Destroying Paradigms In 3 Clicks Or Less

"OK, guys, get your tablets out and navigate over to Google, but don't enter anything yet," I was talking to my 8th graders.  Officially, this class is called Conversational English, but really its Critical Thinking 101 - a kind of Aristotelian discussion group.

I continued.  "Now, who believes the Earth is experiencing global warming right now?"

About two thirds of the hands shot up.

"You're wrong," I stated matter-of-factly.  "Who believes that the last ice age ended 150,000 years ago, or so?"

Nearly all hands shot up.  "Well, you're wrong again."

I always enjoy that particular look on a student's face when they are trying to juxtapose new information with dogma.

"OK, type this into Google: Oxygen-18 ratio for the last 500 million years."  Some furious clicking and tapping noises.  A pause while the information downloaded.  Some murmurs.

"What you are looking at is a graph of oxygen-18 isotope ratios in the fossil record as a function of global temperature changes.  Notice anything?"  I was listening for the sound of paradigms crashing.  There is was...

"What conclusion can we draw from this graph?"

There was a pause while they digested the information.  Then a rather timid voice spoke up...

"Earth is in a cooling period right now?"

"Good!  And what else comes to mind while you look at this data?"

"The ice age isn't over?"

"Nice.  And...?"

"The Earth is much cooler than average right now..."  The voice was getting stronger, more certain.

"Excellent!  Don't close Google yet.  Type in: comparison of atmospheres of Venus, Earth and Mars.  And while you're waiting, who can tell me what is the supposed cause of global warming?"

"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?"  We were back to timid again.

"How much carbon dioxide is there in Venus' atmosphere?  (95%)  And in Mars'?  (95%)  And in Earth's?"

There was a pause.  I love these pauses.  You can smell the smoke of gears grinding.

"0.05%"

"Well done!  Now, if Venus is a hellhole, and Mars is a freezer, and they both have the same amount of CO2, and Earth is in the middle with only 0.05% CO2, what can we conclude?"

"Maybe CO2 isn't the problem?"  I waited.  I didn't want that in the form of a question, but a declarative statement.  "CO2 isn't the problem," said another, more assured voice.

"Exactly.  And looking at the relative positions of Venus, Earth and Mars in the Solar System, what obvious conclusion can we draw regarding global temperatures?"

"Venus is closer to the Sun and Mars is farther away, and Earth is in the middle.  So..."  Pause.

"Go on..."

"So, the closer a planet is to the Sun, the warmer it is," the voice was less hesitant.

"Doesn't that make more sense than a few puny people driving their puny cars and changing the entire climate of a planet?"

"Seems more obvious, I guess," said one particularly bright mind.

"So, when someone tells you that something exists that defies logic and observation, what is the first thing you should do?"

"Check the data!"

They had gotten the idea.  Not that I wanted them to believe any particular thing, but I wanted them to verify for themselves anything anyone tells them...especially if it's a government office of any kind.  Question everything.

There's a whole generation coming up that believes in Easter Bunnies and Santa Claus because every single textbook in every single class spews dogma, rather than facts, and invites blind obedience rather than critical thinking.  As Mickey Rourke said in Barfly, "This far and no further."  We have to stop beating fairy tales into our kids' heads or they will be incapable of dealing with the real world.  In fact, they will be incapable of seeing the real world.

Next topic: GMOs.

Love Thy Neighbor To Death

This week has been particularly difficult.  Not really sure why.

My normal day begins at 3am.  I start with a shot of Goji berry juice and a cup of ginseng coffee.  I read the news in four different languages (English, Spanish, German, Indonesian), write a column, then eat breakfast and off to the office.

For some reason, I've been going to bed at the normal time (8 or 9 pm), but waking up around 5:30a.  Granted, it's been a rather hectic week at the office.  I've edited an average of five large reports and publications a day, compared to the normal three.  But that doesn't explain it.  It's not physically exhausting work.  Just mental gymnastics.  I taught three classes, but those are more fun than work, even though I hate preparing the materials (I may produce my first textbook soon with all the stuff I've created over the past four years).

There was Valentine's Day.  Bought my wife some roses and took her to a nice steak dinner, where I enjoyed a fine wagyu sirloin that melted in my mouth, medium rare sans the usual Indonesian habit of saucing everything.  That also happened to be the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Indonesia.  We enjoyed a couple of delicious and rare gin  and tonics back at the house.  That could only explain one day, though.  And that day, I woke up at my usual 3am.

So what was it that was dragging me down?  Sleeping 10 hours a day is just not my thing, and hasn't been since my wild and wooly late teens/early tweens.

Turns out, after a major round of self-diagnostics, that I was suffering from depression.  But where was it coming from?  I haven't had any major traumas this year (yet).  I've been reasonably productive of late.  I've got my home garden going and repaired some things around the house, got a few chores knocked out, came out of a 28-article writing spree, got a large number of projects completed at the office, and got some social time in.  I even hooked the HDMI output of the computer to the LCD big screen, bought a wireless mouse and keyboard, and started kicking back on the couch to do my research.  It also allowed me to pump my Tcaichovski 1812 Overture through the surround-sound system, which is waaaaay cool!

Maybe it was burn out.  Most writers go through down time.  There comes a point where you just run out of ideas and sit in front of a blank screen.  Other times, you become physically repulsed by the idea of sitting alone in your home office for hours on end cranking out words.  I'm very familiar with this syndrome and I've developed work-arounds over the years.

But this was different.  I had hit a wall where I didn't lack the ideas, just the motivation to do...anything.

Then it struck me.  For the last couple of weeks, I've been researching apocalyptic literature and culture, studying the origin and development of end-times thinking.  The topic had depressed me and taken the wind out of my sails.  Turns out, it is the Yahwist religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that had T-boned my intellect and left me completely uninterested in my usual quest to change the world.

Studying that stuff is rather interesting, if not eye-opening.  But getting anywhere near it will cause a spell of hopelessness and inaction to fall over you.  It's very dangerous.  I can agree with Marx on at least his point that religion is an opiate of the masses.

When you study scriptures from a dispassionate point of view, as opposed the evangelical numb-nut view, you start to figure out that the Bible was sewn together from several ancient sources.  By the Bible, I include both Old and New Testaments.  If there ever was a real people called Hebrews, they certainly aren't the Jews of today, and most definitely aren't the Zionists.

The Old Testament is a hodge-podge of Egyptian, Babylonian and Mesopotamian mythologies cherry-picked to roughly create a story of these Hebrew folks.  Nearly every word can be traced to far more ancient sources, with a few modifications and additions to hold the teetering mass together.

The New Testament is a stew of Buddhist, Persian and Egyptian stories with some vivid imagination lumped on top.  The parables, miracles, names, symbols, and events all come from older sources.  Buddha, Mithras and Osiris are all strung together to create a character called Jesus, and the name is a combination of Julius (Caesar) and Zeus...Juli-Zeus...Jesus.

The truly evil part of this effort, though, is the Revelation of John the Divine, commonly called Revelations.  This is the key to the spell that has captured billions of people over the last thousand years or so (the early Christians didn't really talk about it, so it must be fairly new).

It wasn't until the last two hundred years or so that all the clap-trap about rapture and physical manifestations of God and complete and utter destruction of Earth came about.  Most of it is attributable to one man, Cyrus Scoffield.

Scoffield was a flim-flam man and convicted felon living in Kansas a while back.  At the behest and funding of a secretive group of Zionist lawyers, he wrote down a bunch of internal references in the Bible to vary events outlined in Revelations, including creating things like the rapture out of whole cloth.  You know his work is all rubbish, because the Oxford Press would never have published his mental masturbations without some high-powered backing.  He was a criminal and ne'er-do-well.  Why on Earth would Oxford give serious consideration to that rubbish without someone(s) in the backgroud green-lighting everything?

Since that point, global events have been carefully choreographed to follow the Scoffield script.  The destruction of the royal houses in WWI, the so-called Holocaust in WWII, the creation of Israel in 1948.  The introduction of bio-metrics and the police state in the latter 20th century through the use of false-flag terrorism.

The whole scenario was created and used by a group of elites to paralyze an entire chunk of the world's population while they installed their happy little global empire.

Here's how it works:

• Get everyone to believe in a Second Coming/End of the World
• Publish and indoctrinate a set of 'signs' that the End Times are coming
• Manipulate world events to make the 'signs' appear
• Make everyone believe that if they are saved, they have a free ride out
• Watch as billions of people sit back and let them do their thing while they wait for the free ride and the appearance of 'god'

It's really diabolical, when you start thinking about it.  But that's not all!

The three Yahwist religions are people much identical.  Judaism, Chistianity and Islam follow more or less the same plot, though the names and events vary slightly.  The really crafty part is that the three are masterful creations for instilling hatred, division and separatism among a bunch of people that or more or less the same.

All three start off with one man wandering into the wilderness alone.  There he communes with some sort of Great Spirit who gives him, and only him, a Great Message for the Masses.  Furthermore, only he and his hand-picked successors have the power and ability to interpret this 'message' for mass consumption.

Now you have a tailor-made means of controlling large numbers of people.  You, the elite, need only brainwash a handful of gullible and greedy idiots, and they in turn will go out and do the dirty work, believing the whole time that they have been chosen by God's messenger to bring the One True Interpretation of some dusty of stories to the world.

The best part is that all three groups have a god that will torture and kill anyone who doesn't follow the inspired interpretation.  This god commands people to slaughter entire civilizations, wipe out cultures and baptize/convert anyone left standing.

All three stories begin with a gory murder and revolting violence.  The Jews watch as all the children in Egypt are killed and Pharoh's army drowned.  The Christians see their god brutally tortured and hung on a tree.  The Muslims follow their prophet into horrific battles to wipe out the infidels.

All three stories tell their followers that no one will believe them and everyone will hate them for their beliefs.  All three are told that once the 'signs' are fulfilled, their god will return in glory and justify everything by showing that they were right the whole time.

The scheme has been so successful, that all three groups have been at each other's throats for centuries, and when they aren't fighting each other, they are on pogroms to wipe out the heretics and blasphemers among their own ranks.  In fact, the whole thing is so devisive that the Jews, Christians and Muslims have all split themselves up into multiple sects believing that only they have the True Interpretation of the stories, and only they have direct lineage to the first man who secretly and solitarily got the first message.

It's all quite clever and humorous, as long as you don't think about all the death and destruction that has been caused by these three stories.

What you end up with are about half the world's population, who all hate each other and are suspicious of anyone not in their little sect.  All of them whole-heartedly believe that they will be proved right after the entire Earth is destroyed and their god comes back to say, "See, I told you so!"  And all three will do absolutely nothing to stop the elite from pulling off their evil plan, because the 'signs' are being fulfilled!

Oh, yeah...when atheism started taking hold back at the turn of the 20th century?  Well, those crafty elites came up with a secular version of the exact same stories, called the UFO Phenomenon.  Basically, aliens created humans and will return to destroy all the wicked ones and take the True Believers off to paradise.  In the meantime, they are kidnapping folks and giving them secret and solitary messages and empowering those folks to go out and spread it to the masses, along with their special interpretation.

Same damn story, same plot, same everything.  Only this time, we don't have something called 'god.'  Now we just have vastly superior lifeforms from 'out there.'

Once I saw through all this crap, I was fresh again.  Today, I vacuumed the window sills and cleaned the windows, re-arranged my office, wrote a column, and got some useful repairs and chores done around the house.  Amazing what can be done when you break this evil and cynical spell that's been cast over the world for so long.  I no longer feel depressed and gloomy!

For those who are still True Believers and refuse to See the Light, then try this mental exercise:  If God appeared to you right now and commanded you to go across the street and murder your neighbor, would you do it?  If the answer is an honest "no", then you are well on your way to a full and complete recovery.

We Control The Vertical

Why do humans feel the need to dwell on the eventual demise of our species, and ultimately the planet?  It borders on obsession the way we not only expect the end of civilization at any moment, but that we actively pursue it in so many ways.

Jews have been waiting for a messiah for 2,300 years to come and vanquish everyone who has ever spoken an unkind word in their general direction.  Christians have spent 2,000 years enthralled with the idea that their savior will return and kill everyone who has made them servile.  Muslims are anxiously awaiting the Twelfth Imam to climb up out of a well and wreak havoc on the enemies of Islam.  The Buddhists are awaiting the re-incarnation of the Great Buddha, who will destroy the current age and institute the next.  Science is wringing its hands over red giants, asteroids and global warming/cooling/changing/not changing.  Science has so many disaster stories, I can only imagine it must be a very depressing line of work.

The Hindu have Shiva, the New Agers have whatever it is they believe, and pretty much all the rest have their version of The Endtimes cataclysm.  What is this burning need to be destroyed and have some outside force do the honors?  If this sort of thinking underpins all of our cultures, then what does it say about us?

First of all, I admit that I can not speak authoritatively on any of these, save christianity.  Though I have studied many of them, my strongest arguments are built around the christian fairy tales, since that is my background.  So if this article has a certain bent, there is a reason.  However, there are numerous underlying similarities in all these tales that may allow us to pull together some common strings.

Let's begin by clearing up something that really bothers me.  The word 'apocalypse' does NOT mean the 'end of the world as we know it,' also known as TEOTWAWKI.  It simply means 'to reveal something which is hidden.'  How that word came to mean death and destruction is a complete mystery to me.  Now that we've dispensed with that matter, let's move on to more interesting things by starting with a little though experiment.

Suppose you had the desire and opportunity to control a great number of people, and you needed a simple but effective way to pacify them and prevent them from rising up and slitting your throat.  You need this group of people to accept any amount of servitude, abuse, suffering, and depravity, while at the same time, deflecting any responsibility for this horror away from yourself.  In fact, you set yourself up as the only possible intermediary with the cause of all this, and it is your efforts that prevent the final horror from occuring.

Easy!  Implant a though virus at the core of every person's being, pounded in from birth, that the entire world will be destroyed by a wrathful god who's sick and tired of all the sin and stuff in his creation.  However, if you follow everything I say, then we may be able to put this final horror off a couple of hundred years.  Oh, and throw a few bucks in the basket on your way out so we can affort to focus all our attention on delaying the final outcome.  And while you're at it, spend the next three generations building us a nice big church right over here, would'ja?

Yup, just the ticket!  Free ride through life, ownership of some of the best land and buildings on Earth, and instead of being seen as the cause of all the crap, we are the heroes, interceding on the part of some invisible old man in the sky who's really pissed off that his image and likeness is using reason and intellect and enjoying things like sex, that he invented.

So, how do we achieve this?  Well, here's come nifty old stories that have a secret meaning, but we'll interpret it all for the rubes, so they don't see the real meaning.  While we're at it, Mr. Jerome, this line right here in Romans says humans are free.  Let's change that to obeying the Powers That Be (namely us).

Great, now we need a way to keep them in line.  Let's hire a good writer to come up with a story about the end of the world.  We'll say it was penned by a guy trapped on a Greek island having a hallucination.  Let's make it really vague and mystical sounding, so we can interpret it dozens of different ways.  That'll keep the rubes in abject fear and terror, looking for signs and wonders.  Hell, every time it rains, they'll think it's the end of the world!

Now, hmmm...I know!  All of this will happen because the rubes are all worthless, useless, groveling sinners with no intrinsic value, and without us, they'll never get free of this burden.  That way, they'll serve us and praise us, and every day the world doesn't end, we get credit for keeping the old man happy!  What a great idea!

What next?  Oh, I got it!  We invent this nation that never existed and put in our little hallucination story that this nation must rise a third time, as a sign that all this stuff is about to happen.  Then we'll create a great war and slaughter a bunch of these Jews so that everyone feels guilty and clears out a few Arabs to give them a homeland...which, get this...just happens to be the third incarnation of this imaginary land!  Man, will the rubes be afraid now!

Ooh!  This is rich!  We'll tell everyone that some mystical sequence of events has to happen in order for their savior to come to their rescue.  Kind of like a celestial distress signal that we need some help down here.  So, this mythical nation we created must be taken over and, get this, an anti-old man takes up residence!  And this guy will REALLY be bad, even badder than the old man himself!

Think about it.  We'll have the rubes supporting any amount of evil, horror, terror, slavery, cruelty, and deprivation, because they think it will get them closer to being rescued from their own stupidity!  Man, this is great stuff!  Just to make sure, we'll invent something called the rapture, where only 144,000 people will get a free ride outta here just before the real shit comes down, even though they are creating the shit storm that they are running away from, in order to get rescued by some old man in the sky, and the whole time no one will suspect us, since we are the only hope they have of getting one of the free-ride tickets!

Oh, my...this is really rich!  I bet we could easily control a billion or so people, make them do whatever we want, suffer any amount of outrage and humiliation, fight wars, give us money, build us some nice digs, and never once suspect that we are the bad guys!

Heck, we'll just use our little bad-boy country in the Middle East to raise all kinds of hell.  We;ll set it all up so that our followers would give this country a pass on anything it does, so we can use it to start wars, soak up money (even from non-believers who give it to us as taxes at the point of our guns), and generally raise Cain any time and any where we choose.  Best of all, it will all be written off as signs of the end times, which our rubes will all support blindly because they think it will hurry up their savior to come rescue them!

My gosh, we could rule the world!  We could live in absolute splendor and glory without doing more than passing out a little bad wine and tasteless bread.  The rubes would be thankful for it.  We could abuse them, torture them, burn them at the stake, and god forbid, Excommunicate them if they get out of hand.  We would have the rubes believing that the more they suffer, the more stuff they get in some mystical place called 'heaven.'  They'd put up with anything to get some stuff in heaven, I'd bet.  The best part is we'd be absolutely immune from prosecution, suspicion and retribution, because if the rubes attack us, they lose all their stuff in heaven.  Worse!  Hahahaha!  They'd spend all eternity being treated the way we treat them!  Hohohohohoho!

This is such a great plan!  Why hasn't anyone else thought of this?  Heck, we'd be kind of the world, completely unassailable and above suspicion.  What a great life it would be.  Just for the hell of it, let's make it a boys-only club, and we'll tell everyone we're celibate, so we can be left alone with their most vulnerable and defenseless ones, and no one would ever believe we could do anything wrong behind closed doors, because we have the mainline to the old man!  If they raise a fuss, we'll just send up the cosmic distress signal and boy won't they be sorry!

Gosh, it's a good thing something like this could never happen.  I mean, just think, hundreds of generations duped into servitude by false promises of rewards and fake terror of punishment.  After all, if people ever caught on to the ruse, they'll hang us from every lamp post from here to Timbuktu!  That would be a truly horrible apocalypse/revelation, wouldn't it?

The State Of The States

P. T. Barnum famlusly said,

"There's a sucker born every minute."

Listening to Obama put on our rose colored glasses, it sounds as if he thinks there are 300 million suckers currently living in North Anerica.

To which I reply,

You can fool all of the people most of the time, but you can't fool some of the people all of the time.

Not sure what that has to do with anything, but I said it, at any rate.

First, there was the voodoo economics parts, like lowering corporate taxes without raising the deficit. Yeah right...tell me another! I mean, any corporation over a certain size has so many offshore accounts and shell corporations that they never earn a profit, as far as the tax calcs go. Heck, if you jigger and jive enough, you can show a loss while making billions in profits and handing out bonus checks like they're going out of style. Just look at the banksters in New York.

And what about the housing market, which according to CaseShiller is taking anouther huge, stinking dump right on the American door-step? What about the pernicious inflation showing up in luxuries like, oh, FOOD? What about oil pushing $100 and heading non-stop to $150 or even $200 this year? Five-dollar gas is a recovery, all right, but not for us little folk on the steet. Sure makes me want to be CEO of ExxonMobil right about now.

Another knee-slapper in the dopamine-induced dream world of Washington was the goal of 80%-ish of American households getting green energy by the year 2150, or something like that. Shoulda thought about that way back when Nixon was running around slapping price caps and national speed limits all over creation. Know what I mean? Heck, on Obama's timeline, shifting it to Nixon time-frame, means we'd all be sucking up zero-point energy by now.

And what about that national high-speed rail system? Ya think we coulda done that instead of throwing away trillions on bailing out the jerk-wad a$$-holes who put us in this mess in the first place? I mean, if we took all that TArP money, and instead of giving it to Goldman Sachs, who just paid billions in bonuses to their robber barons, we gave it to AmTrack? In the past two years, instead of watching a slow-motion implosion, we might already have the first link of high-speed rail inagurated.

Heck, just putting in a line from El Paso to Houston would at least move the drug lords around faster. It would also make a handy line on the map for the newly annexed northern territories of Mexico. You know...kind of a line in the sand type thing. Wouldn't even have to buy more land. Just run it down the middle of I-10, instead of paying for all those concrete barriers that will keep us fro U-turning when the military check-points crank up later this year. Give the runners something to dodge, as well.

What a bunch of bogus horse-$hit.

This whole dog-and-pony show (to really appreciate that analogy one must have been to Nuevo Laredo's Boys' Toy on a Saturday night around pay day) was brought to us by a man who has yet to prove he is an American citizen, much less a natural-born citizen, as the Constitution requires. His best hope was the newly elected governor of the captured kingdom of Hawai'i, who swore up and down that he was going to put an end to all this 'birther' crap and give us the goods. He started out with, "Hang on, we're looking." That became, "Yup, here it is." Which morphed into, "I know it's here somewhere." And has finally settled on, "Nope. Ain't got one."

In other words, the jaw-flapper up there on the podium contributing to global warming ain't even legit. That pretty much means that anything he has done since stealing the Big Chair is illegal and has no color of law. Good news for all you anti-Obamacare folks. Didn't have to repeal it. It was a done deal when he signed it.

Oh, and while he was talking, Arizona, that last bastion of sanity, give or take an assassinatino or two, was working up a law to prevent anyone from getting on the 2012 presidential ballot without forking over the birth certificate. LOL!

And Obama talked like he really made a difference. All honey and no suckle, that one.

I really miss Reagan sometimes. There was a guy who could shove the Big One in, twist it around, and make you thankful for the experience. The only thing Obama makes you thankful for is the end of the speech.

Pre-speech, word was the Supremes were ditching to bong a little Constitution and catch the show on CNN. Over here on the Far Side, we haven't heard if they went through with it. After all, the Chief bonger himself was complicite in swearing Obama in during a private session back-stage after Barky 'botched' the oath of office (of course, he couldn't really swear the other, being a foreigner and all).

And so the charade waddles onward dragging IV tubes and iron lungs with it. The former Republic looks a little rough around the gills there. I mean, the national debt is equal to the annual GDP, the gress-full-of-cons is working up the paperwork to let states go bankrupt and the country is STILL prosecuting two wars of naked aggression against innocent nations, while secretly expanding (can you say Cambodia?) into a third and possibly a fourth.5

The kids are alright, the song says.

Hell, ole Hu popped by the White House to measure the Oval Office for a re-do and see if the kitchen was up to snuff. He even checked to see if little BammyBaby was studying her Mandarin so she'd be ready for the final take-over.

Yup, ain't nothing wrong with the old Union that a few tax cuts for the rich, some useless hot-air for the starving, and some platitudes for the immobile won't fix. If anyone survives to 2035, you'll be able to laugh about it while using 80% green energy travelling at high speed by rail from New Beijing to Hu Jintao City.

Won't that be fun kids?

Meanwhile, we got our very first ever crop circle down in Indonesia over the weekend.

Some things are MUCH more important than listening to fairy tales.

Why Worry About Facts?

"Do you want to accompany me go to the chruch?" she asks in the standard Englishnesian syntax.

Can't think of anything I would less like to do, frankly. Two hours of hellfire and damnation speeches interspersed with over-loud rock-beat music and people speaking some kind of jibberish sold as 'the language of the angels.' Just doesn't appeal to me, especially since they generally completely mangle the facts.

"But it's Christmas," she protests.

Exactly. One of the most fact-deprived holidays of the christian calendar.

"It's Jesus' birthday. You must go to church," she protests.

Ah, just the opening I was hoping for. I love it when people step in the middle of their own ignorance. She's holding her modern mistranslation of previously mistranslated versions of The Book. I ask if I may see it.

I flip to Matthew. Ah, here it is...the shepherds were tending their flocks in the firlds when angels appeared in the heavens. I avoid the temptation to go into the validity of UFO sightings in biblical times and stick with the facts.

So, Jesus was born on December 25th, right?

"Yes, of course," she confidently replies.

I open Google and search for average weather patterns in Israel, a country which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Just as I suspected. December is the coldest, wettest and windiest month of the year. What damn fool shepherd would be tending his flocks in the fields in the dead of winter? But just to be sure, I look up current weather conditions in Bethlehem, a city which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Hmmm...10C, which is what? 50F, with a chance for rain. Sounds like perfect camp-in-the-field-with-sheep conditions to me.

"Things were different back then," she protests.

Oh, so global warming has made the region colder in the last 2,000 years? A familiar argument. Al Gore's been using it also. I understand. It's difficult when facts get in the way of a good story. So I click over to Roman fastivals, since Rome was around 2,000 years ago.

Would ya look at that...December 25th is the Roman fastival of the Birth of the Invincible Sun God. Gee, do you think there's a connection? After all, every modern christian faction is a break-away from the ROMAN church, which is a vestige of the ROMAN empire, which celebrates its rituals in basilicas, which originally were ROMAN indoor markets.

I'm just sayin'.

She has that blank look on her face that tells me that, like most christians, she has already turned off and tuned out. Most people don't want to hear facts that get in the way of fun fairy tales. But, I'm on a roll here.

So I launch into how Buddha and Mohammad were actual historical figures, whose lives are independently documented. Even Hinduism has evidence that their panteon may be based on actual, historical people and events millions of years ago, though the jury is still out. Christianity, however, requires one to take on faith that there was someone named Yeshua, who was a carpenter by trade, and who, at the age of 30, changed the world, leaving not a single historical trace of his existance.

However, there are remarkable similarieties between his story and a much older one, the story of Osiris, Isis and Horus. It's all there: virgin births through miraculous means, death and resurrections (using trees and 3 days, no less), betrayers (Seth), physical ascentions into heaven, all of it. There's even the strange way that Egypt keeps popping up in the whole Gospel storyline, not to mention numbers like 3, 13, 33 and so on.

It's still early and I haven't had enough coffe yet, so I avoid getting into the whole discussion on the etimological similarities between the names Osiris and Jesus, or the wine and bread rituals used by Egyptians and christians alike.

I really didn't want to get into Amun Ra, the highest of all Egyptian gods, the father Sun, whose name is used by many major religions when imploring the deity for favors. "Amen," "amin," "ohm," nearly everyone says, after they pray fro victory or wealth or another man's stuff. Nor did I want to get into the whole symbolism of the single eye of Amn Ra, or the All-Seeing Eye, or even the Indonesian word for "sun," matahari, which literally means 'eye of the day.'

She was still blankly staring at me, waiting for my response. Facts had completely unphased her. It's always the same argument. You have to make a leap of faith. You have to clear your mind and accept Jesus into your heart. And really, that's the problem. I can't turn off my rational mind and just swallow fairy tales as truth, especially when someone wants my hard-earned money to tell me that I'm a sinner for not following blindly in just the right way.

Nor can I accept religion. To me, it's just pro sports writ large. This team against that team. these players are stronger than those players. Killing millions to prove that this fairy tale is 'mo betta' than that one.

I can't believe that three gods are really just one. I can't believe that peace comes through war. I can't believe that love is proved by hate. I can't believe that law is established through chaos. My mind refuses to accept that black is white. I even have a hard time suspending disbelief at the movies. All I see up there is special effects, actors, lighting, camera angles, propaganda.

A control system is a control system, no matter how benign it purports to be. I do not follow. i do not lead, for that matter. I just present facts, research and think. Then I act on what I find.

I sure as hell don't want to be berated, sung to and babbled at for two hours, then asked to pay for the priviledge.

She was still waiting for my answer, as if my 38 minute diatribe had simply not occured.

OK, if it makes you happy, I'll go with you.

"Good, go take a bath," she ordered.

Now them's fightin' words.