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.