Holy Nova!

Either a supernova  or a mammogram.

So the Good Star Betelgeuse might be on the way out. One thing is guaranteed, humans being what they are (gullible, imaginative, and self-centered in the extreme): if Betelgeuse goes ahead and dies on us in a fiery explosion, a lot of people aren't going to be content to admire it for the awesome spectacle it is, but will impute all sorts of significance to it. It will be a sign of something: impending doom, God's Moral Flashlight, anything but the collapse of a massive star that has about run out of fuel and can no longer overcome the force of gravity. Nope: people already believe that their lives are disrupted whenever a planet looks like it's going backwards but isn't. They're not going to let a supernova go by without wringing as much meaning out of it as they can.

For instance, there's quite a lot of speculation that the Star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to Jesus's bed of straw was actually a supernova. Now, right off the bat you have that problem with witness reliability: Matthew was the only Gospel writer who even mentioned a big star, which you'd think one of the others would have noticed. Especially if it was moving around the sky and pulling up short and parking right over the baby.

But evidently there was a doozy of a nova on February 23, 4BC. And some scholars, based on various things known about King Herod, put Jesus's birth at anywhere between two and six years before his birthdate, which is a good trick all by itself, but maybe not a problem for the divine.

We can't take everything the Gospel writers said to the bank. They don't agree with each other. Everyone has the blessed event taking place in Bethlehem, which concords with an earlier prophesy, but some have Joseph and Mary and the babe hieing off to Egypt and others have them right back in Nazareth, having only popped off to Bethlehem for the census.

(Think about that for a moment. We get all upset when someone bangs on our door for the census, or we have to fill out and mail a form. Imagine how a modern person would feel about making a road trip for the purpose. On a donkey. Pregnant.)

Anyway if it was that particular nova, once again, we're dealing with something that actually took place 21,000 years earlier, so if it really was announcing the birth of the Savior of Mankind, that was some slick planning. The only thing we know of that was happening around then was that people were moving to the vicinity of Canberra, Australia. And generally speaking it isn't mankind that needs to be saved when people start occupying territory, it's the animals that already lived there. Nevertheless, the whole coincidence--star blowing up, baby born 21,000 years later, mankind redeemed--is considered by some to be a mystical slam dunk, because God.

Now if good old Betelgeuse were to collapse this year, it really would've happened in about the time Peter the First of Portugal was born. Peter was in love with his wife's maid and his own father hired men to decapitate her; he had her dug up again, but nobody is reported to have sailed into the sky or anything, and he had to settle for matching tombs so that at least they could be together at the Last Judgment.

To be fair, lots of supernovas haven't panned out, Messiah-wise.

But let's stick to the convention that the significant event is the arrival of the light from the explosion to our planet. In that case, if Betelgeuse goes off now, we should start looking around for a new savior, and it's none too soon. I would've put my money on Greta Thunberg, but I guess it's too late.

A Matter Of Faith

Harold Sidney Brewster

What with all the religion weighing down my family tree, it's a wonder none of it slid onto me. I've got one ancestor that felt so strongly about his faith that he talked all those people into sailing on the Mayflower. I've got a great-grandfather so pious that he sent Mark Twain over the edge when they did a lecture tour together. My grandfather was an Episcopalian minister. My dad quoted the King James Bible all the time, although I'm not sure he meant anything by it. But here I am, bereft of faith.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't rebelling. By the time I was introduced to religion, it was a very inoffensive sort, just like my mom, who was responsible for the introduction. There's nothing to push against with Lutherans. It's just a bunch of nice people and weak coffee and singing in four-part harmony. No brimstone, no damnation. The word on God was that he was love. I expect I bought most of the stories at first. The whole manger scene was easy to imagine, and things didn't get real sketchy until later, but I suppose I bought that too, even though it involved coming back from the dead and floating into the sky, and other things generally accepted to be unlikely in the normal course of events.

No, the first time I questioned anything, it was that line in Mark: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." Wait--what? How could that possibly be fair? Are they just making this all up? (This was an intriguing possibility that had not yet occurred to me.) I guess I was willing to go along with the believing part. That seemed like a sound requirement if you're planning to join a club, and of course there are going to be rules: don't swear, remember the Sabbath, no girlz allowed. But throwing in that other makes no sense at all. Why not "he that believeth and performs the chicken dance at midnight on the second Sunday in June shall be saved?"

There are so many ways to go wrong,  once you start larding on these random rituals. So many ways to separate your fortunate self from the less-than-true believers. Take baptism: do you go full dunk or delicate sprinkle? Do you need to douse your infant before she has a chance to go to hell, or can it wait?

I guess there was some sort of Baptism before John the Baptist but he's the one with the marketing. Every good cult needs a gimmick. The word comes from the Greek and means something like "dip" and the general idea is you're getting washed clean and starting over, but I'd be careful where this is coming from. Dipping and washing is one thing, but at least one derivation of baptize gives its primary meaning as "plunge," with helpful examples including plunging a sword into a throat or an embryo, which leads me to believe the simple sprinkle will not suffice, and a sacrifice might be in order. Which, traditionally, is not outside the bounds of religion.

I personally have an aversion to being dipped, plunged, or sprinkled with water that is not coming hot out of a showerhead, and for this and other reasons, I am taking my chances with the heathens. Maybe I'm just not much of a joiner. I think if Jesus had had a different cousin named John the Chicken Dancer, I'd have stuck around a little longer, though.

The Answer, My Friend

We just had a big wind. It was something that got ginned up in the South Pacific and then spun through the Aleutian Islands, and then Alaska flang it back down to us, and it was something. The house groaned and the wind roared like they were in a sumo match, outcome unknown. I tend to enjoy these events, up to a point. It's exhilarating, until you realize that those are all your next breaths out there, and they might be whipping by too fast to catch them.

They say that those sustained strong winds will drive a person crazy. Technically, this is not true. What really happens is that all the non-crazy people are inside behind thermal windows with a toddy, and that makes the crazy people easier to spot. But it is true that there is something deeply exciting and spooky about wind. Because you can't see it. All you can see is garbage cans flying past your house and trees bending over and hats shooting off people's heads like popped corks, and any one of those sights would freak you out if you weren't already familiar with the concept of wind. It's like an invisible hand is pushing everything around.

Religions have been founded on less. I mean, look: here we all are, inexplicably, and there's all this stuff, and it's moving around, and we're being blown about in ways we can't understand, and most of us just feel better if we have someone to pin it on. Preferably, someone that is a lot like us in familiar ways, only much, much bigger. I'm as fascinated by what I see around me as anyone else, but I personally get no juice out of that particular notion. It's an unsatisfying explanation. It just passes the buck.

Of the many traditions that postulate the existence of the way, way larger Beings pushing everything around, I'm most comfortable with the ancient Greeks'.  They at least observed that all kinds of shitty stuff happens to people who don't necessarily deserve it. So they figured the gods were just having themselves a fine time amongst themselves, and if someone gets his liver pecked out or gets swan feathers in her hoo-hoo, that wasn't really any concern of theirs. We're game pieces; we're collateral damage. In contrast, people who plant their flags on the idea of one single really, really large Being--one who is presumed to be affectionate and have our best interests at heart--those people get themselves all pretzeled up over their own misfortunes. We take everything so personally.

One of the times we had a huge windstorm, a 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree came down on the deck of our cabin. Then another came down precisely on top of the first. Then another. We had three gigantic trees stacked up right alongside the house and they only nicked a little flashing off the roof. This is the sort of thing people like to think of as a miracle. We weren't home at the time, but we take things so personally that even the preservation of our real estate holdings gets to count as miraculous. I call it dumb luck. Even if there were a really, really large Being in charge of aiming a falling tree, who's to say the effort was on our behalf? It could have been the grand comeuppance of a naughty chipmunk who was overdue for a smiting. It all depends on your viewpoint, and it pays to have more than one.

Now, if the wind ever blows the Cubbies into a World Series championship, that would be a miracle.

My Beliefs Can Kick Your Beliefs' Asses

A Colorado baker refused to sell a couple a wedding cake because doing so would violate his religious beliefs. The engine of commerce was chugging along right up to the frosting and sugar roses but as soon as he put the little figure of the two men in tuxedos on the top he felt he would be crossing a line that God had been very clear to him about. Why, you might as well ask him to drive the tour bus to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Elsewhere, the owners of a craft store chain kicked up a fuss over providing insurance to their employees if it meant some of them could get birth control, which violated their religious beliefs. If there was any chance their benefits package might result in a sperm not fulfilling its destiny, they would have no part in it. God had been very clear about his interest in human overpopulation. It would be crossing a line.

It would be like forcing me to sell bed linens to a Klan member, who might decide to make grand wizard duds out of them. Or sell whole cloth to a fundamentalist, who might decide to make divine instructions out of it. All of our precious individual souls are at stake, and we all expect to be indulged and accommodated, even if my blood sacrifice is of your sacred cow.

It would be one thing if everyone agreed on a god to listen to, but it's pretty clear that there is a whole pantheon of them out there, each with its own bizarre bailiwick--this one in charge of what you get to eat, that one in charge of who you get to kill. You spend enough time paying attention to everything that violates someone's religious beliefs, you realize you're in the company of schizophrenics. Everyone's hearing voices.

I always wondered if my eyes could roll back in my head so far they snapped off, but I gave them a good whirl the other day, and they don't. Some woman woke up recently to discover her husband was trying to suffocate her with a bag. Once in custody, he admitted he tried to kill her because he thought she was leaving him, and he didn't think he could live without her. "And it's against my religious beliefs to kill myself," he said.

That's enough. I have strongly held beliefs too. I believe war is a shitty way to make peace. I believe this planet has been rumpling its covers for billions of years and we should not take earthquakes personally. I believe we've managed to squander so many of our limited resources that we are on the verge of making the world fit only for insects and bacteria. If I just went ahead and said God sent me all that on a tablet, could I win a court case?

Embryonic Glory

Photo by Nina Harfman

My recent musings in which I implied that salamanders are the crown of Creation were not meant to state anything that wasn't already obvious. I mean, look at them. But it got me to thinking about a scientific maxim I learned in college: ontology recapitulates phylogeny. It's a dense phrase. It is, of course, designed to make people feel stupid, then defensive, then irritated at smartypants elites, then prone to making snide references to Obama and his "faculty lounge" as though educated people should be scorned, and before you know it they've voted in a bunch of scoundrels wholly devoted to getting themselves and their friends rich enough to buy out God. So probably the phrase should be retired.

Photo by Nina Harfman

But what it means is pretty cool. The idea is that in the course of developing from egg to embryo to fully-realized critter, we exhibit the stages of our own evolution. We start out sort of wormy, then begin to sprout the accoutrements of our species, reabsorbing our tails and fattening our heads and whatnot. Mom's a little uncomfortable in the second trimester when we go through the triceratops phase, but things smooth out. It's a very attractive notion. It was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel who drew a picture of the various embryonic stages, pointing out the early salamander. That's the hook, right there--who wouldn't want to claim a salamander in her heritage? I've noticed that most people who have looked into their own genealogy have been able to trace back to Charlemagne at some point. We like to think well of ourselves. This just ups the ante.

Trouble is, apparently it's not true. I am old enough to have learned it in school, but it's not true. I also remember looking at a world map in fifth grade and all of us kids pointed out what is perfectly obvious: it looks like the Americas had somehow split off from Europe and Africa. We got on our tiptoes and reached up to trace the map, our voices rising in excitement. The teacher smiled at us indulgently and shook her head and began talking about our delightful imaginations and segued right into something about Santa Claus that we also didn't want to know.

So she was wrong on two points, if you include Santa. But that's science for you. We don't always get things right, but eventually the weight of evidence is brought to bear, and minds are changed. Sometimes it takes a while, because scientists are human too, and they see what they want to see.

Photo by Nina Harfman

That's one of the differences between science and religion, at least the ones that purport to know something. It's hard to knock a good religious story off stride. Once we've got a good narrative going, we don't really want to examine it too closely. An Iroquois succumbing to deadly curiosity could march all the way around to the bottom of the world and back around to the top and approach the shaman and say, "you know? I checked, and the world really isn't balanced on the back of a turtle after all," and that will be the last sound you hear before the thunk of his severed head hitting the ground. For a lot of recorded history, curiosity killed a lot more than cats.

But I'm a curious soul, and I have to go where that leads me, rather than where I want it to. I'm really sorry I didn't get to spend a fetal week as a salamander, but that's life.

All the splendid portraits in this post were made by Nina Harfman over at Nature Remains. She's a great photographer with some sweet subject matter and she's pretty dang limber, too.

A Latter-Day Ain't

Most people entertain some kind of idea of what happens to them after they die. Some of them get pretty creative. My notion is that nothing happens at all. I'm here, and then I'm not. I might wish it otherwise, but not enough to make stuff up. This idea is not original to me, but it does worry some people, and some of them are praying for me. Although, to be fair, not all of them are praying because of my lack of imagination concerning the afterlife, but also some errant behavior I might be exhibiting while fully upright and viable. I don't really blame them, and I'm not averse to their efforts to intervene on my behalf. I think it's sweet. But I still think it's going to be lights out, don't-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-butt for me.

I'm perfectly willing to find out otherwise on the other side, though, and under those circumstances I do not expect to be penalized for my lack of faith. As unlikely as I consider the prospect of a Supreme Being who is keeping tabs on me, I believe it is even more unlikely that such a being would have the nanner-nanner sensibilities of a seventh-grader. Hey, I could be wrong, though, and if there is a hell I'll bet it's a lot like seventh grade.

What would really suck, on the other hand, is to be zipping along in the void after my demise and suddenly discover I'm a Mormon. Apparently that is a possibility. I'm not picking on Mormons, because they're welcome to their whole philosophy, and I'd feel the same way about being a retroactive Muslim or Congregationalist. But the Mormons are the only ones practicing Baptism By Proxy. This is the practice of locating dead people--they've got the whole genealogy database set up for that--and baptizing them as Mormons using a currently warm and viable Mormon who gets dunked on their behalf.

The reason for this, as I understand it, is that baptism is necessary to achieve exaltation, or eternal life as miniature gods and goddesses in our own right. According to some reports, there is a quorum of Mormons that must be reached before everyone goes for glory, and so there is a concerted effort to rope in as many people as possible, including people previously snubbed (see: evangelism in Africa) and people previously, uh, alive. According to other reports, there is no quota system as such, and it's just a nice thing to do on behalf of folks who don't have as much opportunity to sign up, now that they're dead and all.

Either way, count me out. I'm not a brave person, and if you try to convert me at the point of a gun--this is not unprecedented religious behavior, and is starting to seem more and more likely all the time--I'll tell you anything you want to hear, and right now.  But in general I'm not one to cover all the bases just in case additional information turns up later. I'd have to spend my life genuflecting, wearing special underwear, painting my face, sacrificing animals, chanting, burning incense, and maintaining a shrine, and frankly, I have a hard enough time keeping up with the laundry.

Besides, if you're a Mormon and have been sealed with your family, you have to spend eternity with them, and Thanksgiving is hard enough. If I must, I must, but I'll take my chances with my own relations, thank you, and not some random Mormon family that might not even play Scrabble.