BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: February 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
Sir Chuckles
Charles Barkley is an ex-basketball player and living, breathing, hairless quip machine. He's consistently hilarious, and back when I used to watch TV, his analysis and one-liners were consistently the funniest thing on it, even coming, as they usually did, during halftime of a basketball game. NBA.com has posted a collection of his best quotes of the year, and I LOL'ed at about half of them. It helps if you imagine them in his voice, and allow for the fact that he's delivering them live, and usually ad libbed. I can't find a compilation of his best clips from the TV show, just tons of individual shorts, but most of them are pretty funny.
A few samples from this year's list:
Barkley: "I was reading that heavy drinking is not good for your health, so I have to stop." Smith: "Stop drinking what?" Barkley: "No, I gotta stop reading."
Barkley on whether Knicks coach Isiah Thomas is 'safe' from being fired: "He's about as safe as me in a room full of cookies. If I'm in a room full of cookies, the cookies ain't got no damn chance."
Barkley on the Miami Heat: "On the bright side, if your team sucks it might as well be in Miami."
Barkley on legendary hip-hop artist Michael Bivins doing weekly features on TNT OverTime on NBA.com: "We couldn't get Bobby Brown?"
Last late-summer and into the fall, I did not have a gym membership, I started mountain biking around a very hilly nature preserve near my apartment. I generally got out twice a week, and did 15-25 miles each time, depending on the weather, how much time I had, how much energy I had, etc. It didn't especially feel like heavy exercise; I was leg weary but seldom actually panting out of breath, and I only sweated heavily on hot days. As the weather turned colder I kept at it, wearing more layers and dealing with mud as necessary. During that time I lost about 15 pounds, without substantially altering my diet. In fact, I'm sure I actually ate more, since I always ate before I went out to give me energy, and was usually starving when I finished a 2 hour ride.
I wasn't actually overweight to begin with, since I had above average muscle tone, but my BMI went from around 24.5 to 22.3, which is theoretically an improvement. This despite the fact that my thighs got way bigger from all the muscle in the hams and quads. I didn't measure or anything, but the difference was visually evident.
The weight loss surprised me, since I was only doing it once or twice a week, plus the semi-workout I get from martial arts class once a week. I'd never been able to lose that kind of weight going to the gym, and then I was trying to lose weight. Of course I was gaining muscle from weight lifting, while losing fat from that and cardio, which made a simple BMI calculation useless.
I've been doing a lot of weights again during the past 6 weeks since I joined a gym again, and it's made an evident difference already, in my upper body and arms. My weight has gone nowhere, though. It's stayed right around 165, up about 5 pounds from where it was in the fall before bad weather cut back on my bike riding. So clearly I'm losing fat and replacing it with muscle, and they say muscle weighs more since it's denser, but I do a damn lot of cardio too. I usually hit the elliptical machine for 45 minutes when I first get there, and often for another 15 or 20 before I leave. I go hard too, with the resistance up pretty far. I sweat nonstop, just running down my face, though it's not enough to get me out of breath unless I put on a sprint or do one of the mountain climbing programs, where the resistance spikes every few minutes. Plus I use the arm levers as well as the legs (the first few times back at the gym in January my arms were dying, since my legs were strong from biking but I hadn't been doing weights for upper body) to get more of a workout. But I don't lose weight from that, even though it feels like I'm doing way more effort/work than I do biking.
I say this not to brag or anything, but because the weight loss issues confuse me. Apparently the trick to losing weight is to do medium exertion, with some sprinting spikes, for like 2 hours at a time. I lost far more weight bike riding 2 days a week than I ever have from any type of gym workout, even going every day and working myself to exhaustion. Even though the bike isn't always a strain, isn't doing anything for my upper body, has up and down hills, etc. I've been tempted to try to emulate that at the gym, and just go like 100 minute sessions on the elliptical to see what that does to my weight and tone, but I get so bored after 30 minutes that even making it 45 is a stretch, and that's with fun mashups on my ipod and bad movies on the overhead TVs. Maybe a video ipod with a new movie each day would get me through?
The one advantage (or is it a penalty?) of the gym is the much lower likelihood of returning home looking like this. Muddy, yes. But note the big post-splash, post-slide-out-crash smile?
The one odd thing I've noticed about the gym lately is the mystery weight loss. I've taken to weighing myself on the locker room scale when I arrive; I stand on it with my ipod on and a full water bottle in my hand, and when I leave a 90 or 100 minutes later, I weigh 4-6 pounds less. So where does the weight go? I'm not peeing it out, and sure, I'm dripping sweat the whole time, and wiping it off with a towel, but there's no way I lose 2kg of sweat, when most of it just absorbs into my clothing. If I were weighing myself naked, (as a disturbing number of flabby, fish belly-white, 50 y/os do in that locker room) I'd understand. But I'm still fully-dressed, and I've simply transferred the water from the bottle into my tummy. So where does the weight go?
I guess it's mostly water vapor? I exhale constantly, it evaporates from my head and through my clothing, and that's why the windows are always steamed up at the gym at night. I also find it kind of disturbing that I'm regaining 7 or 8 or 10 pounds of liquid every day between gym visits, but I guess that's the price I pay for not weighing what I drink and what I pee and tabulating the difference.
This was the haunting message some vandal left on the wall of a local Barack Obama campaign office in (heavily redneck) East Texas. Police have no leads, though some bloggers may have found a suspect.
Today brings to an end my recent run of atheist book reviews. Wipe away those tears though, since I've saved the best for last. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, a masterpiece of nonfiction and one of the most interesting books I've ever read. And I can say that even having viewed (well, listened to while cooking) many dozens of hours of Dawkins' speeches and interviews.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist, a lecturer and debater, and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science of Oxford University. I have no idea what that means, but it's always in his bio, and it sounds impressive. He's published several of the most influential and important science books of the past twenty five years, including The Selfish Gene, in which he introduced the concept of "memes," an idea at once so simple and obvious, and complicated and explanatory, that it's created foundational changes in how scientists view society and psychology, even as it's trickled down into the cultural consciousness. Dawkins also has a very busy eponymous website that functions as an online clearing house of atheist news and content, and there you can find links to numerous excerpts from this book. He reads large chunks of it in appearances from his book tour that are all over Google Video.
This book may or may not be his magnum opus, but it's an amazing piece of work. Entertaining, thought-provoking, massively-researched and informative, and logically persuasive on many levels, if a book of this magnitude were arguing anything other than religion, it would change the mind of anyone who read it without prejudice. Since it is about religion, that obviously won't happen on a massive level, but I think the work can still do some good in helping people overcome the lingering effects of the faith that was drummed into them as they learned their ABCs and 123s.
To the scores:
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Concept: 7 Presentation: 9 Writing Quality: 8 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 9 Entertainment Value: 7 Rereadability: 8 Overall: 9
If I have any criticism of this work, it's that it's too sprawling. Dawkins takes on religion and faith from so many different angles that some of them are necessarily abbreviated, and the sheer amount of content can produce fatigue in the reader. Almost every chapter features several ideas that would take the average reader some time to think over and process, especially if they were trying to figure a way to deal with Dawkins' insights and arguments while retaining their faith. The fact that so many of these come in rapid sequence might do something to diminish their impact.
Dawkins' specialty is in the areas of science and biology, and he's at his best explaining Darwin's theory of natural selection, clarifying how genetic mutations function, how populations change over time, why Creationism/Intelligent Design is a crock, and so forth. He's written entire books on those subjects in the past (The Blind Watchmaker is an excellent example, though it's a bit technical and advanced for a general audience, as I remember from struggling through it some fifteen years ago.) so he doesn't belabor it too extensively in The God Delusion.
What he does quite a bit is engage in mind-expanding theorizing. His professional skill is in understanding how evolution functions on a micro and macro level, and some of his discussion about topics such as the biological origin of our shared human morality and the group selection advantages and disadvantages of religious belief, are legitimately fascinating. Whether you believe in God or not, it's fun to study how such beliefs (memes) spread in populations, and to examine what the benefits and drawbacks are, for individual believers and for societies on a whole.
Check the table of contents if you want more specifics about what he gets into; he there provides quite a thorough listing. Rather than go over it in order, I'm going to do what I've done with other recent nonfiction book reviews/discussions, and touch on some things I found most interesting. When I'm using a library book I don’t want to write in, I fold back the corner of the page when I want to note something interesting on that page. As a measure of how interesting this book is, I must have folded back 35 or 40 pages in this book; I did that with about half a dozen pages each in God is not Great and The End of Faith. I enjoyed and found value in both of those titles, but they didn't hit nearly as many noteworthy points as Dawkins' did. There's something really worth thinking over in every chapter, which is not something I can say about any other book I've ever read. I'm only going to take the time and space here to touch on a few of them.
One of the concepts well worth considering is NOMA. This term was coined by famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, who though an atheist (like most top scientists) is quite the opposite of Dawkins in his interest in confronting religious belief. NOMA acronyms "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," by which Gould means science and religion. From his apologetic point of view, science is the study of empirical fact and measurement, while religion is about ultimate meanings and moral values. Gould says that both can be studied and analyzed to their fullest extent, and that to do so people should simply ignore the areas in which they overlap or contradict. Dawkins has none of this, and in a chapter on the issue, he makes a point I found compelling. It's one Hitchens hit upon in God is not Great, too. Here's what Dawkins says on page 59.
Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods. To dramatize the point, imagine, by some remarkable set of circumstances, that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? "Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium. We're concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other."
The very idea is a joke. You can bet your boots that the scientific evidence, if any were to turn up, would be seized upon and trumpeted to the skies. NOMA is popular only because there is no evidence to favour the God Hypotheses.
Seems a pretty valid point to me, and of course humans seize upon evidence to back up their theories when such evidence exists. It's just that we've come so far in understanding the events of the world that explanations that once fit, and that make up the core of ancient religious (and non-religious) texts, are now almost entirely rejected on empirical grounds. Virtually no one still believes illness comes from demonic possession, or that the earth is flat, or that famines or plagues or volcanoes or hurricanes are punishments for our wickedness, since we've got scientific answers for all those things, and countless others.
As part of an extended discussion/exploration of the biological origins of religiosity, Dawkins considers and rejects a number of possible theories. One he touches on is the consoling nature of belief. This functions on numerous levels, with the idea of prayer, potential divine or semi-divine intervention in the form of guardian angels, and of course the biggie that all religions provide; the consolation that death isn't really the end. There's a problem, though:
As Steven Pinker pointedly said of the consolation theory, in How the Mind Works: "It only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plain see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing that he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit."
This problem is left unresolved by Dawkins, but I think the answer is fairly simple. He's simply giving people too much credit. Sure, most religious ideas are plainly false if you are of average (or greater) intelligence and if you examine them with a critical eye. But plenty of people are not that smart, and plenty of others don't apply the same rules of logic to their faith that they apply to everything else in the world.
The examples of being cold or eaten by a tiger aren't useful, since they posit an absolute situation with clearly observable outcomes. Furthermore, they're probably fatal for the individuals. If the false beliefs of religion usually led to death for their believers, then the religion wouldn't survive simply because no one would live to spread it. Believing that a guy born of a virgin died and came back to life isn't exactly on top of the reasonable conclusions to draw from history, but it's not that critical to the lives of most believers, and it's not fatal to very many of them at all.
This isn't to say that there aren't religious beliefs so toxic that they burn themselves out. The once small but thriving sect of Heaven's Gate came to a pretty abrupt end, as did the People's Temple, and many others throughout human history. Larger religions lead to the deaths of plenty of their followers too, but the body count from warfare, suicide bombings, or disease (AIDS for Catholics who don't use condoms, preventable disease for Christian Scientists who refuse medicine, etc) isn't great enough to imperil the survival of the religion as a whole. And in all of those cases, religion can, and usually does, function as a consoling belief for the people dying and those left behind after their deaths.
Later in the book, around pages 195-200, Dawkins gets into a topic that fascinates me. He talks about memes and how they self perpetuate, and then gets into something he calls a "memeplex." This is cluster of memes that would have little survivability on their own, but that perpetuate in conjunction with other supporting memes. For instance: the idea that you will survive your own death and go on to play a harp in a magical cloud-filled city with streets of gold, or that faith in something logically unbelievable is a virtue, or that a cracker becomes the literal flesh of a minor Jewish prophet who died 2000 years ago when a priest mumbles some Latin over it, are all ludicrous on their face, and taken singularly, they wouldn't last a minute. Imagine any of these ideas, or something similar, tacked onto a scientific theory or philosophical argument? "I think therefore I am, because winged people in a cloud city play harps." "I think therefore I am and therefore I will achieve eternal life." "I think therefore I am because when I think part of my brain literally becomes the brain of a guy who died 2000 years ago, and this is a good thing." Absurd, right? But no more so, and in fact quite a bit less so, than some of the chief tenants of all major religions that believers take to be literally true. Self evidently true, in many cases. Thus is the power of a memeplex demonstrated. Individual ideas that would be rejected persist if they are inextricably tied to other equally-improbable ideas, that all work together to form a more cohesive, if not necessarily coherent, meme.
There's a section beginning on page 202 about cargo cults that's also a must read. During WW2, US forces hop-scotched across the Pacific, pushing the Japanese back. On the various islands the US forces occupied, they immediately cut runways out of the forest and set up huts with radio equipment, and soon afterwards planes would begin landing or ships arriving with useful goods of every kind. The islanders observed this, and emulated them in amazing fashion, inventing new religions almost on the spot. After the Americans moved on, or on islands they did not build on, the islanders took to clearing out runways, building control towers complete with bamboo radios and antennas, constructing decoy planes from plants and wood in an attempt to lure down the desired cargo shipments, and so forth.
That's amazing enough, but they even evolved a cosmology of sorts. One much-studied cargo cult, which still exists on the New Hebrides (now known as Vanatu), has deified a man named John Frum. Even as recently as the religion formed, it's already unclear if any such man ever existed back in the 1940s, but that's no more important to the persistence of the cult than the historical reality (or not) of Jesus, or Buddha, or Confucius. The people believe John Frum was on the island during the heyday of the cargo, and they believe he will one day return. They've got canonical descriptions of him (that have shifted over time; John Frum he got taller since the earliest descriptions -- compare this to the way Jesus developed Aryan features and white skin in European Christianity), a holy date for his return (February 15th), and more.
So far he has not returned, but they are not downhearted. David Attenborough said to one cult devotee, called Sam:
"But Sam, it is nineteen years since John say that the cargo will come. He promise and he promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn't nineteen years a long time to wait?"
Sam lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at me. "If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years for John."
I enjoy the story of the cargo cults, (which I've only very briefly summarized here) since they're such perfect lab example of how religions are created and then how quickly their memes take on a life of their own, evolving to fit new events or the changing state of mind of their believers. It's also interesting to realize, as Dawkins notes, that the genesis of these cults seems to prove Clarke's Third Law; which that states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I liked the story enough to spend a few minutes in Photoshop throwing together the following masterpiece. It's LOLGod, I guess?
In Chapter Seven Dawkins discusses the "changing moral zeitgeist," as part of his (largely successful) efforts to demonstrate that 1) religion is not moral, and 2) that morality does not come from religion. It's a massive argument, one that I'm not going to try and recap here. Read the book if you want it. I did like the following quote enough to transcribe it, though.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved" by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors, and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.
Another brief but interesting quote falls on page 321, as part of Dawkins' reply to a woman who says that she's come embrace science and Darwinism, but that she's still haunted by the horrible visions of hell that were (literally) beaten into her by nuns in her primary school days. Dawkins replies:
...I suggested that the extreme horribleness of hell, as portrayed by priests and nuns, is inflated to compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter.
I'm not sure I agree, but it's a fascinating insight I'd never before considered. It's eminently logical, of course. People always overstate threats to make them scarier, and while this seldom makes the threat more believable, it makes the potential so awful that even the faintest chance it might be true is motivating. I.e., hell. Or "Saddam Hussein's going to build a nuke and give it to Al Queda." Improbable and unlikely in every way, but such a horrible possibility that it galvanized a nation (if not the world) into war.
I also like the idea of a mildly-unpleasant hell. He's got a point; that it lasts forever and is not the perfect bliss that is heaven should be enough. However, what's Heaven, when you get right down to it? I think it says something about human nature that it's so much easier to craft a convincing, emotionally-moving hell than heaven. This is something that Christopher Hitchens, atheist and widely-read literary critic, often mentions in his lectures and debates. Where are the enticing visions of heaven? Countless books have created fully-formed hells, Dante chief amongst them, but what's heaven? Is anyone really all that interested in the popular conception, featuring clouds, golden streets, harps, white robes, vestigial wings, and so forth?
Okay, but that's just the modern version, which lacks any real literal validity from the scriptures. What does the actual Book say about it? I don't have a quote but I've heard that it's a much purer concept; a sort of "existing in a perpetual bliss from the presence of God." Okay, but what does that mean? It's like asking the finite mind to conceive of infinity. It can't be done. What's it like to bask in the presence of God? How is that blissful? Is it like an orgasm? Like scratching a really bad itch? Do you ever get hungry or thirsty still? Is there a physical sensation? Wouldn't that get boring after a while, like a hot bath that's paradise for half an hour, before turning tepid and wrinkle-fingered?
On the other hand, we can all imagine (to some extent) what it would feel like to be dipped in a boiling pit of tar, or stabbed by a be-horned, pointy-tailed imp with a rusty trident. Hence visions of hell are far more detailed and believable, in their own way, than the intangible purity that is heaven.
Speaking of heaven and hell, on page 356 Dawkins makes a nice point about those beliefs.
Polls suggest that approximately 95% of the population of the US believe they will survive their own death. I can't help wondering how many people who claim such belief really, in their heart of hearts, hold it. If they were sincere, shouldn't they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him. "Congratulations! That's brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you."
...Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday? ...Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside shower her with messages for those that have gone before? "Do give my love to Uncle Robert when you see him."
Why don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying? Could it be that they don't really believe all that stuff they pretend to believe?
Another nice short bit. On page 360, Dawkins returns briefly to the argument from consolation.
There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty? Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless? To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren, and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that someone else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.
This goes to the heart of the philosophy of atheism, and is, I think, a major reason many people retain some theology in their hearts, even after their minds have long since rejected the rest of it on scientific grounds. People want to believe there's something more, something above and beyond our tawdry, inconsequential, brief years of scratching out an existence on this pitiless rock. It's telling of many religious apologists that they argue against atheism in this fashion, saying what Dawkins' so aptly summarizes in the above quote. "There must be a God, or else life is meaningless." Left unexamined is how meaningful life would be even with the God of which they conceive?
Take Christianity. To say that God gives live meaning and purpose is kind of a stretch. After all, in that cosmology, isn't human existence essentially just a rat maze? Humans are created, gifted with a soul that sets them above all other animals on earth... and then what? Nothing. Humans are merely meant to live out their lives running blindly through the twists and turns of a vast maze, doing a little good but more importantly avoiding the ever-present temptations of evil, and if all that goes well at the end they're rewarded with a yummy food pellet. For all eternity. That's meaningful? And atheism, with its complete concentration on the importance of events accomplished in this life, regarding other humans and the world at large, is barren and pointless and empty? I can't really see the logic of that one, but then again, that's why they call it "faith."
There are a ton of other excellent bits throughout Dawkins' book, both long and short, but like life itself, this book review must end at some point. Collect your heavenly food pellet on the way out, thanks.
A new survey shows that it's not just anecdote and personal experience; there really are a great deal more atheists and agnostics around these days. Even in America.
When it comes to religion, more and more U.S. adults either have none or do not identify with a particular church, although the country remains highly religious, a survey said on Monday.
...The survey, based on interviews with more than 36,000 U.S. adults, found 78.4 percent of the population identify themselves as Christian. Of U.S. adults in general, it said 51.3 percent were Protestant, 23.9 percent Catholic, 1.7 percent Mormon, 0.7 percent Jehovah's Witness and less than 0.3 percent each Greek or Russian Orthodox.
"The biggest gains due to changes in religious affiliation have been among those who say they are not affiliated with any particular religious group or tradition," the survey found.
"Overall 7.3 percent of the adult population says they were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child. Today, however, 16.1 percent of adults say they are unaffiliated ... sizable numbers of those raised in all religions -- from Catholicism to Protestantism to Judaism -- are currently unaffiliated with any particular religion," it added.
The survey did not seek to try to find why people abandon churches or join new ones. Greg Smith, a researcher at the forum, said it may be that younger generations are not reconnecting with religion as they age as previous generations did, a trend that if continued could have a profound impact on American religion.
The unaffiliated are now the 4th largest denomination in the US, and when you consider that the US population is around 350m, 14% of that is nearly 50,000,000 people. (Incidentally, that would be the 24th most populous nation on earth.) While not all of those 50,000,000 are actually atheists or agnostics (any more than all of the "affiliated" are actually religious), it's a substantial group, and I think their (our?) growing numbers are largely to blame for the recent and ongoing spate of religious fervor in the nation. The old time faithful (of whatever age) see increasing numbers of "their fellow Americans" who are indifferent to their religious importuning, and turn up their efforts to preserve the dominance/relevance of their fading clan. Hence the hysterical bleating about the "War on Christmas," steady efforts to introduce Creationism into science classes, etc.
I've never read about it, but I wonder if there were similar events during Europe's relatively recent ascent into secularism? After all, Europe was entirely superstitious and still full of witch burners in the 1700s. The creation of America's constitution in late 1700s was as remarkable for the enshrinement of democracy and equality as the avoidance of theocracy through the first (and other relevant) amendments. France followed suit not long after, when the Revolution overthrew the monarchy and religious controls, but by no means was the continent in any way secular at that point, or at any time before WW2. Somehow, during the past half century, religions in Europe largely shriveled up and dried out. What caused that? Were there flares of fading passion by the loyal and faithful? I really don't know.
Speaking of old time, European-themed religions, note that the survey points out that Catholicism has the highest burn rate of any religion. More people leave the Catholic Church than any other; it's numbers in the US stay high only thanks to a steady influx of immigrants, chiefly from heavily-Catholic South/Central America. Interesting implications there for the immigration debate, and the continuing viability of any religion that stays tied to a strict orthodoxy, rather than adjusting to the (increasingly secular) times and ending in-church discrimination against women, gays, birth control, etc.
Christopher Hitchens is journalist, a public intellectual, and an accomplished writer and scholar. His atheism is long-held, first arrived at as a boy (as related in the opening chapter of the book), and as he approaches the age of 60, he's had a lifetime of reflection, research, discussion, and debate to strengthen his positions. His book is the most accessible, humorous, and lively of the recent slew of best selling atheist titles, and it's masterfully written, with a flow, a rhythm, and a strong narrative voice throughout. It's a great example of how to construct a work of non-fiction for a general audience. I took many mental notes on his techniques.
The content is very good too, though not as wide ranging or scholarly as Dawkins' The God Delusion (review of that one coming soon). Hitchens' arguments are more personal and impassioned than the scientific and philosophic approaches favored by Dawkins and Harris. Hitchens hits on philosophy as well, but he's very good at personalizing the issues with examples and literature, history, current events, and his own very well-traveled life. I don't know if God is not Great is going to persuade anyone to give up their religion, but it's certainly a lively read, and I can imagine the faithful reading it and laughing and having a good time, even as they disagreed with or minimized every argument Hitchens made.
To the scores:
God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006 Concept: 6 Presentation: 8 Writing Quality: 9.5 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 8 Rereadability: 6 Overall: 9
I debated awarding a 10 on writing quality, something I'm not sure I've ever done for any book. I've certainly never done it for a non-fiction book, and may never, barring an Ebert-esque near death experience. I settled on a 9.5 since this book has nearly perfect flow and rhythm and pace, but could have been improved (if only just) on the order and presentation of material. It jumps around too much, at times. And yes, I'm nitpicking to justify my sub-perfect score on that issue.
Hitchens' attack on religion is thorough, and hits from countless angles. Just skimming the chapter titles on the books' incomplete Wikipedia page gives you a pretty clear idea of his approach, and having read the book I can say that he doesn't fail to deliver in chapters such as Religion Kills, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, The Nightmare of the Old Testament, The Tawdriness Of The Miraculous And The Decline Of Hell, Is Religion Child Abuse?, and others.
If you want a taste of the work, or just some enjoyable reading, Slate's hosting three excerpts; one in which Hitchens lays out his four principle objections to religion, and two other historically-themed entries; one on the fraudulent dubious origin of Mormonism, and the other on the similarly contentious foundation of Islam. If that's not enough, here's audio of Hitchens' reading Chapter Three, on "Why Heaven Hates Ham." It's just 9 minutes for 7 pages, and is the shortest and probably least consequential chapter in the book, but gives you some of the flavor of his work (bacon-y!) and should provide a few laughs as well.
Rather than summarize any further, I'll hit on a few nice bits I noted while reading, with my usual quotes and comments, though hopefully without my usual lengthy digressions, since I've got other reviews yet to write.
Here's a bit I liked from Chapter Seven, "The Nightmare of the Old Testament." I've got no comment on this one; I just thought it was well-written, especially the last few lines. It's also argumentatively devastating, simply by applying the iron jaws of objective logic to a subject that's traditionally treated with the fuzziest of kid gloves.
Another way religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed laws that could then be passed on to those less favored.
These are some very obvious objections to be made to this. In the first place, several such disclosures have been claimed to occur, at different times and places, to hugely discrepant prophets or mediums. In some cases -- most notably the Christian -- one revelation is apparently not sufficient, and needs to be reinforced by successive apparitions, with the promise of a further but ultimate one to come. In other cases, the opposite difficulty occurs and the divine instruction is delivered, only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law. Since all of these revelations, many of them hopelessly inconsistent, cannot by definition be simultaneously true, it must follow that some of them are false and illusory. It could also follow that only one of them is authentic, but in the first place this seems dubious and in the second place it appears to necessitate religious war in order to decide whose revelation is the true one. A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.
One of Hitchens' favored (and most effective) techniques is to detail a story from scripture, demonstrating clearly why it's such an awful thing when considered from a modern (largely secular) perspective, and then citing some historical examples or parallels to show how society actually is when such teachings/writings/moral lessons are taken literally (as the Bible clearly means to be taken).
For example, he starts off Chapter Fifteen: Religion as Original Sin, by bullet pointing some of the ways in which religion is not "just amoral, but positively immoral."
Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous.
The doctrine of blood sacrifice.
The doctrine of atonement.
The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment.
the imposition of impossible tasks and rules.
He's already covered the first, so he gets right to the issues of blood sacrifice. Historical citations are included, along with absurd and frightening stories about modern day farmers attempting to produce a spotlessly pure "red heifer" as mentioned in the book of Numbers, chapter 19, which is to be sacrificed on the site of the third temple in Jerusalem in effort to bring about the end of the world. No, really.
This is complicated by a lack of red heifers, and also by the fact that there is no third temple. The first temple was destroyed by the Romans (who ruled the Holy Land in those days) when the ancient Jews got too rebellious centuries before Jesus. A second temple was built on the same spot, and while it stood was the so called Golden Era of Jewish kings, including guys like Solomon and Herod. It too was destroyed by the Romans after another Jewish revolt, in around 70BC. (Yes, long after Jesus' death, but he was a minor prophet of very little historical consequence in his time, so his coming and going was largely irrelevant to the dominant Jewish culture/faith.) Prophecy says that the third temple must be built before the Messiah will return and the rapture will take place and all that other science fiction-y Left Behind stuff.
The problem (aside from the fact that grown adults are taking the mythological aspects of Bronze Age legends seriously) is that Temple Mount is the required site for the building, and it's already occupied by the Islamic "Dome of the Rock," a structure that's considered the third holiest site for the world's Muslims. (After temples in Mecca and Medina associated with events in the prophet Mohammad's life.) The reason there's a holy Muslim temple there is that Temple Mount is the spot that the quasi-historical Abraham was set to sacrifice his son for the glory of God, until an angel intervened and gave him a goat to butcher instead. Abraham was granted extremely long life for his willingness to engage in divinely-inspired infanticide, and when he died around 150 years later he was buried in a cave on the Temple Mount. (Or so goes the story.)
That cave is now a very holy spot for Jews and Muslims, (and Christians, to a lesser extent) since Abraham is a foundational patriarch in both religions. Jews trace their lineage through his son Issac, who was renamed Israel after a truly odd story about late night wrestling with a visiting angel. Hence "Israelites." Muslims trace their lineage through Abraham's other son, Ishmael, born to his concubine Hagar, who, along with the son, was exiled when Abraham's first wife, Sarah, got bitchy about the baby-momma.
The absurd nature of much of Jerusalem is well demonstrated by the Temple Mount, which is now under Israeli control, since they seized the land as part of the spoils of the Six Day War of 1967. The Israelis allow Muslims access to the site, but there are separate entrances to Abraham's (almost certainly fictional) tomb, and the Muslims and Jews pray at different altars within the cave. A memorable event took place there in 1994, as Hitchens explains on page 208.
An Israeli zealot named Dr. Baruch Goldstein had come to the cave and, unslinging the automatic weapon he was allowed to carry, discharged it into the Muslim congregation. He killed 27 worshippers and injured countless others before being overwhelmed and beaten to death. It turned out that many people already knew that Dr. Goldstein was dangerous. While serving as a physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients, such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in declining to do this, as many Israeli religious courts have confirmed, so an easy way to spot an inhumane killer was to notice that he was guided by a sincere and literal observance of the divine instruction. Shrines in his name have been set up by the more doggedly observant Jews ever since, and of those rabbis who condemned his action, not all did so in equivocal terms. The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.
Here as elsewhere, Hitchens' point is that people who actually take their religion serious are the most dangerous. The counter argument from religious "moderates" is that sure, there are bloodthirsty and awful stories in the Bible, but that those are the exception, and that the vast majority of people don't take them seriously.
Which is true, but it's a truth that plays exactly into another of Hitchens' points; the moral value of holy books is only enhanced by secular considerations, which have watered down all the original, meanings. Which, I might remind you, are considered to be the inerrant word of God, which is why they're held as the source of all morality. The most devout Jew on Temple Mount that day in 1994 was Baruch Goldstein, and he acted exactly as would be expected of a true believer. That the vast majority of Jews, Muslims, Christians, etc, don't engage in mass murder of their religious enemies isn't evidence of the goodness of religion; it's evidence that most people (thankfully) don't (any longer) take very seriously the book(s) they claim to value so highly.
Worse yet, even if you leave aside the machine gun mass murder, consider what the people on that hill, Jews and Muslims both, are there to commemorate. A story about a man dragging his son off into the wilderness, armed with a sharp knife he had every intention of using to cut the throat of his own child, for the glory and pleasure of his God. A God he believed in more strongly than anyone in modern day Jerusalem. Well, anyone but Baruch Goldstein, perhaps. And Abraham's attempted act (infanticide avoided only at the last instant thanks to biblical intervention in the form of an angel) is not some minor bit of the Bible, but is considered one of the best things in it; one of the best moral instructors in the whole book. Obey any order you think comes from God without question. Like say, machine gunning hundreds of unarmed religious penitents?
(Bonus trivia, courtesy of my fading memories from an Italian Renaissance art class I took last semester. The importance of Abraham's act of attempted infanticide was considered such a great moral example that it was the scene chosen to serve as the subject for the contest to win the commission to forge the Baptistery Doors in Florence. Competition squares from Ghilberti and Brunelleschi survive, and are considered two of the earliest sculptural masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Ghilberti won, since his sculptural style was more traditional and his casting technique more expert and less expensive. This loss so upset Brunelleschi that he went, with his friend Donatello (yes, that Donatello), to live in Rome for several years, where they made extensive study of ancient Roman sculpture and architecture, learning new ways of portraying proportions and structure and greatly influencing the Renaissance in a classical direction.)
There's tons more good stuff in Hitchens' book, but much of it is good because of how well he writes and presents it, and there's no point in me quoting it, when you should really just read the book yourself. My copy's gone back to the library, but I will definitely read it again someday, just to enjoy and observe how well Hitchens incorporates a common thematic element and how well he weaves a consistent narrative voice into the work.
I've been to my new gym every day this week, after making it down there two or three days a week for the previous several weeks. I'm enjoying the workout, I can already feel/see the difference in muscle development from hitting the weights again after a year of mostly bike riding with some desultory dumbbell exertions, and I'm growing fascinated by the television offerings in the cardio machine section of the gym. There are five or six flatscreen TVs mounted overhead, and they always have the same channels on them, at least when I'm there at night.
Two always show ESPN, one always shows CNN, another one is usually on TNT or TBS or one of those movie-intensive cable networks, and another seems be on ESPN News. The ESPN ones are pretty self-explanatory; it's a gym after all, with more men than women working out. The one that interests me more is the TNT set, or the programming on that channel. They show about a dozen episodes a day of the various crime dramas, generally Law and Order or one of its pedophile-intensive spinoffs. They also show a lot of mediocre, semi-recent films, and seem to run a cheesy horror movie every night around midnight, when I'm doing my elliptical calorie burn. I saw part of the laughably bad (but not funny) Arachnophobia a few days ago, and yesterday I saw the first hour of the remake of the Amityville Horror.
I would have guessed it was 6 or 8 years old, since I remembered seeing trailers for it, and sneering at yet another unnecessary remake of a "classic" horror film. I promptly forgot it after that, and did quite a job forgetting it, since IMdB tells me the film was released less then 3 years ago. It also clears up one of my main complaints about the film, that the mom looked way too young to have 14 y/o son. She looks about 24 in the movie, and her oldest son looks about ten years younger. The actress, the instantly-forgettable Melissa George, was born in 1976, so she was 29ish in the film. That helps the math, until you note that the absurdly-named actor playing her son... was 16. The fact that the mom in the movie apparently had the first of three children when she was about 13, and looks like this 16 years later is a bit off-putting. Worse (from a believability standpoint) is Ryan Reynolds, who spends quite a bit of time running around shirtless, looking like this. Because every average guy in the late 1970s (the 2005 remake is set in the same time as the original) was ripped like that. And freshly-waxed.
Casting and styling issues aside, the movie was okay. I watched about the first hour it with one eye, while sweating away on the cardio machine and thinking about some enjoyably-amusing activities the iG and I had engaged in Friday afternoon, reading the dialogue since the TVs are on mute in the gym, and enduring 5-minute blocks of commercials every 15 minutes. Haunted house, scene of past murders, ghosts only the kids can see and the dog smell, a useless exorcist priest, dad's slowing going crazy while dreaming about murdering his family, etc. It's basically a poor man's The Shining, minus the isolated mountain hotel claustrophobia, and if you're wondering about the dramatic drop off between Jack Nicholson/Shelley Duvall and Ryan Reynolds/Melissa George, um... yeah. Going from Stanley Kubrick to Anthony Douglas might have been a factor as well. Or maybe it got better at the end; I didn't see the whole film, after all.
I did see enough to grasp the elements of visual horror, and recognize them from every other horror movie in the past decade. When did solemn, dead-makeup looking children become the height of horror? Most of the "gotcha" scare scenes in The Amityville Horror were based on the zombie-looking little girl, and it reminded me of all those Japanese horror films, the original or US remade versions, most of which prominently feature white-skinned, zombie-like girls. The movies are making money, so someone must like it. Horror fans got burnt out on Freddie and Jason and Michael Myers, so now we're being terrified by eight year old girls? Let's hope the pendulum hasn't any further to swing, since how much further can it go at this point? Deadly kittens? Beware their lethal purr?
Here's a trailer; don't watch it with the lights off!
Sam Harris' The End of Faith is perhaps the most directly challenging and antagonistic of the recent swell of best selling atheist tomes. That's odd to say when comparing any book to Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great, but while Hitchens is happily argumentative and frequently condescending (in his book and his public speaking), he does it with a wry sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye. In contrast, Harris' tone is deeply serious, even somber, and he isn't just playing about with philosophy and theories here. He offers numerous serious policy suggestions, and in the step that's garnered him the most antagonism, (check out how many of his 1-star reviews are of the "I'm an atheist but..." variety) he directly attacks the religious moderates, and even atheists who are less committed to the cause than himself.
In Harris' view, people of lukewarm faith (most of the world's population) are enabling the violent and fanatical fringe, by honoring the concept of faith. People who say that it's okay to believe in things that don't exist, or that don't have any supporting evidence, make it possible for the people who really take the religions seriously to exist. Harris views it as analogous to terrorism or an armed uprising; only a small portion of a population might actually carry guns and fight, but the fighters rely on the material and emotional support of the others.
Harris isn't just attacking for fun, though. He thinks the struggle between faith and reason is the most important challenge in the world today, thanks to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There have been constant religious war for all of human history, with generally horrible results (as all wars create), but this has become a greater danger than ever before, now that a few committed individuals can kill thousands, or millions, with the right weaponry. In this light, Harris' highly combative and in-your-face views are the only rational response to the persistence of fanatic-enabling faith, and the fact that most of us don't share his urgency, even if we agree with him on substance, is largely an indictment of humanities' general, "Nothing bad will happen to me." mentality.
To the scores:
The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, 2006 Concept: 6 Presentation: 6 Writing Quality: 7 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 7 Rereadability: 7 Overall: 7.5
I was surprised at the quality and depth of this book. I didn't know much about Harris going in; I'd watched a few of his speeches on Google Video, and thought he made some good points, but he seemed clearly a few steps below Hitchens and Dawkins in rhetorical flair and content. In his video appearances, Harris is clearly intelligent and committed, but he has somewhat the vibe of a barely-contained maniac; like he's itching to rant at the crowd in a "Why won't you people listen!" fever. I also thought he made fewer interesting points and analogies, but really, it's unfair to compare any public speaker to Hitchens and Dawkins, who are both especially skilled/gifted at it.
In that light, I was pleasantly surprised by The End of Faith. It's got more good arguments, more clever points, and a lot more depth than I expected. Harris earned his undergrad degree in philosophy, he's working on his PhD in neuroscience, and in this book he combines those fields, with a lot of general knowledge of history, anthropology, science, culture, and more. A lot of atheism is just applied philosophy, when you get right down to it. If a personal philosophy is a description of how an individual views the world, and the sorts of actions that view motivates them to take, then there's clearly a large philosophical component to atheism, or religious belief, of anything in between. Harris delves deeply into that area, and brings in his neuroscience background by analyzing how people think, and why, and especially what people are doing when they think they feel the presence of God.
Harris writes about that state, the transcendental, numinous, feeling of enlightenment, and analyzes how that sort of bliss has been achieved, whether through religious belief, meditation, or psychotropic drugs. Harris is a realist and a rationalist about human emotions, and he recognizes that prayer, or a feeling of oneness with God/the universe, is an enormously powerful experience for most people. People from all cultures and societies have felt this sort of thing, and it's a real phenomena, measurable in CAT scans and brain chemistry, though the technology does not yet exist to replicate it (and may never, after all, orgasms are not dissimilar brain events, and they're quite well researched, but there's still no way to use brain stimulation or chemicals to instantly induce one into a patient). The interesting thing is that humans interpret a moment of transcendence through their own cultural filter. Christians think it's rapture and feel the presence of Christ within them, Buddhists feel at one with the universe, and when one of those hobos out scrounging in your dumpster scores some LSD, he's, "Like wow, man..."
The clear scientific conclusion from this evidence is that there's nothing supernatural or magical or religious about what's often called a "religious experience." It's a physiological process in the human body, mostly about brain chemistry, but since it's so uncommon and powerful that we can't process it or contain it rationally we have to find some mystical explanation for it. Harris examines what this can teach us about our brains, and our need for supernatural explanations for unsettling events.
That's enough of a general overview of the work. I highly recommend it, and my library had a copy, so yours probably will too. I'm now going to touch on a few of the most interesting and novel arguments in his book, for my own notes as well as your edification.
An old argument for atheism is the one about how religions, Christianity and all the rest, only exist now since they were created back then, and since they're perpetually transmitted to the minds of young people before they reach the age of reason. I've often heard Hitchens make the point that religion is our first, and therefore worst, surviving attempt at philosophy and explanation. Harris builds on this point with a interesting thought exercise. Imagine, he posits on page 23, that everyone in the world came down with amnesia. If, "...all six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computer are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first?"
Pretty clearly, we'd need to figure out how to feed and clothe ourselves, and operate the machines that power our cities, etc. But what about religion? Harris doesn't go that deeply into the whole scenario (which I think would make a fascinating SciFi novel), but questions if anyone would spend that much time worrying about whether or not Jesus was really born of a virgin, or was resurrected, or boasted other magical powers. Leaving aside the fact that our amnesiac selves would be unable to ignore the sheer abundance of Bibles lying around everywhere, would we expect anyone to give the Bible, and the various creation myths of other religions, or their cosmologies, any serious credence?
...like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death?
[In finding ways to get along as a society]...There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard -- but as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up gain. The Bible and Koran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved next to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
...most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature -- to say nothing of killing and dying for them -- would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?
On page 39 Harris makes a hell of a point about our elected officials.
...we live in a country in which a person cannot get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell. This is truly remarkable, given that there is no other body of "knowledge" that we require our political leaders to master. Even a hairstylist must pass a licensing exam before plying his trade in the United States, and yet those given the power to make war and national policy -- those whose decisions will inevitably affect human life for generations -- are not expected to know anything in particular before setting to work. They do not have to be political scientists, economists, or even lawyers; they need not have studied international relations, military history, resource management, civil engineering, or any other field of human knowledge that might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern superpower. They need only be expert fund-raisers, comport themselves well on television, and be indulgent of certain myths. In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clear indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?
Hard to argue with that one, eh?
On page 66 Harris makes an nice observation about the necessity of faith in the absence, or presence, of evidence.
But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life -- a statue of the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to the ground -- are seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith... There is no way around the fact that we crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such justification is, at the very least, in the offing. Is there a practicing Christian in the West who would be indifferent to the appearance of incontestable physical evidence that attested to the literal truth of the Gospels? Imagine if carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin had shown it to be as old as Easter Sunday, AD 29. is there any doubt that this revelation would have occasioned a spectacle of awe, exultation, and zealous remission of sins through the Christian World?
His point is that the "faithful" only say that faith is so important because they don't have evidence or proof. Scientists, doctors, chemists, architects, mathematicians, and others in fact-based professions lack that clerical luxury, which is why faith has no value in any fact-based profession or endeavor. You can pray that God blesses your new skyscraper, but you sure as hell aren't designing it with angels instead of I-beams and double welded joints.
Incidentally, in one of his countless endnotes, Harris points out that three labs independently tested pieces of the Shroud of Turin, and all concluded it was a Medieval forgery dating between 1260-1390. There were dozens of supposed "shrouds" touring around Europe in those days, along with countless reliquaries full of saints' bones and teeth, chunks of wood from the true cross, spears of destiny, and so forth. Most of those objects of fundraising veneration were lost or thrown away once the gimmick wore off, though quite a few churches in Europe and the Middle East still house crypts with saints' names on top and cow and dog bones inside. As for the Shroud of Turin, there's no telling it if was one of the better shrouds, or just the only one that happened to survive into the modern era. At any rate, there's no question that it was never associated with Jesus. It's well over one thousand years more recent, it's dark where it should be light and vice versa, and chemical testing has revealed that it's drawn not in blood, but in vermilion, red ochre, tempura and various other paint pigments commonly used in the middle ages.
Harris makes an argument about the time sink that is religion on page 149.
Think of all the good things humans will not do in this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men. How many hours of human labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation's phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millennia.
There are lots of other interesting bits; his analogy of the neighbors who spend every Sunday digging in their backyard since they believe there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried there is particularly amusing, but I've quoted enough. Harris' isn't the best of the recent slew of atheist best sellers, but this book is an informative, insightful, and challenging read.
There are a ton of these on YouTube, but this one was amusing for the Best in Show-esque play by play. Get your girl out at center court and ask her to marry you. What could go wrong?
"Just once I'd like to see one of these ladies say 'no.'" "Well, he'll probably get over this in 10 or 12 years."
My favorite part was her running off, and him leaving through a different exit, while holding a beer and being consoled by some sort of giant fuzzy rat.
In an effort to, for once, keep a book review shorter than the book itself, I'll get right to the point on this one.
This book by journalistic provocateur Christopher Hitchens is exactly what the title advertises. It's a series of semi-fictional letters from him to a non-specific "young contrarian," advising and encouraging the young person how they might best stick to their chosen path in life. Hitchens is perhaps too controversial and bomb-throwing to be "distinguished," but he's certainly worthy of that adjective, in the unlikely event he might accept it.
As for the book, it's formatted as a series of short letters from Hitchens to a hypothetical penpal, a young person asking for advice and insight into how best to find their own way. The book does what it sounds like it would do, but not much more, which explains my unbalanced review scores.
Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens, 2001 Concept: 7 Presentation: 6 Writing Quality: 8 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7 Entertainment Value: 6 Rereadability: 7 Overall: 6
This brief book (large type over 141 short pages) is comprised of advice and encouragement to an individual who resolutely wishes to stand out from the herd. There aren't a lot of specifics, since after all, if you simply followed what you were told, you'd hardly be a contrarian, would you? So the bulk of the text is made up of general exhortations and theoretical incitements, most of which boil down to "think for yourself," "go against the grain," "make up your own mind," "stick to your guns," and so forth. None of it bad advice, but I didn't find it inspirational or uplifting, nor was it nuts-and-bolts functional.
It wasn't sappy or self-indulgent, at least. Hitchens is a brilliant writer and thinker, and he's got a good sense of humor about this issue. He clearly feels a healthy absurdity in being asked for his advice on career goals or philosophical principles, but he takes the mentoring concept seriously, and gives advice that definitely rises above the level of platitudes. He's certainly lived a life that qualifies for the book's title, and a good chunk of the letters are devoted to discussing the stances and approaches he's used to make himself such a contrarian.
He was a Marxist in his college days and a writer of liberal polemics for some years after that, before maturing into a free thinker who made his name as a brilliant writer, ravenous reader, diligent researcher, and fearless author of books that were both informative and highly critical of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and many others. Of late (after the publication date of this book, ironically) he's achieved his greatest contrarian fame as a relentless debater and the author of the atheist manifesto God is Not Great, as well as a trenchant supporter of the Iraqi War, and any other hypothetical military initiative against any (and all) Islamic, Middle Eastern nations. This despite his long history as a leftist, and his staunch opposition to virtually every other policy or societal goal of the Neo-cons who so wholeheartedly agree with his approach to US foreign policy, vis-a-vis the Middle East.
Hitchens has clearly walked the walk, but can he talk the talk? Not especially, but I'm not sure anyone can, or that it's even possible in this type of book. The best he can do is talk about what he's done, and set himself up as an example to emulate. And he's done so. I feel a bit unfair giving the book a low overall score when it was done about as well as it could have been done, but that doesn't change the fact that the book didn't inspire me, despite my strong interest in it and admiration for much of the work of the author. Perhaps I knew too much about him going in, or perhaps I'm no longer young enough. This book would surely have made a stronger impression on me at 21 than it did now.
With all the posting I've been doing about human psychology and how it relates to sexuality, I felt compelled to mention this news item about some new research on the ever-elusive G-spot. As always, it's by a male researcher.
After more than half a century of debate and bedroom exploration, a row about the location of the fabled G spot may be settled at last, the British weekly New Scientist says.
The answer, according to Italian researcher Emmanuele Jannini, is that, yes, the G spot does exist, but only among those women who are lucky enough to possess it, New Scientist reports. Jannini, of the University of L'Aquila, used ultrasound to scan a key vaginal area among nine women who claimed to experience vaginal orgasms and 11 who said they didn't.
The target was an area of tissue on the front vaginal wall located behind the urethra. Tissue was notably thicker in this space among the first group of women compared with the second, the scans revealed.
Jannini, who reports the research in full in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, says the evidence is clear: "Women without any visible evidence of a G spot cannot have a vaginal orgasm."
"For the first time, it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has a G spot or not," he believes.
Some experts question whether what Jannini calls the G spot is a distinct structure or the internal part of the clitoris, whose size is highly variable. Others say more work is needed to confirm Jannini's belief that the G spot is missing in women who don't experience vaginal orgasm. The G spot could be there in all women, but with differing degrees of sensitivity, they believe.
So, what exactly has this clarified? All women may or may not have it, to varying degrees, and it may or may not be part of the clitoris. I've also got to point out that this study is useless on methodological grounds, unless there were testing controls not hinted at in the brief news item summation. If the examiners/scientists knew which women said they could or could not, then the physiological examination would have tester bias. Like all studies, this one needs to be done double blind, though that's obviously going to be tricky when you're researching something like this, where you need a special type of volunteer
At any rate, it's odd that they report the tissue in the "spot" is thicker amongst the women who said they can have vaginal orgasms; if the G spot were part of the clitoris you'd think that thinner tissue there would enable more transmission of sensations, or something like that. I'm also wondering where the connection between the G spot and vaginal orgasm was established; the article makes it sound like the researcher takes that as a fact, but there's nothing approaching 100% correlation in real world studies of this.
If you want to read more about the G-spot, and how could you not, there's a fairly informative page on Wikipedia, though they don't get into how to find it. The About.com page does, and it was the first return on my "finding the g spot" search, so you might start by looking there. So to speak.
And you might as well read about the much-debated issue of female ejaculation, since it's a related topic. One of the About.com pages on female sexuality treats that juicy subject as an extension of G-spot stimulation, but experts are still arguing the issue. Early sex research (as related in the book I recently reviewed on the subject) by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson conclusively "proved" that it was a myth and that women did not ejaculate when they orgasmed. That remained the official position until later researchers provided female test subjects who could routinely ejaculate upon orgasm, and it's now taken for granted that some women can do it all the time. However, they still don't know what causes it or what the ejaculate is. It's basically urine, and it comes out of the urethra, but it has some enzymes and proteins that differ from usual pee samples. So yeah, basically she's peeing on you (or you're peeing on him/her/it), but it's like, special super love pee. So treat it with reverence; you worked hard to earn it.
Here's another long discussion camouflaged as a book review. The book itself was quite informative, and it had some awesome artwork (as seen below), but what it spurred me to discuss at the greatest length was the comfort humans can obtain, or not, from their belief system. What psychological benefits do atheists receive from not being able to tell themselves, "this is all part of God's plan" when some disaster strikes? And how does this question relate to a book about Satanic cults and mass hysteria throughout human history? Read on and find out.
Remember the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s? When seemingly every preschool and daycare worker in the world was accused of being part of a vast Satanic conspiracy, and (literally) unbelievable stories about children being terrorized and abused by the tens of thousands, women being bred and babies being born solely for their future value as bloody sacrifices, animals being tortured and killed to scare the children into silence, secret tunnels and black rituals, and more. The whole thing blew up in just a few years, was aided and abetted by a rash of "recovered memories" in adults coached by credulous psychiatrists, before it all crumbled under the weight of its own nonexistence. It was a modern day witch-hunt, and once you go beyond the tabloid-esque specifics of the events in question, the larger question is about human psychology and cultural dynamics. What causes people to make such accusations and to entertain such absurd allegations? What is the deeper root of this kind of mania? What human needs does it serve?
This subject is examined at length by the unfortunately named David Frankfurter, in his massively-researched title, Evil Incarnate. His book, the culmination of more than a decade of research, draws from the fields of history, psychology, anthropology, and religious studies, and presents a fascinating overview of witch hunts and societal panics over much of recorded human history. Dozens of such instances are reviewed, and it's startling how familiar they all are. Children, coached by authority figures, make incredible accusations, communities mobilize against the accused (who are always powerless fringe figures, usually nonconforming and/or elderly women), professional prosecutors appear and fan the flames with their "expertise," torture is used to extract confessions which implicate others and confirm the conspiracy theories of the prosecutors, and so on, until some critical mass is reached and the community grows sickened by the excesses and shakes off the collective mania. Whether it's Poland in 1050, or Spain in 1620, or Manhattan Beach, CA in 1983, the elements are always the same.
I suppose that a person could take this pattern and conclude that there really are hidden cults of Satanists carrying out these grim torments all the time, and that they are only occasionally uncovered. There's always child abuse of some level going on in the world, but I think it more likely, and this is the conclusion Frankfurter draws as well, that the identical nature of these episodes are signs of various weaknesses in human nature, ones that run the same course once fabricated manias come about, taking on a briefly self-perpetuating life of their own. But why?
...where do these images of extreme evil come from? What is the relationship of such extreme images to the popular wish to expel it so violently from our midst? Why are people's larger anxieties and traumas expressed in these particular images, with rituals, perversions, cannibalism, and infant-sacrifices -- how do these kinds of scenarios come to represent evil?"
This book goes a long way towards answering these questions, in modern and historical terms. It probably goes without saying, but the author doesn't give any credence to the allegations made at any point in history. Based on his research, he does not entertain the notion that there might really be Satanic forces, much less demons and witches with magical powers. Of course there has been child abuse all through human history, and sometimes its been organized by a small cell of pedophile perverts, but if any individual witch-hunt actually uncovered and destroyed such a conspiracy, rather than just torturing and murdering dozens or hundreds of innocent people, Frankfurter never uncovered it in his decade of research. To the scores:
Evil incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, by David Frankfurter, 2006 Concept: 8 Presentation: 6 Writing Quality: 6 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7 Entertainment Value: 4 Rereadability: 5 Overall: 7
My scores for this one are somewhat constrained by the presentation and tone. This is not a text book, but it's quite scholarly, and is not written on a popular level. It's composed with an advanced vocabulary and quite long sentence/paragraph structure, and was clearly prepared by an academic. The average chapter has 60 or 70 citations and endnotes, giving it the feel of a very thorough and professional, but not especially readable, research paper or dissertation. I doubt I would have gotten through it a few years ago, before my return to college, where I grew accustomed to reading this sort of material, and can now do it for pleasure, as I did with this book, since I was interested in the subject.
If you want more over-arching discussion, check the Amazon listing for the book, where there are snips from quite a few high level (NYTimes, Publisher's Weekly, scholarly journals, etc) editorial reviews. Rather than duplicate them by giving an overview of the book, I'm going to focus on a few things I found most interesting.
Frankfurter's research was extensive, and produces numerous fascinating citations, quite often from the Bible, or various non-canonical scriptures. One from the Gnostic Testament of Reuben, is cited on page 23. It details the types of suffering and difficulties various demons can inflict upon humans, and where these diseases are located in the body.
The first, that of impurity, is seated in the nature and the senses. The second, the spirit of insatiate desire, in the belly. The third, the sprit of fighting, in the liver and the gall. The fourth, (is) the spirit of flatter and trickery... The fifth is the spirit of arrogance.... The sixth is the spirit of lying in destruction and jealousy... the seventh is the spirit of unrighteousness... for unrighteousness works together with the other spirits through the receiving of bribes. Besides all these, the spirit of sleep, the eighth spirit, it connected with deceit and fantasy.
There's plenty more of this sort of cataloging of diseases and maladies, along with the demons to blame for them. On page 25 Frankfurter lists the demons of the Testament of Solomon .
...the demon Onoskelis, with female torso and mule's legs, inhibits cliffs, caves, and ravines. A nameless headless demon and another named Obzouth attack newborn babies, knowing the price times that women give birth. Kunopegos ("dog-flow") sinks ships with giant waves, while a variety of demons or illness and strife are linked to the 36 heavenly bodies: for example, Sphandor, who wakens shoulders, numbs hands, and paralyzes limbs.
This sort of thing is seen in the mythologies and religions of every culture, and just goes to show how creative and precise humans can and will be with their quantifying and qualifying, even when what they're just sorting imaginary gremlins.
Another perpetual feature of the supposed cultists is sexual immorality, and it's striking how similar the charges are, in every culture and time. There are always orgies, sexual congress with animals and/or demons of some sort, and sexual fetishism of offal; blood, feces, afterbirth, etc. Basically the worst things people can think of, which always tell more about the suppressed sexual perversion of the accusers and society in general.
...ethnographers have noted especially in modern ideas of witch-cults a fascination with inversion itself: not only what is eaten and who copulates with whom, but every aspect of what witches (or demons, or Satanists) do: Their dances, their music, their singing, their transportation. Everything is turned upside down: They eat what we find disgusting, they mock what we find sacred, they expose what we do in private, they abuse what we protect, they congregate when we stay at home. It is as if the wholesale inversion of cultural norms carries an intrinsic excitement, which compounds both the overall picture of the monstrous and the prurience of contemplating it.
There's always a good bit of titillation and prurience in the spectacles too, especially for the star prosecutors. A prominent aspect of all the historical cases of witch hunting was the torture, examination, and purgation of the accused. Searching for the Devil's Mark was mandatory in the good old days, a process which necessarily entailed stripping accused (women) nude, so that groups of the accusing (men) could thoroughly examine them from head to toe in order to find the incriminating moles or birth marks. If a suitable mark could not be found, it was not uncommon for one to be manufactured by vigorous and cruel pinching, prodding, or probing, and it's impossible not to imagine the sexual connotations of a room full of torturing church or court elders having their judgmental fun with a parade of helpless nude females.
Lest you think the sexualized aspects were only interpersonal and extralegal, Frankfurter includes numerous illustrations and examples from the witch-hunting books and manuals of the time. This picture is only a century old, but it's based on earlier works and comes from a French history of witch hunts and persecutions. Not a great deal of subtlety in the context and implications of that scene, eh?
Not all the witch hunts were brought about by accusing children, of course. Throughout the Middle Ages and even more recently than that, there have been numerous documented cases of possession of adults, usually women, and often nuns, in events that appear to be a sort of mass hysteria. One such incident took place in a nunnery in Loudun in 1634, when the cloistered nuns were disturbed by the presence of a new and unpopular priest.
Feeling irritated, for example, that the new convent priest was offering communion through the grille rather than directly,
"...it entered my mind that, to humiliate the father, the demon would have committed some irreverence toward the Very Holy Sacrament. I was so miserable that I did not resist that thought strongly enough. When I went to take communion, the devil seized my head, and after I had received the holy host and half moistened it, the devil threw it into the priest's face. I knew perfectly well that I did not perform that act freely, but I an very sure, to my great embarrassment, that I gave the devil occasion to do it, and that he would not have had this power had I not allied myself with him.
The tangible presence of the demonic becomes not just terrifying, but inspiring: a context for imagining, then embodying, a rush of feelings to transgress or rebel emerge through the adoption of demonic identities: insulting priests and bishops, cursing sacraments and God -- all the "worst things imaginable" become imagined, performed, and at some level, enjoyed.
It's easy to see how being possessed by demons could be quite liberating and freeing, for people forced to live very controlled, orthodox, ascetic lives. Indeed, there are numerous accounts of nuns so "possessed" falling to the ground, tearing at their clothing in sexual ecstasy, shouting every sort of profanity and so forth. Cutting loose all at once, like a bomb going off after their years or decades of stultifying self control. It seems a pretty obvious human pathology, but the fact that this sort of release was forbidden the nuns (and others) meant they had to blame it on something else. Could it be... Satan?
Frankfurter makes an interesting distinction between the types of "Satanism," all of which exist, but none of which actually match up with the fevered fantasies of the credulous.
Today, for example, one can see distinctions between youth who embrace a "Satanic style" with jewelry, tattoos, and clothing in order to express feelings of deviance, youth who adopt Satanism as a legitimization of violence (often ex post facto and encouraged by parents or advisors in order to gain popular forgiveness), and the often deranged adults who conceal their crimes under the anonymity of "Satanic cult atrocity." All three of these modes of performance have the capacity to prove the reality of a Satanic cult conspiracy for those who believe in it, but in fact they reflect important differences in the actors' motivation.
I think this sort of thing plays into a need of most humans; for explanation and reason in the face of madness. That's essentially what fuels memes like mythologies, religions, conspiracy theories, and so forth. The fact that we are pattern-seeking mammals, who don't like to accept that major events, especially things we find disturbing, can be just luck, or chance, or random and entirely outside of human control. Someone's teenaged son dies drunk driving, gets murdered, dies in a senseless accident, etc, and it's a fair bet the grieving parent will be quoted saying that, "God has a purpose." or "These things happen for a reason." Never mind that there's no evidence of this, and quite a bit evidence going against it; such thoughts provide consolation, which is why every faith, belief system, and religion with any popularity in the world today incorporates them at a structural level.
Almost everyone sees larger causes behind important events; the main difference is in how high up the chain one assigns the blame or credit. Traditionally it went right to the top. God -- or once the concept of dualism was introduced into Christianity with the New Testament, Satan -- is responsible. Good works are inspired, bad things are curses or temptations, and everything lacking a clear causal agent (storms, drought, plagues, etc) must be a sign of God's displeasure, likely caused by some indefinable human actions. Eastern belief systems are similar in their ultimate assignation of causes; although their deities are largely non-interventionist, good things come from positive karma built up in previous lives and bad things are signs of negative karma being worked off.
A slightly more modern view lowers the causation a bit, putting the ultimate causes, be they God or the Universe or whatever, out of the range of direct influence on events. Their proxies are then to praise/blame, so things are caused by individual demons, or spirits, or guardian angels, or kiri (nature spirits in Japanese Zen Buddhism).
A bit lower down the chain the concepts get secularized, and there's no longer a demon or angel or holy spirit controlling things, but it might as well be, since the powers in charge are equally-far out of your reach or control. Humans do evil things, in this world view, but they're doing them as directed by demonic forces. In this view the lone gunman is never to blame for the assassination, since he's just a fall guy. An interesting psychological aspect of this is that bigger conspiracies are better, perhaps because that explains more, and helps to restore a bit more logic and orderliness to a chaotic world. (It's still chaos on the ground level, but the hope is that if you can grasp the higher level forces, it will begin to make more sense. Remember, we're pattern seeking mammals, so this works directly on our psychology and vanity.) So a conspiracy of 19 hijackers on 9/11 isn't sufficient. They must be part of a far larger, worldwide movement of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Or better yet, it's even bigger than that, and the actual hijackers and their inspirational leaders might think they were acting on their own recognizance, but they were actually just a pawn in the hand of the Jewish world bankers, or the Trilateral Commission, or the New World Order.
The lowest level of causation and order in the universe is the purely naturalistic one, and that's what I aspire to. Shit (and sunshine) happens, and while it's in our nature to try to explain it in larger terms; God, fate, destiny, conspiracies, etc, that's just mental masturbation for people who can't deal with the messy, chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable reality of the universe. Of course there are reasons for things; humans have individual goals and ideas, short and long term, and sometimes these goals are pursued by larger groups; i.e. conspiracies. But Occam's Razor has to be applied judiciously, which rules out most of the wilder theories.
By extension, and here's where it starts to get interesting: people with a naturalistic, non-religions, non-superstitious, non-conspiracy theory viewpoint... are satisfying the human same needs by believing (or not believing). Rationalists aren't special or different in their psychological needs; they're (we're) also using our philosophy of life to make sense of things. It's just less obvious what that sense is. The religious person who says "God has a plan." in answer to misery or triumph, doesn't require any deep analysis. They're wearing their beliefs and needs on their sleeve. But what's getting an atheist, or a rationalist, through trials and tribulations? How does believing (accepting?) that the world isn't governed by some divine or human plan, give a sense of order and reassurance to the mind?
I'm not sure about that one. I've not seen it addressed by any of the leading atheist philosophers, and I don't have a complete answer. I'd say that in part it's slightly narcissistic; knowing that we know the truth, that we don't need supernatural crutches to face reality, functions as a reinforcement in of itself. When something bad happens, it's cheering to tell myself, "That was just random chance; I can accept that and don't need to blame God, or spirits, or karma." And I feel better for being strong and independent minded and realistic. But that only works so long as most of the rest of the world is still trapped in one superstition or another. What happens when/if everyone is a rationalist? I don't mean just non-religious, since often as people outgrow or throw off that ancient security blanket, they fall into another more modern one. Astrology or numerology or psychics or New Age medicines, etc. But if everyone left those concepts behind, and we were all rationalists and didn't envision magical causes behind daily events, the psychological value of knowing I'm right and special and smarter than most people would be gone. So what then? (Fortunately, there's no chance of that ever happening, so it's purely a psychological exercise.)
It should go without saying that the majority of the world's population, people who believe in various religions or other scientifically-unprovable world views, think very differently than I do, while still arriving at the same conclusion. They think that they have the unique truth of it, and that everyone else is deluded in one way or another. Interestingly, they can get a double boost, by believing in a supernatural plan, and reveling in the same sort of gloating that a rationalist might indulge in. Their broken ankle, lost job, dead friend, etc, sucks, but 1) it's a lesson of some kind, and custom tailored by God for their situation, and 2) the fact that they realize this gives them an extra bonus. "Some idiots actually think bad things are just chance and happenstance," they could tell themselves, "and those idiots don't learn the lesson, or enjoy God's blessing that accompanies it!"
Does that sort of "I know best." reassurance actually function in real life? Perhaps not.
Exhibit 1: Not much more than a year ago my relationship with Malaya ended suddenly and painfully. I'd never been in romantic love before her, had never been in an LTR of that nature, and hadn't planned on being out of that one. So, to be on my own again, after living more-or-less happily with her for nearly four years, was quite a change. Especially since the break up entailed me moving to the North Bay (where I knew no one), and establishing a functional household almost from scratch since I'd disposed of most of my furniture, dishes, electronics, etc when I moved up here from San Diego in 2003. Plus I was busy attending school full time in the middle of my high-impact three-semester return to college, juggling part time work and federal loans to cover my tuition and suddenly-increased living expenses, etc.
Now this in no way compares to a truly stressful life experience, like the death of a child or spouse, but it was both difficult and unpleasant. A few paragraphs ago I speculated that rationalists like myself can gain some psychological comfort in times of grief by reminding themselves that they know the truth about the universe, and that they're superior or stronger than religious people who need to appeal to their invisible buddy in the sky (or earth, or sea, or wherever) to get through such ordeals. How often do you suppose that thought occurred to me, and comforted me during the early month(s) of 2007, post breakup, while sleeping alone in a cold apartment in a cold bed, wondering if I'd ever find love and/or happiness again?
Never. I never once had that thought, that I can remember. And I had a lot of thoughts, philosophical and other.
That might not shoot down my whole theory about rationalists gaining reassurance and strength from a narcissistic indulgence in egotism, but it's certainly not support for my theory. I think the support comes more often in everyday life, rather than in times of crisis. Contrary to the popular expression, there are atheists in foxholes, but none of them are whiling away the time indulging in philosophical musings. That said, neither did I ever indulge in the standard platitudes about our breakup being meant to happen, or tell myself that I was being tested, or flatter myself that these events were all part of some divine plan/supernatural event/conspiracy theory. It was what it was; the end result of various interpersonal, experiential, financial, and emotional incompatibilities. That was the truth, and it was neither reassuring nor depressing. It just was, and at the time, and in retrospect, I don't see how romanticizing, or giving a metaphysical spin to things, would have helped.
Frankfurter's book doesn't go into that area at all; it's just my own musing on the subject. He does conclude the book with some good stuff, though:
No forensic or archaeological evidence for Satanic cult atrocities as alleged by SRA experts has ever been found: no bodies, crime sites, burials, or even past pregnancies of those claiming to have been successful "breeders." Research and clinical psychologists alike have shown that patients' memories of abusive Satanic ceremonies upon which the SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse] conspiracy was based were so contaminated by media, improper and unethical therapy techniques, and SRA subcultures that, whatever psychological or traumatic truths they revealed about the patient, they could never stand as eyewitness or historical documentation of real religious practices. The question then follows, if there is no reliable evidence for SRA, and if indeed simpler explanations for the claims can be found in their social and psychological circumstances, on what basis can we assume that it should exist, especially on the scale alleged by its revealers?
So the modern accounts aren't true (although if you believe them, then the complete absence of evidence is just further proof of how powerful these cults are) why should we believe that any such stories are true? Most historians have take the centuries of persecutions and panics as proof that the people were reacting to something, but if we consider that all the evidence is of persecution, what does that prove, in light of the comprehensive debunking of the SRA?
On the whole it's an interesting, massively-researched book, and while it presents far more information than insight, or argument, I learned a lot from it. Plus, it's got some really cool illustrations, taken from centuries-old woodcuts. I'll close this installment of Flux's massively overlong, digression-filled book reviews with a photo of a second illustration that's just bursting with juicy details. Click it to view it supersized.
Jan Ziarnko, engraving of witches' Sabbat, to accompany Pierre de Lancre, tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613). Ithaca, New York. Courtesy of the Division of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Details include: (A) Satan enthroned as a five-horned goat, along with (B) the Queen of the Sabbat and another mistress, to whom a naked witch and a demon present a child for initiation. (C) The Sabbat involves (at lower right D) a banquet of human body parts, hearts of unbaptised babies, and diverse vermin, and is atttended by female witches and their demon-lovers; and it is followed by a backward, naked dance of he women and their demons. (F): "they dance... with the most indecent and dirty movements they can." To the left (H) more women and girls dance, naked and backwards, to the sound of a cacophonous musical ensemble (G): and below them (L) can be seen an elegant masque for the lord and lady-witches. In the center (K) more children arrive with a anked witch on the back of a goat to be dedicated to Satan, while to the lower left (M) the initiated witch-children tend to the toads they have brought to the Sabbat for senior witches (bottom center, I) to mix in a maleficent brew.
