Ever wake up and feel like the world has been bled dry of all meaning? That life is a meaningless puppet-show, a shadowdance on the walls of some dismal Platonic cave, and that every action you take is a pathetic whimper amidst the cosmic crash of chaos and catastrophe?

Really? You have? You poor bastard. My biggest problem is figuring out what to write on my blog.

I started out writing nice, long-ish personal pieces in this space. Recently, I gave the ol’ college try at publishing News of The Hour – three to five posts a day on current event topics that caught my fancy. It was an attempt to break out of a creative rut, get the juices flowing again. I didn’t want my online writing to become the same ol’ bloggy bullshit, a litany of petty grievances and amusing neuroses.

And it was great. Except that it sucked.

I don’t mean the content sucked. Well, some of it did. (They can’t all be pearls, people.) What sucked was sitting hunched over a computer several extra hours a day, churning out posts about the same shit that everyone else was talking about. What sucked was using my network of online friends – some of whom, in my more deluded moments, I think of as real, living people – as pawns in my quest for online self-promotion. I was tense, stressed, and grouchy. My shoulders ached; my eyes throbbed. Most of my important offline pursuits – drawing/painting, biking, eating well, going out – fell by the wayside.

Returning to that grind reminded me why I had abandoned it in the first place.

There’s no point to being online if I’m not a compelling person offline.  We all need time to mold ourselves into interesting people who can bring something unique to the table. I love to write. But I want what I write to be both entertaining and meaningful – to bring a perspective to the world that challenges, confuses, that makes people think. The Internet has enough junk information flooding its pipes on a daily basis; it doesn’t need another trickle of inanity.

Which is all to say that, if I’m silent for the next few days, chillax. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just giving some thought to which colors I want to splash on this infinite scrolling canvas.

blogging, plato, slavery, writing

I may return to the long form soon, but for the moment, 140 characters works just fine.

tweets, twitter

I’ve biked naked. Twice, in fact. Hey, at least it keeps me off the streets dealing dope. Besides, clothing-optional cycling is a quasi-legal summertime tradition here in Seattle. Riders can participate in the Fremont Solstice Parade (where nudity is openly sanctioned), the Gay Pride Parade (where it’s tolerated until you reach the Space Needle), and the World Naked Bike Ride (where the cops will give you about 3 hours before ordering you and the rest of your hippie friends to put some goddamn clothes on). The “freedom” is tenuous at best, extended only up until the point that someone gets their panties in a wad and berates a 911 dispatcher.

In New Zealand, however, that freedom is now a matter of precedent. Nude cyclist Nick Lowe appealed his conviction for “offensive behavior” to the country’s High Court, which ruled that cycling in the buff is a protected form of self-expression.

Good for you, New Zealand. Use your freedom wisely. As far as I’m concerned, if someone doesn’t want to see me biking naked, they should look the other way. And, of course, avoid this year’s Seattle Solstice Parade…

(Hat tip to No Right Turn for the link)

bicycling, free expression, new zealand, nudism, nudity, world naked bike ride

I hated shop class. (Restrain your shock, please.) But I might have hated it less if one of the projects had been a Wiccan altar. Not that I’d even heard of Wicca back then. But I lived in a small town where the only two acceptable religions were Christianity and beer. I would’ve been into it for the shock value. And, frankly, to build something more intriguing than a birdhouse. Like Hank Hill says, birds already have houses – they’re called “nests.”

But a teen in Guthrie Center, Iowa wasn’t in it for the shock value: he’s Wiccan, and wanted to build an altar as an honest-to-Goddess project. That didn’t sit well with Guthrie Center High School shop teacher Dale Halferty, who told the kid to build a birdhouse or some such bullshit instead. Halferty’s now on paid leave while the school aims a fire hose at the ensuing controversy.

State and federal law are clear: students have a right to introduce their religion into school assignments. So Halferty’s on the losing end of this issue. To his credit, he also prevented a Christian student from building a cross – so, kudos for consistency. Unfortunately, Halferty’s motives for creating a secular shop class are, shall we say, less than open-minded:

His viewpoint: “We as Christians don’t get to have our say during school time, so why should he?”

…

“It scares me. I’m a Christian,” he said. “This witchcraft stuff – it’s terrible for our kids. It takes kids away from what they know, and leads them to a dark and violent life. We spend millions of tax dollars trying to save kids from that.”

We DO? There’s a federal anti-Witchcraft program?? Dammit, Obama, I knew you were keeping secrets from me!!

Halferty’s only half the issue. The Wiccan student apparently has infuriated his Christian brethren at the school. At least 70 of these Bob Barr wanna-bes signed a petition saying that witchcraft had no place at Guthrie Center High. Apparently, while everyone in this school takes shop, some students are allowed to pass on History and Civics.

Major-ass religious tolerance kudos, however, go to School Superintendent Steve Smith. He’s not only sticking by the law, but striving to re-educate students (and his wayward shop teacher) about Wicca, which he acknowledges is nonviolent and based on the worship of a sacred Mother Earth. If only we had more administrators like Smith running our nation’s schools.

The teen at the center of this controversy has remained nameless. Which is too bad. He deserves a salute for standing up for his beliefs. When Halferty told him he could build an altar so long as he didn’t bring any religious symbols into shop class, the young adult defied him, and clung to his First Amendment rights to bring a book on Wicca into the classroom. That’s when Halferty lost it, and forbade the project outright. It can be frightening to stand up to authority figures. Congrats, my friend – you done good.

As for Halferty, his attitude from the start has been one of intolerance and bigotry. (His reaction when his student told him about the Wiccan faith: “Ah, you’re kidding, right?”) I’m voting for Superintendent Smith and Principal Gerald Thomas to read him the riot act, send him to diversity training, and order him to keep his disdain to himself. As an American, Halferty has every right to his own beliefs; as a teacher, he has no call demonizing those of his students.

high school, iowa, paganism, religion, religious liberty, spirituality, wicca, witchcraft

You’ve gotta love divorce. Short of war and banking, no other institution excels at bringing out the worst in human nature. But add religion to divorce? Hooboy! Now you’re cookin’! That’s like throwing gasoline on a nuclear holocaust!

The awesome Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate, recaps the battle between Joseph Reyes and Rebecca Shapiro. It started when Shapiro, who’s Jewish, obtained a temporary restraining order against her pending ex-husband to forbid him from raising their daughter Ela as Catholic. No transubstantiated wafers for you, kid. (Then again, no Bill Donohue either – so there’s upside.) That didn’t sit well with Reyes, who had converted to Judaism when he married Shapiro, but now claims that he did so “under duress.” With camera crew in tow, he took Ela to a Catholic mass.

Ka-BOOOOOM!!!

As a divorcing dad, I’m sympathetic to Reyes. But the dude is being something of a butthead. He’s told reporters that his ex-wife-in-waiting isn’t really Jewish because she doesn’t keep a kosher home. Furthermore, he contends that by teaching his daughter a form of Christianity, he’s actually raising her in a “radicalized Judaism.” In his eyes, being Catholic makes him something of a Super-Jew. Smooth move, brother. There’s no better way to get the Jewish community on your good side than by pissing off every Jewish person in the United States.

And what’s this nonsense about converting to Judaism “under pressure”? That’s just man-code for “It was easier to cave to my wife than to grow a pair.” Blaming your ex for your lack of spine is a Dick Move.

Both parents deserve to be smacked with a wet mackerel for being more childish than their child. So Ela Reyes grows up in two different faiths. What’s the danger? That she’ll grow up well-rounded and well-informed about the practices of two of the world’s most prominent religions? That she’ll be in a position to make her own choices about religion when she’s an adult? The horror! Forget eternal salvation, Ela’s soul is already in Hell: the Hell of bitter parents. Thank goodness Ela is only 3 years old. Even so, her parents are leaving a permanent media trail she’s free to unearth as she grows up. Reyes and Shapiro are doing more harm to their child with their highly publicized, bitter divorce proceedings than they’ll ever do by raising her in dueling faiths.

As for the courts, they need to butt out. As Lithwick notes, that’s part of the problem – many of them do, but some of them don’t. Like it or not, the parents have rights here that go beyond considerations of “the best interests of the child.” Court intervention in this dispute will only end up prejudicing one faith over the other. More importantly, the court will be acting as a surrogate parent. And the last thing Ela Reyes needs right now is a third parent.

catholicism, judaism, religion, religious tolerance, spirituality

It’s an odd-numbered day, which means it must be time for another tale of “zero tolerance” policies run amok in our public schools like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Lo and behold, today’s victim: Rachel Greer, a seventh grader at River Valley Middle School in Jeffersonville, Indiana. A classmate placed one of her Aderall pills (prescribed for ADHD) into Greer’s hand. Greer gave it back. But – doesn’t matter! She TOUCHED it! She’s got DRUG COOTIES!! The school suspended Greer for Possession of a Controlled Substance with Intent to Return Promptly.

Administrator Marty Bell of Greater Clark County Schools says Greer is guilty of holding out her hand, and that a good girl wouldn’t have extended her palm skyward in the first place. Yes, seriously. That’s the argument. Instead of praising Greer because she made the right decision to give the prescription drug back, Greater Clark County is punishing her for not being good enough.

On second thought, who can blame the school? Everyone knows that touching Aderall is a gateway drug. If River Valley Middle hadn’t intervened, Goddess only knows what drugs Rachel Greer might have gone on to fondle. I had a friend in high school who touched marijuana once – you know, because “the cool kids” were all doing it. Now he spends his days huddled under the Fremont Bridge in Seattle, gently caressing heroin baggies. Let this be a lesson to you, kids: Just Say No to drug molestation!

aderall, adhd, indiana, rachel greer, zero tolerance

If you want proof that people who label themselves as “skeptics” are as subject to confirmation bias as the rest of us, look no further than a new study by Japanese researcher Satoshi Kanazawa “proving” that atheists and liberals have higher IQs than the religious. I’ve seen this story pimped across the blogosphere by skeptics and atheists in typical “ha ha ha” fashion, even though the IQ difference found by the study – six to 10 points – is laughably small.

Josh Schrei at HuffPo rips the study to shreds. Schrei finds plenty of problems with its methodology – chief being that it focused exclusively on Americans, among whom liberalism, godlessness, and higher education are highly correlated. Would Kanazawa have obtained the same results if he’d drawn his samples from India or Saudi Arabia, where the educated are also highly religious?

Then there’s Kanazawa, who interpreted his own study’s results to mean that belief in God – or Goddess, or any sort of Deity or supra-dimension – is driven by “paranoia.” Which is nothing but the author’s own prejudice shining through. It seems prejudice and Kanazawa go hand in hand. In 2006, the scientific community gave him a tongue-lashing when he argued that Africa suffers from poverty and high infant mortality because Africans are stupid.

It’s not just the spiritually minded like Schrei who are dismissing Kanazawa. P.Z. Myers is also quick enough to realize that there’s no “there” there:

Seriously? Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real.

Thing is, while this study is crap, Kanazawa gained some insta-cred because he echoed the feelings of most atheists and skeptics about the religious: that they’re motivated by primitive fears about life and death. Even the astute Michael Shermer echoed a variant of this argument in his book Why We Believe. That’s prejudice, pure and simple. I could count on one hand the number of people who are Christian because they were scared shitless by a Jack Chick tract. Most converted because their lives were in shambles, and religion provided a structure they otherwise lacked. The same is doubly true for more modern religions such as Paganism. I don’t know a single Pagan who adopted their religion out of paranoia and fear. Faith provides people a deeper meaning and connection to the world that they find missing in secular worldviews.

Why is that so hard for otherwise intelligent atheists to understand?

atheism, paganism, religion, satoshi kanazawa, spirituality

I hate to say “I told you so.” Especially when it involves the Catholic League. A week ago, when remarking on news that a cross had been left in the Air Force Academy’s new stone circle for Pagan and Wiccan worshipers, I said that it was overkill to call this act a “hate crime”:

It’s not a hate crime. It’s a dumb prank. Referring to a cross as a “hate crime” does nothing but encourage overblown rhetoric on both sides of this debate.

I’d forgotten that “overblown rhetoric” is a Wiccan magickal incantation that summons Bill Donohue, the League’s blowhard commandante, from his seat in the dark heart of Mordor. (That’s my bad.) Donohue took Air Force Lt. General Michael Gould’s comment that the cross incident was “destructive behavior” and accused the Air Force of persecuting Christians. Yes, that’s right – someone tries to intimidate Pagans, and Ol’ Bill pretends the AF is feeding Christian cadets to lions. Fortunately, Catholic Chaplain Rev. Robert Bruno intervened and convinced the League to back the fuck up on its demands for a probe, assuring them that steps were being taken to ensure religious liberty for all cadets.

Thanks to Rev. Bruno for intervening and getting the Catholic League to do something alien to its nature – i.e., see reason. And yes, if the shoe were on the other foot, and someone had put a pentacle on a Christian altar, Donohue would be on his megaphone screaming about how the Christian faith had been “desecrated” by this “destructive behavior.” I’ve no doubt of that. But it’s nonsense to get our panties bunched up about sacred spaces. We live in a messy world. Sacred spaces are desecrated all the time. You clean up, you reconsecrate, you pray for your enemies, and you get on with the business of worship. That’s that. It’s no reason to ignite a spiritual word war.

In short: shouldn’t we all strive to be bigger people than Bill Donohue?

air force academy, bill donohue, catholic, catholic league, christian, paganism, wicca

Bill Whatcott may be an asshole, but judges say that he has every right to be an asshole. After distributing various pamphlets in the cities of Saskatoon and Regina with titles like “Sodomites in Our Public Schools,” the Canadian man was saddled with a $17,500 fine for what a lower court deemed “hate speech.” This week the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals overturned the decision on the grounds that Whatcott criticized homosexual behavior, not homosexuals as people.

This isn’t the first time Whatcott has made the news. He previously had his nursing license suspended for engaging in anti-abortion protests outside of work. After an appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court, Whatcott had his license restored.

This dude is quite the character. The only writing of his I could find online, while fervent, is coherent and level-headed. (It’s here, but WARNING – GRAPHIC photo of a beheaded teen girl from Indonesia at the top.) After reading his history on Wikipedia, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. Given that he aims to make homosexuality immoral, my sympathy only extends so far – but it’s limited by knowing that he escaped Canada’s foster system, and turned away from a life of drugs and prostitution. I’m sure Whatcott is convinced that Christianity saved him from a short, brutal life of degradation and drug abuse. He’s probably right. But a quick perusal of his Flickr page – a melange of naked men at gay pride parades, oddly-titled head shots that hint at personal vendettas, and graphic photographs of obliterated soldiers in Iraq – hints that all’s not well in Wonderland. This man’s demons haven’t been exorcised: they’ve merely found a new release valve.

Be that as it may, Whatcott has the basic human right to work out his neurosis in public. As for the law, the Court of Appeals did not strike down the portion of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code under which Whatcott was originally found guilty. In a section entitled “Prohibition against publications,” the Code states:

14(1) No person shall publish or display, or cause or permit to be published or displayed, on any lands or premises or in a newspaper, through a television or radio broadcasting station or any other broadcasting device, or in any printed matter or publication or by means of any other medium that the person owns, controls, distributes or sells, any representation, including any notice, sign, symbol, emblem,
article, statement or other representation:

(a) tending or likely to tend to deprive, abridge or otherwise restrict the enjoyment by any person or class of persons, on the basis of a prohibited ground, of any right to which that person or class of persons is entitled under law; or

(b) that exposes or tends to expose to hatred, ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of any person or class of persons on the basis of a prohibited ground.

(2) Nothing in subsection (1) restricts the right to freedom of expression under the
law upon any subject.

The “Prohibited Grounds” encompass religion, creed, marital status, family status, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, colour, ancestry, nationality, place of origin, race or perceived race, and receipt of public assistance. That’s a broad class of speech, and the vagueness of the law (“tends to expose”?) practically invites abuse.

I can see an argument for banning speech that directly invites harm to a class of people – e.g., “Shoot the homos,” or “Let’s round up and burn the Jews.” That falls under the “inciting to violence” exception to free expression. And I’m down with meting out harsher penalties for hate crimes. But banning speech that merely creates an “atmosphere” of intolerance contradicts the guarantees that the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code makes regarding speech. It’s also counter-productive, in that it allows disturbed men like Whatcott to play the martyr. Better that his half-baked ideas are exposed, ridiculed, and tossed on the trash heap of history, rather than redacted with the censor’s pen.

bill whatcott, censorship, free speech, gay, glbt, saskatchewan

For all the porn that floods its pipes, nudity gets a bad rap on the Internet. Anything that smacks of a bum or a bare breast risks getting smacked down by major content providers and social media sites (cf. Facebook’s breastfeeding brouhaha). Most sites with “ABSOLUTELY NO PORN WHATSOEVER YOU DIRTY PERVERTS!!” policies don’t distinguish between hardcore pornography and simple nudity, which is insane. The nude human figure has been the subject of artistic adoration since before the dawn of Greece. Art students learn the basics of the human figure by drawing nudes until their eyes blur and their hands cramp.

(Not THAT kind of hand-cramping. Seriously, you people…)

That didn’t stop YouTube, a.k.a. Google, from yanking a series of videos by artist Amy Greenfield. The removal revealed a major double standard in Google’s policy, which allowed nudity from major film and television producers, but almost no nudity in “community content.” Translation: there’s one set of rules for people with money, and another for the rest of you pissants.

The good news is that, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Coalition Against Censorship started dogging them, YouTube relented and restored Amy Greenfield’s work. YouTube hasn’t permanently altered its policy, however, and has no review process in place for artists whose work is removed. So there’s still work to be done.

But that can wait. For now celebrate freedom by watching the video that YouTube feared would melt the Internet’s eyeballs. (NSFW. Duh.)

amy greenfield, art, censorship, nude, nudity, youtube