Proof of Human Evolution

It has occurred to me that the proof for human evolution is right in front of our eyes.  


One of my favorite places to think is in the sauna at my gym.  The endorphins from the exercise have saturated my brain so I’m naturally high, and the heat makes me quickly relax as the sweat pours out of me.  It is at this transition between a hard, intensive workout and deep relaxation that wonderful insights will often present themselves.    

This gym has its amenities that include not only the sauna, but a pool, Jacuzzi and steam bath as well so it is quite popular with a very diverse group of people.  It also happens to be located very close to San Francisco one of the most diverse places on the planet.  Young, old, fat, thin, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Persian, Spanish speakers, French speakers, there is no limit on the diversity found there.  It is a veritable Galapagos of human specimen contained on three levels and 55,000 square feet.  

Now in order for living and irrefutable proof of human evolution one must simply do the following.

Go into the men’s locker room at my gym and open your eyes.

Boom!  There before you, is living walking proof of evolution while it dries itself off, applies deodorant, takes a dump and combs its hair.  

Not to be rude and trying to be as genteel as I can, the best evidence lies in the last noun of the previous sentence.  Hair.  

When you enter a locker room with an incredibly diverse array of men you will see hair, and a lot of it.  Hair will be in places it shouldn’t be, like on the tops of feet.  There will often be more hair running down the back than on the tops of heads!  Sometimes the hair is so plentiful on the torso it is as though they might be wearing a very poorly knitted sweater! 


The image of man we most commonly see before us in a gym locker room (or any changing area for that matter) could not be farther from the more classical male portrayal best represented Michelangelo’s David.  If one had never seen the nude male form before, was first shown a picture of David, then an image of one of the hairier specimens from my gym’s locker room, they could easily be forgiven for not believing the two examples are representations of the same species.  

The battlefield for this debate on evolution lies in the classroom.  There are monumentous debates among the states as to how the history and scientific books should be worded in regards to evolution vs other ‘theories.’  But just as Darwin emerged from his study and traveled afar for proof of his idea, our young people too engage in ‘field trips’ to further solidify and provide actual proof of what they have learned.  

As my gym locker room is a paradise of living, breathing scientific proof, yet undiscovered by the academic community I propose we arrange ‘field trips’ for the most mature of our young scholars.  What they will see is indeed shocking, but true science isn’t for the faint of heart!  Just march those wide eyed students right on through the middle from the door to the shower and back out again.  Let them pause to scribble down a few notes, snap a couple of pictures and gather undeniable evidence for consumption by the outside world.  Let the realization that we are indeed descended from the apes sink in right before their own eyes in all its musty, odoriferous and fuzzy glory!

 tourbusA revolution is at hand my friends.  It should have occurred a century ago at the Galapagos islands but nobody lives near the Galapagos islands so how could we be absolutely sure this wasn’t some anti-religious plot to confuse the faithful?  Well friends, my gym is in Daly City near San Francisco.  And San Francisco is a place everyone wants to visit if they haven’t already.  Perhaps in addition to field trips we could also make my gym’s locker room a stop on the big bus open top tour line!  Surely then everyone would then see for themselves and the case for evolution will disseminate far and wide as they return to their home countries!   

 Science is so exciting especially when new discoveries are made that completely overturn long held beliefs!  

A revolution indeed!  

Dream as Reality, Reality as a Dream



I have had the good fortune to travel the world, learn languages and delve deeply into the mindsets of other cultures.  These fortunes enabled me to escape from the fishbowl of a small environment and see the enclosure from the outside, as well as compare it to all the other enclosures I have been recently exploring through language study and travel.  Through these studies I found such a sense of freedom and excitement that I have never been able to stop or quell my desire for more information, more learning.  I found freedom from established traditions, mindsets, beliefs and biases.  I found great excitement for the unknown, the new, the exotic, the blasphemous, the feared and the heretical.

Recently however, time, money and obligations have limited my actual travel but in its place have come books, magazines and a need to devour more knowledge.  A great discovery I’ve recently made is Lapham’s Quarterly.  This publication pulls the golden nuggets out of history and complies them in a neat publication according to a central theme.  I have decided to pay much less attention to the daily noise of the news, the gossips and the outright stupid splashed along the T.V. screens.  Instead I have turned my focus to books, mostly historical nonfiction, and anything similar to Lapham’s Quarterly that really adds to my knowledge and gives me a greater understanding of this world I currently occupy.

Through these studies, travels and continual quest for more knowledge and in order to simply make sense of my surroundings, I’ve come to the conclusion that this world I live in is absurd.  Now that I’ve given my introduction let me put down some examples from the silly to that which has changed the course of the world.  

1.  High Heels

-   Once cannot venture outside without seeing multitudes of women wearing the most ridiculous form of footwear that while being extremely uncomfortable, also causes grotesque foot problems such as bunions.  The high heel was designed in 17th century Persia as a riding shoe so that the rider could stand up in the stirrups and maintain balance while shooting his arrows.  

After I learned this I can no longer look at women in high heels the same way.  I do not find them as an attractive addition but rather as an absurdity akin to one wearing over sized clown shoes.  

2. The suit and tie

We men did not escape this evolutionary comedy of the fashion trend either.  The origin of the tie is that it was essentially a bib worn to protect the shirt from stains.  The bib has just gotten smaller.  The suit on the other hand came out of military uniform fashion.  The military is regimented, disciplined and serious.  The businessman being formal in all his dealings must give an air of seriousness and formality and thus what a better fit than the military uniform without the military trappings?  So here we are, men running to our office to sit in our cubicles typing away in a modified military uniform and small bib.  

Once you know the origins of why things are the way they are life becomes completely bizarre.  

3. Wars 

I have recently been reading books on WWI and II as well as checking the facts on many historical wars through Wikipedia.  The conclusion I’ve come to is that war is absurd.  What is even more absurd is how quickly a leader can convince the people about the “just” reasons for the war.  

World War I is the most raw example of this.  In brief, a rather significant regional assassination happens and then due to country alliances we end up with millions dead.  It is as if monkeys wrote the framework of this play and gorillas carried it out.  We do not retain the right to consider ourselves separate from the animals.  The absurdity of the reasoning behind the war combined with the very real consequences are simply incomprehensible.  

As for the absurdity of reasoning for war, this has happened very recently in my country.  The slogan is “defending freedom.”  Now whenever war or soldiers are mentioned this is what a good portion of the population mindlessly blurts out.  Need to start a war?  Just have the leaders say we are “defending freedom.”  This slogan has had some wear and tear but still has at least another decade of durability before it is worn out. 

My conclusion is that humanity is still very primitive and that this period in our evolution will be looked upon millennia from now as just branching off from the animals.   For any reason, any reason what so ever millions and millions can still be convinced that extinguishing the life of another is the appropriate solution for whatever ideology, belief or passing issue of the day holds sway.  

It is as though we are not fully conscious.  For if we were fully conscious then the fibers of creation should tear apart while everyone screams in writhing agony for the atrocity, the unnatural, the unthinkable that has occurred.  

4.  Religion – Christianity

I hold no qualms with the overall spirituality and trying to connect ourselves with that which is unknown yet pervades everything including our own existence.  I also am inclined to give a bit of a pass to those that need religion, a set framework to tell them exactly what to do since the majority of adults are unable to discover a spiritual side on their own.  Most adults no longer advance mentally/intellectually and thus how could anyone expect them to make progress with that which cannot be seen, experienced directly or understood?  

To get straight to the point here, after all my travels, experiences, studies, meditations, reflections and so on, I can definitively say that Jesus was just a man.  I have extricated myself thoroughly from the fairy tale, the bedtime story that we use to sooth our fears about that which we do not know but which we pretend to hold every answer (unless it is a mystery of course *inside joke for those raised Catholic*).  

To stand up against 2000 years of history which has reshaped the world, billions of believers and an institution which has outlasted governments and call it nonsense is frightfully empowering as well as bewildering.  This belief, that a simple peasant is the son of the unknown which in our feeble minds we call God.  This God, the soothing blanket which keeps us warm and secure against that unknown void, that veil behind which nobody has seen yet everyone must go is a creation of our own imagination.  It is my opinion that we cannot even conceive of the true nature of the Great Spirit, الرحمن,  יהו   or whatever we have decided to call the unknown.  

I have been connecting the dots for some time now and the tapestry is complete.  Now, explaining exactly how I’ve arrived at this point would fill up a book which one day I may write but one can find clues in my previous posts from the past.  But let us just say that a good many things in the Bible have turned out to be fabrications, metaphors, or just plain wrong.  The world was not created in 7 days, humanity didn’t start with Adam and Eve, Jesus had brothers and was married and many of the miraculous acts happened in other cults/pagan beliefs long before Jesus.

If Christianity were a corporation it would have gone out of business a long time ago.  Anyone who puts their money and belief in a corporation that has been so wrong so often throughout history would be an investment opportunity for the slow witted.  

So why do so many people believe?  The reasons are as varied as the stars but I would say the main reasons are tradition, security and the need to believe there is something more than the disappointment that is often found here in this existence.  

The ship guiding my belief out of Christianity set sail a very long time ago and has visited many ports.  I recently read a book which seems to me as my final bill of lading summing up what I already knew and putting it in a well researched, organized intellectual format.  That book is called “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan.  

Jesus was just a man and I feel as though I’m in a dream when I see so many clinging to this fabricated story even though we have more universities and more learning than at any other time in the history of the world.  

The old religions die hard.  

5. Reality

Most people at this point will either have stopped reading or want to know what my own opinion on creation/reality may be.  People are so eager to know the opinions of those they disagree with not so they may consider the idea but rather to have the opportunity to defend their beliefs.  One cannot readily do this until they know the beliefs of the other.  

In any case, here is my belief.  

I have no idea where I am, what I am or where this environment came from.  All I know is that I have thoughts.  These thoughts come and go and I do my best to control them.  

This “I don’t know” is a very thought out, deep, reflected upon statement.  It is just as probable to me that we are in a computer program designed by a highly advanced civilization as it is that this universe is some advanced biology student’s creation and we sit upon a shelf in a small jar surrounded by millions of other universes in small jars.  The reader of this post may scoff but I have not said that I know we are in a small jar, I’ve said the opposite with a very clear “I don’t know.”  The jar example is one possibility out of infinite possibilities the majority of which I believe I cannot even comprehend.  

The book that really got me thinking about this was “Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story ” by Jim Holt.  He interviewed the brightest minds as well as researched the major philosophers in trying to discover the answer.  Obviously the book never comes to the supreme truth and Jim’s own opinion is hidden in an unrelated paragraph in just one sentence in the middle of the book that most people might miss.  

I enjoyed reading all of the theories but one of my major takeaways was the realization that I cannot comprehend these theories the way the men who created them can.  Any one of them would take me years of study and even then I know I do not have the raw intellectual fire power to get there.  

So all I can do is continue to explore and be completely fascinated as well as a little terrified at not having the answer.  All I know are what my senses, studies and inquiries have gathered.  Here we are, talking monkeys on a biological rock flying through space where only a fraction of us are trying to figure out what is going on while a good majority are quite certain they know the secrets of the universe, the divine and everything in between already.  

This dream began with my birth and will end with my death.  The longer the dream persists the more bizarre it becomes.  The best I can do is to be nice to my fellow dreamers, help those having a nightmare and try as hard as I can to fly.   


Christianity and its non-Christian Origins


Written by:  Yonatan Zunger – from Google +

Since I’ve heard that there’s some kind of religious festival going on this weekend, I thought it might be an interesting time to write something about the history of how Christianity came to have such a blend of non-Christian origins in it. There’s actually a very interesting history to this: in essence, it isn’t so much that Christianity absorbed external elements, as that through the tumult of the first six centuries CE, a bunch of European religions mixed and combined, and the Christianity we know today was the result of that — it got its name on the label, so to speak.

To realize how big the difference between what came out and what came in is, just pick up the Christian Bible and read through the discussions between Jesus and the Apostles. This was, originally, a Jewish reform movement, responding to the particular skews and corruptions that had shown up in the (Pharisaic) leadership, concerned with economic reform, (e.g. Luke 12) a hard shift away from ritual towards personal piety, (e.g. Matthew 15) and a serious mystical trend. (Largely cut out of the “canonical” texts, but very present in the Egyptian texts) The first radical change came with Paul, who was interested in converting outsiders — something that the earlier “followers of the Way,” as they called themselves, had very little interest in. But if you compare even Paul’s early churches with (say) medieval Christianity, or even most modern branches, you’ll see very little in common. How did this happen?

Let me start by setting up a few bits of history. We’re in the Classical Roman Empire, say around the year 100 CE. Rome is expanding everywhere; there’s a well-practiced routine when a new barbarian tribe is encountered. The Romans make offerings to the gods of that tribe, saying that they will build them a temple in Rome if they let this tribe be joined to the empire; then they go to war, win, and start to fold yet another tribe into the center. The erection of that temple isn’t something accidental: it’s part of what’s called the “Pax Deorum,” the peace of the gods, and what it really is is a public statement that these new people are being folded in to the society. These conquered barbarians aren’t at quite the same level as true Roman citizens, but they’re part of the Empire now, and light-years above those barbarians outside the gates. The physical mechanisms of the Empire are backed by a deep civic notion of “Romanitas;” to be a Roman is to be part of this great thing, to have a particular relationship to the outside world: we will conquer you and you will join us. And to be part of Romanitas is to have the weight of the Empire behind you.

And then it stopped working. Hadrian makes it halfway up Britain and builds a wall; and the Romans start to realize that they’re at the logistical endpoint of where they can conquer. A climate cycle drops food production down and leads to widespread famine and disease across Europe. Worse climate cycles to the east start to push nomadic tribes further out in search of resources, and they start to hit an already-weakening Empire. Without the constant influx of resources from conquered tribes, the underlying lack of planning in the Roman economy (and system of succession) starts to show; and from about 180 to 280, the Empire essentially collapses into an infinite sequence of famines, plagues, civil wars, and barbarian incursions. The last of these wars, the War of the Seven Emperors, is ended in 287 when Diocletian personally executes his last rival, and sets up a new regime. 

Diocletian’s empire was very different from Caesar’s in a lot of interesting ways, but the one I want to talk about today is that notion of “Romanitas.” Once, to be a Roman meant that you were ready to conquer everyone that you met; but the later Roman Empire was in no state to do such a thing. The central question of civic identity — of what it even meant to be a part of this empire — didn’t have a good answer, and with it, the whole question of what held the Empire together at all was up in the air as well.

Now switch over and look at the religion of the time. If we rewind back to the year 100, the Latin word religio had a very different meaning from what we think of today: it was the set of public rituals that the society participated in. These were tremendously important in a lot of ways. First of all, they were a key economic glue. Roman society didn’t have a notion of “taxation” in the modern sense; but instead, leading citizens were expected to regularly have sacrifices to the Gods to honor their good fortune in various things. At a sacrifice, animals would be killed, their first fruits given to the Gods with various prayers, and what followed is what we would today call a “big damned barbecue.” A Roman could expect to go to a sacrifice every week or so on the average, and this was the primary access that most Romans had to meat. (So when I say “key economic glue” I mean “a major part of how the society got access to food.”) Second, they were the way in which people defined their civic nature. Today, we define our nationality in terms of things we learn in school, what we read in the papers and discuss in the media — all things which didn’t exist in Rome. The expression of nationality was the common rituals that people went to. (And this, incidentally, is why the cult of the Emperor was so important: by sacrificing to the Emperor, you were indicating your loyalty to the Emperor and the Empire) Public actions were the main way that people communicated their thoughts.

One thing you may notice is missing from that list is anything which resembles our modern notion of “faith.” This wasn’t an unfamiliar concept, but it wasn’t considered to be part of “religio.” People had household gods with which they had a personal relationship, and actual priests had relationships with their gods, but nobody was generally expected to have a deep and abiding religious faith in each god that showed up through the gate. But the urge for deeper religious experiences was certainly there, and ever since the time of Alexander the Great (around 300BCE) one of the main ways this manifested was in “mystery cults.”

Mystery cults were the religious secret societies of the ancient world. You could join some of them by simply walking in the door, and for others you had to know someone, but what they all had in common was that you would be initiated, participate in secret rituals, gradually learn more and more of the secrets of this god. These cults often taught a combination of mysticism, philosophy, and theology; they offered a chance to see into the world beyond; and they offered a close confraternity among the members. And they were quite separate from “religio” proper, bearing it about the same relationship that gentlemen’s clubs in Victorian England bore to Parliament. 

There were a few categories of mystery cult which were becoming particularly popular in the first few centuries CE. The first was the cult of Magna Mater, which was basically the worship of Isis gradually transmuted into a pan-European religion. Consider that ancient Egyptian religion was already extremely, incomprehensibly ancient: the pyramids are a great work of the late Stone Age, as much older than the Romans as the Trojan War is older than us. The knowledge of hieroglyphs had already passed out of the world, but the infinite number of mummies and inscriptions and magical practices were still very much there. Add on to this that, even thousands of years earlier, Egyptian religion had highly favored spectacular, awe-inspiring temples where people went for rituals, healing, miracles, surrounded by fire, strange smokes, talking statues — and that this tradition was still very much alive — and you have a great factory of religious beliefs which were immensely popular in the Roman world.

Second was Mithraism, a religion that we still understand relatively little. Mithras was a warrior-god, of Persian origin; he has many similarities to similar warrior-gods spread across the Near East, not least the version of Yahweh worshipped in the western Levant which later became a core part of Judaism. In Rome, his worship became very popular among the army, starting with soldiers who had served in the east. The rituals were very secret, part of the brotherhood of joining the Roman Legions; underground caverns, secret dances, sacrifices, rituals that we know very little about today because they were actually fairly good at keeping their secrets, and quite deliberately didn’t write many things down. 

The third was ascetic monasticism, something which never really caught on in Europe but which was a huge deal in Egypt for hundreds of years. There was a tradition of hermits retreating off into the desert to pray, fast, and generally mortify themselves, and these hermits were considered to be avatars of purity itself, holy, powerful, capable of great magics, and mad as a bag of clams. (As a side note, The Book of the Fathers, a book on how to be a good monk written in fragments from the 4th through 10th centuries, has lots of examples of the stories of early monks, who were basically Christian Egyptian ascetics. Something like two thirds of these stories end with either “and then he/she starved to death” or “and then he/she died in a sandstorm.” These guys werehard-core.

And Christianity — Paul’s Christianity, the kind that wanted to spread — joined in to this mix. This early Pauline Christianity worshipped in secret, because it was defiantly anti-religio; this was honestly a holdover from its Jewish roots, with the Jews being rather famous for their (often violent) unwillingness to sacrifice to other gods. But it had many other familiar features: secret meetings in (literally) underground churches, intense personal faith, mystical healing, close confraternity between the followers. Unlike many of the other mystery cults, it was built fairly strongly around concepts of morality — another holdover both from its Jewish antecedents and from Jesus’ own focus on reforming Judaism towards personal religiosity. 

These religious traditions competed with each other pretty openly. If you read Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (arguably the first novel), you’ll see all these conflicts show up in people’s daily lives. Laws were passed banning Christians from serving in the army — it would destroy unit cohesion, you see, and the men might feel uncomfortable. (Le plus que ça change…) And they also combined: Christianity became popular in Egypt, and people combined it with both Egyptian asceticism (to form the seeds of monasticism) and Manichaeanism, another Persian import from which Christianity got its notions of the duality of God and the Devil. The healing magics of Magna Mater stayed popular across the board, and Christians found themselves doing basically the same things. 

(There’s a whole history here, too, of how these religions related to the earlier Roman political order.)

And around the year 300, these religious and political trends started to come together. The political order of the old religio made less and less sense: giant, formal, public rituals to the gods of old Rome didn’t pull people together the way they once did. But the underlying needs behind them, both civic and economic, were still there. By the time of the civil war that followed Diocletian’s retirement (a very interesting story in its own right), Mithraism was in a bit of a downturn, apparently not providing quite enough mysticism relative to simple brotherhood; Christianity had folded most of the magical elements of Magna Mater into itself, and had done a better job of conversion through its strategy of focusing on women, and soldiers, many of whose mothers had been converts, started to use it as their secret brotherhood ritual. Against this background, Constantine (one of the warring emperors) made it the quasi-official religion of his army, and soon after won control of the Empire. 

What happened here was that a religious trend of secret societies, previously illegal in many situations, which thus tended to forge close relationships among the practitioners, suddenly became an official Thing which people realized they could further their careers by converting to. Many is the Roman nobleman of this period who went to bed one night, a contented pagan, and woke up the next morning a bishop, and a few hundred thousand solidi poorer. (That was the going rate for a bishopric) But this new religious system had communal identity baked so deeply into it, and held people together well enough (after all, that’s one of the big things Constantine used it for!) that it started to become a substitute for this now-missing identity.

Several things happened over the next hundred years which reinforced this, but perhaps the most dramatic was the sack of Rome in 410. It’s hard to express how world-shaking this was: imagine if, on 9/11, rather than destroying the Twin Towers in New York, the Taliban had simply marched in to New York City andsacked it, and the government was powerless to do anything about it. That’s roughly what happened then. And yet: the Goths who sacked Rome left the churches untouched — they, too, were Christians. Augustine used this as the jumping-off point for his book, The City of God, which crystallized the ideas that had been building up over the years: Christianity united its believers in a sort of world-spanning empire. This notion of Christianity as a social identity, rather than as a religious faith, became the cornerstone of European society for the next thousand years.

This answered the question of “how do we deal with those barbarians?:” If they were Christians, then you could use this common language of Christianity to establish relations with them. If they weren’t, you could convert them or kill them — or point your own friendly barbarians their way. It also provided a new social glue for the society, so long as everyone came over and converted.

And what you might notice is missing, again, from this picture is the modern notion of “faith.” It was important that everyone be a Christian because that was part of being part of the Empire, but the details weren’t quite as important. So the common variety of “conversion” in the Late Antique Empire went something like this:

A priest shows up in a village. The village is generally having some kind of major problem or another, whether it be a failed local irrigation system, or a famine, or a plague. The priest calls people together in the name of his god, and fixes the problem: either by prayer, or by getting people together to fix the well, or by pulling in external resources. (Most of the time, incidentally, the priest didn’t successfully fix the problem, in which case he simply would move on to the next village and try again) On success, the village praises God and converts. They have to give up “pagan rituals” — i.e., they have to adopt the forms of Christianreligio rather than whatever they did locally. But the underlying importance of the sacrifices (economic, civic, etc) was still there, so what was important was to do them in a Christian way. Do them in a church, not a cemetery. Praise a saint rather than a god, and so forth.

And then the priest would move on to the next town, racking this up as yet another successful conversion. But nobody was left behind in this town who actually had a particularly deep understanding of Christian doctrine; and in fact, owing to how bad travel was in the Empire at this point, it was often 100 yearsuntil the next priest would reach a particular village! So Europe “Christianized” by adopting a shared set of practices and religious language, but not a shared religious faith in the modern sense of the word. 

The results of this weren’t fully appreciated until nearly a thousand years later, during the Counter-Reformation: in response to the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church started to try to root out “heresy” in its own world, and discovered (much to its shock) that the average Christian had absolutely no ideawhat the religion was supposed to mean. (A truly fascinating account of this can be found in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, which studies the record of the heresy trial of some random schmuck who was grabbed by the Inquisition. The title comes from his attempt to explain just how the world was created.) 

So when we talk about a “Christian syncretism,” what was happening wasn’t that Christianity deliberately or accidentally took on bits of other religions. Rather, most of the conversion of Europe — and very similarly, most of the conversion of other parts of the world later on — happened very quickly, with groups of people agreeing to take on the structural forms of Christianity, praying to saints in churches and so on, but with very little emphasis on constructing a shared “faith” in the modern sense.

In fact, this modern notion of faith came largely out of the Protestant reformation. The Protestants started out with a notion that people should have a direct, personal familiarity with scriptures and a much more personal relationship with God: ideas which hadn’t really entered much into the Christianity of the preceding millenium. The Catholics, in response, tried to “purify” their own faith and make sure that everyone was on the same page, using much the same techniques which they had developed for ensuring that there were no secretly practising Muslims or Jews in Spain after the Reconquista. (Yes, I know. You were expecting that the Spanish Inquisition would show up in here at some point.) Several centuries of spectacular bloodshed later, it was a commonly accepted idea in all branches of Christianity that Christianity was, first and foremost, about individual faith, and a common understanding of doctrine was what bound Christians together. But this hadn’t actually been a feature of Christianity ever since the days of Paul, and the Christianity of the 19th century is a very different beast from that in too many ways to count. It was a new thing.

So today, when people tell you about how Christianity has “borrowed” ideas from non-Christian religions, or that this or that holiday is actually a pagan festival in disguise, your surprise isn’t coming from the fact that Christianity ever was really a common religious language rather than a unified faith: it’s coming from the fact that, over the past few hundred years, Christianity has deeply rewritten its creed, and largely forgotten its own history. These things aren’t alien to Christianity at all: they’re the deepest part of its origins.

For more information, some places to start:

The best sources of all on this subject are books. Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints or The Rise of Western Christendom give an excellent snapshot of the Late Antique transition and can get you started looking for other things. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms is a great way to see what ground-level faith in the sixteenth century looked like.

The Truth about Thanksgiving

Truth about Thanksgiving






Book: The Hidden History of Massachusetts
Author: Tingba Apidta

The Real Thanksgiving




What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621?




The Pilgrims of Plymouth, The Original Scalpers




Who Were the “Savages”?













Puritan Holocaust














Past Meets the Present – Infinite City


































The means to attain a happy life


MARTIAL, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:—
The richesse left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule, nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

From Wikipedia


Question Everything: Jews, Circumcision and Netflix


























Goodnight – Laila Tov





Native American Spirits


I recently went on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona.  I had never been in the state and the desert environment was entirely new to me.  We were shuttled to a place called Scottsdale and we stayed in a luxury hotel.  

Now I had heard of this place called Scottsdale before.  Many older rich people had raved about it and a lot of young people I knew bragged about living there.  As I walked through the hotel, I payed particular attention to the other guests and what they were like.  It seemed to me as though many of the women were auditioning for a place in the show Desperate Housewives.  This idea came to me so strongly that I actually mentioned it to a few I had met at the bar and they had a very good laugh.  Not only that, but they told me I was right on the mark.  There was so much wealth there that a sort of competition had emerged and the inhabitants really did portray the characteristics one would find on the show.  

If you haven’t seen the show “Desperate Housewives” it is basically a caricature of the white upper class living in privileged suburbia who have nothing better to do but create drama.  This is exactly what I found in Scottsdale.  

But this is not what was impressed upon me most strongly.  At the luxury hotel all of the art were of Native Americans.  

Now, if you read my posts with any frequency you can probably guess where I am going to go with this.  I pride myself on understanding the mentality of others and try to put myself into their lives and see the world through their eyes.  To me, this is what a Global Citizen should be about.  The constant effort to understand and see the world exactly as others would.  This is an exercise I practice almost daily and in doing so, discover that we simply do not understand each other.  

We go about our lives only seeing the world from our own very limited point of view.  We believe we can judge right and wrong based on our own very incomplete understanding and miniscule point of view.  

Now I know very little about Native Americans except from what I have read and the songs I have listened to.  My favorite descriptions of the Native Americans come not from Western historians but instead from George Catlin who, in my opinion, understood them as much as any white man could.  He traveled into their lands and painted their portraits while the Natives still inhabited a large amount of the USA.  I would highly encourage taking a look at his website.  What he did was create a record of a people who did not write, in a time where their world was collapsing.  

I tried very hard to get into the mindset about how a Native American would feel about all this art.  In order to do so, I awoke before dawn and took a walk in the Cactus Garden that was laid out beside the hotel.  From this place I could study the landscape which included an enormous desert mountain and very distant terrain.  

In this peace and quiet I reflected on how a Native American might feel about all the sculptures representing his people that were placed in the garden.  Perhaps it was the silence of the desert, or the quiet solitude one feels while walking in the desert at night but an incredible feeling of sadness came over me.  

These sculptures represented the lives of people long ago wiped out by the very people now attempting to honor them with a piece of art.  As I looked at the sculptures I saw these people being murdered by white men on horseback, children screaming and women being shot in the back as they fled.  

I expected tears to start flowing from the sculpture depicted above as I imagined all of these things.  It was almost as if the spirits of these long deceased spirits were calling out to me in the silence of the desert night.  I could feel their presence, their energy and in my mind I responded, yes, I know what happened to you, you are not forgotten.

I found it unsettling that this luxurious hotel had been built upon land which was stained with Native American blood.  The guests swimming in the pools, drinking, eating find food and not giving one thought to the suffering that had occurred a century or two ago.  These are the people that would look upon the sculptures and only think about how nice it would look in their mansions.  

I soon came upon another sculpture with this inscription.

“From where the sun now standsI will fight no more forever.” 

I did not know this quote and so promptly looked it up and found that it came from Chief Joseph.  As I read, two ideas quickly came rushing into my mind, perhaps with the aid of the spirits that were whispering to me.  

The first is that this Chief had taken a Christian name.  The influence of the white man had already penetrated the tribe but this was not enough to appease them.  They required more.  They wanted the Indian lands but, with no Indians on them.  Even though the tribe had excepted the white man’s religion he wanted more and what he wanted was to have them disappear.  

You can try to appease the devil but in doing so will only add to his desire for more.  This desire will not abate until the giver is completely destroyed. 

The second thing that occurred to me after reading the description was that Chief Joseph was not from Arizona.  He lived in Oregon and the US army wanted his people relocated to Idaho.  Thus, the “white man” who erected this sculpture did not even bother to try and honor a local Chief but must have thought that any Native would do.  

And to add insult to injury, according to Wikipedia the quote was made up by an Army lieutenant.  

“The popular legend deflated, however, when the original pencil draft of the report was revealed to show the handwriting of the later poet and lawyer Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who claimed to have taken down the great chief’s words on the spot. In the margin it read, “Here insert Joseph’s reply to the demand for surrender”

As if this was not enough insult I came upon one other sculpture that left me in complete despair in regards to our understanding and sympathy for each other.  


This one is called “The Future” by Alan Houser.   What I find in this piece is irony smacking me right in the face.  There is no future for Native Americans.  They were decimated and what remains are in the squalor of reservations except for those lucky tribes that have been awarded casinos.  And what do they do with these casinos?  Well, what one would expect of humans in our current state of development,,,,  horde all the profits for themselves while their brothers and sisters languish on the reservations.  

I was thrown a twist when I looked up who Alan Houser actually was.  It appears he is an Apache Indian.  Now, perhaps I simply do not understand his aims or purpose and I sincerely hope my conclusions are the result of misunderstandings.  

Yet, I cannot help but feel the ire, the disdain of the Native spirits seeing their image being sold to the wealthy ancestors of the conquerors who most likely have no real understanding of what has occurred.  

Perhaps I feel too deeply.  Maybe I understand history too clearly.  I could have traveled too much.  Yet, I simply cannot understand how people can so quickly forget the past.  An entire civilization erased and even when presented with the images of the long deceased they only think of how great a piece of art would look in their foyer.  

The spirits remain in that desert and they have not forgotten.  

The Rape of Nanking – Thoughts



- Babies torn out of their mothers and killed
- Daily rape and thrusting of bamboo poles into them






















This book has put me in a very foul mood.

Japanese Internment, Asians, Integration and Muslim Congressional Hearings

Selecting my usual nightly Netflix documentary I came across this documentary and I couldn’t help but draw a few parallels even though they are currently not as severe.

This is a documentary about the Japanese/American internment during WWII.  It is a dark period of US history that most people are not very familiar with.  In case you need a quick refresher, here is the Wikipedia link.

Japanese-American Internment

Now, I know my history but this story really came alive to me after moving to San Francisco.  As you may know there is a “Japan Town” here but, as I have learned, it never fully recovered after all of the inhabitants were forced to leave during the war.

My education began soon upon my arrival in San Francisco as I had the good fortune to quickly find a job with a very large Japanese corporation.  We participated in all the Japanese events of the city with none being more important than the Cherry Blossom festival.  This takes place right in the middle of Japan Town and is where my interest was first peaked.

I noticed that many of the shops were Korean and that there were very few young Japanese people who actually lived there.  When I asked why, I got a very quick history lesson.

You see, Japan Town up to WWII was full of Japanese but they were all forced to leave and live in internment camps.  They had to leave everything behind.  There was a great fear that they were aiding the enemy “Japan” and so were not trusted.  Yet, over time it was realized that these were Americans and the majority had no affiliation with Japan the country.  So, when the war ended they were shipped to other places where jobs were more readily available and thus dispersed throughout the United States.

Then, in 1998 President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology which was a very long time in coming.  It was not right what was done to the Japanese and with the apology never to be repeated.

*Side note:  I met the mother (Issei – First Generation Japanese) of one of my colleagues and she was sent to an internment camp.  She told me what happened and all I could do was listen. I had no response.

*Side Note 2:  A popular place to visit when in Munich is Dachau.  I’ve visited there as you can see in the picture and I tell you it is a very depressing place.

Everyone is familiar with Dachau due to the movies and famous WWII tales.  But how many people are familiar with the following?




This is a Japanese internment camp that used to be located right in San Bruno about 15 minutes from San Francisco.  It has now been replaced by a shrine to capitalism more commonly known as a shopping mall.

It has since been torn down and replaced by this plaque in a small little garden that nobody notices.

Now, granted, the US internment camps were nothing like the Nazi variety but if you want to argue the awfulness of internment camps I suggest you apply to Fox News.

Now, going back to the Cherry Blossom festival held in Japan Town, I have some inside information as to how they choose the ladies for the Cherry Blossom beauty pageant.  There are not enough full blood young Japanese ladies to form a full court.  A court is comprised of about 10 ladies so really not many at all.  Then, they lowered it to half Japanese, and then a quarter because they still could not find enough.

So what happened to all the Japanese?  Well, they simply became American and melted into society (albeit under terrible circumstances).  However, we cannot simply blame it all on a sort of forced integration as the same is happening to the Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese and every other race here in the Bay Area.  Over time, they simply become Americans whether their parents approve or not.

You might be surprised to know that it is not Asians simply melting into a white majority.  It is the white people melting into an Asian majority.

But currently, it is not Asians or Japanese (inside subtle joke there) that are having a hard time in the USA.  It is the Muslims.

It was once said in the fashion world that “Red is the new black.”  Well, Muslims are the new Japanese, the new Poles, the new Italians, the new Africans, the new whoever had a hard time in this country.


But true to form we have the new idiot demagogues such as Glenn Beck and Limbaugh who feast on fear, bigotry and hate.

While I was watching this movie, a Nissei (second generation Japanese) said that the US government believed the Japanese Americans were working with the enemy,,, Japan.

This recalled to mind a quote from Glenn Beck to the first US Muslim Congressman.

‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies’ – Glenn Beck

Well, as it turned out for Japanese Americans, they were not working with Japan and an official government apology was issued by a REPUBLICAN!

I cannot help but draw a parallel to current Muslim Americans and the congressional hearings.  Again, the government is targeting a group of people basically due to 9-11.  Only this time, it is not necessarily a country, not a race but an entire religion.

Sure, there are no camps and I would like to believe us enlightened enough that we would not do so again.  However, with the amount of bile and hatred spewed by Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Bachmann and the rest of their hate-fest club I really cannot be too sure that it wouldn’t happen again.

After all the process has already begun with our friends over in Europe with perhaps the most visible being Marine Le Pen.  Just a quick look at this quote should get you thinking, or if not, read the entire article below.

Ms Le Pen’s talent has been to move the far-right away from its thuggish neo-Nazi fixation to more respectable concerns about integration and what she calls “Islamisation”. – The Economist

France’s far right: Le Pen’s daughter takes over

In case you missed it, Neo-Nazi and integration were just used in the same sentence.  There you go Beck, no need to draw some far flung parallel using Nazis, it is written in black ink supporting your strain of thinking.

In school, they always tell us to learn about history because history has an uncanny ability to repeat itself.