice into a setting that people could relate to.  The Gospels are not a record of historical facts or even doctored facts or even badly retold facts.  They are entirely made up in order to present christian principles in narrative format.  

When you're a believer, as I was for many years, you train yourself to ignore the problems in the bible that indicate Jesus was not real.  You gloss over biblical difficulties and in the back of your mind you trust those wise old preachers you adore to understand it all and comfort you that there really is no problem, these are not the droids you're looking for.  But honesty compels us to look at the bible squarely, expose it to the light, scrutinize its claims, in effect, treating it as if it were the word of God.  If it is God's word, then it will be perfect in all respects, as God is perfect.  Oh, but wait!  Now, the christians claim that because the bible was given to Man, and Man is imperfect, we have somehow corrupted the bible, the perfect word of God.  The perfect word of a God is able to be corrupted by Man?  That calls into question its original perfection, wouldn't you say?  Oh, but then wait again!  It is SO perfect that we just can't grasp it well enough to resolve the conflicts found within it.  Then why did the God give it to us in the first place if He knew we couldn't understand it very well?  Oh, but wait! And on and on in that vein... That's how the christians will lead you down the convoluted path of their circular logic until you get so mired in their preposterous nonsense that you either surrender (a word they LOVE to use!) or just give up on the whole subject. 

When the modern radical right, which includes the evangelical cults all across the country, start bringing in their mythology as though it were real history (or real future), it's a harbinger of serious conflicts to come.  The christians have talked about the "coming conflict" for as long as I can remember, and I'm not a young man.   They feed on conflict.  They become giddy in the anticipation of conflict.  War, battle, and bloodshed are very common themes among the evangelical cults, and when you have millions of people who have grown up inured to those three horrors, who knows what they're capable of?  They anticipate a "second coming" of a Jesus who never came a first time.  They have been hoping for this since the third century, and they have remained disappointed all that time.  Now they have slowly but surely grasped great political power in the most heavily armed nation on earth, the nation that holds the most wealth of the world, a nation whose general citizenry has a long tradition of political apathy.  Will they try to make their prophecies come true?  Was that what caused George the Second to invade Iraq, to invoke his cult's mythic views?  I wouldn't be surprised, though we'll probably never know.  Christians in politics is not in itself a bad thing, in fact, it's a good thing for as many citizens as possible to be active in politics.  However, they are not active in politics for the good of the nation, but to install their mythology and doctrine as the law of the land.  That is not a good thing.  Politics has to come to conclusions that benefit the most people possible, not just one strict ideology.  Politics has to deal with the real world as it is, not as some see it through bible-colored lenses.  

The one about civic duty

They're cleaning the building today.  As I sit here in my office and listen to the cleaning crew, it reminds me of seminary.  In our seminary, and I don't think this is common for seminaries, the student body was required to pitch in on a weekly basis to clean the common-use buildings, take care of the grounds, and any other chores that needed doing.  We also had to take turns washing dishes in the refectory.  It's based on an old christian principle called ora et labora, prayer and work.  It probably comes from years of communal sharing among earlier christian groups, reflected in St. Paul's admonition, "if he will not work, neither let him eat." There were some of the seminary who claimed that the principle was really ora est labore, prayer is work, but there is no historical evidence that any early christians thought about it that way, though at the time, many of us thought that this was not a bad way of looking at it.

However, there is something cathartic about mundane labor done for the community in which one lives.  When you share something, you take care of it for one reason or the other.  Maybe you don't want others to think badly of you for mistreating communal spaces, or maybe you take pride in your work caring for it, or maybe you like the others you share it with and want them to be as pleased as you are about it.  Whatever the reason, communal living offers many opportunities to serve and be served.

I've read that the ancient Greeks required citizens to participate in cult performances as a civic duty.  Of course, people are always people, and as the old religion was replaced with the new christian cult, the need for civic duty waned, the work done by the lower classes who couldn't afford to shirk the responsibilities, a situation that has remained unchanged to this day.  Though America is a diverse nation, technically neutral on religion, there are still many things that could be done by citizens pitching in.  Wouldn't that be an old fashioned idea come round if perhaps citizens could get their taxes cut in exchange for raking the public parks and sweeping the courthouse walkways?  Scooping trash from the creek and mowing the lawns of the town cemetery?  Civic duty is a phrase fallen by the wayside, or rather, pushed aside by that modern idea of Individualism, what we might be tempted to call "Me-Firstism" as we survey the panorama of it's insidious effects upon our country.  It's not a Democratic or Republican idea, definitely not a "Libertarian" or "Tea Party" idea, this notion of community and civic duty, social responsibility.  It's a human idea.  I am who I am because of the community that bore and nurtured me.

So we probably aren't going to go back to the townsfolk pitching in to paint the school, but we can at least cultivate a mindset of civic responsibility.  We can look at our town, our county, our state, and even our nation as our brothers and sisters.  We can be more patient at the DMV.  We can be respectful at school board and town hall meetings.  We can always be more generous and forgiving of the people we share our community with.  It's an old idea that might just get a second life even in these modern, fast-paced times.

The One About Faith

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."     

These words are found in the treatise to the Hebrews in the New Testament, and just to piss off the evangelicals and fundamentalists, I will not give the chapter and verse.  My opinion of chapter and verse references is that if you are so ignorant of the bible that you cannot recognize it when you hear it, then you are a piss poor student of the damn thing and not worth my time in the first place.  That out of the way, let's return our attention to the words above.

Any commentary you read will have all kinds of qualifying and backtracking remarks about this text, because on the surface, it seems to say that faith is substantial and is evidence.  Yet, most of us who haven't completely closed our minds to the realities of the universe can see quite clearly that faith is the antithesis of substance and evidence, especially the evidence bit.  Believers in the heavenly bogey man have been and still are quite proud of the fact that they have faith in the presence of no evidence.  They believe without a single substantial element of reason, and they find it both pious and noble to do so.  But the human mind, in my opinion, cannot live with that irrational insanity without stress somewhere along the seams.  

The human mind needs to make connections that give structure and order to the world around us. We need to see that the chair has four legs before we sit on it.  We need evidence before we act.  When someone calls out at home, "It's snowing!" what's the first thing we do?  We look out the window for ourselves to verify the report, not with cynicism, but just because it's our natural reaction.  That marvelous characteristic is what protects us and keeps us alive and well. 

So why is it in every other aspect of human life, people need evidence before they act, yet when it comes to some of the craziest non sequiturs in human history, some people are willing to believe them fully, devotedly, and militantly?  For example, they say "something" must have made the universe.  Granted, "something" might have, but how to you get from "something" to the Apostle's Creed without a lot of making stuff up along the way?  Why do you believe what was written in a book a long time ago by people you didn't know?  How do you know they weren't lying? How do you know they didn't misunderstand events?  You don't know.  You simply chose to believe what someone told you, and you discovered that absolving yourself of all responsibility to think and reason for yourself makes you feel kind of good, a little euphoric, so you call that euphoria the "holy spirit" and there you have it!  A ready-made "inner witness", something the rest of us call circular logic.

The fact is, faith has no substance.  It is certainly not evidence of anything except maybe gullibility.  We all know that if there were actually evidence of anything the religious authorities try to push on us then the need for faith would disappear.  In the face of evidence, faith no longer exists.  To me, that means faith has no place in the human mind. To believe something stupid simply because I am told to believe is itself blatant stupidity.  If we apply to religious nuttery the same tests of substance and evidence we apply to all else, then we should easily and quickly see that religion is nothing but an illusion, or a delusion.

Photo: by Rembrandt, who is dead, so I'm using his painting of the Apostle for decoration. 

The one about Christ

When I was a christian, the ultimate guiding principle of my life was the life of Christ as revealed in the New Testament.  I was one of those guys who always had a pocket New Testament, not for show, but because I really believed in it.  I always read it when circumstances gave me spare time.  I was ridiculed by some in school because of my habit of pulling out my New Testament as soon as my ass hit a chair.  At one point in my life, I would have taken a bet that I could have quoted in order most of the New Testament.  In my mind, the New Testament was explicitly how God wanted his disciples to live.  The New Testament was expressly the word of God, and Jesus was the very presence of God in the flesh, and that made Christ the only model of life for believers.  Everything Christ taught both explicitly and implicitly became the only goal of my life.  It was the only possible way to live.  As far as I was concerned, God did not sanction any other way of looking at things.  The way of Christ was the only way God approved of.  I couldn't understand anyone who thought otherwise.  The whole world around me was seen through the eyes of Christ.  It was, therefore, impossible for me to ignore the poor, to disregard the helpless, to stand off from the needy.

When I realized, eventually, that right-wing partisans also claimed Christ, I was flabbergasted.  To me, it was impossible to be a follower of Christ and not believe in workers' rights, care for the poor and needy, equality of the races, respect for women, and social reform for the good of the community.  To realize that some whom I called brethren in the faith were working hard against the Christ of the New Testament purely to satisfy their own political or socio-economic agenda was disheartening to say the least.  However, it helped the light to dawn on me that very few people who claimed Christ actually revered and followed his path.  Even though time and experience taught me that religion is nonsense and christianism is a lie, that earlier devotion to the life of Christ somehow lingered within me.  I no longer believe Jesus was anything more than a carefully constructed myth, but what the myth stood for in real, personal terms has stuck with me.  I can talk about Christ and look up to him as though he had been real and continue to model my life on his example by not shunning the downtrodden, not turning my back on the needy, not refusing to help the poor, and not giving in to the liars who claim Christ yet do everything in their power to emasculate what he stands for.  Why?  It doesn't matter whether a real god-man savior existed or not.  What matters is we exist now and can save the world if we choose to.  It doesn't matter if there is a heaven or not; what matters is doing the right thing now.  If you claim Christ, and you reject what he stands for, how do you explain yourself?  How do you get off exalting your culture, your business, your banks above your Christ?  You probably believe he existed and believe that he will be your judge at the end of time.  You, then, of all people should be wary of acting against him.  I wonder at your kind.