Atheist Meditations

Listening to Major General John Batiste on Democracy Now! got me thinking about something.

AMY GOODMAN: Recently, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz testified he urinated on the dead body of an Iraqi killed by his fellow Marines. Sgt. Cruz also said he saw his squad leader shoot down five Iraqi civilians who were trying to surrender. The testimony came in a pretrial hearing for a Marine charged for the massacre and the ensuing cover-up.

MAJ. GEN. JOHN BATISTE: There is a fine line between an armed mob and a disciplined military force, and it’s up to military leaders to hold that line with rigid discipline. What you just relayed are examples where we lose it. There is no reason in the world why that kind of behavior should be condoned or, for that matter, happen in combat.

I don't think we can put too fine a line on it.

Our Military, particularly the branches that work on the ground, are dangerously past the crossing of it. Around a third polled are pro-torture, about half would hold to a 'code of silence' for a fellow who executed an unarmed civilian, about one in ten openly admit to war crimes. All this in an institution where 25% of females leaving report having been raped, a number that is surely far higher, where in civilian life where we often hear that the number of rapes that gets reported is something like 1 of 5.

These numbers are just fucking crazy. Jump off the mother-fucking page crazy. The picture they paint of our Men and Women in Uniform is dark. These troops come off sounding like soldier/gangsters - guys' who take what they want and don't respect women. They bond with the fellas in their squad like a ganger 'bout his brothers - always got his back, never rat him out. You want that kinda guy on the street with a Machine Gun near where your toddler is playing?

imagine why The Insurgency keeps growing.

Which half of Germany do you want to create? The half where a sophisticated, wounded people were won over by a professional, disciplined army? Germany soldiers and families sought desperately to be captured by Americans in the last days of the War. Or the half of Deutschland that was overrun by invading Russians, who murdered and raped hysterically?

Which was the better invading force? Which was the better Germany?

I can understand why General Batiste is so upset. Our Military had been tracking forward since the dark days of Vietnam. Gulf War I, Balken States, I have never heard of a single Human Rights complaint. The casus belli of each engagement seemed reasonable. In the Balkans, all we seemed to be trying to do was stop a genocide, in GW I, Kuwait had been invaded and they were an ally of the U.S. - I mean, it is 1991, you just can't let a country invade another on bullshit pretense.

Yet this war had none of that. The justifications for war were a matter of propaganda, not policy defining fact. Such levels of factual analysis seem to have been avoid for sake of 'selling the war.' The standards of the Geneva Convention were purposefully re-defined, despite the fact that they had worked for fifty years. This opened sundry Dark Doors. The realistic troop levels that would be needed to provided security (one of those quaint Geneva Convention obligations of the invading force) were not going to be met by a multiple of four. This was not a dare to stick your dick in a hornet's nest. This was penetrate hornet nest with hands tied behind back and a cubic yard of bee's wax shoved up your ass.

I think General Batiste's opinion jives with mine since day one. Putting a relatively small amount of Christian troops in the middle of the Muslim Holy Land will never generate positive results. It is just stupid. We allowed an administration to get/seize election that cared about nothing more than getting/seizing election. . .

I'm going to quit, I'm just overwhelmed. George W. Bush is such an incompetent President , I just can't believe how much we have lost. We're not even a Superpower anymore thanks to him, we're just another Asshole at the Table.

Look at Putin. He's currently terrorizing Europe with radiation murders and threats of cutting of energy supplies. Can we call this former KGB and bully out? No Way! He knows we just went all in on the last two hands. We can no longer bluff with the former Soviet Union.

That sucks, considering we fucking 'won the Cold War.'

I think we need to consider how each of us, as Americans, takes responsibility for the Bush Presidency. The infantile motherfucker has ruled this country for seven years. The damage inflicted upon every corner of our society cannot be underestimated. Failure to recover in just one area could be societal death.

Even if you embrace the conspiracies of voter manipulation and DeBolt machine fraud, it still happened. Nobody stood up within the national press and challenged the legitimacy of this President. We didn't stop traffic and halt commerce, we let it happen.

We protested, but not loud or often enough. We were outraged, but it wasn't something to disrupt the family Easter over. We sent a few dozen emails, knowing how easily they are filtered out.

"You ain't seen bad yet, but it's come'n."

This Wednesday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article in the lower center of their Front Page. I'd provide a link, but WSJ is all into the registering of readers, and I'm not down with that shit. Here's a summary:

Colonial-Era Ties to Africa Face a Reckoning in France

"On the evening of March 4, 10 French paratroopers" dropped near a militia controlled airstrip in the Central African Republic, 'ambushed the rebels, killing several and reclaiming the airport for the government."

"In France, neither the public nor the parliament was informed of the attack for three weeks." This action was run by the 'Cellule Africaine' a three-man office. The 'Cell' has had their dick in African affairs for over fifty years, in the bland words of the WSJ; "has overseen France's strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France's military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests. In return, these countries give French industries first crack at their oil and other natural resources." Plus, of course, "The Cell's close ties to oil giant Elf Aquitaine, whose top executives were jailed on corruption charges . . ."

Wowsers. This is not the sort of reporting one gets to see very often. I'd hazard that this article made it into the conservative press for two reasons. First, the country in question is France, a nation state that has been heavily characterized by the U.S. Right's propaganda. Secondly, some of the Journal's readership already understands how the world works - they have ideological structures in place to allow them to ignore injustice and suffering in the Third World - or, they lack the critical thinking skills that would permit one to extrapolate this example to our own society. Even at newspaper as prestigious as the Wall Street Journal, at least half the readership is retarded.

So a French President come into power, and the head of the secretive Cell, comes to visit in the still of a Parisian night. Tells the President what the Cell can do for him. They know Africa. They know who has the power, who is vulnerable, and have an extensive understanding of how to utilize force their effectively. They are already tight with the powerful oil and other industries to which so much of the French economy is dependent. They understand the ways that things can be done to protect/enhance the profits of said industries. The President doesn't need them to tell him how pleasing France's largest oil company is good for his Presidency.

This is realpolitik, an level of understanding of how asymmetrical power almost invariably plays out with our species. It seems that when a technologically/militarily superior group encounters a group that cannot rise to meet the level of threat, the dominate group will never voluntarily stave off the exploitation and violence. Anyone who has studied history or global politics beyond the community college level has to grapple with realpolitik. Powerful men, when facing no serious oversight, will seek to utilize the full extend of their power.

We can learn a lot about why France is still a member of the G-8 from this article. Most powerful economies don't function without submissive satellite states from which resources and wealth are extracted. We can also gleam a bit about the natural sprouting of corruption inside a secretive and dangerous 'Cell.' How quickly before someone who routinely bribes foreign official or organizes coups against foreign governments begins to loose respect for his own nation's jurisprudence?

I'm not sure what's going on in France these days, but if the Cell is facing any sort of 'Reckoning', than the level of informed political discourse must be light-years ahead of anything our own pundits and citizenry are capable of. How shameful. This Cell has not done anything worse than Iran-Contra, or the Iraq/Oil Crusade, but neither of those are actually understood by more than five to ten percent of our population. Most will have their brains cease activity before they ever move beyond jingoism and the mere repetition of slogans.

I pity them, so of course I also pity us. Yet nothing will change the fact that realpolitik be the law of the land. There is nothing new under the sun.

Labels: Realpolitik

Today is one of those days where 'no joy in Muddville,' seems too apropos.

The Minnesota Twins have lost six of the last seven games, some of those spectacularily. The pitching has been mediocre, the bats cold.

Tough times. That's professional baseball. Statistics tell us nobody wins all the time.

Wait for the wheel.

Labels: Twins

Social encounters of the last five minutes have set off a series of blogable thoughts. While our neighbors are away, the daughter's fiance - an affable, young chap with a tastefully-tricked, red Dodge Ram - met Cindy on her walk home and detailed his unenviable task. Something had gotten into their trash can and presumably drowned. The nose knows, and this something was a few days damn well past ripe.

He's out there wearing my respirator right now, fishing rotten squirrel corpses out of stagnant water and scrubbing the insides of the plastic dumpster with bleach. I told him that the squirrels were trapped by plastic and water, but he was trapped by the more subtle bonds of relationship. Men who are scooping maggots into a plastic bag are rarely inclined to indulge in the philosophic distractions. Perhaps I was clumsy.

What I had meant to select with that statement was the strength of the bond, a mutual recognizing of it, not to draw parallels between being with his girlfriend and drowning in a rancid pool. Certainly this task sucks, and certainly the motive force that compels one to put on a stranger's respirator and stick one's upper body into a stench and fly infested space is not a weak one. Any of us who are invested in a loving relationship understand how he is trapped by this scenario. Not 'trapped' with a negative connotation, just trapped enough to elucidate the ensnaring motive.

Lets call that Love. As Katharine Hepburn said in a recent A&E Biography I accidentally watched half of, 'a desire to change oneself or do things; to please the one you love.'

What I want to talk about is how Love is both necessary and inevitable in most physical relationships, yet how the intensity of that emotion has virtually zero correlation with the success of said relationship. I want to talk about marriage, meaningful relationships, and spiritual maturity. All the things that go into a relationship that are excluded from the afore defined set. Just because you want to riff on Love like a long-haired 80's rock star in the midst of a 'power ballad', does not mean the relationship will succeed. It's like knowing what what soil, climate, and light are right for planting something, just wanting it to grow is immaterial.

We know relationships implode (or explode, guess it's personal preference.) I do not believe that marriages fail because as Cappellanus's quote 'All Love be Either Increasing or Decreasing.' I think relationships fail because folks are too immature when they enter into them, they don't yet have enough understanding of the world/selves to 'get it.' I'd go so far as to say that the only time relationships actually fail is when one member grows into something more mature or complicated.

Literature is filled with examples of the man who goes off to war or other dramatic experience and then deals with the fact that his wife and him just don't see the world the same way anymore. Feminist Literature has their own paradigm. As Spiritual Beings, we must never be afraid to try to grow into something more, to expand our selves and our understanding.

The main problem is that 17 - 25 is the main time for individuals to make a major leap to a more complicated world-view. Current theories of brain development argue that the human mind is not physiologically capable of higher level moral considerations until sometime in the early twenties.

Some humans want to experience a more complicated reality, some are easily manipulated by their fear of it.

Take the current 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' schlock. I would bet my sideburns that a proud member of the college republicans has never justified selecting a major based on 'I'm trying to find myself,' or 'I'm looking for something that I can be passionate about.' Such Aimless Wanderings are anathema to the conservative movement. Their role-models knew from a very early age what they wanted to do, or what their 'calling' was. The archetype of 'The Seeker' does not exist on their side.

Yet the few rational voices left in the press keep bringing up the disparity between the cultures. Liberals and states that have progressive views on these matters have a much lower divorce rate than the 'red states.' The religious hyperbole of the South won't shut up about 'values', yet they divorce (or murder their wives) at a rate far beyond that of any 'blue state.'

I think it's because of the fundamentalists' foolish belief that seeing a man married at nineteen is somehow a good thing.

Theocracy does not need the level of civic responsibility that Democracy does. In fact, it kinda needs to keep the baseline a few notches beneath most of the twentieth century.

So, us who 'get' liberalism engage and screw during our early twenties, not looking for life partners, just dissipating (the groovitastically pleasurable) primate needs. We read and we dwell and maybe we get depressed, then around three oh we try to accept Mortality and make the most out of who/where we are. We've got a feel for where we are in 'riding the wave' that be life. Let's try to have a good ride.

'Conservatives' (or 'evags' to my more regular readers) are motivated by a sub-conscious knowledge that their belief system makes less sense than a Pepsi commercial. Exciting something, brand name. Exciting excitement, brand name brand name, we all want to be like exciting brand name. Embrace Brand Name. Do not question the word of Brand Name.

I've got two plus hours into this. Please, my friends, 'get' what I'm driving at here. Curse the religiously damaged world that makes these discussions so difficult to initiate.

This morning on Google News I saw this: "Sharpton Remark on Faith was Bigoted." Rev Sharpton, who 'led the attack on poor Don Imus', is 'now in the cross-hairs himself.' While having a rather informal, sit down style debate with Christopher Hitchens (an Atheist, but someone whose political opinions have drifted . . . basically, I think he's a literary gun for hire. Few on the hard right have the skills to opine in favor of the Iraq War in front of a hostile crowd. C H has those skills, honed to an arrogantly fine edge), Rev Sharpton said something about 'those who really believe in Gawd.' Governor Romney's team wasted no time playing the 'Offended Christian' card.

Here's my thoughts, as I delay going to work this morning.

Listening to CNN's pundits talk about 'the problem here is we don't have the whole context of his statement.' Oh really? You can't, as a major 24 hour 'news' program, have an intern track down the transcript of that debate and take ten minutes to read it? Obviously the whole damn thing was filmed. The problem is that modern pundits can't put any thing into context. That is a critical skill practiced by real journalists, purposefully lacking on the cable networks.

Secondly, does this lame fiasco mean that all Atheists are bigots? Mr. Romney seems to be able to allege the victim stance just because someone may have questioned the legitimacy of his religious faith, yet to an Atheist no religion is legitimate and Mormonism is one of the more blatantly rediculous. Divine texts that vanished whenever they were critically questioned, polygamy, Brigham Young? Five million followers or not, it's still a funny belief system.

I don't get the controversy. Clearly Al Sharpton is being held to a different standard than any other religious leader. Evangelikals accuse Jews and 'weak' Christians of worshiping the wrong god. Catholics have long been disparaged by proddies as having fallen into a confusion of latin mumbo jumbo, of having lost the true meaning of Jesus' message. Ten minutes of 'Christian' radio will give you ten examples of 'we're real Christians, these other groups are wrong.'

As Atheism is Self-Evident, many religious belief systems are a house of cards. To a house a cards, even a breath - even the spoken word - can be devastating. The Fragile Construct must be defended at all times. Surround oneself with fellow believers, condemn critical thinking, we see this behavior over and over again.

Voltaire once said that 'those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' This observation does not bode well for a country with standing members of congress who see creationism as reality, a country where 24 is watched by anyone over twelve. Yet while a myopic culture can have serious consequences, the same refusal to engage illogical memes can have exponentially worse consequences within certain institutions. Our military is the paramount example.

A recent interview I read had a military officer taking a moment to stress just what the U.S. military is: 'the most efficient fucking killing machine that has ever been created in the history of our species.' And it is true. The more one learns about the military, from A-10 tank killers to bombing systems that could turn an entire sports stadium into hamburger in seconds, the capacity to bring death numbs the mind.

This is what makes the recent poll numbers released this week so damn troubling. About fifty percent of marines and army soldiers informed America that they wouldn't report a fellow soldier whom they witnesses kill or maim a civilian. That's broken. The number can't be trusted straight up, because most individuals should be aware enough to lie if that was their honest belief. That fifty percent represents members of the U.S. military who don't give a good gawd damn about the institution they serve.

If you love your mother, you don't go telling strangers about what an easy slut she is. If you love the corp, you don't go summarizing to the media how little honor and the uniform code mean these days.

F.T.A. is back again, this time with soldiers openly admitting that they have rejected any sense of a moral code more enlightened than that of a prison gang. Represent, stick up for your brothers, never snitch.

I remember a conversation I had over Easter with several family members lamenting how 'a soldier would have to file out paperwork in triplicate before he can fire back a kid with a AK-47.' That's part of the rightwing bullshit these days, that our soldiers are dying cuz bleeding hearts want them tie their hands with rediculous regulations. 'Back in my day, you didn't have to call for permission to fire your weapon, if somebody was shooting at you, you shot back.'

This has a lot to do with the utter misunderstanding of modern warfare. In an arena where dozens of units from dozens of countries are working together under a shared command and control; war has changed. With the percentage of casualties attributed to friendly fire somewhere near 40%, when you are taking directed fire from over the horizon - the chances are pretty good that you have been mistakenly fired upon. You don't get to return fire until that hostile has been confirmed. You call down an airstrike on a team of Japanese, now the U.S. has an international incident on her hands.

I know that most Army recruiting media makes soldiery seem like Rambo. A soldier's job is not to kill. To paraphrase, 'a soldier's job is to do and die.' Sometimes 'doing' is killing, and in pitched battles our soldiers are second to none at killing, but many times the job is to die. To follow orders even when they seem suicidal.

I think too much of the thinking about the military has been affected by the 'Black Hawk Down' syndrome. A glorification of fighting for the sake of fighting, why and who are not important, only that you 'never leave a buddy behind.'

If I were a military leader, I'd love a military with such malleable morals. As a citizen, I'm shockingly disappointed that the men and women who serve do not aspire to more.

What makes America's military great is not its ability to wage war. What makes it great is its willingness to submit to civilian leadership. The Arsenal of Democracy fights for the good of We the People, not for some king or some fucking corporation. When half the uniform members tell the world that they don't give a rat's ass about international law or civilian oversight, they are saying something dark about the state of the U.S. military.

Withdraw from Iraq and most of the world. Bring our troops home and give them the care they have earned. Cut the standing army down drastically, and only keep/promote those who care about preserving the honor of their institution.

Labels: Institutions, Iraq War

Had a conversation today that helped my mindfire grow beyond kindling with the topic of the soul. Most if the major species of monotheistic religion posit the existence of an immortal soul as an article of faith. Engaging Descartes, our existence is divided into two completely separate spheres. The realm of the body, the material world; our skeletal system, tables, computers, beer. The world of moving bodies, opposite and equal reactions, starvation and fat. On the other side be the realm of the soul, the inner world of the spirit. To this nebulous region experiences such as emotions and spirituality reside. If you believe that your soul lives on in heaven or some other afterlife, that 'soul' becomes the reference point for all that the tensions, desires, fears, - in short it becomes shorthand for you, all the characteristics that one references when they contemplate selfhood.

Now I'm certain that many enlightened (no, not enlightened . . . edjemicated ) are already assailing Cartesian Dualism with either Skinner's Behaviorism or a recently released study on neuroscience. For this entry, however, I'd like to run off into another tangent.

To most theists, when they discuss the soul they are thinking on some level about the things they treasure about themselves - the things that make them unique. Parts of themselves that they anticipate will be with them in the 'next life.' Skill at pool, a fascination with astronomy, a way with the ladies, traits that will continue to define them once they have left this body behind. Uncle Fritz just wouldn't be Uncle Fritz if he didn't have that goofy sense of humor in heaven. In heaven you're you, just without the material body. What is not flesh, muscle, or bone falls into the region of the soul. Hairs could be split, but the soul is the self.

So let's ponder the soul for a few moments. Do Atheists have a soul? If we don't believe in Gawd can we believe in a soul?

A rudimentary definition of the soul: the unique parts of a sentient being that engages the spiritual.

What is the spiritual? Those drives and impulses in a human being that lure and urge some of our kind to act in ways that transcend the mundane. I'm not prepared to define spiritual (especially after just leaving the May Day festivities this afternoon) , like the famous quote regarding pornography - 'I know it when I see it.' The swelling in a heart that makes one stand up to tyranny despite threat of death, that impetus be spiritual. The decision to take in an orphan when one's own children have an uncertain enough future as it is, that choice was motivated by something beyond an instinct for survival. Somewhere between sheer irrationality and cold, cold rationality; spirituality inspires some to seek a better world.

The tolerant accept that this spirituality can be found in many places. It might be hardwired into our brains. The intolerant see spirituality as exclusive to their cultish belief system. The intolerant must be purged.

With this pair of terms crudely delineated, I do not support my Atheist brothers and sisters who would throw away the realms of the soul and spirituality.

Just because we refuse to labotomize ourselves into sheep so that megalomaniacs can shamelessly exploit us, does not mean that we have forsaken all the subtle wonders of life that lift sentient beings above poultry.

I happen to agree with many that empathy supports most of what our species considers to be morality. I've always felt I was a rather empathic individual, it is the feeling of others emotions. When others are suffering, I suffer. When others are truly joyful, I am often joyful. I will choose actions that affect others' emotions because often I can feel them too. An interesting motive in a society whose 'capitalism' supposedly has elevated 'acting in one's self interest' to the primary virtue.

Faith also belongs in the real of the spiritual. To the ignorant evags who think that faith and Atheist are anathema I say read S.K's Fear and Trembling. I have and understand faith. The evag has been too damaged intellectually to comprehend the true Virtue. They are the blindmen being lead by the elephant's tail.

I think that we are born with a genetic blue-print that will create an organism with a huge mass of cleverly connected neural cells. Each of us possess processing power that dwarfs every computer on earth working together by a few exponential steps. Within that almost incomprehensible processing machine the capacity for self-awareness began. Within that self-awareness an awareness of others and our own certain mortality also springs forth. These realizations of self allow for the development of the characteristics that have been short-handed into the soul.

I don't believe that we are all born with a soul, but as humans we are all born with the potential for a soul. I'd say most kids these days have devoted more time to developing a digital pet/mmorpg character than they have ever spent cultivating their soul.

I forgot how long one of my blogging sessions can last. I'll have to continue this at another time.

Labels: Spirituality, The Soul

Cindy helped get me started, and soon four hours of my life were sacrificed to the capricious deities of Blogger and HTML. I'm still not sure what happened to my profile pic and my blog description, maybe they will just pop up sometime in the future. That's what used to happen with my Google ads, sometimes they'd load in time, sometimes they won't. Anyways.

I'm going to make another attempt at being a more regular blogger. I've hit my six months at the new job, and while I have considerably more free time now (the daily commute went from around two hours to ten minutes), the job requires me to be there early and prepared to patiently socialize. Back in the good 'ole days I'd start blogging with me morning coffee, and stop when I felt like it - an hour in the truck on my way to the job site gave me plenty of time to get my thoughts in order. Now I don't even get to empty the coffeemaker before I'm pulling into the parking garage.

To say that my supervisor has 'the gift of gab' qualifies as the understatement of the epoch. Some days, after hours of animated conversation darting from refinishing a '67 chevy to Bush's utter incompetence like a mongoose on meth, I'm just worn out with communications. Back when I worked with the ignorant evags, I came home desperate for intelligent communication with the woman. Now it's a brace of beers, the ball game and 'please shut the hell up.'

Yet I know that my world is defined by my assumptions and all that rot. Change my habits, change my expectations. Nothing is good or evil but thinking makes it so.

Tomorrow is the May Day festival at Powderhorn Park across the river. Great parade and paganesque ceremony celebrating spring, rebirth, and renewal. I'm hoping to catch a bit of the positive energy (and an eyefull of young female squeezed into a chainmail bra.)

Holy crap! The Twins are playing, and Santana's got a lead. . .