Just one. Oblivion.
A God Too Old to Change, or Pope Sinks Hope
FIRST PRINTED JULY 1998
NOW THAT THE FUTURE is just around the corner, different groups are reacting in different ways—usually predictable ones.
The Catholic Church, for instance, ain’t going.
(Fair disclosure: as George Carlin once said, “I was born Irish Catholic; now I’m a human being.” I left the Church thirty-five years ago, following a year in the seminary. Those who enjoy sausage should not see it being made.)
On June 30, 1998, Pope John Paul II declared any deviation from Roman Catholicism’s “definitive truths” to be a violation of church law. John Paul did not name these truths, but his chief of doctrine quickly supplied specifics, which suggest the Pope has drastically extended the doctrine of papal infallibility.
This is a doctrine the Church has historically been most careful to limit, and for obvious reasons: it is hard to imagine a doctrine more offensive to other religious groups. It says: the differences between my sect and yours are not merely a matter of mistranslation, or accumulated copying errors over centuries, or God speaking differently to different cultures in different conditions. I’m right and you’re wrong: God told me so, personally—and not millennia ago, but just now.
Even someone who believes that must notice how arrogant it sounds. Hey Jack, if you’re infallible, how come you didn’t warn us about Brian Mulroney? So when I was in Catholic school, we were taught that if those of other faiths criticized papal infallibility, we should correct the misconception: the Pope was infallible only when he spoke “ex cathedra,” which he did solely in matters of faith and morals.
Problem is, the phrase “matters of faith and morals” means anything the Pontiff says it does. The wholesale butchery and rape of innocent Muslims by Christians practically next door to him over the past decade, for instance, is not a matter of faith or morals—or were there mass excommunications in Serbia I didn’t read about?
What then are the important faith-and-morals issues of the day, the points God chose to stress in his last conversation with the Pope, the things a Catholic now must believe if she is to call herself a Catholic?
God dislikes women: forget female priests, for all time. God finds women too repulsive to deal with directly. Nor is He comfortable with men, if they have recently been sexually intimate with a woman: forget married priests, too. The Church’s principal miracle, Transubstantiation, is reserved not merely to males, but to celibate males.
God dislikes gays: as with women, even celibacy isn’t enough to excuse a homosexual: forget gay priests. In fact, forget gays: they remind God of women.
God likes overpopulation: the miracle that can’t be taken away from women is actually a duty, which they must perform relentlessly: effective birth-control is prohibited, and procreation remains the only valid excuse for sexual pleasure. God cannot do arithmetic, so Catholics must multiply.
God hates singles: the fourth most powerful compulsion He hardwired into us (after the compulsions to eat, excrete and tell other people what to do) is forbidden outside matrimony. God feels sexual ignorance makes for a good marriage. Widow(er)s lose the right to a healthy sex life until they correct their defect.
God is a sadist: terminal patients in agony are forbidden to seek premature relief; He sent that agony deliberately and requires them to experience every pointless drop, or be damned.
God is a bigot: in a bizarre footnote which may stir more controversy here and in England than in America, Catholics are now specifically forbidden to believe in “the legitimacy of Anglican ordinations.” Rejecting the literal interpretation (the Pope just called the Archbishop of Canterbury a bastard) we are left with two possibilities: the Pope simply stated a tautology (Anglican clerics are not Catholic clerics) or he issued fighting words (Anglican clerics are not men of God at all).
God likes to fool us: Catholics are forbidden to doubt “the legitimacy of papal elections”—in which fallible mortals infallibly choose an infallible Pope. The copious historical evidence that the chain of Apostolic succession was broken more than once during the Middle Ages is just one of those tricks, like fossil evidence of evolution, that God sometimes uses to tempt evil people—the rational ones—into revealing themselves.
God isn’t perfect: Catholics are forbidden to doubt “the canonization of the saints.” What then of Saint Josaphat? Don’t bother looking him up: he isn’t in the roster any more. But he was for centuries—until someone finally got around to closely examining the original field reports—and realized the man they described was better, and rather more widely, known as the Buddha. He is by no means the only deletion from the “undoubtable” list over the years, but certainly the most embarrassing.
God hates dissent: the above beliefs are required of all Catholic prelates, priests, theology teachers and religious superiors (I’ve always found that last an oxymoron), without argument, on pain of sanctions including excommunication and eternal hellfire. (Parishioners may argue, as long as they lose.)
Faced with the twenty-first century, Catholicism has opted to lunge headlong into the seventeenth. Its conception of God now closely resembles Chairman Mao. Like him, and like the Anti-Drug Empire, the Church has decided that if something isn’t working, you just shut your eyes and do it twice as hard. (Same slogan as the drug war, too: “Just say ‘no.’”) It has opted for authority over reason, stasis over change, death over life, and so it will continue its steady dwindle. A pity, for during its first two millennia it accomplished enormous good—perhaps even as much good as harm. Who knows what it might have accomplished if it had been willing to grow? I’m glad there are other, less intransigent Christian sects extant—for the third millennium will belong to the rational, and they simply aren’t going to swallow such sexist authoritarian nonsense. Not even in the Crazy Years.
You Just Can’t Kill for Jesus/Allah/Jahweh/Rama/Elvis…
FIRST PRINTED APRIL 2002
God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent—it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash, and in small bills.
—ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN
A FEW YEARS AGO we finally persuaded psychiatrists to remove homosexuality from the list of recognized mental disorders. Maybe it’s time we started lobbying them to add belief in God to the list. Belief in an angry, intolerant one, anyway.
I’m told 81 percent of Canadians believe in God, or at least claim to when asked by a pollster whose expression makes it clear the only other possible stance is satanism. I believe what that statistic actually means is that most of my fellow Canadians realize the universe is larger than themselves, sense there is something higher and better to aspire to, yearn for a deeper understanding of suffering and mortality, have difficulty accepting that 12 billion years of blindly bumping particles just happened to produce their love’s left eyelash and Lennon and McCartney and/or are capable of awe and wonder. I refuse to accept that four out of five of my neighbors believe in a bearded paranoid in the sky who enjoys having His feet regularly washed in the blood of heathens and licked clean, and plans to torture most humans for eternity.
It seems to me that if a religion decides, with an entire planet to pick from, to select as its most sacred spot one already in use by another religion and to kill for possession of it…then and there, that religion is disqualified. Revealed to be bogus, whatever else it professes or does, until the day it recants. It cannot be a genuine, bonafide religion if it permits (much less requires) spilling human blood for God—it must be either a fraud or a severe mental disorder. If the religion already in possession of the sacred spot spills civilian blood to keep the place…they’re disqualified too. Any shaman who believes God wants children orphaned or maimed over the zip code of His temple is by definition out of touch with God, incompetent to preach.
I’m calling for
minimal standards of shamanic competence. Physicians must swear to “First, do no harm,” before we let them use a scalpel on so much as a dead frog; it’s time we started requiring that much of our soul-doctors. “First, kill no unbelievers…” Any faith that won’t go at least that far should forfeit tax exempt status.
All four of the world’s major religions are presently in disgrace, and all are hip-deep in denial. How many Arab imams have publicly denounced Arafat or suicide-bombing? How many Israeli rabbis have loudly repudiated Sharon or provocative settlement? How many Hindu or Muslim leaders in India have spoken out against the madness there? How many Catholic cardinals have condemned abortionist-murderers, bishops covering for pedophile priests or Pius X’s quiet complicity in the Holocaust? I’m sick of all four allegedly godly gangs: I don’t even use their product and I’m disgusted by the shoddy merchandise they peddle. I demand assurances that a given religion will not cause or potentiate mass homicidal psychosis or priestly pedophilia before we let it indoctrinate helpless children and vulnerable adults. Bloodthirsty, authoritarian theology threatens Canada as much as tobacco, obesity and booze put together, and endangers our planet more than global warming, nuclear winter or rogue asteroids.
I have not been what most would call religious since I left a Catholic seminary at fifteen. (Still a virgin, oddly.) But I get along very well with people who are religious, even profoundly so. I’m prepared to prove it: I’ve been happily married to a monk for twenty-seven years now.
I’m not a Buddhist myself—I use Irish whiskey—but I respect my lay-ordained wife’s Soto Zen faith highly. As far as I can tell Buddhists don’t seem to go in for holy war, though there are as many flavors of Buddhism as there are sects of Christianity. Get a Buddhist totally outraged, and he tends to set himself on fire…taking care for bystanders downwind. Siddhartha Gautama’s message has spread across the planet, not by blood and conquest, but by example and adaptation—altering to fit the local culture as it passed from India through Tibet to China, thence to Japan, and most recently to North America. Most Buddhists seem far more interested in achieving the real state than in acquiring real estate.
I note too that Buddhism is one of the rare religions that does not have a central god. (Though Tibetan, Korean and Burmese varieties did incorporate preexisting pantheons of gods and demons.) Buddha is not divine; the name means only “Awakened One.” The historical Buddha was the seventh in a series of twenty-one buddhas. There’s no UberDaddy, no paradise to bribe with, no hellfire to threaten with, no Satan Great or small. There are hells…but they’re states of mind. Tolerance appears built into Buddhism’s very bones; it seeks only freedom from delusion. Buddhists may belong to other religions—that sort of says it all.
I don’t object to people believing silly things; I believe some silly things myself. Where I draw the line, where I suggest all civilized residents of this crowded starship must soon draw the line, is the point at which someone’s God tells him to go kill those unbelievers in the next valley. That’s the basic litmus test I’m proposing. A God who says He wants you so much as arguing theology with your neighbor, much less trading punches (let alone bullets), is not God at all, but 1) a damnable hypocrisy invented to excuse villainy, or 2) the same voice all the other schizophrenics hear if they stop taking their medication.
My friend Stephen Gaskin once said, “Religions only look different if you get ’em retail. But if you go to a wholesaler, you’ll find it all comes from the same distributor anyway.” Fine with me. But I want minimal consumer safety standards instituted in the metaphysical marketplace. Caveat emptor just isn’t working.
Biting the Hand That Leads Us
FIRST PRINTED FEBRUARY 1999
BUILD A BETTER MOUSETRAP, and the world will probably mug you and forget you.
We do not treat our genius inventors well. We take their creations, and often give them little or nothing in return—not even the cold consolation of credit for their achievements.
Consider the archetypal case: the man who created the twentieth century, single-handed. I’ll bet you don’t know his name. All technology which exists in this century, and could not have existed in the last, derives directly from his extraordinary work—yet when Globe and Mail readers (an educated crowd) voted for the “most influential people of the century,” his name was obscenely conspicuous by its absence, even as a runner-up. I’ll give you a hint: he made electricity practical.
If you guessed Edison, you’ve proved my point. Edison championed the virtually-useless DC (direct current). If your city were powered by DC, there would have to be a power plant every two blocks. Instead we use the more practical AC (alternating current)—which Edison lied, lobbied and tortured animals to try and suppress. I’m talking here about the chap who invented radio.
No, not Marconi. Guglielmo ripped off radio from the same man I’m speaking of—the US Supreme Court ruled it so, after lengthy consideration. In addition to radio and alternating current, this man invented and patented the electric motor, transformer, condenser, the robot, the remote control, five different propulsion systems, all the essential components of the transistor and half of the basic circuits needed to build a computer. If you know his name at all, it is probably as the inventor of a coil used as a special-effect in the 1931 Frankenstein film. He was called Nikola Tesla, and he died broke in 1943—eight months before the Supreme Court proclaimed him the true inventor of radio. Shamefully, he was not even inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame until 1975.
Tesla is merely the template, the first- and worst-screwed genius of this century. Few of his successors have had better luck. Consider the man who wrote the most successful computer operating system in history: DOS, precursor of Windows.
Now you’re sure I’m crazy. Has there ever been a luckier man than Bill Gates? An interesting question—but moot, because Mr. Gates didn’t write DOS. Nobody at Microsoft did. Actually, depending on how you look at it, two men did—and neither one ever saw a penny from it.
Last year’s splendid PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, a history of the personal computer, unraveled the saga. When IBM decided to enter (and conquer) the PC market, they needed two crucial pieces of software: a version of BASIC, and an operating system to run it on. Microsoft had the former, now a potential goldmine. But it ran on Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system—and Mr. Kildall, inexplicably, declined to deal with IBM! But there was a freeware rip-off of CP/M floating around called *QDOS* (for Quick and Dirty Operating System), and it was functionally indistinguishable from the real thing. Its author, Tim Patterson, had a day-job whose rotten contract gave his employers ownership of any intellectual property he produced, even if he did it at home on “his own” time. Bill Gates found this out, fast-talked Mr. Patterson’s bosses out of all of the rights to QDOS, forever, for US$50,000 and soon became the richest computer geek in the world.
Mr. Kildall died soon thereafter, probably never suspecting the extent of his blunder. What about Mr. Patterson? I don’t know. The documentary featured extensive interviews, both archival and recent, with the pioneers of that industry. All they had for Mr. Patterson was a photograph and a few seconds of an old appearance on his local community cable channel from before his program became famous: apparently PBS could not persuade him to be interviewed today.
Forget the money. Assume there is a certain inner satisfaction in changing the world for the better that’s worth more than money. It’s a pretty thought, anyway. But what about the credit? Anyone who’s eaten at a McDonald’s knows conceiving an idea worth billions is a way to make thousands—but at least it’s still the McDonald brothers’ name up there above the arches. Tesla deserved more than wealth, he deserved immortality—and thanks to Edison, Marconi and his friend George Westinghouse, got neither.
When I first saw Triumph of the Nerds, I made a conscious effort to fix both Mr. Kildall’s and Mr. Patterson’s names in my memory. Weeks later, I noticed I’d forgotten both. But PBS re-ran the documentary, and this ti
me I taped it. A good thing: I ultimately viewed that tape twice more before I succeeded in committing both names to memory.
This year a sequel to that documentary examined the history of the Internet. We met, in succession, the inventors of such things as the personal computer, mouse, modem, Internet, World Wide Web, e-mail…and they pretty much all had two things in common. If you didn’t catch the documentary you’ve almost certainly never heard of them—and none made a dime. I’d like to tell you all their names—but I accidentally wiped that tape, so the only name I can remember now is Douglas Englebart, father of the mouse.
It’s hard to remember a name nowadays. A hundred thousand hype machines churn nonstop, insistently repeating Important Names of nitwits. Attempting in self-defense to filter them out, we reach a point where any name we’ve not heard fifty times is not really heard. And when we do hear one, sometimes what we hear is wrong. The retraction never quite catches up with the original error. (After thirty years and endless corrections, one still sees news stories inaccurately alleging that Sir Paul McCartney’s late wife Linda was related to the Eastman Kodak family.) The odds are good that within weeks of reading this essay, you’ll be unable to recall Nikola Tesla’s name.
Sometimes I worry. In this Age of Information, even geniuses are better-informed than they used to be. They may start noticing the same pattern I have—before they start their careers—and say the hell with it. If they do, it will be our fault. As long as we permit improving the world to be a thankless task, we deserve whatever we get.
Whatever
FIRST PRINTED MAY 2003
IT’S A TURNKEY OPERATION. One size fits all. Plug and play. Who am I this week? Whatever.
The Crazy Years Page 14