Rational Dreaming
In all the Mega Millions lottery fervor last week, I got as far as Googling the nearest lottery ticket outlet, and no further. I did see a number of silly articles purporting to give advice on how to play the lottery — about 95% of it being nonsense. The only advice worth following is (a) not to spend money you can’t afford to lose (because you are going to lose it) and (b) to pick plenty of numbers above 31, not because it gives you a better chance of winning, but because if you do win, you are less likely to have to share the jackpot with someone else (many people use birthdays when choosing their numbers).
Now the jackpot is won and all the fuss is dying down, there’s a story of a rather unfortunate Mega Millions lottery player who was struck by lightning the very same day he bought his tickets:
This wasn’t the one-in-a-million strike a Kansas lotto player was hoping for.
A Wichita man was hit by lightning on Thursday night just hours after buying three tickets in the record-setting $656 Mega Millions lottery, drawn on Friday.
…
The wannabe mega-millionaire had toted his ham radio into his backyard to check for storm activity at around 9:30 p.m. when a towering bolt of lightning slammed into the ground nearby.
“It threw me to the ground quivering,” Bill Isles, 48, told Reuters. “It kind of scrambled my brain and gave me an irregular heartbeat.
Ouch!
The Reason Rally was held in Washington DC this past weekend, and by all accounts (from the people who were actually there), a good time was had by all.
There wasn’t exactly an avalanche of press about the event, but there was some, and it was enough to send the usual suspects scurrying to scoff about the numbers and fret about the incivility of some of the speakers and signs seen there. Kelly Boggs of the Baptist Press was one such commentator:
The crowd was estimated by the Religion News Service to be between 8,000 to 10,000. USA Today indicated the number of those gathered was closer to 20,000.
If this was “the largest secular event in world history,” the movement, it would seem, has some work to do.
A rather gentle scoff, no doubt, but the message is clear–not terribly impressive numbers for a movement taking the national stage.
You know what they say about stopped clocks…
Pat Robertson came out today in the New York Times as an advocate of the decriminalization of marijuana:
Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.
“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
(Note: Robertson’s own comments would imply that he supports full legalization, but his spokesman later said that he’s only backing decriminalization.)
Mr. Robertson, 81, said that there had been no single event or moment that caused him to embrace legalization. Instead, his conviction that the nation “has gone overboard on this concept of being tough on crime” built up over time, he added.
“It’s completely out of control,” Mr. Robertson said. “Prisons are being overcrowded with juvenile offenders having to do with drugs. And the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get 10 years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all.”
He’s right, of course, I just wish he’d gotten there thirty years sooner. The whole “tough on crime” stance that has been a mainstay of conservative American politics since the 1980s has certainly helped to make America somewhat safer in the short term, but it’s come at a terrible price, with millions of non-violent citizens thrown on the scrap heap that this the American prison system.
I was listening to Catholic radio while running a couple of errands this afternoon, and they were in the middle of discussing “pro-life” issues (when are they not?). This time they were talking about euthanasia and the supposed slippery slope toward infanticide and genocide.
Leaving aside the fact that genocide is more widely considered to be a great evil today than at any time in world history—even as euthanasia is gaining popularity as a valid end-of-life choice—they went on to assert that shedding more light on the issue would change people’s attitudes toward it in a very substantial way.
As an example, they talked about a PBS Frontline documentary on euthanasia that followed a dying man to Switzerland where, in the presence of his family, he ended his own life. They said that it was very disturbing to watch and clearly, most people would likely agree with them. Very few people are comfortable watching other people under any circumstances. They also agreed that it was, on balance, a good thing that Frontline aired the documentary, arguing that the more people are exposed to the visceral spectacle of euthanasia–watching someone take their own life–the more they would oppose it. I suspect they might be right.
But, of course, that’s only half the story. If you want to start showing difficult-to-watch scenes of people taking their own lives, then you also need to show just how intolerable the lives of many of those terminally ill people really are. For every video of someone taking their own life, there would be one, two, maybe more, of someone driven to despair by the agonizing pain and deeply embarrassing indignities their illness causes them.
We are often spared such scenes of suffering because doctors will often prescribe doses of medication they know are large enough to kill the patient. It is the only way to free them of the pain.
So, by all means, let’s see more examples of voluntary euthanasia, but let’s also see more examples of why the option to choose the time and place of one’s own death can be a gift worth its weight in gold for those who are unfortunate to be dying from a long and painful illness.
Then I suspect, as with most things these days, popular opinion would not be on the side of the Catholic Church.
So, I was driving home this afternoon, listening to the umpteenth religious radio commentary on sex and contraception in the last few days –this time it was Chuck Colson wailing about “vending machine abortions“–when the thought suddenly struck me about just how utterly futile the religious right’s crusade against extramarital and recreational sex is.
I mean, throughout history, before easy contraception was available it was always an uphill battle to fight against the most basic natural instinct there is, even during the time when people almost routinely died as a consequence of having sex–either through childbirth or by contracting an STD.
Today, now that consensual casual sex is a safe, widespread, and almost consequence free (when there’s no cheating or deception involved), they have absolutely no hope of stuffing the genie back into the bottle.
But when it’s pointed out to conservative Catholics that the overwhelming majority of sexually active Catholic women of child-bearing age have used birth control, the only thing their priests and bishops can say is that they will have to do a better job of explaining the evils (yes, to them it’s an intrinsic evil) of artificial contraception.
Good luck with that, is all I can say.
And survey after survey of young people shows that even many couples who claim to be regular Church-going Christians are sleeping together these days and often cohabiting before they decide to tie the knot, not least because they don’t want to risk major disappointment on their wedding night.
Hey folks — so did you miss me…?
Nope?
Well, never mind, I forgive you 
One thing I found out last year when I was trying to blog about something new every day, is that it is extremely hard to do. I doff my hat to those who can do it, and have done it for years. It’s not as though I have nothing to talk about either. I have plenty of ideas for what to write about, but (for me) it’s a lot of work to convert the random thoughts swirling around in my head into coherent prose that people might be interested in reading.
To make matters worse, of course, I have an issue with brevity–or rather, the lack of it. The secret of most bloggers who post several times a day is that the majority of their posts are typically just a couple of sentences long. I find that hard to do.
Hmm… Perhaps I should practice more on Twitter…
Anyway, we’ll see how things go this time. I have visitors coming to stay in a couple of days, so my postings might be a little bit random over the next couple of weeks, but looking back at the stats, I am encouraged by the bump in viewership of the blog when I was posting regularly (even after a relatively short time) and I would like to see what happens if I can succeed with a more sustained effort.
Oh, and I’m thinking of changing the name of the blog. I’ve never been particularly fond of the name Rational Dreaming. It sounds like something akin to lucid dreaming, or some kind of woo-like remote viewing, but it’s tough to think of a great name for a blog and be lucky enough that nobody is sitting on the domain name on the off-chance that they might actually get round to using it some day. Anyway, I finally found one I like, though since I haven’t bought the domain yet, I will refrain from announcing it just yet. I’ve just paid for another year of rationaldreaming.com, so there isn’t any particular hurry.
I don’t know about you, but this bizarre “Cross Spangled Banner” version of the US National Flag seems a little creepy to me. Perhaps it’s because the only place where you ever see serried ranks of crosses like that are graveyards — especially military cemeteries like the World War One cemeteries in northern France.
There isn’t anything else of note on this one-page web site except for a new variation on the incredibly annoying use of “for a minimum donation” commonly used by conservative Christian web sites with something to sell (if there is a minimum, then it’s not a donation).
This time it’s “Please allow $5 S&H” if you order a flag. Given that you can’t order the flag without the $5 shipping and handling fee being added to your bill, it’s not a question of “allowing” anything, you are required to pay it.
Andy Hamilton, one of the geniuses behind the brilliant BBC sitcom Outnumbered, has a new documentary out about the Devil himself, called Andy Hamilton’s Search for Satan. Those of you who live in the UK (or, ahem, if you have access to a UK proxy server) will be able to watch it on iPlayer for the rest of the week, but someone has conveniently (and rather naughtily) posted the entire thing on YouTube for your viewing pleasure:
[Update: not surprisingly, the video was removed from YouTube. It's not that difficult to find, though, if you really want to see it.]
It’s a very entertaining hour, chronicling the evolution of Satan over the centuries from his mythological beginnings in pre-Christian religions to how he is depicted in the popular culture of today. Especially funny are the clips of three medieval monks discussing how best to cobble together all the little bits of Biblical and extra-Biblical Satanic lore into a cohesive and passably convincing whole. Not surprisingly, that is not an easy undertaking.
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