Religion versus Rational Thought

I’ve stayed away from dwelling on the rea­sons that we are leav­ing the US. Bet­ter to spend time on the mechan­ics of the activ­ity. I’ve avoided the sub­ject, partly because, you can become quite occu­pied with the forms to fill out, the doc­u­ments to locate, the money to spend and the mov­ing com­pa­nies, real­tors, lawyers and bankers to com­mu­ni­cate with. But in the end I keep com­ing back to the fact that the US has become a theoc­racy. Not mov­ing toward it, not in dan­ger of falling into it. It’s there.

I learned the other day that accord­ing to a poll in 2003, ’79% of Amer­i­cans believed in God’. I think the num­bers are even higher than that (I heard some­thing like 90% on the news. By the way, when bro­ken down by reli­gion (same poll), Jews had the low­est belief in god: 48%. Among adults as a whole, 66% were absolutely cer­tain (the poll’s lan­guage, not mine). (Here’s the poll: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=408)

George Bush con­stantly uses reli­gion to keep peo­ple com­pla­cent about the job he is doing (or rather what he is doing to the coun­try). That only goes so far, as his ‘poll’ num­bers show. Nev­er­the­less, while peo­ple may dis­ap­prove of his han­dling of the war, Social Secu­rity, Health Care, the econ­omy, and what­ever else he could have an impact on, they nev­er­the­less fol­low that up with ‘But he’s a good man’ or ‘I still believe in his moral­ity’. And for that, they give him a free pass to do what­ever he wants, giv­ing hand­outs to cor­po­rate cronies, or pri­va­tiz­ing (which usu­ally means dis­man­tling) some other aspect or activ­ity of the pub­lic sector.

In fact, Amer­i­cans now no longer believe that you can be moral with­out being reli­gious. They believe that the two are one in the same. That’s just ludi­crous. And it gets really weird when you start to look at things log­i­cally (which reli­gion seems to be counter): OK, in Freako­nom­ics, a fas­ci­nat­ing new book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­ner, a bunch of econ­o­mists do some analy­sis on every­day things, like what do peo­ple typ­i­cally die of, or why drug deal­ers live with their moms. Logic, and sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, as the lit­er­a­ture about the book put it, “reg­u­larly turn the con­ven­tional wis­dom on its head”. It offers this extremely non-religious, non-mystical, and refresh­ing view:

“What unites all these sto­ries is a belief that the mod­ern world, despite a sur­feit of obfus­ca­tion, com­pli­ca­tion, and down­right deceit, is not impen­e­tra­ble, is not unknow­able, and — if the right ques­tions are asked — is even more intrigu­ing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.”

Why did I segue into this dis­cus­sion of Freako­nom­ics from reli­gion and moral­ity? Because it can indeed be more moral, to take the non-religious view. The reli­gious view, par­tic­u­larly of Chris­t­ian Con­ser­v­a­tives has been that abor­tion is immoral, that we should save the life of the unborn child. Yet, here’s an abstract from a paper posted on the National Bureau of Eco­nomic Research site, (a view that is echoed in Levitt and Dubner’s book):

“We offer evi­dence that legal­ized abor­tion has con­tributed sig­nif­i­cantly to recent crime reduc­tions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abor­tion legal­iza­tion. The 5 states that allowed abor­tion in 1970 expe­ri­enced declines ear­lier than the rest of the nation, which legal­ized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abor­tion rates in the 1970s and 1980s expe­ri­enced greater crime reduc­tions in the 1990s. In high abor­tion states, only arrests of those born after abor­tion legal­iza­tion fall rel­a­tive to low abor­tion states. Legal­ized abor­tion appears to account for as much as 50 per­cent of the recent drop in crime.“
– NBER Work­ing Paper No. 8004, Issued Novem­ber 2000

It seems that those unwanted chil­dren grow up to become career crim­i­nals at an alarm­ing rate. There­fore, if you want to save lives by pre­vent­ing 50% of future crimes, (mur­der among them), keep abor­tion safe and legal. The moral thing to do for the future as well as the women forced to sup­port these unwanted chil­dren is to allow them (after their own care­ful delib­er­a­tion) to ter­mi­nate their preg­nancy. Yet, if we log­i­cal non-religious types bring up such facts (and they are facts, not belief), the howls of the pious descend upon us. We are not only wrong, we are bad peo­ple, we are immoral and unamer­i­can.
George Bush was inter­viewed back in 1987 regard­ing his views on Athe­ists by Robert I. Sher­man, a reporter for the Amer­i­can Athe­ist news jour­nal. The exchange went like this:

Sher­man: What will you do to win the votes of the Amer­i­cans who are Atheists?

Bush: I guess I’m pretty weak in the Athe­ist com­mu­nity. Faith in god is impor­tant to me.

Sher­man: Surely you rec­og­nize the equal cit­i­zen­ship and patri­o­tism of Amer­i­cans who are Atheists?

Bush: No, I don’t know that Athe­ists should be con­sid­ered as cit­i­zens, nor should they be con­sid­ered patri­ots. This is one nation under God.

Sher­man (some­what taken aback): Do you sup­port as a sound con­sti­tu­tional prin­ci­ple the sep­a­ra­tion of state and church?

Bush: Yes, I sup­port the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. I’m just not very high on Atheists.

So there you have another rea­son for why we are leaving.

So much happening, so little reporting

OK, OK, so it’s been a while since I did an entry here. Like 8 days.

It isn’t as if nothing’s been going on. Life has been turned upside down by try­ing to do two things that are nor­mally all-consuming when they are done on their own: sell­ing your house, and buy­ing a new house. We’re now doing them simul­ta­ne­ously. Oh, and the buy­ing part is nearly entirely by long-distance in another coun­try, and on another coast. But you knew that last part, dear reader.

Where to start? Well, with our house now on the mar­ket, it means that we still had to decide what to do about where to live in Van­cou­ver. While I was there in March, I hap­pened to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion at the Mas­sive Tech Con­fer­ence with a fel­low named Terry who just hap­pened to be mov­ing back to Toronto from Van­cou­ver. He offered to show off his condo (in Canada these are called apart­ments, but the asso­ci­a­tion that man­ages them is called a ‘strata’. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the term.) On a whim, I took him up on it. You never know, right?

It turned out that the place is small, but prob­a­bly just right for us. So after talk­ing it over and ago­niz­ing over the deci­sion, Pam and I sub­mit­ted an offer for Terry’s place. After some nego­ti­a­tions, we agreed on a good price (for both par­ties, I assume), we also agreed that the offer was good con­tin­gent upon the sale of our place here. Tomor­row a home inspec­tor will take a look at it and send us a report (com­plete with dig­i­tal pho­tos — I won­der if we could have done any­thing remotely like this 5 years ago!), and next week we meet with a Bank rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Van­cou­ver to get a small mort­gage. We decided that rather than cover the entire place with the pro­ceeds from our house here, we’d take out a rel­a­tively small mort­gage, mainly to start to build up a his­tory of good credit in Canada. We also wouldn’t want to raise any red flags about us being drug deal­ers or some­thing like that, buy­ing a house 100% with US cash.

The apart­ment is indeed small, but it has some key fea­tures that make it par­tic­u­larly attrac­tive to us; it is on the sec­ond floor of an 11 story build­ing, and set on a hill over­look­ing False Creek. It has a large patio/deck, roughly the length of the place full of plants, includ­ing a set of tall bam­boo trees. The view faces north toward the city and Grouse Moun­tain. The deck is large enough for a table and chairs, as well as another seat­ing area, so it’s essen­tially another room. Also, the com­plex has a secure front lobby entrance, under­ground park­ing, a health club, steam room and jacuzzi. The loca­tion is near the Granville Bridge and Granville Island to the north­west, and a great neigh­bor­hood with many restau­rants and shop­ping to the south and south­east. It’s extremely close to nearly all of the main bus lines into Down­town Van­cou­ver, but in good weather is no more than a 20 minute walk from most of the places we would want to go. It’s has easy access to the main road south­ward toward the US, as well as the air­port. It has a gas fire­place, good kitchen (with high qual­ity gas stove, oak cab­i­nets and gran­ite coun­ter­tops), broad­band inter­net and a heated floor for the mas­ter bath­room. There is only one bed­room, but I think we can make the den dou­ble as a guest bed­room via fold-out couch or mur­phy bed. Rather than put up pho­tos of the new place — and we have some —I’m think­ing I’ll post them after our fur­nish­ings are in place. Terry and his partner’s (inci­den­tally, in Canada, ‘part­ner’ can refer to the sig­nif­i­cant other of the same sex or the oppo­site sex — so Pam is my ‘part­ner’) taste in fur­ni­ture and gen­eral decor are very dif­fer­ent from ours, and I want us to show the place as ‘ours’ rather than ‘their’s and about to be ours’.

That said, there is another nice fringe-benefit of hav­ing to show off your house for so many prospec­tive buy­ers: it looks nice, for a change. So I posted a set of pho­tos of the inte­rior to Flickr. On Sat­ur­day, a spe­cial video­g­ra­pher will be com­ing over to do a video tour of the place. I hope we get to take some of his footage with us as well. It’s nice to have a record of the place you lived, espe­cially when it was look­ing it’s best, with most of the fur­ni­ture and art you fur­nished it with.

So we’re off.

Not a minute too soon, either. I’m get­ting more and more upset with each evening news­cast, as the Chris­t­ian Tal­iban con­tin­ues it’s inex­orable progress toward tak­ing over the gov­ern­ment, media and lives of cit­i­zens here. This last week­end was ‘Jus­tice Sun­day’, where politi­cians and church lead­ers broad­cast nation­wide their inten­tions to take over the Judi­ciary. That would be the last branch of gov­ern­ment they don’t have a firm grip over. It feels more and more like the novel The Handmaid’s Tale of Mar­garet Atwood. I used to feel like we were leav­ing because I felt that this was no longer the coun­try that I grew up in. Now it’s even worse than that; it’s a coun­try that I’m begin­ning to fear and loathe.

Putting on our Best 'House' Face

The first two groups of prospec­tive buy­ers came through today, if what our real estate agent told us is true. Tomor­row we get the whole Cald­well Banker Office walk­ing through and another poten­tial buyer at noon. It feels very strange, as if our lives are on dis­play. I know that they are look­ing at the rooms, not our per­sonal para­pher­na­lia, but I’m sure that they see a book here, a mag­a­zine there, etc. I hope they aren’t peek­ing in the med­i­cine cab­i­nets. Nah, there’s prob­a­bly not time for that.

To pre­pare for this onslaught of browsers, we’ve cleaned up a lot. We’d already been through some­thing like this before, when we were con­sid­er­ing swap­ping this place for a sim­i­lar unit across the court­yard. “The key to sell­ing a house”, our real­tor at that time said “is to have it look as empty as you can. Lots of empty sur­faces. Let the buyer imag­ine them­selves in your space.” Well, we are far from empty, but it is a lot tidier. My office is the only area that is still full of clut­ter, and even there I’ve cut it back to just the desks. I’ll get it down to desk level, but that will take a few more days. Most of this was achieved through fill­ing boxes with what I could not throw out and tak­ing those boxes to our stor­age room in Lynn, MA. If Pam said our place felt like a Hotel room after Socrates was gone, it cer­tainly feels a lot more like one now.

Pam also did a bit of land­scap­ing in our back yard. I use the term back yard loosely; the tiny postage stamp of a back area we have behind our town­house is roughly a 12 by 20 foot plot with a dog­wood tree (hurt badly a few years ago from an ice storm but recov­er­ing slowly), aza­lea and lilac bushes on one side, and a few tulips (and later in the fall, wild chrysan­the­mums) on the other, with some stone and weeds in between. So, Pam took down what had to be the ugli­est plas­tic shelv­ing I’ve ever seen that we had up for a year or two for our house­plants to dur­ing the sum­mer and planted 9 box­wood bushes at the back. We set up a bright red fold­ing table and match­ing chairs we got from IKEA back in the Meso­zoic and it almost looks OK. At any rate the scene no longer looks like an empty lot.

All this means that no mat­ter what, we are pulling up anchor and mov­ing on. I have this feel­ing in my gut that I haven’t had in a long time, the same as I felt when I was ready to leave Rochester, NY at the end of my grad­u­ate school stud­ies there: Impa­tience, like itch­ing pow­der in my head. I just want the whole thing to be done, but there are many i’s to dot and t’s to cross. We have to try and take care of all the details because we are not just mov­ing across town, or even to Prov­i­dence or Con­necti­cut. We’re leav­ing the whole damned country.

Did I say damned? Oh yes, when Anne Coul­ter is on the cover of this week’s Time Mag­a­zine, with a puff piece inter­view inside about how she ‘blushes’ and rants on about how she’s glad that lib­er­als hate her because we are so evil, etc. Damned is what the coun­try is, and they can have Ms. Coul­ter and the sick bile that she vom­its into the cul­ture all they want.

Post-Flea Thoughts

My friend Marty at the MIT Flea
Orig­i­nally uploaded by andyi.

We got up early on Sun­day; about 6 AM. We had packed our VW Bee­tle to the roof the night before. Pam got on line with­out me (there wasn’t enough room for a pas­sen­ger) in the long line of cars and trucks in the park­ing light as the sun began to rise. We got our usual spot, on the sec­ond floor of the park­ing garage, and Pam did most of the arrang­ing of our ‘mer­chan­dise’. At 8:00 the mar­ket opened to the buy­ers. For awhile I was wor­ried that we wouldn’t be able to sell our bulki­est items (a printer stand, 2 mon­i­tors, and the beige G3 Pow­erPC). For­tu­nately, we found new homes for all of them. My friend Andy got the printer stand, and a fel­low from the Cape got the G3. The only things left over at the end of the day (or rather, 2 PM), were a lot of books, LPS, soft­ware CDs and some music CDs.

What else did I see at the flea?
Let’s see:

• Two Tesla Coils
• The Enigma Guy, there again
• Tons of old CRT Mon­i­tors, but not a sin­gle small LCD Mon­i­tor, which we are in the mar­ket for (more about that later)
• Sev­eral friends
• USB cables, old Macs, old PCs, old lap­tops, tons of old desk­top PCs
• Old radio equip­ment, cam­eras, clocks, circuitry
• Tons of the geeki­est peo­ple you’ve ever seen. Well I should talk.

In fact I will geek out (warn­ing, if this sort of thing turns your stom­ach, skip to the last paragraph):

Since the Mac Mini (which replaced the old G3) now con­trols the house­hold lights (and poten­tially the ther­mo­stat, if I wanted to start mess­ing with that at this late date), and is now monitor-less (or as they say head­less) because we sold the big, heavy, black mon­i­tor we got to set it up, I took some of the pro­ceeds from our sales and got a small, light, and rel­a­tively cheap 15″ LCD mon­i­tor for it. It works per­fectly and mir­rors the aes­thetic and scale of the Mini; The whole setup is ele­gant and unob­tru­sive. I think it’s a per­fect exam­ple of a what a home server will be (although I doubt it will be as pretty — it will more likely be some­thing that peo­ple put in the base­ment on the wall next to their cir­cuit break­ers and alarm sys­tem mas­ter unit.)

After we move I’m going to task the Mini with some other duties: per­haps cap­tur­ing audio from the Inter­net on a sched­ule, or with the RadioShark, a USB-based ter­res­trial radio tuner, grab­bing some local CBC pro­gram­ming to lis­ten to either later over the home stereo or on my iPod. I’m also inter­ested in get­ting the web server run­ning so that it can inter­act with the other tasks. Per­haps I could have access to that media via the web server so that I can lis­ten to radio that I’ve cap­tured while away from home! I cer­tainly want to be able to con­trol the lights from the web server (as I did before with the pre­vi­ous setup), but first I’ll have to find out a way for the UNIX part of the Mac OS run­ning the Apache web server to talk to the off-the-shelf appli­ca­tions (like the X10 con­trol soft­ware, Xten­sion), which is usu­ally done with Apple­script. Two worlds that don’t talk to each other much, yet.

OK, OK. I’ve got­ten all of that out of my sys­tem. Now we have to clean up the house because it’s now on the mar­ket. That means clean­ing up the piles of papers and other debris on my office floor and desk. I’m about halfway there, but we have the first prospec­tive buy­ers tromp­ing though tomor­row! Can you say: Hide-it-stow-it-put-it-out-of-sight!!!!

Intermezzo

Inter­mezzo
Orig­i­nally uploaded by selva.
Just a lit­tle interlude.

One of the most inter­est­ing pho­tos on Flickr. Also, it’s one of the pho­tos found with an inter­est­ing new algo­rithm that looks for pho­tos with a cer­tain amount of user activ­ity around them (i.e. a lot of users look at, rec­om­mend, blog, or com­ment on a photo). I think it would make a fun postcard.