Lee Moller's Blog, page 12

Sunsets are all Wet

Sunsets can be fabulously beautiful. Get the conditions just right and they are awe inspiring. Every other woman's profile on dating sites cite "walks on the beach at sunset" as a favorite activity. "Spiritual" people have been known to pity the poor slobs (i.e.: people like me) who cannot see the greatness of god or the glory of nature in a sunset. It is true… I do not see that. I think I see a little more.


When I see a sunset, perhaps off a beach in Hawaii, my thoughts have been known to wonder down a number of paths. Here is one spontaneous, extemporaneous, well thought out, chain of idle musings, while staring at the horizon.


My first thoughts go to the beauty. When the clouds are just right, with the  sunlight, forced to colors from the redder end of the spectrum, bouncing off them,   the sense of 3D hugeness is hard to avoid. The sun itself goes pear shaped as it touches the horizon. All of that is caused by water and warm wet air. The clouds are suspended micro-droplets of water. Evaporating water changes the density of the air and its refractivity. Nice, very nice, but boring to watch. So again my mind wanders...


I then see the ocean. Water.  Dihydrogen monoxide. H2O. The most dangerous chemical on Earth (floods and such take more lives than any other natural disaster).


The Earth has a lot of it. The average depth of the oceans is about four kilometers. If the Earth's surface where a little less dimpled, we would all be under thousands of meters of water. Having lots of water is not unique to the Earth in the solar system. But having water in all three forms -- solid, liquid and gas -- on the surface, is.


"Water, water everywhere" is true in one sense. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the matter in the universe. Helium, a "noble" non-reactive, chemically boring gas, makes up 23% of the universe. The remaining 2% is everything else. Oxygen is number three on the hit parade at 1%, taking half of what is left, and carbon is number four  at 0.5%, again taking half of what is left. Hydrogen compounds are everywhere. The simplest hydride of oxygen is water. H2O. So it should be no surprise that there is a lot of it about.


Water is both an acid and a base at the same time. The universal solvent. Real chemistry needs a solvent because most chemistry of note requires a liquid where the atoms are close together, but can move freely, get cozy with each other, and then move on. Water was required to create most of the minerals that today make up both the crust of the Earth and our bodies. Most of the Earth's hydrogen is bound up in water. Oxygen reacts strongly with almost everything  (just ask the astronauts who lost their lives on Apollo 1) and is big part of the crust of the planet. If not for life on Earth, there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere today. The Earth would have "rusted" it all out. In a feedback loop, life created oxygen, which created new minerals, which created more new life and so on. Most of the Earth's crust came from life, directly or indirectly. And that needs water. In that sense, there is truth to the idea of a living planet (aka Gaia).


Water has a few more unique properties. Have you ever noticed that ice floats? Of course you have. But why? As a general rule, gases are less dense then liquids, and liquids are less dense than solids. Most solids sink in the molten version of themselves. But not water. And that is a damn good thing. It is a result of the dipole nature of  the water molecule. As it solidifies, the dipole molecules line up in such a way as to decrease density slightly (about 9%). If ice sank, here is what would happen. Some ice would form in winter. It then sinks into the colder and colder water where it will never melt. Slowly, the water column would fill with ice from the bottom up. And finally all the water on Earth would be solid (a snowball world). The Earth would be white as a cue ball and highly reflective. New incoming solar radiation would be reflected back into space, keeping the Earth frozen forever.


Water creates snowflakes and rime and other crystals. Delicate little displays of fantastic mathematical symmetries. Fabulously beautiful.


Water in space is creepy. What would happen if you hand-wrung a water-soaked towel on the Space Station? The water would simply move from the inside of the towel to the outside. Now you have a cylinder of water between you hands, with a towel going down the center. But it gets weirder. Due largely to surface tension, the water would spontaneously start creeping up (or down?) your arms. Shades of "The Blob".


To a chemist, water is strange. It bucks a lot of trends. Its boiling and freezing points are much higher than other similar hydrides like hydrogen sulfide,  which boils at -62 degrees C. Water's boiling point "should" be lower still. water 's Heat of Vaporization is also exceptionally high (this makes it ideal for steam engines). Ditto water's surface tension and cohesion. These properties result in rain, rather than what I would imagine as a choking falling mist. All these properties make water act like water.


Where did all the water come from? There was none on the hot primordial Earth. We are not 100% sure, but a lot probably came from comets containing cubic miles of the stuff impacting the Earth. And just a few hundred millions years later, life and water was all over the place.


Water is everywhere. On planets, and in nebulae (giant gas clouds), comets, and other cold objects  between the stars.


After the sun sets, the stars come out. Perhaps you can see Andromeda, the remotest naked eye object and our twin galaxy, two million light years away? You will need good eyes and dark skies, and you will need to be north of the equator. Whole civilizations could have risen and fallen multiple times in the 2 million year transit time of the light. What would a civilization that is one million years old look like? But I digress...


Where was I? Oh yeah. Yep… the sunset sure is purdee.         


Full disclosure: OK, I had to look up the boiling point of H2S and the percentages for carbon and oxygen in the universe, so it is unlikely that those numerical values would have been featured in my spontaneous daydream.

Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far, The; Lawrence Krauss; Atria Books; 2017; 305 pgs, index

Krauss is an excellent writer, akin to Carl Sagan, and has a bent for philosophy. The book, as the title implies, is the history of big ideas… all physics of course ("god" is actually a very small idea).


The book is sprinkled with anecdotes about people who do not think like you and I.


E.g.: Paul Dirac (a mathematical genius who has his own formula named after him) was giving a lecture involving a lot of math. A student stated "Sir… I do not understand what you did between steps 12 and 13." Half a minute went by. Another student asked Dirac "Sir, are you going to answer his question?" Dirac replied "What question?"


Faraday was asked what all his electrical experiments were good for by Gladstone, the future PM of England. He is reputed to have replied "Well, sir, there is a good chance that in the near future you will be able to tax it."


The book has virtually no math in it, and is relatively easy to follow, up until it isn't. Even though I know the nomenclature fairly well, I get lost in the sea of particles (as did many physicists in the 60's).


Physicists have, throughout history, been dragged kicking and screaming toward their conclusions. Each step was thought almost ridiculous. There is a speed limit in the universe! Absurd! The "two-slit experiment" tells us of a ghostly world of weird interactions, and that weirdness is the foundation of our modern world.  


Here is my encapsulated version:


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.    Galileo provides some moving insights, and Newton discovers gravity (it was over there, in a box, all along) between jobs writing about the occult and alchemy.Faraday delves into electricity and changes the world… later. Maxwell get mathematical with rays of light and writes his famous equations, out of which pops "c", the speed of light.Not satisfied, Einstein invites all his relatives.Fermi gets involved and everything gets all timey/wimey. Max Plank causes interference and everything gets blurry.Hiesenberg is uncertain; Plank is very small about the subject; and Einstein goes big.Subatomic particles (neutrons, neutrinos, meson, pions etc) start accelerating our expectations. It is confusing. Feynman makes a notation, and QED, things get better.Madame Wu shows that the universe leans left, not right.Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg unite the particles, break symmetry, and create the Standard Model.Murray Gell-Mann introduced gluons to quarks while trying to understand super-conductivity.Weak and strong forces unite to create W and Z.And the Higgs field is like a total drag, man. 
The physics of the last 60 years (my lifetime) have illuminated the world in ways that we cannot imagine (OK, I read the book and I cannot imagine). Near the end of the book, I confess I got lost, like the physicists of the 20th century, in a sea of particles.


The final chapter talks of great things: CERN, SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) and LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory) are some of the biggest, most expensive, machines ever built.


True monuments to the power of the human mind and utter weirdness of the world we live in. If it were not for cell phones and other forms of modern magic, I would think it all bullshit.


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.    

Left vs. Right and Expectation Bias

Left and right are perfectly common words, with obvious meanings, right? Wrong.

Look up “left” in the dictionary, and it will say something like: Face north; your left arm is the one to the West. This just displaces the definition from “left” to “north”. Not very helpful. If you are standing next to someone when they ask “Which side is ‘left?”, it is easy. All you need do is point. Or point out that their heart is on the left side of their body. Easy to understand, but flawed because it is referring to shared objects that are familiar to both speaker and listener.

Describing left versus right to someone on the phone is pretty easy. You might say “Look at a clock. Nine o’clock is on the left. But again, you cheated. Effectively, you have just "pointed" again by referring to an object you both understand.

What if there are no shared objects?

Now suppose you are talking to an alien on the other side of the universe. You gave agreed on and defined hundreds of words until you get to “left”. Is it possible to tell that alien which side is “left”? You might say “Sure! I will send a bitmap picture of something and point out that this or that bit of the image is on the left. But how did they get the bit-map? They had to print it out in some sense, and when they do, they have to decide whether to print from the left to right or right to left. If they pick wrong, their “left” and yours will not be the same, and the image they look at will be a mirror image.

It turns out that it cannot be done… at least not by mere mortals like you or I.

Physics and biology are full of left and right hand rules. If you point your right thumb up (north) and curl your fingers, you have just used the right hand rule to determine, for example, the direction of the Earth’s rotation (counter-clockwise), or the direction of a magnet field around a conductor (where thumb points in the direction of the current), or the direction of the spiral in DNA.

Left and right are important. If you only have one hand, and you want a glove, for example. (Fun fact: If you invert a left hand glove, you get a right hand glove.)  Simple sugar comes in two versions: a left-handed isomer and right-handed isomer. In our bodies, and all other critter’s bodies, we all use just the one isomer and ignore the other. Once biology made its choice, it was stuck with it.

The labels of left and right are (almost) completely arbitrary. If we were to redefine right as left and vise versa, some interesting things must happen, including relabeling the poles of a magnet (north becomes south), and redefining “clock-wise” too.

If you were to look down on a game of pool, there would be no way to tell if you were looking at the real image, or a mirror image. The balls would ricochet about as usual regardless. A mirror image universe would be almost indistinguishable from our own. Almost…

Physicists often speak of CPT conservation. The C is for charge. Charge is always conserved. The T is for time, and says that the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether you run time forward or backward. The P is for Parity, and it essentially says that laws of physics are the same for a mirror interaction. However, a few decades ago, it was discovered that P is not conserved and that some physical interactions differ from their mirror images!

That is weird.

The universe cares about the difference between left and right. It turns out that Parity is not always conserved ( see the Wu Experiment for more). So, as I said, for us mere mortals, telling an alien race on the other side of the universe what direction left is is not possible.

But if you are a physicist, you could tell the aliens to “go like this, then do that, and you will see such and such, you will find that certain things tend to go one way rather than the other, and that direction is ‘left’ and the opposite ‘right’.” To do the experiments involved, you will need a particle accelerator. When the results were announced that Parity was not always conserved, physicists reviewed older experiment data and discovered that the pattern was there all along, but the result was so unexpected, no one thought to look at it.

Expectation bias strikes again!

Taking Hitchen’s Advice: F*ck *ff

Shortly after I got married, my wife and I were walking Granville Street’s “mall”… an area that is largely traffic free and attracts all sorts: drug dealers, buskers and god-squaders.

On one corner, a street preacher had set himself up. He had a car battery, bull horn, and about a dozen shills handing out pamphlets. It was a real challenge for the two of us to wend our way through the crowd to get to the theatre we were aiming for. A woman, about sixty, blocked us, handed us a brochure and said “Have you been born again?” (or some such rubbish… it was a long time ago). Proselytizers annoy me. So I replied and a loud booming voice “Fuck off!”.  We were not asked again.

I caught a lot of flak from my wife. She thought I was rude. I though quite the reverse. I also thought it was funny as hell. The look on the woman’s face alone was worth the price of admission. And upon reflection, my position only solidified.
​
A few days ago, I was watching the always funny, always brilliant, Christopher Hitchens on Youtube.  In it, a woman, also about sixty, asked what he would recommend she say when people ask her a similar question. Hitch though for a second and said “I would tell them to Fuck Off!” and then gave a very concise reason as to why.


I smiled.

​The Left Versus The Right

Left and right are obvious words, with obvious meanings, right? Wrong..

Look up “left” in the dictionary, and it will say something like: Face north; your left arm is the one to the West. This just displaces the definition from “left” to “north”. Not very helpful. If you are standing next to someone when they ask “Which side is ‘left?”, it is easy. All you need do is point. Or point out that their heart is on the left side of their body. Easy to understand, but self-referential. Have you ever tried to describe left versus right to someone on the phone? It is still pretty easy. You might answer “Look at a clock. Nine o’clock is on the left. But again, you cheated. Effectively, you just pointed again by referring to an object you both understand.

Now suppose you are talking to an alien on the other side of the universe. You gave agreed on and defined hundreds of words until you get to “left”. Is it possible to tell that alien which side is “left”? You might say “Sure! I will send a bitmap picture of something and point out that this or that bit of the image is on the left. But how did they get the bit-map? They had to print it out in some sense, and when they do, they have to decide whether to print from the left to right or right to left. If they pick wrong, their “left” and yours will not be the same, and the image they look at will be a mirror image. It turns out that it cannot be done… at least not by mere mortals like you or I.   

Physics and biology are full of left and right hand rules. If you point your right thumb up (north) and curl your fingers, you have just used the right hand rule to determine, for example, the direction of the Earth’s rotation (counter-clockwise), or the direction of a magnet field around a conductor (where thumb points in the direction of the current), or the direction of the spiral in DNA. Simple sugar comes in two versions: a left-handed isomer and right-handed isomer. In our bodies, and all other critter’s bodies, we all use just the one isomer and ignore the other. Once biology made its choice, it was stuck with it.

The labels of left and right are (almost) completely arbitrary.  If we were to redefine right as left and vise versa, some interesting things must happen, including relabeling the poles of a magnet (north becomes south), and redefining “clock-wise” too.
​
A mirror image universe would be almost indistinguishable from our own.   
I said “almost”…

Physicists often speak of CPT conservation. The C is for charge. Charge is always conserved. The T is for time, and implies that the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether you run time forward or backward. The P is for Parity, and it essentially says that laws of physics are the same for a mirror interaction. However, a few decades ago, it turned out that P is not conserved and that some physical interactions differ from their mirror images! That is weird. The universe cares about the difference between left and right. It turns out that Parity is not always conserved ( see the Wu Experiment for more). So, as I said, for us mere mortals, telling an alien race on the other side of the universe what direction left is is not possible. But if you are a physicist, you could tell the aliens to “go like this, then do that, and you will see such and such, you will find that certain things tend to do one way rather than the other, and that direction is ‘left’ and the opposite ‘right’.”

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic; David Frum; 2018; Harper Collins; 235 pgs; notes, index

David Frum is a name you might find familiar. He is the son of Barbara Frum (the internet does not mention his father), a Canadian journalist that I recall for her raised eye brow and her tenacity.

David Frum is a conservative, and he sees Trump as an idiot. DJT has no idea what real conservatism means. I liked Barabara Frum and I like David Frum, who regularly appears on MSNBC and shows like Bill Mahar. I learned a thing or two about conservative politics from the book, but that was not its point.

Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump… the most powerful man in the universe. -- Omarosa Manigault

Omarosa is a whore (in the political sense). Once she was physically ejected from the White House, she jumped to the "detractor" ship in a nanosecond. The quote speaks not just to her sycophancy, but the whole, disreputable, in many cases felonious, cast of slobbering ring-kissers he has surrounded himself with.    

I liked this book, because it took no sides that I can see. Frum called out Democrats, as well as Trump-ites and Republicans, when he had to… but mostly the latter. He sees Trump as destroying not only the country but the ideals of his party. 

The book is a quick read. After all, the Trump story is only half way in. But the leading is loose and the 235 pages go by quickly. It is broken into chapters that discuss how he got there, who helped and why, and what the result was. Spoiler alert: its not good.

He discusses the history from birther BS through to Republicans hating him, to their come-to-Jesus moment when he won. Now it seems he can do no wrong in Republican eyes. Who can forget the "thank you for the honor of licking your boots Mr Trump" meeting he had on air to feed his ego. The chapter called Plunder speaks for itself. Trump's in-your-face lies and self enrichment never cease to amaze me. He is conning the public in the least subtle way one can imagine, and they just take it.

Trump's golfing-loving lifestyle has a already cost the American people more in one year than Obama burned in eight. The Kushners have two agendas, get out from under 666 Park Place, and get richer.    

Read the book if only to discover the good news, according to Frum. The good news is that post-Trump America will probably put a leash  on  the powers of the president and that a better, sounder democracy will emerge from the wilderness.  They can start by making it law that the president must submit his taxes.

Fun facts from the book...

We all know Trump refused to release his taxes, but he also funneled campaign funds into his own businesses. The book reports that DJT's companies do not generate P&Ls and balance sheets because no one in the family reads them.  DJT ignorance of world affairs allows him to cling to a belief that the US has a trade deficit with Germany and that Germany believes it is under trade restrictions. They are.  Germany is part of the EU, which is the entity Trump should be talking to.

I recommend this book as a good read, especially because it comes from a conservative.  

The Quantum Labyrinth; Paul Halpern; 2017; Basic Books; 271 pgs; index, notes

​On or about 1977, John Archibald Wheeler spoke at the Hebb Theater at UBC, and I was there. The title of the talk, as I recall, was "The End of Physics?". Wheeler was one of the preeminent physicists of his day. He used to live next to Einstein and knew more about gravity than just about anyone. He literally wrote the book (Gravitation) on the subject.

Richard P. Feynman was his student. Without question, if you were to name the top five theoretical physicists of the 20th century, they would be among them. A third would be Einstein. Others possible candidates include giants like Gell-Man, Pauli, Dyson (of Dyson Sphere fame), Heisenberg, Bohr,  and recent Nobel winner Kip Thorne. 

While priests stare into their navels to try to find the secrets of the universe, Feynman and Wheeler, the protagonists of the book, were looking to nature to answer the big questions. Both Feynman and Wheeler were skeptics. Feynman liked the phrase "Cargo Cult Science" (read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jarod Diamond for more on Cargo Cults).

The author is himself a physicist which helps a lot in the narrative.

Feynman and Wheeler were quite different people. Wheeler's thoughts would often stray to the philosophical, whereas Feynman took one course in philosophy to get  his Art points for his degree (something he and I have in common), and thought it all rubbish.

The thoughts of both men were unconstrained by conventional thinking and often bent to the philisophical. A good example: Wheeler once suggested that all electrons are identical to each other because they are all the same electron! He also suggested that positrons (anti-electrons) are electrons moving backward in time (mostly because the math worked). Now that is thinking outside the box. 

The universe is very strange and we literally do not have the language or experience to explain it. But to a physicist, whatever the explanations, the math must work out. Feynman invented a mathematical trick called the "sum of histories" that got rid of pesky infinities and gave real answers to quantum mechanical problems. Oddly, QED (Quantum Electrodynamics), is the most accurate theory in physics history, but Feynman was always leery of it because he did not trust the math… his own math.

Wheeler gave rise to the idea of "wormholes", which has become a Sci-Fi staple. Both physicists dismissed the idea of wormhole travel (it would require matter with anti-gravity, and the machinery would have the mass of a galaxy) as implausible.

Wheeler in later life would turn to an information based view of physics. Another reflection of his philosophical bent. Bohr once said "Philosophy is too important to be left to philosophers." and Wheeler agreed.

Both physicists struggled with the nature of time and the book gives the usual discussions of thermodynamics in that regard.

The book tells the very human story of both protagonists. Feynman was a hound, but when he finally found the right woman, he stuck with her.  His swan song was the O-ring Challenger disaster story (there is a good movie on that subject with William Hurt). While Feynman was free-spirited, Wheeler was more of a homebody/family man.   

Wheeler died in 2008; Feynman died of cancer in 1988. As mentioned, Wheeler liked the idea of information as the basis for physics. He was inspired by rapid advances in information theory and in computing in general. Sadly, Feynman tied too soon to really see what modern computing can really do. He would have loved it.

Future physicists will be able to manipulate formulae as they always have, but now with the aid of computers to make sure they got it right. And more importantly they will be able to see the results in real time in graphical form. Kepler spent years grinding numbers to validate his three laws. With a modern computer, he would have been able to see the theory and the observations line up before him. What the next Feynman will be able to do with such tools is what keeps the game interesting.

In one amusing anecdote, Feynman (I think) forgot the location of a large physics conference. He had an idea, and asked the driver if any of his fares had used words like covariant  and "geuvee". He had, and Feynman said, "Take me to where you took them." This was an unexplained inside joke. "Geeuve" is actually Guv (where u and v are subscripts). Guv appears in Einstein's field equations all over the place. It is known as the "metric tensor". The "metric" is essentially a description of the shape of a mathematical space, and it is a corner stone of general relativity.

I really liked this book. No math. Lots of mind-bending ideas. And real lives.    
    

Time Travel, A History; James Gleick; 2016; Vintage Books; 309 pgs, index

It's about time. Or more aptly, it's about cultural speculation on the nature of time and time travel.

I do not have a lot to say about this book. It is well written and very well researched. There is a lot of material to cover. Here are just a few of the items discussed:


HG Wells and The Time Machine;Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps and others;Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure;Jules Verne, Dr Who (it is all kind of timey-wimey), Groundhog Day, The Man Who Folded Himself, A Wrinkle in Time, and so on. Few sci-fi series have gone a more than a season or two without an episode on time travel. If he missed any, I could not tell.
The usual brief discussions of the speed of light and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (i.e.: You cannot stir things apart) are there. It is generally the Second Law that gets in the way of time travel (another is causality problems). The universe began in an extremely ordered, low-entropy state. How it got that way is unknown. But once things got started (the big bang), entropy began to increase. Entropy is essentially the amount of disorder in a system. One possible end for the universe is the so-called heat-death:  the universe expands endlessly; stars die; the matter in stars ultimately decays; and all we are left with is a thin gruel of electrons and positrons orbiting each other with an orbital diameter the size of the universe today.  Would time still exist? There would be no events to mark its passage, so it is hard to say.   

It is a fact of physics that if there arrow of time were suddenly reversed, no laws physical would be broken. At the atomic level, you would not be able to tell that time was running backwards. But at the human level, it would be obvious, as you watch your pee magically pull itself out of the toilet water and spontaneously shoot itself back into your body.

Time travel has implications about free will that are summarized. 

The book is light on physics, but gets the physics right.

It does not: Tell you how to build a time machine; tell what time really is (other than the usual quips, such as "time is needed to keep everything from happening at once"; or resolve the causality paradoxes involved (e.g.: Go back in time and kill your grandmother… what happens?).
Gleick has written a few science books, including his very good biography on Richard Feynman.

ATC, I liked Hawking's A Brief History of Time, although, to be fair, they are not really comparable.    

The New Catholic Church "Rat Line"

I spent quite some time dissecting the Roman Catholic Church (the RCC) in my book, The God Con . I spent as much time as I did for several reasons, The RCC is big and old, well organized, and well documented.. And corrupt as hell.

If you have seen the movie Spotlight, you know what I am talking about. That true story only focused on the Boston area, but all the tactics of the RCC were on display. Deflect, hide, duck, doge, hide and lie. The pedophile problem was everywhere -- hundreds of priests in the Boston area alone -- and the church covered it up. And it is still doing so. I said that Francis appeared to  be an improvement on his predecessor, saying the right things, and giving believers hope that the church might resurrect itself. He promised to address the pedophile issue. Spoiler alert: He lied!

The Passionate Eye recently ran a piece called Behind the Alter that asked if Francis has lived up to his promise. He has not. In post WWII Europe, the RCC Rat Line helped Nazis escape to South America and other places. A new Rat Line has been established. It hides pedophile priests in foreign, usually third world, parishes without telling the locals of the risk. The show points out that the church's policy of zero tolerance is actually not zero, but 75%. That is, three out of four priests with credible charges against them faced no punishment.

The RCC has always had a policy that literally says priests are better than you or I, and that they should therefore be cut some slack. Bullshit. These are priest-pedophiles! I can think of no worse combination. They are the people that hardened criminals cannot stand. Wolves in shepherds clothing. They take confessions and use them to blackmail innocents. The RCC actively hides these creeps in your back yard without telling anyone..

I take no joy in saying that my skepticism was well founded. Pope Frankie, like his predecessors, still believes that the church is more important than one kid getting sodomized, or even a thousand. The values of the RCC are not worth shit if they do not extend to protecting children, even if it means shutting down the RCC or large parts of it. All the RCC  cares about is the three Ps (Power, Profit and Sex). Nothing else. They say they must spread the word of god... but I am pretty sure this is not what their god had in mind. The Pope could fix it with a few Papal commandments, like "report violations to the cops", but he does not. Why not? Because he knows the price. Billions of dollars and perhaps his life.
​
Organized religion is the scourge of civilization. It is a con job and just plain evil.

Jesus For the Non-Religious; John Shelby Spong; 2007; Harper Perennial; 293 pgs; notes, index

This is a book with a difference. The author is a retired Episcopal Bishop arguing that almost everything believers think they know about Jesus is not true. A poker buddy of mine (Hank Reiner) recommended it to me after I explained the premise of my book. I wish I had read it before writing The God Con.


A key component of my arguments in my book is that religions are cons. Religion evolve. There are two ways to start a religion: from scratch (Scientology) or by adding and subtracting bits from existing religions (cults and religious sects). Central to that idea is that Christianity is just Judaism with a few extra layers added to it. Spong's book confirms that view on almost every page. That is certainly not his intent.

The book is in two parts. The first part is a historical breakdown of the Jesus myth. The second part -- about one third of the book -- then tries to tell the reader how Jesus was a real guy and that one can still experience god through Jesus.

Both segments start by saying that atheism is not a disbelief in god, but a disagreement about the definition of god.  He states this like it as an obvious fact. It is not and he is wrong. The dictionary disagrees with him on this point and so do I. The second part of the book paints god as transcendent experience that one can still have through Jesus, who he also claims actually existed. Jesus might have existed. But the problem with the other statement is that it is entirely subjective. This is where I stopped reading and started skimming. I have no doubt that Spong does believe what he says. I too have transcendent experiences, but Jesus has nothing to do with them.  When I look at the huge image of the Andromeda galaxy I have hanging on one of my walls, I have thoughts that fill me with awe, but not with god. I should say that Spong believes in what science has to say about just about everything and on that score, we agree.   

I did not read the second part of the book in any detail. Subjective experience is nice for the guy experiencing it, but that is about all.


The first segment of the book, however, is fascinating. I have never  read the Bible and I never will. Life is too short. Spong is a brave man. He is religious, but does not believe in miracles. His book breaks down the Jesus myth largely as Judaism on steroids. The Jesus myth is just a retelling of Judaism. He breaks down the gospels and meticulously relates New Testament story telling to Jewish tradition. In other words, he validates virtually all of my arguments with respect of the origins of the Jesus myths, from the virgin birth to the crucifixion. All the Jesus stories are just Jewish stories shoe-horned into the "modern" world of 2,000 years ago.


The following are conclusions and observations made in the book. Some are clearly true, others were appropriately defended by Spomg.  Spong argues constantly that all this is for liturgical reasons. Liturgical just means ritual-related. It is all about the show!


Mark, the first gospel, didn't mention the virgin birth or Bethlehem;
There were 41 generations between  David and Joseph. Half the planet could claim lineage;
Mark only mentions the name Mary once;
Joseph was a fiction created to keep Jesus from being a bastard;
Scholars do not agree on the names of the disciples;
Judah is a name from Genesis and is the same name as Judas (story crossover (SC));
There was no Judas;
Twelve disciples, twelve tribes of Israel (SC);
Lots of people (e.g.: Peter and Paul) did miracles… more miracles, more power;
Miracles are recycled (eg: Moses and Elijah caused water to divide);
Miracles associated with Jesus were a later addition to fit Jewish traditions and ritual;
Moses fed a multitude with a small amount of miracle food, as did Jesus (SC);
Jesus curses a fig tree for not giving figs... off-season;
The gospels stretch language to make Jesus sound cool… cooler than Moses;
Paul only said one line about the crucifixion: That Jesus died for our sins according to scripture (Jewish scripture (SC));
No one was there when Jesus died;
The resurrection language is gibberish;
Elijah/Elisha story crosses over a lot;
There was no last supper;
There was no betrayal, no crown of thorns, no thieves, no darkness at noon, no crowds and no resurrection;
Jesus is just the Greek spelling of Joshua (Israel's greatest deliverer (SC));
Jesus and the Passover Lamb were both slaughtered and the Eucharist and Passover are reflections. This is where the consuming the flesh of the lamb of god comes from  (SC);
Ditto Yom Kippur. The Jewish sacrificial lamb dies for our sins; the goat carries them away (hence scapegoat) (SC);
Barabbus, an odd figure in the bible, literally translates to "the son of god";

Again and again Spong argues that it was all about the ritual (in my words, the con). He still clings to the idea that it is all about the experience of Christ, which is meaningless to me, and entirely subjective.

This was an eye-opening book, but not in the way the author intended.