It can at times offer a team’s opponent a 14-point advantage at a crucial time in the football game. See Bills, Buffalo.
Includes kitteh goodness.
I’m so glad that Elantra in the garage that I keep mistaking for my own car wasn’t my own car. That owner is going to get a nasty surprise today, in the form of a post-it note that says “the license plate of the car that hit you is…”
Ugh. That and the weird way the couple of to-go boxes were piled near the back tire. Somebody had quite a party there, just hanging out in the garage.
I’m going to have to start parking on 3 instead of 2.
Meanwhile, Happy Independence Day! Texas Gov. Rick Perry believes that Americans have “freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”
I distinctly remember the first time someone used the ol’ “freedom of religion not freedom from religion” line on me. 1993, maybe? It sounds just as terrifying now as it did then, especially when it’s coming from state executive types who have actually been considered for the White House.
March 19, 2012
I drive alone to Dresden, NY, eager for a road trip, having not had an excuse for one in quite some time. It’s a beautiful day, untimely for upstate New York, with the crisp air just shaking the snow off its boots.
I drive mostly on thruway to the Seneca Lake area and came upon Geneva, New York, a lively little downtown, and I am pleased. I like lively little main streets like this; this is what Candidate Obama was talking about, Main Street versus Wall Street. Little shops and taverns and oh, a little music store I’ll visit on my way back.
I leave Geneva toward Dresden and am pleased to find myself deep in New York winery country. I pass winery after winery and spent grape bushes galore. I let the windows open to let the chilly wind rush around a little, and I’m blasting De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising.
I find Dresden eventually. It’s a crossroads. It’s so little there that you find yourself looking for the rest of it, and then I’m driving down a road ravine with signs warning that there’s actually no way to turn around. I figure I’d better find a way to do so before I’m sucked in to whatever black hole awaits. And then to my right is my destination, the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum.
Within five minutes of peering into the windows, I realize that it is closed to tourists except for on Saturdays and Sundays, information I did not somehow manage to glean from the World Wide Web. I take a few snapshots, stand for a moment to take the whole place in, including the smallest Post Office I have ever seen just across the street, and I get in my car and drive back.
Some might mark this road trip as a failure. No such thing. I will return to Dresden someday. Perhaps even when this place is open.
*
My interest in Robert Ingersoll stems from the writing of Susan Jacoby in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, an excellent book that any blogger endeavoring on the BAT should have a well-thumbed copy of. Ingersoll is one of her book’s showpieces, and as well he should be. He was known as a Civil War hero, a colonel indeed captured and then paroled by the South; as one of the great orators of his time; and as the “Great Agnostic.” He is the reason you know the name “Thomas Paine.” He was a spirited member of the Republican party and indeed spoke at one of that party’s convention to nominate a candidate to the floor (who was then not nominated).
He was one of the great Americans, a man I am coming to think of as that generation’s King of Late Night. And, as I may allude to here so many times it might become cloying: You’ve probably never heard of him.
One of the biggest things Robert Ingersoll accomplished: He resurrected Thomas Paine, who died broke and screwed. His country had twice turned its back on him, once to let him rot in a French prison. Theodore Roosevelt called Paine a “filthy little atheist…that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to assail Christianity.”
Jacoby continues: “Were it not for the unremitting efforts of Ingersoll, who, despite his nineteenth-century fame and notoriety, is ignored in standard American history texts, Paine’s vital contributions to the revolutionary cause might have suffered the same fate. Unfortunately , no champion arose in the twentieth century to do for Ingersoll what Ingersoll did for Paine.
Well. I’m not sure I’d say I’m a “champion,” Susan, but we can sure get started, and what better occasion for this than the world-famous Blog Against Theocracy?
*
A few things to know about Ingersoll: Walt Whitman considered him to be the greatest orator of his time.
“It should not be surprising that I am drawn to Ingersoll, for he is Leaves of Grass,” said Whitman of his friend. “He lives, embodies, the individuality, I preach. I see in Bob [Ingersoll] the noblest specimen—”American-flavored”—pure out of the soil, spreading, giving, demanding light.”
Novelist Sherwood Anderson had Ingersoll as a character in his novel Poor White, so persuasive a speaker that he “…came to [a small Midwest town] to speak . . . , and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens.”
Ingersoll is mentioned in Sinclair Lewis’ novel Elmer Gantry, where Gantry’s friend Jim Lefferts suggests using an Ingersol sermon, “love is the only bow on life’s dark cloud,” but Gantry opts not to credit Ingersoll. “Rats!” exclaims Gantry. “Chances are nobody there tonight has ever read Ingersoll. Agin him. Besides I’ll kind of change it around.”
Colonel Bob Mountain in Washington state was named for Robert Ingersoll.
I kind of throw these facts up there to emphasize the stature of the man in his day. He was, as I’ve come to think of him, the Johnny Carson of his day.
What was mass media then, after all? Books and newspapers. The theater, and, perhaps, the symphony. Or, you went to see a guy give a speech. And the guy who is considered one of the best at the speech-making is Robert Ingersoll. He’s lauded for his monologues, and his ratings are through the roof.
He’s the King of Late Night of the time.
*
This may be one of the most foolish things I’ve ever come across on the Facebook. I didn’t want to go over and poop all over the wall of the person who hung it. That’s not nice and I often feel bad if I walk over to someone’s Facebook wall and smear excrement all over it. But I had to note it somewhere. Why not at the Adventures site, after all.
I’m not sure which I despise more about this garbage, which, if my sourcing is accurate, originated from the page of one Tony Hurlow, not sure which I hate more about it, the dishonesty, or the brash ignorance. Or do I simply hate that I can’t tell which vapid quality is driving this?
Here’s the thing. Atheists believe one thing. There is one thing that atheists believe. Atheists disbelieve in deities.
Beyond that, it is entirely presumptuous to assume that every person who rejects the notion of deities puts full stock of the universe’s origins into the hands of Georges Lemaître. I’m not certain most folks who are atheists give a G* about how this all came to be. Some may have become atheists simply so they could stop fussing around with it, all this hand-wringing about how the whole universe began. But I don’t know. Unlike Tony Hurlow and my Facebook pal, I don’t presume to speak for all atheists.
I can’t even tell you with 100 percent certainty if I am one myself.
But this little bumpersticker, it’s hardly the explanation of the Big Bang you’d consider adequate for a second grade class. It is a gross simplification of ideas that are so complex and shimmering that only a handful of people on the entire planet have actually ever grokked them. And those ideas are nowhere near as silly as that of the virgin birth, of the resurrection, of a guy flying from Mecca to Jerusalem on a winged horse overnight, of a guy out west chatting it up with Native American ghosts, that Jesus Christ was actually reincarnated as the Emperor of Ethiopia, that the creator of the universe is actually a giant spaghetti monster, that the Earth is actually the center of the universe.
This little slogan here, it lies. Atheists do not “believe” in the Big Bang and Evolution. Atheists prefer not to try to speak to an imaginary friend in the sky. That is all. But saying that Atheism is a religion is like saying that not collecting coins is a hobby. An Atheist may pick up, you know, a “book,” for instance, and read some ideas that scientists have developed to try to explain all of this, and he might stroke his chin and go yeah, that makes sense. That hardly means that the bloke thinks that Stephen Hawking is the Lord.
I can’t help but wonder, when I see something like this. Dude. If your faith is so great, if your religion is such a terrific product, then why do you have to sell it so hard? Just pray and believe and stop lying about the rest of us. I think that one’s in the Bible in there somewhere.
Oh, and one more thing. I mentioned earlier in this piece of a man named Georges Lemaître. He was the Daddy of the Big Bang Theory, though he’s not the one who coined the term. But he did first introduce the notion of what he called the “primeval atom.” Also, I should mention, Lemaître was sometimes addressed as Abbé or Monseigneur.
He was a priest.
P.S. Some bonus footage I recently discovered. Here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson remembering how he met one Carl Sagan. This story reveals Sagan to have been one of the coolest dudes evar. Listen.
* This is part of an ongoing effort to encourage those of the humanist ilk to get away from the GD when you feel like letting out a good cuss and blaming the universal force that is A) Godless and B) More often than not the ACTUAL CAUSE OF WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO SWEAR IN THE FIRST PLACE. Gravity, kids. Use it as a swear, early and often. If you don’t believe in God, why blame Her?
Whilst in sunny Illinois: I couldn’t help but read the bumpersticker out loud in the back of the cab. I wish I hadn’t. But it made use of an ol’ Southernbaptisism that I only know because it’s a Jennyanykind song. It was sort of in rhebus form somehow, and it said, “you better get right with God,” and so I read it out loud and went “hmmmmph.”
The coworker next to me said, “That’s right.” Then said, “What, are you not a true believer, Aaron?”
Now, my religious beliefs cannot actually be written on a notecard. I tend to follow the thinking of many of our Founding Fathers, most of whom were Deists. However, I also tend to believe in some form of reincarnation. But I do not tend to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. Call me a skeptic, or call me a person who was not * raised * with any particular faith. More certainly, call me someone who has noticed that belief in Jesus Christ has been one of the most politically misppropriated forces of the universe, evar, and that this trend has been on a spectacular rise as of late. You may also call me somebody who has found more universal truths in Frank Zappa’s Only In It For The Money than from any book in the Bible. Finally, call me someone who thinks a tale that spans from virgin birth to resurrection is only slightly less goofy than the one about the winged horse flying thousands and thousands of miles in an evening or the fella what found holy documents based on the advice of an Indian ghost. But how do you explain this to the Suthun belle sitting next to you in the cab after the wine and the prawns and in a still semi-work environment yet?
So I mumbled something like, no, but I appreciate folks who do have faith. Which I do. As my answer trailed off, she chimed in with a “Veddy intedesting.” Which I thought was weird. Her editorial comment was as if to say, how very strange it is that you say you don’t believe in the Christ. Wow. You really are a weirdo. And I find it sad as a progressive that this country hasn’t gotten further than this, that in fact the government has been infiltrated by the Lubavitch of Christianity, and that just admitting that you believe differently than a Christ-worshipper grants you an eyeroll.
I once, seriously, had a fella tell me that the Constitution guarantees us freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Seriously. So, by this guy’s mandate, I’d be game to be locked up in the stocks because I tend to believe that some fortuitous spark, not an ethereal being who watches over us like Santy Claus and requires us to kiss his ass every Sunday, is what led to all of this?
Anyway, I know I’m probably overreacting. I often do. Still, I sort of wish I hadn’t read that stupid bumper sticker out loud.