The Old Testament is germane. Anti-gay Christian hypocrites—and not all Christians are anti-gay; not all Christians are hypocrites—are constantly citing passages in the Old Testament to justify their persecution of LGBT people. We are far likelier to hear about Leviticus 20:13 and Sodom & Gomorrah in an anti-gay sermon than we are to hear about Corinthians or Timothy. And when conservative Christians toss Leviticus 20:13 in our faces—or get it tattooed on themselves (in violation of Leviticus 19:28)—we have a right to confront them about everything in the Old Testament that they choose to ignore, from the “abomination” of eating of shellfish to God giving dads the okay to sell their daughters into slavery. (“Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” is a popular an Old Testament reference too.)

But it’s only when gay people bring up a passage like Deuteronomy 22:20-21 that you hear anyone say, “Oh, that stuff about stoning daughters to death on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins is in the Old Testament, you goof! That’s not in the New Testament!” If it’s out-of-bounds—totally not kosher—for gay people to bring up what the Old Testament says about clams and farming and personal grooming and tattoos and menstruation and virginity and adultery, then it shouldn’t be kosher for conservative Christians to bring up Leviticus and Sodom & Gomorrah. Which they do. Constantly. And it’s not like they have to: there are, courtesy of Paul, plenty of anti-gay verses in the New Testament. But those verses aren’t anywhere near as hateful or murderous as what you’ll find in Leviticus, of course, which is why they’re nowhere near as popular with anti-gay bigots who call themselves Christians.

This also can’t be posted often enough.

By allowing the challenges of the 21st century to be hijacked by the apocalyptic storyline, we find ourselves awaiting a moment of clarity when the problems we must confront will become apparent to all — or when those challenges will magically disappear, like other failed prophecies about the end of the world. Yet the real challenges we must face are not future events that we imagine or dismiss through apocalyptic scenarios of collapse — they are existing trends. The evidence suggests that much of what we fear in the future — the collapse of the economy, the arrival of peak oil and global warming and resource wars — has already begun. We can wait forever, while the world unravels before our very eyes, for an apocalypse that won’t come.

The apocalyptic storyline becomes a form of daydreaming escape: the threat of global warming becomes a fantasy to one day live off the grid, or buy a farm, or grow our own food; economic collapse becomes like a prison break from the drudgery of meaningless and increasingly underpaid work in a soul-crushing cubicle; peak oil promises the chance to finally form a community with the neighbors to whom you’ve never spoken. Yet despite the fantasia peddled by Hollywood and numerous writers, a world battered by natural disasters and global warming, facing declining natural resources and civic unrest, without adequate water or energy or food, with gross inequalities between the rich and the poor, is not a setting for a picaresque adventure, nor is it the ideal place to start living in accord with your dreams.

The deeper we entangle the challenges of the 21st century with apocalyptic fantasy, the more likely we are to paralyze ourselves with inaction — or with the wrong course of action. We react to the idea of the apocalypse — rather than to the underlying issues activating the apocalyptic storyline to begin with — by either denying its reality (“global warming isn’t real”) or by despairing at its inevitability (“why bother recycling when the whole world is burning up?”). We react to apocalyptic threats by either partying (assuaging our apocalyptic anxiety through increased consumerism, reasoning that if it all may be gone tomorrow, we might as well enjoy it today), praying (in hopes that divine intervention or mere time will allow us to avoid confronting the challenges before us), or preparing (packing “bugout” packs for a quick escape or stocking up on gold, guns, and canned food, as though the transformative moment we anticipate will be but a brief interlude, a bad winter storm that might trap us indoors for a few days or weeks but that will eventually melt away).

None of these responses avert, nor even mitigate, the very threats that have elicited our apocalyptic anxiety in the first place. Buying an electric car doesn’t solve the problem of a culture dependent on endless growth in a finite world; building a bunker to defend against the zombie hordes doesn’t solve the growing inequities between the rich and poor; praying for deliverance from the trials of history doesn’t change that we must live in the times in which we were born. Indeed, neither partying, nor preparing, nor praying achieves what should be the natural goal when we perceive a threat on the horizon: we should not seek to ignore it, or simply brace for it, but to avert it.

Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every timeduring that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.

She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).

Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.

Science is based on faith – you can have a “strong conviction” based on available evidence, but that evidence could easily be overturned. We’ve gone from Newton to Einstein to who knows where. Faith in God is less provable, but who’s to say we might not have an instrument a million years from now that can do that. The universe is uncertain, and humans are basically infants in the age of the universe. It is sane, then, to be motivated by faith, rather than certainty. This is not saying all faith is equally valid, just that people need to be open to what’s possible.

Michael Shermer has always struck me as a hard-liner. More interested in promoting skepticism then looking at the evidence of what he’s disproving.  He comes to skepticism with similar pre-conceived biases as believers. He writes this about Leslie Kean’s book.

More work needs to be done to bring those anomalies into the accepted paradigm.

Great scientific discoveries have deviated from established orthodoxy, not conformed to it. He does also write this:

In the meantime, it is okay to live with the uncertainty that not everything has an explanation.

Which is just another way of describing faith.  Belief=certainty. Faith=the jury’s still out. For example, it’s OK to have faith that extra-terrestrial UFO’s are a real phenomenon, given the size of our universe.  That’s actually an evidence-based approach. Saying that UFO’s are definitely from the Pleiades is one thing, but believing in the possibility is another. I’ll admit that I want the UFO phenomenon to be real, and that likely clouds my judgment.  But I’d rather err on the side of possibility, then close a door.

Doomsday 2012: Thousands queue for UFO rescue at Pic de Bugarach

According to The Inquisitr, the pilgrims, already over 20,000, believe that when Doomsday comes on December 21, aliens will appear in UFO ships at Pic de Bugarach to rescue all people awaiting them in the area and fly them off safely to a place of dawn of a new age and era. BBC reports that for years, there have been rumors circulated on Internet that Pic de Bugarach is home to powerful aliens and that on apocalypse day, December 21, the top of the mountain will open and the UFOs will emerge to rescue those gathered in the area.

UFO cults and the mystery of Pic de Bugarach

The Pic de Bugarach at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbieres mountain range and many believe that mystical forces, energies and powers are resident at the mountain, like the biblical Mount Sinai. According to The Independent, “New Agers” have been making pilgrimages to the mountain because they believe it has special mystical “magnetic waves.” Rumors authenticating the sacredness of the site also claim that the late French president Francois Mitterrand flew to the peak by helicopter. Other rumors claim the Nazis and later Israel’s Mossad have carried out mysterious digging rituals at the peak.

Led to other AMMACH interviews. Nevermind the truth of any of this, interesting series of normal-seeming people talking about their abduction experiences.

More: The Mysterious Life and Death of Philip Schneider

My prediction for Sam Harris – at some point in his life, he’s going to have a 180 turnaround and become a mystic. He seems to be the most open-minded of the atheists.

Via the newly-revamped rawilsonfans.com.  Description via Alchemical Archives.

A philosophical flume ride through the physical, political and moral borders that inhibit the free movement of people and ideas. Mixing commentary, computer graphics, dramatisations, and investigative journalism, “BORDERS” probes the unsettling paradoxes behind immigration, drugs, Star Wars, and other topics.

Staring: Robert Anton Wilson, Michio Kaku, Margaret Randell, Juanita Kreps, Brian Freemantle & Steve Buscemi

Written/Produced/Directed by: Merrill Alidighieri & Joe Tripician