Fabulous Fifteen - Greta Christina on Belief

A filmmaker who was working on a documentary about Christian beliefs about life after death interviewed Greta Christina.  That interview was later made into a podcast for "This is Really Happening".

The podcast features just Greta Christina's answers in the interview, giving the listener a pleasantly intimate experience. It feels as though Greta is confiding her thoughts about belief and the evolution of her personal set of beliefs to you, the listener, personally. (Spoiler alert!  Greta does not believe in the Rapture! Shocking, I know).

This is a quick, engaging and interesting 15 minutes.  Listen!  Greta Christina's podcast:

Update:  The first attempt to embed the podcast did not work,  so here is the link to the (free) iTunes version.

Is This Art?

The photo above has been making the rounds today and people are talking about it. Apparently there is controversy! Apparently, reasonable fair-minded people must weigh up these obviously equivalent* viewpoints:

It is art!   

vs.   

It is a ghastly racist, misogynistic exploitation of the horrific experiences of women of color in societies which practice FGM for the benefit of a callously opportunistic "artist".

As you can see from all the laughter and smiling faces in the photo, the "art" cake was well-recieved in Sweden, at least amongst the delighted throng of white people who attended the event at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

According to this story, the "performance art" was part of an installation purporting to be highlighting the issue of female genital mutilation.  I don't doubt that the museum was trying to highlight the issue of FGM, but I think it would be mistake to assume that the museum's - or the artist's - motivation for highlighting this "issue" was to support the women whose lives are impacted by the practice. An alternative motivation, given the repugnant and culturally tone-deaf centerpiece of the opening party, could be that "highlighting the issue of FGM" has been identified as a hot topic likely to generate a great deal of interest and revenue for the artist and/or the museum.

The "art" consisted of a grotesquely caricatured, naked "African" woman's torso with the "head" being that of the artist who was sitting under the display table with his head poking out through a hole in the table placed above the neck of the cake sculpture.  The artist had painted his face in a ghastly "black face" mask, with a wide-mouthed exaggerated grimace complete with cartoonish wide-spaced teeth.

The "performance" element consisted of the "head" of the "woman" screaming in feigned agony as the Swedish Culture Minister - by previously arranged request - picked up a knife and cut the "genitals" on the cake, mimicking ritual female genital mutilation.  Riotous laughter apparently ensued. The Minister enthusiastically ate her piece of cake and even fed the artist a bit of cake, to the delighted amusement of all parties.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

Melissa McEwan had a few suggestions, as did Feministe and these news outlets:  BBC ,  New Statesman, MSNBC.  (Here is the Sarah Baartman story, which some of these articles reference).

Were these people sincerely trying to "highlight" the issue of female genital mutilation in support of the women whose lives are impacted by this horrible practice?  Perhaps they were.  But, if financial and promotional gain were not the real goals behind this mind-bogglingly offensive display, it is hard to think of a worse way to have "failed".

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that instead of a jovial celebration - complete with cannibalistic cake and re-enactments of terrible mutilations - why not simply take a more direct approach?  I don't know, maybe something like this:

* By "obviously equivalent", I mean: not. remotely. equivalent. Obviously.

Equal Pay Day

For all those who work for pay in the USA, today is Tax Day - midnight tonight is the deadline for filing income tax forms.  It also happens to be Equal Pay Day, which is pretty ironic.  Equal Pay Day marks the point in the year when the average woman has finally earned as much as the average man working at the same job had earned by December 31 last year.  Yes, the earnings gap remains that wide.

NPR touched on this subject yesterday in this interview.  It is hard to believe that a political candidate can be so utterly tone deaf, but it looks like Mitt Romney really is that out of touch with the reality of ordinary, middle-class life in the USA today.   From their privileged perch of inherited wealth, Romney and his homemaker wife, Ann, chastise women and the poor for not working harder.  The breathtaking lack of empathy or even basic human decency really does stun me some days.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin,  a state senator is giving Republican governor Scott Walker a run for his money in the race to win this weeks' Most Misogynist Medal. Sen. Glenn Grothman asserts that earning money is just more important to men.

"Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who supports Gov. Scott Walker's repeal of a law that protected workers from pay discrimination, recently said, "You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious."

Got that, ladies?

I wish this were an aberration, but this is just the latest attack in the War on Women from the Republican party. The push to strip away reproductive rights, to deny equal pay for work of equal value and to withhold support for continued authorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it might provide legal protections for LBGT victims of violence are all signs that the Republican party believes that it has drummed up enough support in the general voting population to come out openly with its nakedly bigoted and misogynist agenda.  What is really frightening is that they could be right.

Sandra Fluke wrote an excellent op ed for CNN about the importance of equal pay for work of equal value.  Try not to read the comments which follow the third year law student's well-written article. As if it wasn't bad enough that this is already tax day, equal pay day and a Tuesday*, it looks like the very worst of the bottom-feeding continent of CNN trolls made a special effort to be as despicable as possible there.  Do yourself a favor and click away as soon as you finish the article.

*Tuesday Tonics are here for a reason!

UPDATE:  The Zingularity has the latest polls gathered in one place, and the news is better than I feared. Perhaps the spin doctors hope to create a self-fulfilling prophesy by reporting that Romney's numbers are improving among women. Let's hope they are wrong!

Tuesday Tonic - Bill Nye on Evolution Part 1

Sit back and enjoy a little evolutionary science on a Tuesday morning.

Bill Nye the Science Guy:  Evolution (Part 1)

Isn't That Just Ducky!

I am a puppy and I like to play!  I run and jump and play all day!

I am a puppy and I like to cuddle.  I like to play with my human, and then I curl up in her lap and sleep.

I am a puppy and I like to play and cuddle.

Isn't that just Ducky!

Musical Monday - Run Runaway

Need some get up and go on a Monday morning?

Sit up, turn the volume way UP and bounce along to this music!

Great Big Sea:  Run Runaway

Sunday Sermon Antidotes - P.Z. Myers At GAC

An idea can take over the world - until it is replaced by better ideas!

The Global Atheist Convention has just wound down, but I am sure that there will be amazing material - speeches, ideas, videos - coming out of Melbourne, Australia for weeks to come.  I complain a lot about computers and the internet, but I am very thankful for the technology that allows us to see, read and listen to the ideas presented at this and other conferences and events with such ease and almost instantaneously.

P.Z. Myers spoke last night and he posted his "talk" on Pharyngula this morning.  I'll be eagerly watching for the video, but for now, you can enjoy reading it.  Here is an excerpt:

"The most brilliant thing Christianity ever did was to take that idea of the Word, that concept of identity wrapped up in an abstract set of ideas and stories, and to open it up to everyone. Aww, Rome fell? You're all alone? Here, we can help you find yourself, we can give a new meaning to your life, we have a standard that you can hold high and find unity with a greater people. It’s called the Bible.

I repeat, absolutely brilliant. It made Christianity bulletproof.

Cities fall. Kings die. Bloodlines fade. But ideas can go on and on and on. Now, a 21st century person can feel continuity with a 5th century priest; an American can share a central element of their self with someone in South Africa, with someone in China, with someone in Australia; heck, with someone on the space station, or walking on the moon. We can have the concept of an ecumene; people tied together by a common belief that crosses borders. It’s a powerful tool. It’s widely used, too; what is a United States citizen but someone bound by a set of documents, the Constitution?"

He went on to challenge atheist stereotypes, Christian assumptions about themselves and about atheists, harms done to humanity by religion and finally how the small, but growing segment of humankind who have shaken off the dehumanizing shackles of superstition and embraced reality has begun to make an impact.  Religionists are enraged because they know that their grip on the psyche of humanity is weakening at long last - and that it is weakening because of the hard-won advances made by science.

P.Z. Myers zeroed in on exactly why religion fights science so ferociously - why it has always hated and feared science. He discussed how science has been the true savior of humankind over the centuries - with religion fighting progress and useful knowledge every step of the way, of course - and he finished with a rousing battle cry:

"Yesterday I was listening to our Christian protesters outside, and I thought, “Huh. So that’s what you get when you give a sheep a microphone, amplified bleating.” There they were, calling on everyone to deny the richness of human experience and join the flock in the narrow boring confines of the sheep pen, so mindless they didn’t even realize they were calling to the wolves.

I have a different metaphor for us, my brothers and sisters in atheism. We are not sheep; there are no shepherds here. I look out from this stage and I see 4000 pairs of hunter’s eyes, 4000 hunter’s minds, 4000 pairs of hunter’s hands. I see the primeval primate hunting band grown large and strong. I see us so confident in our strength that we laugh at our enemies. I see a people thinking and planning, fierce and focused, learning and building new tools to conquer new worlds.

You are not sheep. You, my brothers and sisters in atheism, are a fierce, coordinated hunting pack — men and women working together, and those other bastards have cause to fear us. So let’s do it: make them tremble as we demolish the city of god."

Here is a  link to P.Z. Myers' speech at GAC. Take the time to read it.  It is worth every minute.

Housekeeping Notes...

My regular readers may have noticed a little change up yonder in the navigation bar - I registered my own domain name yesterday!  The moment I did so, however, I realized that I must have completely lost my mind. I have no idea how to set up the new domain for my blog. I wasted about an hour quite a long time trying to find a help page that could even point me in the right direction, before quitting in a fit of pique giving up in frustration.

I know nothing about web design, web hosting or anything else connected with the actual operation of computers. This is not false modesty (oh, I wish!), but a simple statement of fact.  Really, it is an understatement of fact, because few words can describe my sheer incompetence with computers. Obviously, my ritual of pouring a glass of wine to fortify me when tackling vexing computer-related issues is the one sensible thing I am able to point to in this story, but the rest was a disaster!

Actor portraying Your Frustrated Reporter

It may have all worked out just fine if I had had even the most elementary introduction to how computers work and basic keyboarding when I was younger. Instead, Mr. Nifty dragged me into the modern era, kicking and screaming, in the mid-1990's and soon thereafter left me to fend for myself. The intervening years have not been pretty.

I am not one to complain, but there are some things that are just ridiculously over-complicated and personal computers are the worst. I can never remember how to open programs or even to find things in my own files and the computer experiences regular meltdowns because I forget how to do the simplest operations. Actually, I barely know how to use a keyboard, either, having never learned it when I was younger and now being too old to learn these newfangled tricks!

As a matter of fact, I have been meaning to have a word with the gods about this.  I want to know why I had to suffer the misfortune of being born too late for the computer revolution? Really, it is all too much! Personal computers were just becoming a thing in the couple of years after I graduated from university. Yes, I made my way through college without the internet, without word processing - I hand-wrote most of my term papers and all of my essays! - and without any understanding whatsoever about any of the new technologies coming right up behind me. Life is so unfair!!

Huh? Speak for yourself!

Let us be perfectly frank: when it comes to computer technology, I am as ignorant and helpless as a baby. No wait, a baby would probably be ahead of me in this game. Aren't they training youngsters in basic keyboarding and DOS and fortran and all that nonsense in utero these days? It seems like that to me.

Anyway, in keeping with my usual thoughtless impulsivity mature reflection,  I decided to register my domain name in preparation for the hordes of internet traffic that will never  eventually  soon be visiting my blog every day, without a doubt!

Eventually, I managed to find help*, and figured out how to simply redirect this blog to that web domain and here we are!  It really is very simple for calm, capable people like Your Able Correspondent.

Nothing to see here!
Situation under control

Except that when I logged on this morning to check on my favorite bloggers from my blog list, the blog list was gone!  Searching frantically through random files and clicking crazily on every link I could find, I soon managed to create more chaos than is imaginable on one desktop put everything more or less to rights. True, files have been moved and stuffed wherever I may or may not have remembered they belong, and the desktop is cluttered with more zips and pix and other junk than you can shake a stick at, but I have everything under control!

I have gone through and put my favorite blogs links all back on here, but who knows what else may have been dropped into the internet void during the migration!  The horror!  I may never figure any of this out properly, but I plan to lurch haphazardly onward with my usual impatience  continue to work diligently toward my usual outstanding results!

I hope my regular readers will help out by letting me know if they notice anything that seems wonky on my blog, or if anything has gone mysteriously missing.  It is probable  possible that I may have  brought about blog armageddon overlooked one or two things during the transition!  Not to worry, though!  In no time at all I will have restored the blog to full operating capacity, tamed the internet demons and once again be sitting down to write daily at a desk that looks like this:

Artist's rendition of the future workspace of Your Faithful Scribe

Back to the NiftyUniverse forthwith!  Good Day to All!


*Pro-tip:  Type: "How the #$#!! do I set up my blog?" in the google window-thingie and voilà!  Step-by-step instructions. You're welcome.

Sunday Sermon Antidotes - Controlled

There are antidotes for the poison sprayed upon the multitudes in houses of worship across the continent every Sunday morning.

Sit back and take in some reality-based inspiration on this Sunday morning.

Tombstone da Deadman:  Controlled.

"You like that song?...I wrote that for you."

T'is the Season...For Baseball!

"The Rookie"

To mark Opening Days across the continent.
Play ball!