While this story dates back to February, I only just discovered it while reviewing some old articles on AlterNet.

EXCERPT: “…just 4 days after he insulted Fox News by insisting that they support the troops and give them more coverage, a number of stations owned by Fox decided against renewing his show for another year. It was a rather heavy-handed punishment even Sylvia Brown didn’t see coming, but was done to send a clear message.”

Send one of your own to Fox here.  And watch the video of Montel here.

Tim Minchin’s stunning performance of his beat poem ‘Storm’, eloquently and wittily honouring reason, science and life appreciation and debunking homeopathy, psychics, alternative medicine, religion etc.

MAN SHOOTS MOVIEGOER WHO TALKED TOO MUCH
By Barbara Boyer, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

A South Philadelphia man enraged because a father and son were talking during a Christmas showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took care of the situation when he pulled a .380-caliber gun and shot the father, police said. James Joseph Cialella Jr., 29, of the 1900 block of Hollywood Street is charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.

“It’s truly frightening when you see something like this evolve into such violence,” said police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore.

Police were called to the Riverview Theatre in the 1400 block of Columbus Boulevard about 9:30 p.m. where the gunshot victim, a Philadelphia man who was not identified, told police a man sitting near him told his family to be quiet and threw popcorn at his son.

After exchanging words, Vanore said Cialella allegedly got out of his seat to confront the family when the father got up to protect them. That’s when the victim was shot once in the left arm, sending others in the theatre running to safety.

Cialella then sat down to watch the movie. Police arrived a short time later and arrested Cialella and confiscated his weapon, Vanore said.

All the best to friends and family of the Factory.It’s been about two months since I’ve had a moment to get some new Annamae clips online, so here they are!

10/26/08 – MEETING HER COUSIN PRESSLEY

HALLOWEEN – FIRST TRICK OR TREAT

12/10/08 – TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR

12/14/08 – BOSTON POPS CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR AT SYMPHONY HALL

12/14/08 – FIRST SNOW OF THE SEASON… AND A LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE

12/21/08 - DRY ICE

12/21/08 – BUILDING A SNOWMAN WITH MOMMY

CHRISTMAS EVE

CHRISTMAS MORNING
…WILL BE UPLOADED TOMORROW.

I am nothing if not a huge fan of adaptation. Lifestyle-modifying equipment is what makes life with a disability possible. But at some point, you’ve just got to say to yourself, “Maybe I should move somewhere else”. Really.

Reposted from AlterNet

Religion — at least on the face of things — is the primary source of violent conflict in the world today. It is also the point of division in much of the world’s politics. Obviously, there have been conflicts over ideology, class, race, between tribes and nations, for territory, property and plunder. However, at the moment, religion leads the pack. At least as a way to rally the troops. It is, therefore, important to understand what religion is and why it is so vital.

As a rough, utilitarian generalization, there are four classes of religion: nontheistic, deism, polytheism and monotheism.

Nontheistic religions include some forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, animism, Wicca and the like. They have ethical systems, support social and family networks, have spiritual practices, but do not claim, for the most part, divine revelations — instructions from external entities who watch to see if they are carried out.

Classical deism believes in God, the Button Pusher, aka, the First Cause. He pushed the universe’s “Go” button, then walked off, never to be heard from again. Nowadays, it is common to hear things like “God is Energy,” or the Universe, or Love, or That Which Quarks Come From (heard that one last night, with great conviction and certainty). Such gods are essentially meaningless, at least in the moral and political sense. They do not, and in most cases cannot, dictate their memoirs, instructions and judgments to people. Whatever their concerns might be, they can go on their merry way without us.

Polytheism was the dominant religious form until the invention of monotheism with conversion, proselytizing and forced conversion. Although certain forms of nontheistic religions blend over into polytheism, and elements of polytheism can be found in some monotheistic sects, the last, remaining, significant polytheistic religion is Hinduism. Although it’s different theologically, the political nature of Hinduism is similar to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the big three in monotheism.

The monotheistic religions claim there is one God. He has revealed himself to prophets, who spoke his words to various other people who wrote them down, perfectly, and that is the ultimate guide to how we should live our lives. This a God who created us, cares about us, watches, communicates, interferes, cares, judges, rewards and punishes.

Therefore, to understand these religions, we have to ask about God. We are speaking primarily of a meaningful, monotheistic, beneficent God. One who is aware of and cares about human beings, transmits messages to us, is capable of interfering with human existence and does so. There are three basic positions from which to view God: Belief (the Missionary Position), Agnosticism (a No-Position Position), Atheism (Downward-Facing Dog). Each position forces certain questions and does not permit others.

Belief

If we start with belief, this is the root question: Why won’t God make himself clear?

I’m a writer. If I had divine powers, believe me, I would get it right the first time and never need a rewrite. So why is there an Old Testament and then a New? Why is there the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Vedas, Guru Granth Sahib, Zhuan Falun, the Avesta, the Tattvartha Sutra? As a writer, I worship clarity. If I need someone else to explain what I’ve written, I consider that a failure of the first order. God should surely do better. So why do the sacred texts of all religions always require someone to explain what they mean?

It is possible — indeed, quite logical — to say: “God is perfect, God gets it right every time. But, after all, he’s talking to people, and you know how they screw things up. How often have you ordered a double cheeseburger with onions rings and ended up with fries? Human error, pilot error, mistakes happen.” Actually, that’s a pretty good solution. If everyone said, “Yeah, we know God did his best, but look at what he had to work with, so my bible is just sort of an approximation, and yours must be, too, so let’s not fight over it,” then this would be an academic discussion, not worth writing or reading.

But they don’t. They all say, “This is it. The revealed truth. The one and only. You can kill me, and I won’t give that up. If you want to fight about it, I’ll kill you.” OK, not all of them. But enough to make this conversation a matter of life and death. Is there a way to pick the right truth? To determine which truth is The Truth? Each tradition has produced millions of words that prove that theirs is the one that came direct from God and got it right. Such arguments are very convincing to people who already believe what’s being argued for.

But imagine a panel of judges, made up of a Protestant, a Catholic, a Mormon and a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh and a Buddhist, too. Could anyone make a presentation of his or her Truth as the One and Only Truth that could convince them all? Or even get a majority of such a court? Even within religions — everyone swearing by the same text — there are disagreements, divisions and schisms. These, too — Protestant versus Catholic, Shiite versus Sunni — are volatile enough to lead to violence.

Believers like to argue that the word of God is absolute and unchanging. But in practice, that’s absolutely not true. The rule for marriage in the Old Testament — based on examples and God’s occasional command — seems to have been, “One man and however many women suit the situation.” The New Testament did not explicitly change that. Both St. Augustine and Martin Luther said there was no scriptural prohibition on polygamy. Yet today things have somehow morphed so that the Catholic Church and most Protestants will insist that it is God’s law that “marriage is a union between one man and one woman.” Similar changes have taken place over slavery, divorce and the death penalty for adultery. God’s law, as expressed by religious leaders, evolves quite as much as man’s law.

If we start from the Missionary Position — the position of faith — that God exists, these are the kinds of question we need to ask to go forward: Why doesn’t God make himself clear? Why does God give different rules to different people? Why is it that the culture someone is born into is, far and away, the most important determinant of which revelation they believe in? Is there a way to sort out The Truth? If a new prophet arrives tomorrow — and they do arrive with great regularity — how can we say that the new revelation is not the true revelation?

Atheism

Here are the questions we have to ask from the atheist position: If God doesn’t exist, why do so many people believe in him? If God doesn’t exist, why are spiritual practices and religion among the human universals, things that exist in all human societies? The exception is the Communist experiment, with state-ordered atheism. That can be regarded as an attempt to alter humanity’s basic inclinations, like the various attempts to ban alcohol. It achieved some success, but at great expense. It required violence, a minority always resisted and the practice bounced back, in varying degrees, as soon as the ban was lifted.

Here’s the great paradox, and the most interesting question: If God doesn’t exist, belief is delusional. Delusion is, by definition, dysfunctional. Clearsighted atheists should routinely be happier, healthier and wealthier than delusional believers. But they’re not. According to most surveys, they don’t even have a better sex life.

There have been atheist societies. During the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe, China and the Communist countries of Southeast Asia, almost a third of the world, were officially atheist. They did not generally out perform the United States, the countries of Western Europe, and many of the Asian countries allied with the West, all of which had freedom of religion, and some of which had state-supported churches as well. If atheism is the The Truth, why isn’t accepting the truth more helpful? If belief is a Lie, why isn’t the lie more harmful?

Agnosticism

Agnosticism sounds very reasonable, rational and even scientific. The social sciences — psychology, sociology, anthropology and the rest — officially take the stance that the existence or nonexistence of God, the process of revelation, and what is known through revelation, are all outside the realm of science. But how can you study the psychology of religious belief in a meaningful way unless you first determine if people are believing in something real or false? It’s the difference between someone trying to climb a tree that’s there and trying to climb one that’s imaginary.

If the word of God is true, it makes a certain amount of sense that people will kill and die for it. Understanding that is pretty straightforward. But if people are killing and dying for a delusion, then there’s some explaining to do. That’s actually an exciting question. Because it raises fundamental questions about human psychology.

Religion has an important place in all societies. Even in those where it is proscribed. If the priests are, in fact, acting out the commands of God, they’re like engineers or generals, trying to get certain things done, based on the data that’s available to them. If religions are made up, with most of their creators and practitioners sincerely unaware that they are creating institutions based on fictions, that’s a very different type of phenomenon.

The economics of religion are quite mundane if God exists. It makes sense that billions of dollars are collected in his name. But if he is a widely held fantasy, then the resources devoted to the God business are a great and fascinating mystery.

If people are making up the God stories, it’s not hard to figure out why they’re different. But if God exists and they’re actually coming from him, we have to wonder why he doesn’t make himself clear. Or — more likely — assume that it’s not his problem, since he’s perfect. and then we would have to ask what’s the matter with his prophets that they keep screwing it up during transmission, and figure out why that is. After that, we must wonder why people insist that the revealed word is accurate.

Agnosticism does not permit us to take either approach. Agnosticism can’t ask the fundamental questions about God. Or man. It leads to triviality or incoherence.

The Way Forward

If we start as agnostics, we can’t ask the fundamental questions. We can look at what people do, but not understand why they do it. We can look at the forms that religion and spiritual practices take, but we can’t understand why spiritual practices and religion exist, in all their various forms. We can find out a lot about the subject, but not really understand it or create a coherent theory that explains it.

If we start with belief, we’re stuck. We can’t go up to God, drag him into the witness box, make him swear on himself, then cross examine him about what he’s really like, what he really wants from us, and why he keeps sending different messages. We can’t get up close and examine him. We can’t set up scientific tests to measure and evaluate him.

All we have are “revealed truths.” But we have too many. There’s no way to sort out which is “truthier,” short of killing each other in the hopes that only one side will be left standing. We’ve been doing that for over a thousand years, without making any progress. We are at the same impasse today that we were at when Richard the Lionheart went off to Jerusalem to fight Saladin. In the effort to understand religion and faith, belief — even if it’s correct — is a dead end. If we start from there, we end there. There is no way forward.

If we start with atheism, we are asking questions about ourselves. That’s something we can do. We can examine ourselves, test ourselves, and see if our theories — hypotheses — about ourselves will stand up to examination. We can insist on consistency and coherence. If our ideas don’t work, we can change them, and change them again, until they do. We can even go in front of panel of judges of all the different faiths and say, “if you’re willing to pretend for a moment that God doesn’t exist, would this theory make sense?” If we can’t succeed, and there is no way to explain what’s going on from a position of unbelief, then we have to eventually give it up and go at it from a different perspective.

Even if you, personally are a believer or an agnostic, and you are in search of some way to advance our understanding of faith and religion, to get past the impasse we’ve been at for millennia, there’s only one way forward. There are three doors. One leads us to confusion. One goes to a dead end. Paradoxically, there’s only one that offers the possibility of increasing our understanding of God, the one through unbelief.

Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net. © 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

So completely appropriate, I just had to present it in it’s entirety.  The original is here.

‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE INCREDULOUS
Monday, Dec. 15, 2008

I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:

Money’s scarce
Times are hard
Here’s your f******
Xmas card

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don’t think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn’t Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

The late Art Buchwald made himself additionally famous by reprinting a spoof Thanksgiving column that ran unchanged for many decades after its first appearance in the Herald Tribune, setting a high threshold of reader tolerance. My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor’s office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined “themes” have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader’s birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events. Originally Christian, this devotional set-aside can now be joined by any other sectarian group with a plausible claim—Hanukkah or Kwanzaa—to a holy day that occurs near enough to the pagan winter solstice.

I have just flung aside my copy of the Weekly Standard, a magazine with a generally hardheaded and humorous approach to matters. It contains two seasonal articles that would probably not have made print were it not for the proximity to the said solstice. (To be fair, the same can be said of the article that you are reading, but I claim exemption under the terms of the “to hell with all that” amendment.) In the first example, the gifted Joseph Bottum complains that it’s hard to write a new Christmas carol lyric because—well, because the existing model is composed of songs of such illiterate banality! But he presses on heroically with an attempt to compose a fresh carol, while fully admitting that the recently invented tradition of such songs creates an almost oppressive weight of kitsch. (He also complains of the doggerel-like mystifications of carols like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” while not daring to state the case at its most damning—as in ridiculous and nasty lines such as “This holy tide of Christmas all others doth deface.” Believe me when I say that I know my stuff here and have paid my dues.)

The second essay is a review by Mark Tooley of a terrible-sounding book called Jesus for President by a terrible-sounding person named Shane Claiborne. You know the sort of thing very well: Jesus would have been a “human shield” in Baghdad in 2003; the United States is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire. It’s the usual “liberation theology” drivel, whereby everybody except the inhabitants of the democratic West is supposed to abjure violence. (To the question of whether the plan to kill Hitler was moral or not, Claiborne cites no less an authority than the Führer’s own secretary to claim that “all hopes for peace were lost” after the 1944 attempt. That, as should be obvious even to the most flickering intelligence, was chiefly because the attempt was a failure. What an idiot!)

But why is a magazine of the intelligentsia doing this to us, and to itself, this month? Tooley wants to prove that the legendary Jesus would have been more judicious and perhaps more neoconservative on these points. How can he hope to know that, or even to guess at it? Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?

Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished. (The same obviously would apply to Muslims who couldn’t bear the shock of finding that their prophet was fictional or fraudulent.) But I invite you to consider things more lucidly. If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating. It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth. If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private? Either that or give up the tax-exempt status that must remind them so painfully of the things of this material world.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.  Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Inspired by Annemarie’s recent MySpace post about this past weekend’s events, I felt I should share…

After several weeks of fruitless searching, we did finally book a Santa Claus for Annamae’s first-ever Christmas Party at a price we considered fair.  Am and I both choked up when his arrival produced howls of excitement from the dozen or so children present.  Annamae, as usual, was calm, reserved and not the least bit intimidated.  Santa spent a good hour talking to the kids — among them Annamae’s baby cousin, Jack.  Unfortunately, Kris Kringle finished off with some nonsense about “Holy Days” and ”Baby Jesus”, as if they had something to do with Christmas.  Whatever.  Next year I’ll remember to pre-brief that nonsense out of the script.  Four or five pizzas were consumed, and the whole thing wrapped up in under two hours.  Clockwork.

Later that evening, the grown-ups’ party kicked in with a massive cold-cut platter and copious amounts of spiked egg nog.   Karaoke inevitably resulted.  Great fun was had by all.

The next day was the topper for me.  We took Annamae to the Boston Pops’ Christmas matinee.  I became very emotional about daddyhood during the holidays, and dissolved into man-tears during the sing-a-long.  The baby appeared not to notice that the reason I was hugging her so tight was because I was burying my wet face into her jacket.  Magical.  Memorable.  And just the right amount of Melodrama.

And she got to meet Santa Claus… again.  That’s three times now.  I think she’s getting jaded.

Some things should just last forever.