In 48 hours I start riding a 101-mile mountain bike race

On Saturday August 1st I will join about 300 other mountain bikers to embark on the Wilderness 101, a 101-mile single-day mountain bike race. We will climb over 10,000', cross several county lines, enter and exit a host of state parks and natural areas, and rock trails from the smooth and fast Lonberger Trail to the grueling rocky benchcut of Kikkapu. This is my sixth time entering and should be my fifth completion and my third time on a single speed bike. I mechanicaled out two years ago and last year I didn't enter.

I'm riding a Bianchi Sok with 29"wheels, Maxxis Ignitor tires, and 34x18 gearing (pictured here).

It's going to be a pretty long day. I've finished in as little as 8 hours 22 minutes my second year and as long as 11 hours 32 minutes. [That had some first-year struggles that included an epic bonk leading to a nap just shy of the crest of the last climb. Guys were walking by saying things like, "You know you're only five miles from the end," and "There's beer a few miles away." ] My fastest time on a single speed is 8 hours 55 minutes which got me 7th on single that year and 29th overall. I think that I can get close to that this year but there are more fast people coming every year. The podium is not so in my sights. I have thousands of miles in my legs, big single speed miles, several local short track races, and three official races which have earned me a tie for first place in a three-race series so I'm about as prepared as possible. For a guy who went from 208 lbs in April reaching 180/182 by the last week of July is pretty sweet.

Saturday will be a return of sorts I guess. After about a year and a half of basically no riding I feel almost back to my fastest form from a four and five years ago. More importantly, I think that I've been having a TON of fun and reforging friendships with people I love and admire and gotten to start riding for a new shop, Freeze Thaw. Thanks guys.

See you out there!

Atheist fundamentalist - the empty insult

I really enjoy The Economist. And now, they've had a great piece on why it's silly to call an atheist a fundamentalist. They write:

First and most salient, as Oxford's Tim Garton Ash writes, "there are no al-Darwinia brigades making bombs in secret laboratories in north Oxford." Yes, sigh, many atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennet are just as convinced that there is no God as Osama bin Laden is convinced that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger. On one hand you have faith that makes people fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors (in church), stone adultresses, outlaw certain forms of consensual sex or even just make it impossible to buy beer on Sunday in some states. On the other hand there is the atheist "faith" that makes people write smug op-eds, put ads on buses (see photo), file frivolous lawsuits against nativity scenes on public property, and the like. Show me what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done.

Thank you! The author goes on to write about certainty. Sure, Dawkins and Dennett (and I) are quite certain that we are right. There is/are almost surely no god/s. But we have the weight - or should I say total emptiness - of evidence on our side that suggests that there is no such thing as the supernatural. It, and all of the gods its created, are generated by the gray matter between our skulls and our collective celebrations of these figments. As the article reminds us, the all-powerful creator of the universe could really clear it all up for us doubters with some simple acts. It could tell us all the 30-digit prime number Sam Harris wrote down or...I don't know...just appear to all humans on planet Earth at the same time and make a clear argument about why, say the Bible, is the ultimate guide to the universe. Right? It really is that simple.

So if I'm a fundamentalist then I'm a fundamentalist about some very basic things involving what is real. And my baloney detection kit is picking up nothing about an existing god or gods and a lot about people deluding themselves together to generate meaning, purpose, and happiness. But don't bother comparing me to the Taliban fighter who splashes acid in little girls' faces because she has gone to school and hopes to continue to go to school. We can barely measure the ethical distance between Richard Dawkins who says believers are deluded and the Ayatollah Khomeini who put a fatwah on Salman Rushdie. This says nothing of course of the innumerable holy warriors who, for centuries, fought and killed for their gods.

We may have certainty (a tentative certainty in some respects). But it is not the same as the blindly faithful conviction of the religious fundamentalist. We are not fundamentalists.

John Stossel is an idiot

Stossel really believes that people are "happy to make $1 a day making clothing for American children." That "$1 a day" is the result of free trade. What is his solution? "Free trade." Watch and wonder at the incredible arrogance and ignorance of this neoliberal idiocy. "Free trade" is a euphemism for exploitation.

Don't bother resisting sweat shops. Those people deserve their conditions until they work harder and become "lifted up" out of their primitive states. Until they realize the free-market dream (that one that holds them down as peripheral people in a cancerous system of resource exploitation and depletion) they'll just have to accept their places.



What a greedy near-sighted infant. Maybe we should put him, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly on a boat to Bangkok, get them kidnapped by pirates, and force them to work for "$1 a day" (working day = 14 hours) 6-7 days a week, and see what he thinks after he sees my kid walking around in the clothes they've made. Think he'd like that? Idiot.

Sam Harris on Francis Collins for the NIH

I don't think anyone is going to be surprised by this at all: In an opinion piece in The New York Times Sam Harris opposes Francis Collins' nomination as the new head of the National Institutes of Health. Collins was the former head of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and is admired by religious moderates as an example of science's compatibility with religious faith, Evangelical Christianity in this case. Harris sees in Collins the perniciousness of religious beliefs that he argued against in The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and his numerous articles and debates.

Thinking politically, I find Collins an obvious choice. His book The Language of God and his generally pleasant back and forth with Richard Dawkins make him enormously appealing to the kind of general tolerance and smiling niceties that Obama seems to cultivate and lots of us want. We don't want the rancor of the Bush years and we don't want the outlandish science denial that has occurred under the "Republican war on science." His competence as a manager of scientific research seems beyond question after the incredible success of the HGP. Collins is not a Young Earth Creationist nor a supporter of so-called "intelligent design." Seems a happy choice for everyone. As Harris notes, "Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be." And given the state of attacks on evolution in America's public schools, it is even better. Collins has openly supported evolutionary theory much to the chagrin of his more conservative Evangelical brethren.

So what upsets Harris and some others? Statements like these, advanced in a slide show from
a presentation at Berkeley:

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

I wonder what sort of evidence he has to say these things. How, as a scientist, does conclude that God "gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil" etc.? Obviously we have a moral sense and have concocted categories called "good and evil," but there is no evidence that this is something that was gifted to us through some external all-powerful agent who turned himself into his own son and had himself killed in Israel 2,000 years ago. We have every reason to believe that morality is created through a combination of genetics and socialization. That is, we have an evolved moral sense that has been transferred vertically through our ancestry as social mammals and that is refined (or not) through our interactions in our contemporary ecological and social environments. This is not to say it is an "illusion" as in a false thing, but something that is the product of material interactions through evolutionary time.

We have, as Harris notes, lots of evidence that suggests that mind is the product of the brain working in its environment. This includes morality. Collins has no evidence for his assertions that morality, free will, or an immortal soul are gifts from God. I'd like him to provide us some good evidence for any of them as gifts from God. He will, of course, first have to verify that God is an existing being, something no one has been able to do non-subjectively. These are so many wishes, all broadly culturally supported. They are tissues of invention that people find enormously satisfying. But they are in no way supported by science. In fact, they are quite clearly negated or made infinitesimally unlikely by the findings of the evolutionary, cognitive, and behavioral sciences.

And so I wonder, like Harris, if Collins believes that as the head of the NIH, we should address issues of human happiness and behavior with the "science" of theology? Collins thinks “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence.”

"Why do I behave as I do?" I think that's an important question. I think science helps me answer that question pretty well. At the amateurish level of personal and interpersonal collective hypothesis testing I can learn much more about why I act one way and not some other. I pose a question, gather data, reflect on what I have discovered, pose more questions, and so on. This is much more fruitful than thinking that I act some way because I talking snake duped my original female ancestor into eating from a forbidden tree in a garden that didn't exist.

Of course, at the professional specialist level of inquiry, we might be able to learn the historical deep time reasons for behavior as an evolved mechanism or by looking into the activity of the brain's structures we might be able to learn about the structural sources of behavior. In all, I can learn about myself. In short, we can continue the journey to know ourselves. From that knowledge we can derive and develop meaning and purpose which are integral to happiness. I'd be surprised if Collins would disagree with what I've just written about meaning and purpose. He would, I suppose, just commit a fiat and say that all that comes from God. Now we're back at the beginning.

I don't find Collins' appointment particularly troubling. His bona fides are impeccable and he is eminently able. His religious beliefs are silly and not supported by science. Zero. But in a nation as goofy as ours, I'll take a guy this conflicted who experiences no conflict. After all, at least he understands that evolution is real.

God the mafia boss?

I really enjoy watching The Atheist Experience. Good time. They get into some nice tangles sometimes and this one is very special. I'm used to pointing out the fact that the God of the Bible - especially the Old Testament - is like a Mafia boss who breaks legs when you don't do what he wants. Ouch. And I agree with Matt (who visited Penn State last semester) that most of us are "more moral than the God of the Bible."

Gustav Mahler: pantheistic humanist

Gustav Mahler is probably my favorite composer. Up there anyway with Sibelius, Shostakovich, and Penderecki. I do have him tattooed on my back. I've just read an interesting article on him in The Nation that characterizes his religious beliefs as follows:

Though nominally a Catholic after his baptism, Mahler drew his religious ideas from lesser-known thinkers, such as his friend Siegfried Lipiner (also a Jewish-born convert to Christianity), who espoused a pantheistic humanism far removed from both doctrinal Catholicism and the acute Nietzschian skepticism that the non-Jewish Richard Strauss could bring to life musically (in Also Sprach Zarathustra) without fear of being labeled a rootless cosmopolitan.

Interesting. I look forward to reading more about it. In all of my spare time that is.

Metal Post! Iron Maiden has been wrong for all these years?

"Number of the Beast," quite possibly Iron Maiden's most famous song, might be the result of errors. Of course, they aren't Iron Maiden's errors, but errors made by biblical translators. Let's get real. Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris, and the boys never err. Well...maybe the album No Prayer For the Dying...and some songs on Powerslave... But that's not the point.

A little prelude. The song begins with this,

Woe to you O earth and sea, for the Devil sends the Beast with wrath, because he knows the time is short. Let him who hath understanding reckon the Number of the Beast, for it is a human number. Its number is six-hundred and sixty-six.

Then comes one of the greatest riffs of all time. Most great metal riffs are in the minor mode or one of its close relatives (dorian, phrygian, or locrian). But not "Number of the Beast." It's in G major! And it rules. Full speed ahead in a celebration of orgiastic kitschy horror movie devil worship. Torches blaze and sacred chants are praised as the fans and demonic souls start to cry with hands held to the sky. In the night, the fires are burning bright as the ritual has begun, we all sing that Satans work is done. There are few songs as whole-hearted and full-throated for a despondent and excited teenager to go with as we sing, "6!6!6! The number of the beast! Hell...and fire...were spawned to be released!" It's total fun. Who needs the Jonas Brothers when you can watch dark figures move and twist and you and your friends can push it to the limit with Bruce Dickinson's operatic magic. Check the scream at the song's beginning!



But what am I getting at?

Religion News Blog reports that the number of the beast was not 666 but likely 616.

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil’s prime number.

I think that means main number. But whatever.

Man. I know a guy with 666 tattooed on his skull and it just got a little bit weaker. And screaming, "6! 1! 6! The number of the beast!" just isn't the same. Come to think of it, I purposely got locker number 666 in junior high and loved the hokey messages people left on it: "SATAN!" "Are you the devil?"

I guess I have to change all of my luggage combinations now and listen to Iron Maiden all day.

Other people think Karen Armstrong is wearing diapers too!

So I've been perusing the atheist blogosphere and what have I found? PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, two of my favorite biologists and atheists, shredding Karen Armstrong for her fantasy land. Check out Myers' post, "The power of nonsense" and Coyne's "Jesus and Mo on apophatic theology."

I especially enjoy Coyne's bit. In essence, apophatic theology is so empty that the great prophets that the monotheists adore would have been silent had they been apophatic. This presents no small problem.

And isn't there some call to go out into the world and do something? Oh yeah! Mark 16: 15-20!

15 And he said to them: Go into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
16 He that believes and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believes not shall be condemned.
17 And these signs shall follow those who believe: In my name they shall cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues.
18 They shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them: they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover.
19 And the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of God.
20 But they going forth preached everywhere: the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs that followed.

So those that follow this just don't get it at all do they? Following commands and all. Karen Armstrong sure understands what to do with this one doesn't she? Those silly people following orders from an apostle no less. Geez.

Karen Armstrong's diapers

John Grace shreds Karen Armstong in a marvelous parody at The Guardian. And it got me thinking and fulminating a bit. Mostly, I'm annoyed.

I don't care for Karen Armstrong's versions of theology and over-intellectualized apologetics disguised as hemi-semi-demi-apologetic-non-apologetics and historicism. She is the vanguard of silly academics who think that they can concatenate words into erudite sentences and bedazzle us with rhetorical acrobatics to show us how literal religious belief just isn't the point and that atheists are silly because all of belief is really just above reason, rationality, evidence, and logic. No no! We mustn't be duped by that ability innate in humans to detect baloney and test truth claims because, well, God is just beyond that and not to understand the existence of the apparently explicately non-existent is to make a cardinal error about categories of existence. Or something.

She's wearing designer diapers.

Armstrong and her comrades like to pretend that those silly fundamentalists don't really exist or if they do they're just sillies. They don't really believe in things like 72 virgins in heaven if they're Muslim or the Rapture if they're Christian. Well, I guess they do exist but they aren't really religious. Those are just some misguided wingnuts who don't vote with their mouths, hands, or wallets. No no. Well, if they do, then we can just explain away what they believe and practice as some kind of misunderstanding because they haven't read as deeply as Armstrong has. They don't really understand Jesus, Allah, Moses, or the Buddha. We can be certain of that. Right?

That substantial 1/4 of the U.S. population that thinks it's likely that Jesus will come back to Earth as a super-hero and will whisk them away to eternal bliss with some stadium seating views of the rest of humanity in tribulation doesn't really think that. That's all just fantasy. No one is really a literalist in the really real world where we all understand that God is just some ineffable ground of being, a verb, a transcendent force of inexplicable existence behind/beyond/within/throughout all of existence but is not necessarily existence itself nor non-existence itself but something else.

Well...if they are a literalist then they are infantile. Her ideas aren't infantile. They are grown-up. They are very clear in their total obscurity.

See, "Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God." Because that's what so many people believe and act on and have certainly believed in and acted on for the ~2,700 years since the first monotheism was enshrined. And all of those animists out there and former believers in the pantheons of Greece or the Aztecs, they weren't really religious either right?

How convenient for her to define religion this way and then categorically dismiss huge swaths of living and dead people's ideas about what religion is and how it ought to be believed in and practiced. "They've messed it up with their piffly misunderstandings of nuance," she seems to say.

And people say the "New Atheists" are condescending. At least we have the grounded realism to understand that people who haven't had the leisure to ruminate on whatever they want to come to plain conclusions about their religious teachings and that those conclusions make plain sense from the scriptures they read. Please. I can enjoy me some good woofdyfarkle, historicism, and semantic play. But when it comes to understanding God and his/its will through the scriptures, can we please be realistic in our expectations of what we think Joe and Janet Believer can be expected to believe? They might agree that "God is beyond language" because, as they like to sing, "Our God is an awesome God," but when they do it, they are making God a part of language. When you make Jesus a man, you've made God identifiable as a person. He becomes limited and explainable. He's become not just a piece of language but a being like you that has desires and hatreds and so on.

I think that she's nuts to think that she really understands something that can't be described in words. She's as lost in her own maze of allegedly transcendent concepts as fundamentalists are in their apparent rigidity.

Armstrong's explanations about God are pure literary theoretical inventions - words piled on words that are chained to other words that make for wonderfully silly things like this - that are justified by whoever she likes:

But God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

I just want to stop right here. How do you know any of this? By what means can you possibly verify any of this outside of human imagination? You can't. This is all convenient hand-waving. She is picking and choosing the parts of whatever scripture she wants to and the theologians and historians she's liked and saying that those are the real deal and that people have just failed to understand concept X (if you can even call it a concept because it might be "beyond" a concept). That's nonsense. She has no way to verify the transcendent rightness of any scriptural claim except to say that she thinks it's right because she feels like it's right and so did someone else. She has no more support that believing in God - whatever that even means in the end for her - than in Santa Claus. Why is believing in a non-existent existent God any less infantile than a personal one? If anything, the first is less likely because it is totally outside of all of human experience. At least the second has the benefit of simple human recognition in whose image we have allegedly been created.

In the end, her beliefs are infantile too. Her ideas haven't matured. They've just morphed into drivel and creativity. I'll take Joseph Campbell please for the mythic.

Armstrong wears a diaper from the infancy of our species that she's dressed up with a Ph.D. and some books. She defends the non-existent existent ungendered Santa Claus with no possibility of providing any check on how she might know what she's talking about.

6,000 years old

Breathtaking ignorance. Simply breathtaking.

A blood sacrifice...a blood sacrifice...

Funny.



Does anyone understand people really believing in talking snakes? I mean REALLY believing it.

Oklahoma rep fights for "righteousness"

I'm sure this is going to work out well. Tulsa World brings us this madness: Representative Sally Kern is floating an "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," a document that would "acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness." She has some strong economic ideas too.

A prayer to the FSM for Sarah Palin

When Sarah Palin was nominated for VP by McCain, I thought, "Wow. This is shaping up to be a disaster. This woman cannot - MUST NOT - be vice president much less (*GULP*) president." Can you imagine the total incompetence? I know it's hard to fathom. I nearly prayed to keep her out I was so appalled. More on that later.

But it looks like her tailspin into public nothinghood has reached its next nadir with her resignation as governor. So did she blink in the face of tough times? Me thinks so.

The Washington Times reports as follows:

Jason Recher, an aide who worked for Mrs. Palin during last year's campaign, said the environment in Alaska had changed so much since August "with the influx of the national anti-Republican, anti-Palin movement - it's been like an avalanche."

"With all the frivilous ethics complaints, it just had become completely unsustainable for her to be governor," he said.

Good. She blinked and has gotten out of the way.

In the speech she compared herself to a point guard. The WT writes,

In her announcement, Mrs. Palin said it "hurts to make this choice," but compared herself to a point guard in basketball, a position she herself excelled at in high school.

"A good point guard knows exactly when to pass the ball so the team can win," she said. "I know when it is time to pass the ball for victory." She added the decision to step down had been "in the works for a while."

This isn't passing the ball. This is telling the team during half-time that your quitting in the second half. Magic Johnson didn't step back nor did John Stockton. Come on now lady: did the Celtics get to you?

I'm glad she's being shelled. She has become an icon of fundamentalist politics and she has been a bumbling mess. Her family and work life have been nothing short of a travesty as her daughter's unwed pregnancy and its hullaballoo have shown as have the ethics charges and her total incompetence when questioned about anything of substance. I suppose that it didn't help that we discovered she was exorcised by a shaman...witch doctor...err...pastor and that this sort of magic working is par for the course in her church. She's a quack and she shouldn't be in politics.

On that note though, I think a good sturdy prayer is in order. [Puts on pirate patch, does a shot of rum, and preps to sneer you barmy swags.]

Let us pray,

Our holy and blessed Flying Spaghetti Monster and your outer space avatar the Celestial Teapot, please bless Sarah Palin. May her family be happier outside of the public eye and may she have the wisdom to not drag them back into a circus and fray. Please help her to understand that she is not a blessing for the United States, its people, its teen boys and girls, nor its wolves.

Offer her the insight to carry on her neuroses and bizarre religious rituals in the privacy of her own home.

Also, can you somehow give her an education to understand how impossible it is that the Earth is ~10,000 years old? Can you add to that evolution is a naturally occurring process? Oh yeah, and please don't forget to tell her that human-induced climate change is real and terrifying. That's a biggie. I mean, how does someone from Alaska not get it? With your combined noodliness and interstellar steaminess you can work out all things.

Finally oh master with noodly appendages and co-master with your smooth metallic sides immune to asteroid strikes, I entreat you to bring Ms. Palin and her family great happiness. May the time outside of the circus bring her peace, insight, happiness, and health.

Ramen.

P.S. Can you provide her with tofu wolves to shoot? I guess that's too much to ask.

Notes on the annual double century

For five of the last six years I have gone on a cycling double century. Friends and I - some racers, some not, but all enthusiasts of the highest degree - roll out of State College, PA and head north to Wellsboro and then back along the Pine Creek Gorge and eventually back to State College over the course of roughly 210 miles in one day. It's a brilliant day. This year, we had 15 people make the whole thing, 7 first-timers and 3 women, and one (me) with a cold. Incredible.

And my friend Leah has chronicled the whole thing over at her blog Chaya de Cacao in two entries, one in pictures and the other in words.


(Left to right: Leah, Rachel, Joe, Allen, Steve, Ho, Vicki, Rich, Eric, Bill, Jim, and Me)

Ricky Gervais redux on Genesis

"Free your minds. Listen."

The sisters are in trouble.

This isn't especially comment-worthy, but does anyone else find it generally disturbing how much institutional control men have over women in the Catholic Church? A story in today's New York Times, "Nuns in the U.S. Are Facing Scrutiny by the Vatican," just kind of generally troubles me. I guess some of the sisters are out of line and need to be whipped back into shape so they've ordered an Apostolic Visitation. These women are going to be "corrected" by a corrupt oligarchy of old boys? Right.

My sister was almost a Sister of St. Joseph. I think I'll have to ask her about this.

But on a side note, I agree with the Catholic Church that the nuns should stop practicing Reiki. I don't care if it's non-Christian but it is unscientific. We're not Jedis.