……………………………………..

Here in the days of my youth, I’m sitting at the controls of a bulldozer. I’m at a heavy equipment operator’s school in East Texas. In the weeks I’ve been here, I’ve operated a motor grader, a backhoe, and a number of big diesel trucks.

The trucker mythos would have you believe that there’s something special about trucking. But … no. Sure, the first time you climb up into one is a bit of a thrill. But once you get one of these monsters out on the road in rush hour traffic, and as one zippy little subcompact after another cuts you off before you can shift into even the third of your dozen or so gears, you’re one white-knuckled inch away from murder.

By contrast, a motor grader is much more demanding in terms of skill, and a backhoe is a bit more fun.

But a bulldozer? As George Takei would say, “Oh, myyyy.”

“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world,” said Archimedes, more or less, and he was righter than he knew. Only it’s not a place to stand, it’s a place to sit, and it’s the driver’s seat of a big diesel Caterpillar bulldozer.

Belching black smoke and roaring like a lion on steroids, the huge yellow engine behind you develops power of such intensity that it can only be housed in a steel body so massive it looks like it might laugh at a nuclear blast. Trundling its bulky tonnage over the ground at a deafening two or three miles an hour, the beast has power to spare for casually shoving foot-thick tree trunks out of your way.

The seat of a bulldozer is a golden throne of seductive power. In lives measured by the subtle accomplishments of getting through yet another day at the office, or fostering your kids through one more tiny milestone of growing up, or doing yet another load of laundry, running a dozer is WAY different. A farmer might work for months to cajole a field of corn to produce, an animal trainer might labor carefully for years to produce a well-trained dog or horse, but a dozer operator essentially walks up to Papa Nature [*], grabs him by the balls and throat, and growls “Listen, shithead, this is how it’s going to go.”

Sitting up there, you realize that in one hot afternoon you could turn a field’s worth of heavy East Texas thicket into naked black topsoil, ready for blading into a farm or a ready-made pasture. With an extra hour’s work, you could scrape out the deep bowl that would put you one good rainstorm away from a pond for your cattle or catfish.

And despite your heartfelt chops as an environmentalist, you WANT to.

Power!

The most seductive part of it is that anybody can do it. All you need is the machine, that bright yellow Place of Power, a massive steel throne that can turn the confusion and inconvenience of heavy forest into a clear, sunny pastoral landscape, achingly ready for a sprinkling of grass seeds that will bring fat brangus cows with their baby calves, or sleek quarter horses lazing in the sun, or even those legions of benign destroyers, the rich, fatuous golfers.

Travel anywhere in the United States, and you will witness this kind of power. A million times over, you will see the signs of it – but you’ll actually see it in action fairly often too. Motor graders work on new sections of highway, excavating machines create deep holes from which skyscrapers germinate and grow, mindless robotic backhoe arms cut ditches through marshy areas and drain off their water, turning “useless” wetlands into housing tracts. And bulldozers push down trees: An endless queue of forest giants falls and dies to the yellow power of bulldozers.

It goes on all around you most of your life, and for all the notice and anguish it causes, it might as well be invisible. The hurricane of power that rides on a bulldozer blade blasts forests out of the way for us, and we trail in its comfortable wake sowing cities.

……………………………………………

[ * Chalk up “Papa Nature” to artistic license. Using “Mother” Nature was going to require the use of the b-word, and I knew I’d catch hell for it.]

The house where I live, with my beautiful little red and gray foxes, is being sold, and I have to move. I’ve loved living here, and this was the last home of my bestest-ever friend Tito the Mighty Hunter, so I’m sad about it. On the other hand, I expect to be in a better place in regard to bill-paying, so that’s a plus.

I got a new writing project in the works, and I’m excited about that.

And I also might be blogging at a new site in the near future, and may downsize contributions here. I haven’t been real prolific here over the past year due to other obligations, but as I told the mentor at the new site, I would dearly love to get back into mainstream atheist blogging. And I think I have something real to contribute to the atheist conversation, so I’m excited about the possibility of getting back onto the larger stage.

But first, I’m going on a hike tomorrow with a friend from work. And I’ll get to see waterfalls!

Morality comes from God. No atheist can be moral, because if you don’t believe in God, you can’t have love, compassion, or even respect for your fellow human beings. Because they think they’re going to die and just be dead, atheists believe nothing matters. Cut off from God and the promise of Heaven, they are therefore free to be rapists, murderers, child molesters, thieves and drug addicts, and their only motivation in life is to party and have fun at others’ expense.

Because you supposedly can’t have goodness without God, some people really seem to believe that the fondest wish of every atheist is to live a long, evil life, then fall dead to the floor while in the act of hurting one last innocent victim, hopefully crushing the life out of a hungry kitten on the way down.

One of the truly weird things about living in a specific cultural environment is how few people within it actually think about it. And I don’t mean think about it in depth, I mean think about it at all.

You grow up with your people and in your place, and you unconsciously assume that the things your people do, they do because it’s the best way to do them. It’s only after you leave and get the perspective of distance – and exposure to other cultures that do things very differently – that you begin to understand that your people do those things not because they’re best, but because they’re familiar. Because they’ve always done them that way, and because nobody’s really open to doing it any differently.

Even if someone tells you something different, until you see it for yourself you’re not really able to understand.

Which is why an atheist could argue in favor of non-theistic morality until he was so ancient his jaw creaked, and yet never get the more conservative Christians to understand a single one of the available arguments. They won’t listen, can’t hear, because the argument is outside the confines of their narrow cultural milieu.

So I’d like to make a different kind of argument here, a sort of “process argument” about morality. By “process argument,” I mean I want to explain a bit of moral reasoning, and by getting you to buy into it, show how the rules of goodness can be – and in fact constantly ARE – worked out by ordinary people. I show you the process, and if I do it well enough, you understand the argument that underlies it.

To do that, I want to talk about power.

—————————————————————————–

[I think this might be a 4-parter. More to come.]

…

My roomie just used the phrase “the Twelve Apostles” and my aged ears picked up “the Twelve Opossums.”

…

Why do you suppose the religious stage is a historic hotbed of child molesting, but the science stage is not?

…

THREE gray foxes on the lawn! Playing! (And I wish I was able to take pictures, but it’s too dark.)

…

The GOP has the benefit of ESP — Extremely Scary People

…

Dammit. I went to the local puppy mill six times, and EVERY TIME they were out of puppy flour.

…

Are we doubling down on America’s Greased Chute into mediocrity? Is it possible we’re about to get a White House contender even DUMBER than George W. Bush? Someone who will make Bush look good, as Bush made Nixon and Reagan look good?

…

I wonder sometimes if the music from the 60s to 80s is immortal in a way few of us have imagined. We have Mozart’s musical scores, but we have the actual PERFORMANCES of Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles and the Bee Gees. Will people still be hearing their perfectly preserved voices and instruments in 50 years? 200? A thousand? I don’t see why not.

…

Aware of my upcoming birthday, a friend suggested she might get me a nice geology souvenir — a coarse-grained metamorphic rock with a banded or foliated structure, consisting mainly of feldspar, quartz, and mica.

I replied, “That will be gneiss.”

…

In the end I think it’s going to turn out that “Ann” Coulter is really living an immense joke at the Right Wing’s expense. When the fame finally dies down, I expect the tell-all to end all tell-alls, about how royally stupid the winger leadership is, how gullible the followers are, and how easily they were all taken in. How she said the most outrageous things she could think of, and NOTHING was too low or too offensive for them.

…

Suppose, wherever you are in the world, you voluntarily separated yourself from existing nations, and formed, with other people like you, your own nation. You’d write your own transnational constitution, and formulate your own laws and economy. Something better than anything that exists now, more rational and progressive. Co-existing within the framework of the old nations and laws, but separate and apart. You wouldn’t secede, you’d supersede, wherever you live now. Hmm.

…

Hey, wingers! Texas Governor Rick Perry is running for President! One thing I’d really like to see from all his right wing supporters: Show up at his event wearing guns! No, seriously! He’d LOVE it!

…

Can’t stop yawning in the middle of the day? There’s a nap for that.

…

All you bankers and corporate CEOs, the wealthy who pay no taxes, the politicians who feel comfortably remote from all this economic turmoil, all you safe, rich, smugly arrogant people — here’s something that occurred to me today:

If the world economy melts down, no place is safe. People are going to come over the walls and fucking eat you. And even if they don’t, the sweet life is over. For all of us.

…

You know it’s true addiction when you both pause during sex to check your email and Facebook status.

…

I have two friends (at least) who would get out of bed in the middle of the night, dress and drive to wherever I was, and help me out of a jam. No complaints, no questions asked, no payment expected. And here’s the thing: They’re both atheists.

…

Deja View Estates: Coming Home Never Felt So Familiar!

…

When you go to Heaven, you get your wisdom teeth back. If you’re not 100% grateful, you don’t get to dine at the table with Jesus. Also, they give you a scratchy robe that binds under the arms, and a halo that blinks off and on in a comical manner, spelling out “WHINER” in Morse code.

…

I never use coupons (Subway Sandwich Club cards, etc.), no matter how much money I can “save.” I’m the only one I know who deliberately does this. It would take a while to completely explain how I feel about coupons, but it boils down to “sweet bait offered by corporations in order to own part of you.” If they want part of ME, part of MY time and life, they’re going to damned well have to offer more than 25 cents.

…

They have their own onions, their own shorts, and even their own triangle. Why does the tiny island of Bermuda get so much airtime?

…

Just proposed a story to the New York Times for the Sept. 11 ten-year anniversary issue. Fingers crossed, rabbit’s foot in hand, hat on backwards.

…

Come to find out, the “coffee cake” I got at the store contains no coffee. I’m suing.

…

When I was a kid, I thought “squalor” was the name of a town. Like Squalor, Georgia, or Squalor, Alabama. The way they’d talk about it in the news, practically spitting in disgust — a family LIVING IN SQUALOR — I thought, man, you never want to wind up THERE.

…

So … if you’re getting patted down by TSA agents, is that a bad time to whistle Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You!”?

…

My back has been itching for several days. I think my leathery atheist wings are starting to come in.

…

Every time cops shut down a kid’s lemonade stand, I think they should also shut down a church bake sale. After all, unless every cupcake and muffin is inspected by the Health Department, the public safety is equally at risk.

…

If I ever happen to die, I want my last words to be “What a ride!”

Maybe everybody who’s ever been in love has felt it. But the kind of thing I’m thinking about is … ideas. Facts. Understandings. Things of the mind.

Take a look at this picture. Click on it in a minute or so and go to the original. Warning: It’s big — roughly 37 X 41 inches at 72 dpi — and will take a bit to load.

This is NASA’s APOD — Astronomy Picture of the Day — for August 12, 2011. The big beautiful spiral galaxy in the center of the pic is NGC 7331.

Discovered by William Herschel in 1784, it’s said to be quite a bit like our own Milky Way. It is roughly 50 million light years distant, which means the light we see is from 50 million years in the past. When the glow of those central stars started on its journey in our direction, the ancestors of whales still walked on land.

Okay, now go look at it. Be sure you click on the pic to enlarge it to full size. Center the image over the galactic core and zoom in on that. Cool, huh?

You know what I like best about it?

It makes me THINK things.

For instance: When I first saw it, I almost felt like a voyeur. From my elevated viewpoint, I was looking into someone else’s galaxy.

For instance: In the heart of this 100,000-light-year-wide galaxy, in the midst of that glowing central core, there’s a place where night is impossible. Where space never knows darkness. Jeez, come to think of it, every galaxy must be like that. Whoa.

For instance: That glow above and below the core — if some of that is stars, and if some of those stars have planets, even from 20,000 or more light years away, that beautiful monster of a galactic core is like a cosmic screen saver. It fills the sky, the visual equivalent of a deafening, head-filling roar. If you were on a planet circling one of those stars perched out there a ways, you’d see the galactic core in the daytime. It would outshine your home sun.

In fact, if the plane of your solar system paralleled the plane of your galaxy, there would be an entire hemisphere of your planet that would never know night.

I am an admitted doofus when it comes to science. If there was a college major in doofus, I’d hold a master’s degree.

And yet the image of this galaxy, and the few things I can figure out just from looking at it, frickin’ AWES  me. To think of the further cooler-than-cool facts and understandings about NGC 7331 that might sit in the mind of an actual astronomer, or astro-physicist, or galactologist — if there even is such a thing — just makes me want to laugh with delight.

This, for instance — something known by astronomers: Like a top spinning inside another top, the arms of NGC 7331 rotate in one direction, the core rotates in the other. It even looks as if the core and the arms are aligned at a slight tilt to each other, as if the center top is running down and starting to list over onto its side, inside the outer top.

How is that even possible? I have no idea. But again, it makes me THINK things: Even in the frictionless dynamic of discrete stars whirling about a common center of gravity, between these two counter-rotating masses there must be a zone of unimaginable, star-ripping turbulence. Damn, that’s freaky-cool.

Faith: The opposite of thought

Okay, take a look at the galaxy again, only this time imagine that you’re one of those modern-day goddy people who doubt everything every scientist ever said.

What would you THINK when you saw this picture? At best something like “Oh, what a beautiful thing! God is indeed great, that he would gift us with this beautiful vision in space!”

The image — which, in the first place, you would have sort-of-stolen from science, otherwise you’d never see it, because it isn’t visible to the naked eye — would be nothing to you but a minor piece of art. A pretty bullseye in space, a whirl of lights worth looking at for about 2 minutes.

Would you be awed and inspired by the knowledge astronomers have about this galaxy? No.

Would you reach even my doofus conclusions and be awed by THAT? No.

In the face of this beautiful deep thing, you’d see … a picture. A “wonder” that wouldn’t make you wonder. A source of no answers, no further thoughts. Except maybe “If you can’t see this from Earth, why did God do it?” — and even that question you’d shy away from, because it would cause you the discomfort of doubt.

This is yet another reason I think religion is a bad thing. The modern version of “faith” stops you from wondering, stops you from THINKING about things you don’t know — even about things you DO know, come to think of it — and replaces it with a dull certainty, an awe-killing lack of the curiosity and unfolding delight that comes from wanting to know more than the currently known, to understand more than the accepted explanations.

Religion stops you from wanting to figure things out.

The GOP’s first debate — or whatever it was that happened in Iowa — was last night. I joked on Facebook that it was basically:

Honk, honk! Whoop, whoop, whoop! Hey Moe! Why you! Boop! Ouch! Oh, a woise goi, eh? I oughta— Slap! Reebeebeebee!

More seriously, some of my FB friends wrote recently about leaving the U.S. if Republicans take back the White House. I’ve thought for a long time that this is the exact wrong approach. I wrote back:

__________

Michelle Bachmann in the White House? Rick Perry and Sarah Palin? Time to get that passport in order?

No. The word this time is: WE’RE STAYING.

If nothing else, we’re going to annoy the piss out of the Right Wingers, in a sort of ongoing guerrilla war of words, emails, letters-to-the-editor, speeches, votes, jokes, razzes, marches, corrections and reminders.

We’re going to make fart noises every time they praise Jesus in public.

We’re going to giggle and point and take pictures every time they show up at public events wearing guns.

Our protest signs are going to poke fun at their protest signs — except with more imagination, broader humor and better spelling and grammar.

We’re going to be right on the street with them — or in the newspaper, or on TV, or on the radio — and we’re going to flaunt our educations, our ethnicity, the colors of our skin, our gayness, our compassion, our determination.

If they wave flags, we’re going to wave them right back.  The spiritual/intellectual descendants of the founders are not the right wingers, but US. This country, this flag, this heritage, this moment, is OURS.

Hey, if we survived Bush — THEIR president — the stupidest human being ever to walk through the White House door …

We can do ANYTHING.