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Triple-Filtered Crazy

[ Another long one. Sorry. ]

Sanity has a horizon.

Meaning: Everything you and I do seems sensible to us. Everything other people do seems sensible to them. But not everything you and I do seems sensible to others, and not everything others do seems sensible to you and I.

Everything you and I do seems sensible, of course, because it’s US, and we’re caught up in the subjective immediacy of our lives. We’re inside our own horizon, and everything inside it with us is visible, understandable and comfortable. We naturally find it hard to think of ourselves as wrong or villainous or insane. Everything we do, however weird it might seem to others, seems sane and reasonable to us. Even if we don’t know the reasons, we’re prone to automatically assume SOMEONE knows, and those reasons must be good ones.

On the other hand, other people, out past our own personal horizons of sanity, often do things that seem crazy.

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A Time in the Heart

Robin

Robins look … well, silly. They stand on the grassy verge with heads upraised, stock still for indefinite periods like little feathered statues, than drop down and make lightning-fast dashes to some other part of the lawn. Where they again stand still for an unpredictable while.

And despite all the press they get in songs and stories, they’re not even all that pretty. An unattractive dull gray body, ugly yellowish bill. Okay, they do have that red breast thing going for them, but it’s not even really red, is it? More of a reddish brown. And when you live in a place where brilliant scarlet cardinals regularly visit your back deck – not to mention equally colorful blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches, and several kinds of red-accented woodpeckers – robins are pretty tame fare.

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Curiosity Question

Suppose there was a way to make other people think like you?

Imagine a drug you could hand out that, with regular doses over a period of time, would cause other people to agree with you in every way. A drug that would cause them to be UNABLE, mostly, to disagree with you.

1) Would you give it to your kids?

2) Would you give it to your friends?

3) Would you give it to friends without telling them what it was but saying it would be good for them?

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Why Not Be Nice?

[ Argh. My newer version of WordPress has controls for placing an image, but they DON’T SEEM TO WORK. Until I figure them out, we’ll have to live with the non-existence of text wrap. I say again: Argh. ]

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Comment-volleying on a blog with one of those people I refer to as a “nice Christian” – the people who project kindness and understanding as their motivation, all the while ripping your metaphorical guts out (“There’s no such thing as atheism! It just doesn’t make SENSE!”) – I stepped away from the subject of the debate for a moment, for the benefit of the other rationalist commenters, and addressed the interaction itself.

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Happy 200th Birthday!

darwin2.jpg.

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Our Dear Mr. Darwin would be a very spry (I’m sure) 200 years old this Feb. 12.

The man did so much for us. Aside from the claims of the idiots on the godder side of history, people of reason don’t worship him. But we do give a boatload of credit to a guy who worked so tirelessly, throughout his life, to understand and explain this most beautiful and fruitful idea: that all living things are interrelated. Man, how cool is that?

Here’s a painting of him done by premier natural history illustrator Carl Buell.

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Lest we forget: This is also the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. And bravo for that, too!

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PS: The above image is COPYRIGHTED. If you snake it from my site, after my friend Mr. Buell was so kind as to allow me to post it, I’ll hunt you down and feed you to the invertebrates. AFTER I superglue hungry ferrets to your knees.

If you want a copy of the painting — which is fully life-sized — for your own Darwin Day celebratory use, contact Carl Buell directly at Carl [at] olduvaigeorge [dot] com.

At least one college I know of is printing out the full portrait and mounting it on a cutout backing so that students can pose with it for pictures.

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Molly Ivins Remembered

mollyivins.jpgMolly Ivins died two years ago today.

If you don’t know  who she was, go HERE to read some of her delightful quotes.

“I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.”

She was a Texan — a Texas liberal! — with a loud mouth, a wickedly cynical pen, and a sense of humor and justice and love that made her … special.

She knew, and gently despised, the idiot George W. Bush (whom she called “Shrub”), and all the people he surrounded himself with.

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The Goodness of Atheism

atheism.jpgI got one of those Nigerian email scams. I’d guess it was about number 50, or maybe it was 75.

I’ve been thinking for several days about two very different views of atheism. One is from the godder side, where atheists are consciously evil, and want to hurt people and destroy things. The other …

Well, read the email first.

DEAR BELOVED IN CHRIST,

Yeah, the whole thing is in capital letters. I’ll spare you by translating it into something less shouty. I’m leaving in the typographical errors and misspellings, but I’m fixing the weird line breaks and large number of extra spaces sprinkled throughout.

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Misty-Eyed on MLK Day

Came across this online this morning, and it brought a tear to my eye.

Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk.

Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run.

Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly.

Damn. Here’s to a big step toward ending the inhumanity of racism.

Congratulations, President Obama. And congratulations, America.