----- Original Message -----

From: Sam Collins

To: reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 11:46 AM

Subject: [Reason-Omaha] Boilerplate for friends and relatives: [1 Attachment]

I stopped sending greeting cards thirty or forty years ago; substituted a solstice letter.  Example below.  Suffer.  Or hit the DELETE key.

Sam

---

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I stopped sending greeting cards thirty or forty years ago; substituted a solstice letter.  Example below.  Suffer.  Or hit the DELETE key.

Sam

----- Original Message -----

From: Gary Hoffman

To: Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 9:13 AM

Subject: [Reason-Omaha] Yale Environment 360 -- Stewart Brand’s Strange Trip: Whole Earth to Nuclear Power

 

Stewart Brand’s Strange Trip: Whole Earth to Nuclear Power

When the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog embraces nuclear power, genetically engineered crops, and geoengineering schemes to cool the planet, you know things have changed in the environmental movement. Stewart Brand explains how the passage of four decades — and the advent of global warming — have shifted his thinking about what it means to be green.

By Todd Woody [Yale Environment 360, 22 December 2009]

Stewart Brand helped shape the environmental consciousness of the 1960s and ‘70s with his Whole Earth Catalog, which became a bible of the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement. An eclectic compendium of information and “tools” for innovative, environmentally friendly living, the Whole Earth Catalog reflected Brand’s ecological and technological interests, foreshadowing the rise of the San Francisco Bay Area’s computer and green cultures.

In the 1970s, Brand — a Stanford-trained biologist — started CoEvolutionary Quarterly to continue his exploration of environmental issues and the rise of new technologies like the personal computer and genetic engineering. In between writing books on computing and space colonies, Brand served as an advisor to California Gov. Jerry Brown. In the early 1980s, Brand co-founded The WELL — the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link — an early electronic community in the pre-Internet days with Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who later become the first director of Google’s philanthropic arm.

In recent years, Brand, 71, has begun to rethink his earlier opposition to nuclear power and has embraced genetic engineering, geoengineering of the earth’s climate system, and other issues that were anathema to the traditional environmental movement. This evolution of his thinking has led to his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

In it, Brand calls for the rapid deployment of a new generation of nuclear power plants to combat global warming, arguing that technological advances have made nuclear energy safer and any potential danger from nuclear waste pales compared to the damage inflicted by burning coal.

“The air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year from lung disease in the United States, and 350,000 a year in China,” writes Brand. “A 1-gigawatt coal plant burns three million tons of fuel a year and produces seven million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to.”

Likewise, he says, environmentalists are misguided in their long-standing opposition to the genetic engineering of crops to increase yields and reduce pesticide use. In a move sure to rankle the local-food movement, Brand says organic farmers should also embrace GE crops.

Brand argues that humans have been reshaping the natural environment for millennia and thus should start exploring planet-wide technological fixes to the pending catastrophe of climate change, everything from injecting sulfates into the atmosphere to constructing a gigantic space shield to block solar radiation. And if the Whole Earth Catalog catered to the anti-urbanists of the 1960s, Brand now finds ecological salvation in the world’s mega-cities and their sprawling slums as “concentrators of efficiency and innovation.”

Brand lives on a converted tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., with his wife Ryan Phelan, founder of DNA Direct, a genetic testing service. Environmental journalist Todd Woody met Brand in his book-lined office — located nearby in a beached fishing boat on the Sausalito waterfront — and conducted the following interview for Yale Environment 360.

Yale Environment 360: Who did you write this book for?

Stewart Brand: For two versions of environmentalists — the ones who already know their environmentalism and the ones who are finding out their environmentalism because of climate change.

An assertion I make in the first chapter is that in light of climate change everybody’s an environmentalist. And in light of climate change people who already know they’re environmentalists are facing a changed situation. And I’m trying to help adjust the course in light of the situation and the technologies that are emerging.

e360: Is the environmental movement ideologically stuck in the 1970s?

Brand: It’s moved on in some areas. The environmental movement used to hate cities and is now halfway toward loving cities. The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting compactness in cities. Environmentalists don’t call themselves ecologists any more, and that’s good.

e360: Why is that good?

Brand: It’s good because most weren’t, and most people who said they were part of the ecology movement wouldn’t know one trophic level from another, or what a trophic level is, or what a food web is, or why a niche is a niche, or much less why horizontal transgenic gene transfer is normal rather than unnatural. So not being called ecologists is fine.

e360: Do you see a generational dividing line on nuclear power?

Brand: I’m somewhat speculating that there is a generation gap there. I think it’s probably much stronger with genetic engineering. There is no iGEM [the undergraduate International Genetically Engineered Machine synthetic biology competition] for grownups as far as I know. I take that as pretty much a good sign because geneticists and microbiologists are going to just own so much of this century.

e360: For anyone who’s younger than 35, nuclear power has not been an issue because there have been no new nuclear power plants built in this country for decades.

Brand: Well, that’s my surmise. What one would want to look at is some young anti-nuclear person, do they say Chernobyl? Do they say Three Mile Island? I don’t think they say Hiroshima or Nagasaki because that’s so far in the past. Even for me.

e360: One of the main arguments against nuclear is economic — it’s not viable in the marketplace. How much should the market play in pushing these technologies, versus the government?

Brand: It’s a strange kind of desperate argument. Probably that question applies most in the developing world where coal really is king, is the cheapest. If the market rules, coal wins almost everywhere. I’ve been saying, and I say in the book, that we have to get used to the idea that there’s a very serious role for the government here, basically to make coal expensive, and let the rest fight it out.

It’s not an issue in France and that’s why they have 80 percent nuclear. A bit of arithmetic I haven’t seen done yet is, if the U.S. were 80 percent nuclear, how many gigatons of carbon dioxide would not be in the atmosphere? We could have done that.

We didn’t for reasons very different than France. France was shattered by [the] 1973 [Arab oil embargo] and didn’t have their own coal, didn’t have their own oil. To get some energy independence, not because of anything environmental, they just went dead at it. They respect engineers in France way more than we do here and made the right thing happen and now have a huge export industry with selling energy to everybody in Europe, including all the green countries.

e360: NPR recently interviewed an Obama administration official on whether nuclear power should be an option to fight global warming. That official tried very hard to avoid even saying the word nuclear.

Brand: It’s a hot-button issue. Whether I raise it or not in talks, that’s what people want to talk about. What’s interesting to me, I’m going to go on book tour in England in January. England has just committed to ten new reactors. They’re tired of buying two gigawatts of nuclear power from France, among other things.

Frankly, my book is getting more uptake in England — even though it hasn’t come out there yet — than here. So I’m not sure if it’s my name or the subject or if they’re okay with nuclear, or what’s going on.

e360:: You were an advisor to Jerry Brown when he was governor and anti-nuclear sentiment was at its peak. If Jerry Brown becomes governor again do you see changes in policy?

Brand: We’ve talked about it. He hasn’t said, “Tell me more.” Back in the ‘70s when he first got into office, I said space is actually pretty interesting. Fifty percent of space technology comes from California. He was interested. We hired [astronaut] Rusty Schweiker, he did Space Day, he went to the first shuttle launch and landing. So he became Governor Moonbeam.

I haven’t heard him go that far on nuclear. I think it is still a third rail for all these guys. And I suppose part of what I’m trying to do is to take the charge off the rail.

e360: You don’t talk much about renewable energy in your book.

Brand: I think its very well covered so I don’t have much to add there other than nod, nod, nod, so let’s now talk about something I think I have some fresher information on.

But I think the main point I’m making with this book — and that’s why there’s two chapters about squatter cities and what’s going on in the cities and urbanization and so on — is that five out of six people don’t live in the developed world that has all this excess energy use.

They’re living much closer to the bone, and the greenest people in the world probably are the squatters in the slums of the world — a billion people. How lucky we are that they’re there, they’re getting out of poverty, they’re green as hell but they would really like electricity 24/7 and fresh water and sanitation and some other things that are going to involve more energy use. That’s either coal or nuclear as far as I can tell.

Whether we go to nuclear or not is not as important as whether they do. Or something else that is clean, scalable, and constant.

e360: What about solar?

Brand: My hope, frankly, was space solar because it’s 24/7. [California entrepreneur] Elon Musk flattened my ear on this subject. He said, “Look I do SpaceX so I know a lot about space, I do SolarCity so I know a lot about solar. I’m trying to kill anybody’s sense that there’s some realistic way to do ‘space solar.’”

He said even if you could get your solar collectors into orbit for free it still wouldn’t work. The costs and difficulties of beaming down electricity as microwaves with antennas on the ground don’t work out. For the time being, I’m persuaded by Elon on the matter.

e360: Nuclear power plants consume an incredible amount of water. Is that a concern?

Brand: Yep, water is an issue everywhere and every how. The tech I’d like to see is something more direct. That’s all hand wringing at this point. I don’t know anyone who has figured out how to turn heat into electricity without water.

e360: What has been the reaction to your proposals on genetic engineering and food?

Brand: Well, I’m a little surprised that Michael Pollan hasn’t come over because he has busted the industrialization of organic food.

The local growing of basically artisanal food is absolutely fantastic in a country where the basic nutrition problem is obesity. That’s not the major nutrition problem in much or most of the world. What they need is volume, which is the very thing the Green Revolution spoke to and answered. The second Green Revolution is the next set of good technology in agriculture. Not only green in the sense the first one was — higher yield, lower cost, cheaper food, better distribution and all that — but also green ecologically, environmentally green in terms of climate.

Kind of working backward to what the world wants and needs, and what the climate wants and needs, and ecology wants and needs, then genetic engineering looks like a very important tool.

e360: A theme running through the book is that the rest of the world has a different perspective on nuclear power and genetic engineering.

Brand: We tend to be north-centric, developed-centric. China is going full bore on nuclear. I’ve heard numbers as high as they want to build 400 reactors. And no doubt there will be problems. But there’s problems with dams, there’s problems with all these things. I think that’s the engineering essence I’m trying to have Greens become comfortable with.

When you’re trying to design solutions, you really, really have to get used to the idea of tradeoffs, risk balancing, short-term versus long-term. All this stuff that engineers are comfortable with.

I don’t want the romantic stuff to go away. I don’t want people to stop loving nature or loving some experience they’ve had with nature. They can if they want. Just add this other stuff. And so the line about the romantic loves the tree, but not its genome, and the scientist loves both.

e360: One of your more controversial chapters is on geoengineering, which strikes a lot of people, including scientists, as crazy and dangerous.

Brand: That must be next year’s controversy. I expected some pushback on that one. And I haven’t encountered it at all. Not in person, not in print. But it clearly wants and needs to be there. I think there’s all kinds of things to say.

Actually, the strongest pushback and non-embrace was in Al Gore’s new book. It’s a sentence in which he says we’ve done enough experimentation with the planet, that geoengineering is experimentation with the planet we do not need to do. He goes on about biochar [transforming organic waste into a charcoal-like fertilizer], as he should, but doesn’t think or treat that as geoengineering. I do. I think that kind of effort is a form of grass rootsy, and therefore good, geoengineering.

e360: Do you have concerns that support for geoengineering will be used by others as an excuse to carry on with business as usual?

Brand: Well, I don’t want to eliminate business-as-usual as an okay goal. I want to set aside a potential business as usual that ain’t bad. Suppose we had energy that had that quality of way more than we could use or need, and it was clean.

There is another set of people in the environmental movement who are what I’m calling calamatists, who feel that industrial civilization has committed crimes, sins against nature, and retribution is coming and we must repent, reform, and redeem ourselves in light of these terrible crimes and this terrible sin.

The way you can tell if someone is of that mode is to raise this: Suppose we had clean, squanderable energy available, what do you think of that? The ones that have that frame of mind would say that is the worst thing that could happen.

Again, I think that is not a perspective that makes a lot of sense in the developing world. You can go to African peoples and say what do you think of clean, squanderable energy, they would say, “Yes please. How soon?”

e360: Hasn’t cheap energy in this country lead to our sprawling development and other environmental problems?

Brand: Maybe, maybe. But one of the things the new urbanists changed are that suburbs as they came to be designed are boring stupid places to live. It’s not a question of whether you save energy by walking to the market, you sort of save your mind by walking to the market, by being able to bicycle the kids to school. The idea of parents, smart busy adults, having to be chauffeurs for their children has nothing to do with environmental issues at all — it’s just a weird way to live.

I just want that one on the table. Suppose we do get clean, squanderable energy. Is that okay or not okay? One scenario is that it is okay. [Local-food advocate] Alice Waters’ approach to food — artisanal growing of food — is a better approach to growing food. But you need a certain amount of prosperity and density and all these other fun things for that to happen. That is also a product of highly industrialized civilization.

Alice Waters needs a city and in the absence of a city you don’t get Alice Waters or Michael Pollan. The city is a market. It’s a sophisticated market.

e360: Thirty or 40 years ago if you picked up a book advocating these ideas, what would you have thought?

Brand: So 30 to 40 years ago I think I would have said to all the genetic engineering stuff — hot dog! I did say at that time “yes” to solar in space because I was pushing space colonies. The only practical reason that we could think of was that a business model for space colonies was beaming down solar.

Nuclear I would have said, “Bad idea,” and I did. Not actively and overtly. I just went in a somewhat knee-jerk mode and my own mode of long-term thinking at the time that it was too big a penalty to exact from future generations, because of the nuclear waste issue.

I think a lot of this stuff is shifting, and this book is a next-30-years to next-100-years book. Most of the issues we’re dealing with — [like] climate — will be sorted out one way or the other in this century. It’s going to be a thrilling century because so much is in play and so many balls are in the air.

POSTED ON 22 DEC 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Todd Woody is a veteran environmental and technology journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and other publications. He previously was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, the assistant managing editor of Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.

© 2008 Yale Environment 360

that was likely the same article I read.........not that either of us
needed to read it to know sometimes people get well for unknown reasons.





              Raymond Zbylut
              <rzbylut@...
              m>                                                         To
              Sent by:                  Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com
              Reason-Omaha@yaho                                          cc
              ogroups.com
                                                                    Subject
                                        [Reason-Omaha] Re:
              12/21/2009 08:42
              PM


              Please respond to
              Reason-Omaha@yaho
                 ogroups.com







I recall Skeptic Inquirer did a write up years back on Lourdes, and
Hospital patients who experienced spontanious cures of cancer, the results
showed the hospitals were as "miraculous," as is Lourdes, therefore
sponatious cures of certain illnesses are a natural happening. It does not
matter if a fish swims in holy water from the Vatican, Lourdes, or
from Carter lake, it can thrive in either or die in either,

November 28th,  2009

TO: ACLU Nebraska
941 O St # 706
Lincoln, NE 68508-3625

Dear ACLU,

We, the poor people of Omaha, cannot afford to hire attorneys to advise us, help
us, litigate for us. Those agencies we assumed would be there for the oppressed
have turned their backs on us time after time, as the legal help they could had
given simply is not be high profile enough to assure they and their
contemporaries will be praised, and made media heroes, which from the 1980's to
present is the only thing important to most of the younger generations.

Asking the police for any help whatsoever is akin to a mouse asking a Rat
Terrier to desist from abusing it. Asking Internal Affairs to investigate is a
joke, like asking a weasel to investigate other weasels if they broke into the
henhouse and ate the precious eggs.

ACLU Nebraska, and Citizens for Equal Protection sure sound like the ones we can
turn to for help, but it is the same in the Philippines where I lived nearly two
decades, as well as working in East Africa, (Kenya, Somolia, & Mozambique,) and
South Africa, where NGO's abound but do nothing for the masses unless it
guarantees these NGO's  high visibility to bring in funds from well meaning,
financially secure, and big hearted donors sincerely believing their funding
will be used for the rank and file oppressed.

Nelson Mandela  and many of the White and Black South Africans, as well as 
Ghandi,  and a whole plethora of true leaders too numerous to name in this
letter, risked their lives on a daily basis to help the oppressed & poor,  yet
with the truth painfully glaring back into the eyes of Omaha's poor & oppressed
like a noon-day sun reflecting off a highly polished mirror, our so called
`Legal Aid Advocates,' talk a lot of BIG talk, but cannot walk the walk, not
even little steps for simple advice.  America's and  moreso conservative "Go Big
Red's"  Legal Aid Advocates are nearly mirror images of the NGO's & Legal Aid
Advocates in those developing nations where I had spent over half of my life
working.

As did Mandela, Ghandi, and the many apartheid resisters in the South African
Congress and in the streets, we the poor have absolutely no alternative but to
take on these foes who oppress us, and murder our children yet call themselves
"guardians of the people,"  or more commonly the Omaha Police Department.

The term "grass roots," is overused, but I suppose it fit's the defensive
posture we are forced into, a "Grass Roots Fight to End Police Murder &
Oppression in Omaha."  The police declared a `war' on minorities,  the poor, 
youth,  and those they summarily deem unfit for their City.

We, the oppressed may not have legal learning, but we do have brains and as did
the abovementioned individuals I wrote of who truly advocated for others, we
will use our limited knowledge to bring the struggle right back at the doorstep
of our oppressors using communications via the internet, and cards such as
these, t-shirts, bumper stickers, so the entire world will know the bullshit we
poor & oppressed face daily as we try to raise our families, pay our mortgages,
and  simply put food on the table.  Hopefully, this human organ boycott will
work, hopefully businesses will refuse to hold any conventions in this  `Gaza
Strip' named Omaha. And finally with hope and a campaign of communications to
the NGO's (that do help,)  and leaders and people around the globe, Omaha will
be placed on the map just as Palestine is now.  Omaha Political elites who cheer
every minority death, and youthful pot smoker jailed, will be notoriously
regarded, and denounced  as were South Africa's Apartheid Ruling Elites.

My 2009 Memorial Day beating may seem insignificant, and my 2008 arrest and
jailing, not to mention the physical beating from a raging & screaming Omaha
Policeman may seem small potatoes to the ACLU, and other Nebraska Legal Aid
NGO's but to Marty Conboy, who zealously prosecuted me, for telling the truth on
one of `his' cops,  I may as well had burned down the Vatican in premeditated
arson for the pope and his ilk coving up the thousands of rapes of 10 & 11 year
old alter boys !   To me, it is the biggest event in my 54 years which I will
never forgive, nor forget.  I am certain those in Selma, Alabama will never
forgive nor forget  "Bloody Sunday,"  March 7, 1965 when 600 civil rights
marchers were attacked by state and local police with guns, clubs, police dogs,
and tear gas, and those assisting them the  'Ku Klux Klan'  commit unspeakable
acts of violence on the citizens of Selma for asking to be treated with dignity
& respect. Hell. I was just 10 years old when I watched it on our old RCA black
& white television, but I have not, nor ever will forget those images of those
snarling dogs whipped into a frenzy complete with foam coming out of their
massive jaws, as men women, and even little children were held at bay lest they
be ripped to shreds. I will never forget the hundreds of thousand gallons of
high pressure water shooting out of fire hoses pushing good people back like
specks of dirt on the city streets, nor will I forget the images of KKK members,
taking great pride and pleasure at the inhumanity and hatred they and the police
unleashed on it's own; the citizens of Selma.

One day I would hope the ACLU changes and does what it's founder, Roger Baldwin,
intended it to be rather than impotent media whore it has become. Generally in
closing I would write "Respectfully," as I end all my letters, but in this
letter I shall simply write "Sincerely,"  I am quite certain the  ACLU can
understand why.

Sincerely,


Raymond J.Zbylut
ex-supporter of ACLU Nebraska

Cc: ACLU Omaha, c/o Tristian Bonn

Ccc: Omaha Star Newspaper

I haven't been to many Cafe meetings, or Saturday meetings in some time, I've
been very busy with activism that more likely than not will have the same impact
as a bumble bee stinging the thick hide of an African Bull Elephant.

The A.C.L.U has now decided almost two years after the incident to take a look
at the video and listen to the audio tapes of the infamous January 22nd 2008
"alleged" assault.  Now know, I did not say assault as I have learnd always say
"alleged" assualt or Marty Conboy WILL PROSECUTE!  Maybe it was due to a letter
I sent to them that made them ashamed? I'll post that letter next for your
amusement.

Other NGO's have also expressed interest as well. I won't even think of having a
glimmer of hope or wishfull thinking, as wise man once wrote: "if one expects
nothing, then one will never be disappointed."

But these past two years I have been concentrating on this issue, and as I wrote
recently to a Douglas County Public Official, guilty men do not dedicate the
remainder of their lives after they had served their time, or paid thier fine,
the move on as they know the truth of their indiscretion. The innocent will
however are compelled to spend their remeining lives seeking the truth, and
seeking justice, it would be impossable to live with it otherwise.

Can there be any doubt why those poor & innocent sheep herders become committed
members of the Taliban, or hardened Disciples of Osama Bin Laden after being
tossed into Gitmo, or the other torture chamber in Bagdad, so a shithead can
pick up some easy dope money by turning in anyone to the CIA/US Armed Force
Intel.   It doesnt take a rocket scientist to understand the pyschological
pathology of this, nor of my committment which has taken me two years of work &
campaigning, and a Faust-like drive to continue on until I my ashes are flushed
down the toilet when eventuially an angry cop murders me for pissing off the
"Blue," by bringing thier misdeeds and "testilies" into the public arena once
again.

I'll be back, perhaps though much less opinionated, but unfortunately much more
focused on a singular obsession. I'll be wearing my hearing aid more often as
well, and keep my mind open more than before.

And thank you to those who believed in me from the start,and beleived in me
after the bogus conviction.

While in the shower yesterday morning, I had a flash of insight into the prayer efficacy studies that have been done (It kept me thinking so long that I ran out of hot water.). These studies have usually used statistically significant difference between two groups as the criterion for therapeutic success of intercessory prayer - a merely detectable difference. This, in my opinion, invokes a very sloppy and improper operational definition of prayer answering.

The proper definition of intercessory prayer is that which asks some deity for a certain desired result. So why are we defining a several-percent improvement in patient outcomes as success? Those who believe that prayers are answered use sources such as the Hebrew and Christian bibles for their definition of prayer-answering. Holy scriptures define it as a deity fully and immediately performing the prayed-for task. If these people believe that their god answers prayers, then the target patients in a study should be immediately relieved of the subject ailment, get up, and walk out. That, in my opinion, should be the experimental definition of success, nothing less. These studies are trying to get at the existence of a claimed process that has been thoroughly defined for them, and numerous examples given in their source literature. Why are they re-defining it as something else? To a believer, these studies' definition of prayer answering should be an insult. If a god answers a prayer, it is answered. How could anyone of faith accept a god so weak that he responds to prayers asking for a cure, by helping six percent of the ailing do just a little better?

Seems to me a proper experiment would recruit some pious, sincere and inclined pray-ers to pray for the immediate cure of patients with urgent and well-defined, heavily disabling diseases or injuries. This could be done while pray-ers and patients are together, and the results could be measured immediately with diagnostic exams. Perhaps the most secure test to measure results would be to target patients who had been recently declared medically dead. The Christian deity assured his followers that this was a legitimate purpose for prayer action.

I think it is indicative of our society's and even our medical research community's desire to affirm prayer-answering, that we have allowed sloppy criteria for success to be used, and avoided definitive tests of the claimed powers of prayer.

Thanks for "listening."

-- 

Oddly enough, a question about angels to a rabbi helped put me on the road to rationality.
He was expounding on a biblical passage where a host of angels was praising god, perhaps
out of Ezekiel (I've forgotten, and I'm too lazy to look it up.)  At any rate, I asked him if angels
had free will.  He replied that they didn't.  It immediately occurred to me that the vision of a
bunch of angels praising god ought to be about as impressive as if I'd designed a bunch of
wind-up toys to go around singing praises to me.  It would certainly suggest I had ego problems,
if nothing else!  More ridiculous than impressive, a sort of cheap trick.

John P. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Bechtel <jimbechtel2@...>
To: Reason <Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sun, Dec 20, 2009 10:55 am
Subject: [Reason-Omaha] vampires & angels, theocracy & fanaticism

The continuing rise of the irrational:

1. "What are angels? Did we invent them the way we invented Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Boogey Man who frightens little children into being good? Where do angels come from?" Anne Rice asks these three questions and then ignores the central one about us inventing them.  Instead she answers the first: "Angels are dazzling expressions of God's love for his children," and second: "They come to us right out of the pages of the Bible, complete with their powerful wings." If the Bible says (or even just hints) they exist, then they must be real. (And maybe vampires too?)

What th'? Can you believe Parade magazine, which used to publish Sagan, now spreads this crap?

(And I think Rice's reputation is overblown, she quickly went downhill. For vampire tales I prefer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.)

2. No separation of church & state for c 3/4 of mankind. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/12/20-the-angels-among-us.html

The Angels Among Us

by Anne Rice

published: 12/20/2009

Related Features

1. How Spiritual Are We?

2. Spirituality in America

Author Anne Rice started the vampire craze 33 years ago with her novel "Interview With the Vampire." Recently, she has turned her thoughts-and writing-to angels. (Her latest novel is "Angel Time.") In this season of holiday spirit, we asked Rice why we need angels.
What are angels? Did we invent them the way we invented Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Boogey Man who frightens little children into being good? Where do angels come from?
These days, we see angels everywhere. Gift shops offer gold-and-silver angels as Christmas ornaments and statuettes. Angel faces are featured in beautifully framed paintings and on greeting cards. Angels in plastic or porcelain decorate mantelpieces and dashboards. Countless books on angels, some filled with accounts of visitations, others claiming to know secrets about angels, fill shelves. Some even suggest how to talk to angels and how to hear their voices in return.
Almost any schoolchild can describe angels. They are nearly always tall, slender beings with soft shoulder-length hair and graceful flowing robes. They may wear sandals, but they never wear shoes. Most of the time, their toes peek out from beneath their gowns. But what really makes an angel is a pair of huge, spreading, white-feathered wings. Even roly-poly baby angels, called cherubs, have those all-important white wings.
Wherever and however they appear, angels offer consolation. They smile with infinite patience; they look lovingly on those of us whom they guard. Friends offering angel gifts are seeking to remind us that angels provide safety and peace.

Angels are not a modern invention. And they may not be an invention at all. They come to us right out of the pages of the Bible, complete with their powerful wings. In the Book of Exodus, winged cherubim are carved on the Ark of the Covenant. And in the Book of Isaiah, the prophet sees the powerful winged seraphim singing before the throne of God.
A choir of angels sings to celebrate the birth of Jesus. And Jesus assures us that little children have their special guardian angels, while later on, in the garden of Gethsemane, an angel comes to comfort Jesus himself.
Indeed, all we know about angels comes from holy writ, and countless biblical scholars have developed our notions of guardian angels and angels sent to Earth in answer to our prayers.
Though no female angel appears in the Bible, there is no reason, apparently, that angels cannot take a female form. They themselves are beyond gender, and the bodies in which they appear are either illusions or specially made for a particular purpose and soon discarded once no longer in use. Angels are pure spirit; their natural dwelling place is Heaven. But they are always very busy on our behalf here on Earth.
It is no surprise that these beings fascinate us, splendid and ethereal as they are. We cannot help but wonder what angels think about as they come and go, intervening in our lives for the good. Do they have feelings? Do they like one assignment better than another? Do they learn from us as we learn from them?
Hollywood films have given us a variety of angel personalities, from the delightful little Clarence Oddbody of It's a Wonderful Life to John Travolta's beer-drinking, belching angel in Michael. In the TV shows Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven, the angelic stars, played by Roma Downey and Michael Landon, were known by their innate serenity and tireless good will.
Today, as readers and audiences obsess over vampires, one can't help but wonder if those fans aren't really seeking angels. After all, in the best-selling book (and blockbuster movie) Twilight, Edward the vampire is the protector of the young heroine Bella, saving her from evil humans as well as evil immortals. A good vampire also strives to protect against a bad vampire in the Vampire Diaries novels, now a show on the CW network. And in True Blood, the HBO series based on the popular books, waitress Sookie Stackhouse finds a stalwart guardian in the person of a handsome vampire as well.
Like angels, vampires are powerful and mysterious beings who aren't subject to the ravages of old age or time. Like angels, vampires are often described and portrayed as extremely beautiful. Like angels, vampires look human and sound human, though they are not.
But vampires are sad creatures. They speak to us of confusion and the longing to be human. They struggle in the darkness, lamenting the loss of the light.
Perhaps the whole vampire craze can be related to the age-old yearning for a loving, eloquent supernatural presence that will save us from the perils and disasters of ordinary life.
With angels we are most certainly on surer ground. Our oldest religious texts assure us that the Almighty does indeed have such wondrous messengers and helpers, and that He sends them to Earth only to do good. One cannot help but be glad that once the present vampire craze is over, angels will still be busy guarding their earthly charges and answering prayers.  
Angels are dazzling expressions of God's love for his children. Not only do they bring hope to the weary, but they are always pointing upward, promising that at the end of life's journey, they will be there to carry us to that greatest of all mysteries, the bliss and splendor of our heavenly home.

------------------------------------

2.

70% lack freedom of religion

NEW YORK (AP) - In Indone°©sia, Muslim groups burn down a mosque belonging to the minor°©ity Ahmadiyya. In Singapore, the government refuses to recognize Jehovah's Witnesses. In Belgium, 68 religion-based hate crimes are reported in 2007 alone.
People living in a third of all countries are restricted from practicing religion freely, either because of government policies and laws or hostile acts by indi°©viduals or groups, according to a report released this week by the Pew Research Center, "Global Restrictions on Religion."

That amounts to 70 percent of the globe's population, since some of the most restrictive countries are very populous.
Of the world's 25 most popu°©lous countries, citizens in Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and India live with the most restric°©tions when both measures are taken into account, the study in°©dicated.
"Where those two come to°©gether is where it's most in°©tense," said Brian Grim, senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The United States, Brazil, Ja°©pan, Italy, South Africa and the United Kingdom have the fewest restrictions on religious practices when measured by both govern°©ment infringement and religion°©-based violence or harassment, according to the study.
Timothy Shah, a senior re°©search scholar at Boston Uni°©versity who is familiar with the study, said he was struck by the fact that more than 30 countries have high levels of both govern°©ment and social restrictions on religion.
Shah pointed to Nigeria, where 12 majority-Muslim states adopt°©ed the Islamic Shariah criminal code after returning to civilian rule in 1999, resulting in hostili°©ties against religious minorities.
The report found that the per°©centage of the world's countries with high or very high govern°©ment restrictions is at about 20 percent, which amounts to 57 percent of the world's popula°©tion. These countries include Saudi Arabia, Iran and former communist countries, such as Russia, Belarus and Bulgaria, where state atheism has been re°©placed by favored religions that are accorded special protections or privileges.

-- 

----- Original Message -----

From: mpackard@...

To: Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 12:39 PM

Subject: Re: [Reason-Omaha] Prayer Efficacy Research (Rant)

 

re the law of large numbers, many very sick people visit Lourdes each
year..........many tens of thousands.........by natural causes/luck, some
get better for some reason. although they are few, people tend to remember
their stories and forget the 99% who die.

Mark P

re the law of large numbers, many very sick people visit Lourdes each
year..........many tens of thousands.........by natural causes/luck, some
get better for some reason.  although they are few, people tend to remember
their stories and forget the 99% who die.

Mark P

Prayer effects are less significant than the literature indicates. Note that 1
in 20 well designed experiments will be randomly significant at the 5% level as
will a higher proportion of badly designed experiments.

One can assure finding statistical significance by considering many hypotheses
(or many ways of classifying data) post hoc and then claiming that those that
show statistical significance were the starting hypotheses. Reviewers will be
obliged to accept your testimony that they were the original hypotheses. Of
course noboby will be able to reproduce the result, but then again what
competent researcher would want to repeat the experiment?

--- In Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com, "Jim Bechtel" <jimbechtel2@...> wrote:
>
> Harv;
> I like it! Yeah, why such a feeble statistical response from Yahweh, barely
detectable among the random fluctuations in studies? Hey, maybe the answer is
he's a Woody-Allen type under-achiever incompetent god, kind of a low-grade
moron?
> Clay;
> I like it! And let's extend it beyond an island & visas, to a world-wide
prohibition of science deniers from using the products of science. Computers
cannot be used for horoscopes, global warming deniers are forbidden to use
air-conditioning, creationists can't get flu shots (constantly upgraded for the
evolving virus threats), literalists must join the Amish and not use cars or
electricity, and abortion opponents will be required to turn down medical
services during pregnancies, praying instead for success of the pregnancy, and
holding funerals for specks, clots and clumps (with teeny tiny coffins) if the
pregnancy's unsuccessful.
>
>
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Clayton Naff
>   To: Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com
>   Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 8:22 AM
>   Subject: Re: [Reason-Omaha] Prayer Efficacy Research (Rant)
>
>
>
>   Harvey,
>
>      I like what you have written here, but I think I may have an even better
test of the efficacy of prayer.
>
>     I would like to propose that those of us who are not believers put our
nonfaith to the test: let us pick a day and time, and each take a public vow:
>
>   "I [state your name*] do solemnly affirm that if, upon buying this lotto
ticket and praying for a winning number, I am declared the winner of a
multimillion dollar jackpot,  I will upon accepting the check attribute my
winnings to the power of the deity and bear witness thereunto."
>
>   Now, if one of us should happen to win, it will be a small price to pay for
being a millionaire. As for the unlucky losers, the rest of us will of course
point out that highly unlikely things happen every day, that the power of big
numbers can produce what look like miracles, and that that idiot [state your
name] was always kind of wobbly when it came to atheism and I hope he chokes on
all that money! Etc., etc., etc.
>
>   The winner could then buy an island and found the tiny nation of Rationalia,
where visa requirements would include a declaration that the applicant rejects
all forms of superstition and paranormal nonsense. His former rationalist
friends would then have to make crawling apologies and say they knew all along
that he was a helluva great guy, yea, truly a prophet of straight thinking.
>
>   I think this would greatly advance the understanding of prayer, don't you?
#;-)
>
>   Best regards,
>
>
>   Clay
>
>   * tip o' the hat to Steve Martin and his Non-Conformist's Pledge
>
>
>
>
>
>   On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Harvey Madison <hmadison99@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>     While in the shower yesterday morning, I had a flash of insight into the
prayer efficacy studies that have been done (It kept me thinking so long that I
ran out of hot water.). These studies have usually used statistically
significant difference between two groups as the criterion for therapeutic
success of intercessory prayer - a merely detectable difference. This, in my
opinion, invokes a very sloppy and improper operational definition of prayer
answering.
>
>     The proper definition of intercessory prayer is that which asks some deity
for a certain desired result. So why are we defining a several-percent
improvement in patient outcomes as success? Those who believe that prayers are
answered use sources such as the Hebrew and Christian bibles for their
definition of prayer-answering. Holy scriptures define it as a deity fully and
immediately performing the prayed-for task. If these people believe that their
god answers prayers, then the target patients in a study should be immediately
relieved of the subject ailment, get up, and walk out. That, in my opinion,
should be the experimental definition of success, nothing less. These studies
are trying to get at the existence of a claimed process that has been thoroughly
defined for them, and numerous examples given in their source literature. Why
are they re-defining it as something else? To a believer, these studies'
definition of prayer answering should be an insult. If a god answers a prayer,
it is answered. How could anyone of faith accept a god so weak that he responds
to prayers asking for a cure, by helping six percent of the ailing do just a
little better?
>
>     Seems to me a proper experiment would recruit some pious, sincere and
inclined pray-ers to pray for the immediate cure of patients with urgent and
well-defined, heavily disabling diseases or injuries. This could be done while
pray-ers and patients are together, and the results could be measured
immediately with diagnostic exams. Perhaps the most secure test to measure
results would be to target patients who had been recently declared medically
dead. The Christian deity assured his followers that this was a legitimate
purpose for prayer action.
>
>     I think it is indicative of our society's and even our medical research
community's desire to affirm prayer-answering, that we have allowed sloppy
criteria for success to be used, and avoided definitive tests of the claimed
powers of prayer.
>
>     Thanks for "listening."
>
>
>
>   --
>   Clay Farris Naff
>   Executive Director, Lincoln Literacy Council
>   Member, National Association of Science Writers
>   Vice President, Nebraska Citizens for Science
>   www.claynaff.com
>   (402) 310-0572
>   Lincoln, NE
>   USA
>

----- Original Message -----

From: Clayton Naff

To: Reason-Omaha@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 8:22 AM

Subject: Re: [Reason-Omaha] Prayer Efficacy Research (Rant)

 

Harvey,

   I like what you have written here, but I think I may have an even better test of the efficacy of prayer.

  I would like to propose that those of us who are not believers put our nonfaith to the test: let us pick a day and time, and each take a public vow:

"I [state your name*] do solemnly affirm that if, upon buying this lotto ticket and praying for a winning number, I am declared the winner of a multimillion dollar jackpot,  I will upon accepting the check attribute my winnings to the power of the deity and bear witness thereunto."

Now, if one of us should happen to win, it will be a small price to pay for being a millionaire. As for the unlucky losers, the rest of us will of course point out that highly unlikely things happen every day, that the power of big numbers can produce what look like miracles, and that that idiot [state your name] was always kind of wobbly when it came to atheism and I hope he chokes on all that money! Etc., etc., etc.

The winner could then buy an island and found the tiny nation of Rationalia, where visa requirements would include a declaration that the applicant rejects all forms of superstition and paranormal nonsense. His former rationalist friends would then have to make crawling apologies and say they knew all along that he was a helluva great guy, yea, truly a prophet of straight thinking.

I think this would greatly advance the understanding of prayer, don't you? #;-)

Best regards,


Clay

* tip o' the hat to Steve Martin and his Non-Conformist's Pledge

 

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Harvey Madison <hmadison99@gmail.com> wrote:

 

While in the shower yesterday morning, I had a flash of insight into the prayer efficacy studies that have been done (It kept me thinking so long that I ran out of hot water.). These studies have usually used statistically significant difference between two groups as the criterion for therapeutic success of intercessory prayer - a merely detectable difference. This, in my opinion, invokes a very sloppy and improper operational definition of prayer answering.

 

The proper definition of intercessory prayer is that which asks some deity for a certain desired result. So why are we defining a several-percent improvement in patient outcomes as success? Those who believe that prayers are answered use sources such as the Hebrew and Christian bibles for their definition of prayer-answering. Holy scriptures define it as a deity fully and immediately performing the prayed-for task. If these people believe that their god answers prayers, then the target patients in a study should be immediately relieved of the subject ailment, get up, and walk out. That, in my opinion, should be the experimental definition of success, nothing less. These studies are trying to get at the existence of a claimed process that has been thoroughly defined for them, and numerous examples given in their source literature. Why are they re-defining it as something else? To a believer, these studies' definition of prayer answering should be an insult. If a god answers a prayer, it is answered. How could anyone of faith accept a god so weak that he responds to prayers asking for a cure, by helping six percent of the ailing do just a little better?

 

Seems to me a proper experiment would recruit some pious, sincere and inclined pray-ers to pray for the immediate cure of patients with urgent and well-defined, heavily disabling diseases or injuries. This could be done while pray-ers and patients are together, and the results could be measured immediately with diagnostic exams. Perhaps the most secure test to measure results would be to target patients who had been recently declared medically dead. The Christian deity assured his followers that this was a legitimate purpose for prayer action.

 

I think it is indicative of our society's and even our medical research community's desire to affirm prayer-answering, that we have allowed sloppy criteria for success to be used, and avoided definitive tests of the claimed powers of prayer.

 

Thanks for "listening."

--
Clay Farris Naff
Executive Director, Lincoln Literacy Council
Member, National Association of Science Writers
Vice President, Nebraska Citizens for Science
www.claynaff.com
(402) 310-0572
Lincoln, NE
USA