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Letter to a Dying Grandmother

old-hands.jpgIf you’ve been an unbeliever for any length of time at all, you’ve probably heard this one: “If your grandmother was on her deathbed, would you tell her there’s no Heaven?”

It’s a nasty dilemma for an atheist.

On the one hand, you want to be true to your own principles, which probably includes a great deal of honesty. (I don’t think you can become an independent-minded atheist if you aren’t immensely honest. If you find lies easy and are willing to toss out glib, convenient fibs at a moment’s notice, the path simply isn’t there for you.)

But on the other hand, this is your grandmother, dying, and she has this comforting fairy tale foremost in her mind about the eternal life she has to look forward to. How could you dash her hopes in her final moments? Sure, if she was 50 and healthy, it might be worth it. If she was somebody else’s grandmother-to-be, and only 30, or 22, or 15, that might be a good time to intervene with the no-gods, no-heaven message.

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Invasion of the Buddy Snatchers

crab.jpgThere’s a parasite that eats crabs from the inside. (I read about it in a book called Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer.)

It enters the crab by penetrating a weak spot, then spreads long rootlike tendrils through the crab’s interior. The crab’s immune system fails completely to recognize it, and it soon takes over the hapless crustacean, body and brain. The crab continues to eat, to feed the thing, but it can no longer molt and grow, regrow severed claws, or mate and produce offspring. In time, the parasite produces eggs, and the crab nurtures and spreads them as if they were its own.

It looks like a crab. It moves like a crab. For all I know, it tastes like a crab. But it isn’t a crab anymore. It’s no more a crab than if a toymaker were to snatch one out of the ocean, core out its shell and throw the guts and brain away, and replace it all with a battery-driven mechanism that simulated crab motions.

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Hello, Clarice.

hopkins.jpgI realized some years back that the reason we have heroes in movies is really that there are so few of them. We truly do want unbending honesty, and heroic defenders, and powerful people who fight for truth and justice.

But they’re next to impossible to get in real life. Instead we get … George W. Bush. Jesse Jackson. Britney Spears. People who can’t even aspire to be flawed heroes, because though they possess flaws in abundance, they don’t have the required heroism. They’re just people — famous ones, but not very good ones.

The other side of the thing holds true, though, too. Some of the bad people we see in movies are there because there are so few of them.

For instance, when’s the last time you heard of a real Mad Scientist? I’m guessing pretty close to never. They make it into the movies because they almost don’t exist in real life, and so filmmakers feel free to use them as convenient boogeymen.

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Davey & Goliath

davey.jpgRemember Davey and Goliath?

Wikipedia says:

“Davey and Goliath was the title of a 1960s stop-motion animated television series. The programs, produced by the Lutheran Church in America […], were produced by Art Clokey after the success of his Gumby series. / Each 15-minute episode features the adventures of Davey Hansen and his “talking” dog Goliath […] as they learn the love of God through everyday occurrences.”

I just came across a mildly annoying review of the series at Amazon.com, where Prairie Cajun says “Unfortunately, a series such as this would find it hard to be placed on television these days for the simple fact that our society has become so caught up in not offending anyone. How dare you teach Christian morals and values to children! ”

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Notes of a Fanboy

batman.jpgI went to see the 12:01 a.m. screening of the new Batman movie, and … whoa. I’m really torn about saying this, because I love the superheroes with actual superpowers, but this is probably the best “superhero” movie ever made. The acting throughout was stellar — there wasn’t so much as an eyebrow out of place — but the writing, the dialogue, all the rest of it was incredibly good too.

Oscars: Yes, Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar for the chilling, deadly Joker he created. But Michael Caine deserves an Oscar too, for his supporting role. Aaron Eckhart deserves at least a nomination.

Sitting in the theater and looking around at the audience, I didn’t see another person my age in the room. I don’t know whether they had all grown up and left Batman behind, or maybe were just at home in bed at this unreasonable hour. And all the young people sitting around me — how did they come to know and like the Batman? Was it the movies? The hype about THIS movie? The graphic novels?

It’s amazing the stuff you can find inside yourself: At one point I actually looked around and sniffed with disdain at that audience of 20-somethings. None of these people were REAL fans like me, whose life has encompassed most of Batman’s 69-year history, and who has been a reader of comic books since I learned how. 

Get it? I felt SUPERIOR for a moment. Because I’m a better comic book fan.  

Argh.

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Sauron II: Cheated Dogs

Once more onto the soapbox, dear friends:

sauron-2.jpgI had a friend who had 40 sled dogs. And oh boy, did they ever LOVE pulling those sleds! You could see it in how eager they were to get in harness. They leaped, they wriggled, they screamed to get into harness and start pulling.

I took my own two dogs out for hikes – off leash – in true wilds twice a day, in the woods, along mountain trails, along creeks, and on remote dirt roads.

One summer I started taking one of his sled dogs, my favorite, with us. At first, Walter was afraid of everything on the walks. He shied away from a creek barely a foot wide, and finally crossed it by jumping over it about four feet in the air. He didn’t even know it was water – it was several days before I could get him to drink from the creek. When he finally dipped his muzzle into it, then put a foot into it, he splashed and ran in it like it was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen.

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The Eye of Sauron Looks Down and Sees … Dogs

trick-dog.jpgOkay, that’s it.

I just read a story in the Washington Post about a new CBS TV show, “Greatest American Dog.”

Look, to begin with, I don’t like “reality” TV. I don’t watch it. But I’m okay with it if a bunch of idiots want to go out on national TV and eat cow anuses or climb out on narrow beams above pits of broken glass, all for the remote chance of winning money. Not only do I think they’re more than welcome to do that, I know they don’t even have to care about my opinion. I’m fine with it, seriously. For all I care, as long as they’re adults, and they’re freely choosing to do those stupid things, they can all wind up in wheelchairs. Yeah, it would hurt me to see something like that happen to a fellow human being, but tragedies happen every day and I don’t think I have any right to interfere in other people’s private decisions. Heck, I’m the guy who thinks suicide should be legal. And at least they get a chance at the money, unlike all those people who have crippling injuries while skateboarding or riding motorcycles.

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Carl Buell Rocks. That is all.

titanotylopus_abc.jpgSome pretty neat news (and I hope I have all the details right):

Good friend and paleontological illustrator Carl Buell will have art on ABC Evening News with Charles Gibson on Friday night, July 4th, 6:30 p.m. Eastern time.

The news piece has something to do with American expatriots, and will somehow weave in the fact that the recent diaspora is not the first. It happened as far back as the Oligocene, as long as 33 million years ago, with camels. Originated in North America, moved elsewhere; died out here, succeeded there.

Five of Carl’s paintings of camel ancestors will be featured.

The one shown here is Titanotylopus.

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Queries Away!

ghostbusters.jpgToday I got 20 queries all prepped for mailing tomorrow. I’m doing publishers initially, will focus on agents later in the week.

I took a year off from work and wrote two books, one a children’s book, the other this book on atheism, with the working title “Blue Collar Atheist.”

Anyone who’s read my various blog incarnations over the years has probably read some of my essays; the atheism book is about half those, half new stuff, with cool chapter titles like “Batman Almighty,” “The Wellspring of the Gods,” “Sucking Up to the Virgin Mary,” “The Evidence of True Things,” “Hello Mr. Death” and “The Headwaters of Reality.” More obvious titles are “Why Beliefs Matter,” “Good Without Gods,” “On Being An Unbeliever,” and “Saying Goodbye to Gods.”

If I had to describe the basic idea of the book in one sentence, it would be “You don’t have to be a highly-educated intellectual to free yourself from religion.”

And IF IF IF the thing sells, you might get to read it in, oh, a year or so.

Argh. Should’ve started five years ago.