What is Magic?

During World War I, three Portuguese kids met the Virgin Mary.  I'm not sure why people paid attention.  Kids say a lot of dumb stuff.  My kid, for instance, claimed to have an invisible sister named Marceline last month.  I laughed at her, and I was correct to do so.  Early 20th-Century Portugal was a different time and place, and for whatever reason, these kids were big news.

The kids told people to go hang out in a field and await a miracle.  And over the course of months, people waited.  About a hundred thousand of them travelled to Cova da Iria.  Newspapers sent reporters to cover the event.  

Then, on October 13, 1917, something happened.  Nobody is sure what.  The Catholic Church now refers to this event as "The Miracle of the Sun".  Of the people who experienced it: 

• One third of them saw something freaky happen to the sun.  It flashed different colours, or zig-zagged across the sky, or two suns appeared.  
• One third of them experienced conflicting weirdness, like their wet clothes drying spontaneously.  
• And a third of them saw a bunch of crazy idiots losing their minds over nothing.  

My grandpa Charlie, were he alive for me to ask, would tell me that those religious nutcases saw what they wanted to see.  He was a rocket scientist and physicist, and science was his faith.  Religion and magic are the realms of crooks and crazies, he might say.  He would have said that atmospheric dust created the illusion of The Miracle of the Sun, or that the loonies saw a parhelion rainbow, or maybe they were just staring at the sun for too long and hurt their eyes.  

Charlie failed to get any of his kids to become scientists.  But I inherited his sceptical mind.  In the aughts, I was burned by unsourced left-wing, libertarian websites, and I honed my bullshit sensor.  I like my ability to sniff the false garbage that circulates on Facebook, and I like the idea that we can prove stuff by testing it.  I like the label of "sceptic".  

I also want to believe in magic.  When I was a kid, I loved the stories of trolls lurking under mountains in D'Aulaire's Book of Trolls.  In my twenties, I became entranced with H.P. Lovecraft's tales and their moral that unspeakable terror lies beyond the borders of human knowledge.  Now, I write my own stories, and all of them are supernatural.  

That, and I've seen some weird shit.  I  had an out-of-body experience when I stopped breathing on an operating table.  I've seen ghosts.  I've felt tingling energy flowing through a woman's fingers into my back. I've stepped into rooms and glades, knowing that their was an invisible presence with me.  These are not the words of a sceptic.  

I desperately want magic to be real.  My senses tell me that it is.  Yet science consistently refutes ghosts and energy and chi.  My cousin once shared somebody's theory with me that since science never detects the supernatural, it must be very rare.  Brain misinterpretation of data and mental illness, however, are very common.  Therefore, most people who see supernatural things are either mistaken or crazy.  

So that's me.  I couldn't have seen my dead friend Nick looking down from his old apartment window on Broadway.  I saw some other guy who looked like him and my brain filled in the rest.  

At this point, I want to repeat a phrase beloved by alternative and pseudo-scientific therapies everywhere.  If you're a sceptic, you'll hate this: "(fill in the blank) harnesses the body's remarkable ability to heal itself."  This phrase makes my skin crawl.  But it's pretty much the only scientific evidence for magic that I can think of.  

I'm talking about the placebo effect.  If you give a sugar pill to a group of people and tell them it will cure their illness, a bunch of them will get better.  Who do placebos affect?  Henry K. Beecher, the scientist who practically wrote the book on the placebo effect, said that they affect about one in three people.  Here's another funny one.  There's also such a thing as a noncebo.  This is a harmless substance that, if the patient believes it is bad, will have detrimental effects.  

What is central to placebos and noncebos is that they hinge on belief.  They help or harm because people believe they will.  The reason it works is something to do with expectation, but the science seems really fuzzy.  The point is that your health is, to a large part, subjective.  If you truly believe that acupuncture, reiki, or cutting gluten out of your diet will make you healthy, it might.  Even if you think that you will be healed by sneaking into the Vatican and taking a draught from the Pope's toilet, there is a one in three chance that it will work.  Belief!

So let me express my own beliefs.  I believe that the placebo effect is magic.  I believe that the Miracle of the Sun was magic.  I believe that ghosts and chi energy are magic.  And I believe that these things can exist alongside science.

The immanent physician, Dean Ornish, made a quote about science that I like.  He said, "A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable.  To me, that's beautiful."  In the spirit of that, allow me to give magic the same treatment.

Magic is unpredictable, unverifiable, and subjective.  

Magic can never be quantified by science, because there is never any guarantee that it will work, even in the hands a master.  When it works, it sometimes doesn't work as advertised.  Furthermore, because magic is subjective, the presence of sceptical minds makes it less likely to work.  One person will see two suns rising and be moved to prostrate tears, while another will observe nothing.

Science is great.  It has elevated our humble species.  We live longer, we build astounding things, and we rule the planet.  It provides a great baseline for existing on earth.

However, sometimes weird shit happens.  When magic occurs, it is awe-inspiring, terrifying and cathartic.  It is wonder at seeing two suns rise.  It is inexplicable terror in a lonely place that makes your heart pound.  It is a terminal cancer patient beating the disease.  It can change your life, or become your reason for living.  If you refuse to believe in miracles, it makes them less likely to happen to you.

So believe.  

Book Review of "Sacred Origins of Profound Things" by Charles Panati

Charles Panati is a renaissance man.  He's published books on history, the supernatural, science, word origins, and my favourite: his tome about endings, which covers sundry topics ranging from death to disease to extinction.  This book, Sacred Origins of Profound Things: The Stories Behind the Rites and Rituals of the World's Religions, is about the divine. 

Though this book is about world religions, Panati's interest seems to be attracted by the Roman Catholic Church and Judaism.  By comparison, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu and the Protestant and Orthodox Christians are given only passing mention.  Even so, the scope of this book is massive, covering how humans understood the gods, The God, Satan, the afterlife, religious garments and dogma for thousands of years. 

Panati's tone attempts to be impartial, but it's difficult.  Some of the rationalizations, bizarre interpretations, circular thinking, and blunders made by religions in the past are simply difficult for a modern reader to take seriously.  Also, Panati cannot resist a good digression and will often interrupt his narrative to tell a funny story.

I started reading this book in January of 2012.  Eleven months later, I'm finally finished.  At 500+ big pages, this book is a massive commitment.  It wasn't always an interesting journey, particularly the chapter about Catholic vestments, but I have returned much wiser.  I was unaware, for instance, of the amount of non-biblical story that generations of Catholic thinkers have heaped upon the Biblical Mary, mother of God.

The Bible says a teenager named Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph, though she did not "know him".  An angel named Michael appears and tells her she is/will be with God's child.  She then gives birth to Jesus.  Jesus is raised by his mother, amongst brothers and sisters, until he gets killed by Romans.  Mary sees him briefly after he returns to life, and then she vanishes from the pages of the Bible.  Let's assume that "not knowing" Joseph is a correct linguistic interpretation.  She is the Virgin Mary, after all, and it would be cruel to dissect her greatest miracle, carrying the Son of God without having sex. 

At some point in the early Christian church's history, it started to get more prudish than its Jewish fathers.  Then it got a little more prudish, then ridiculously prudish.  Sex, female anatomy, burst hymen, and birth became abhorrent to Christian thinkers.  They blamed femalekind for original sin, which bore as its wicked fruit, sex.  From this viewpoint, 2000 years-worth of story was interpreted or invented onto the Bible's original text.  Some of this tale is dogma, some of it merely widely believed by those in the know:

Mary's parents didn't enjoy having sex, so therefore Mary was born into the world without original sin.  Jesus didn't have a vaginal birth, rather, he was magically C-sectioned in a ray of light out of her womb, keeping her hymen intact.  Her maidenhead remained intact after Jesus' birth as well, as it turns out all those brothers and sisters were Joseph's from a previous marriage.  When she died, her body laid in the ground for a couple days without decomposing, because bacteria and graveworms don't eat virtuous people.  Then she crawled out of her tomb and ascended.  These days, she ventures out of heaven to tell children to build shrines and convert Russia to Catholicism.

That's interesting.  I did not know that.  If this sort of thing appeals to you, you'll love this book.  Without a doubt, many readers may experience cognitive dissonance, particularly Catholics who may be surprised at the things they are REQUIRED to believe.  As I mentioned before, the book is very long and has boring bits.  Luckily, it's written to easily choose which chapters to read, and you can put it down for long periods if you so wish.  Therefore I rate this book, speaking Infallibly of course:
4 self-inflicted stigmata out of 5
-----

In other news, I put the finishing touches on my fourth screenplay, "The Rising".  Also, Rosie's Knife was finally published in the final issue of Dark Recesses Magazine.  Read it here: http://www.cuttingblock.net/darkrecesses.html.  It's been a good month!

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.com/

Review of "Julian" by Gore Vidal

For the longest time I thought Gore Vidal was this weird character-actor who always played dignified guys with excellent diction. I also knew that he had written the screenplay for "Myra Breckenridge", which appeared in a book called "The 50 Worst Movies of All Time" (Vidal has apparently disowned it). Imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, I discovered that his movie career is actually secondary, and that he is a novelist foremost. He has written an impressive number of historical novels, one of which is "Julian", the life-story of Julian the Apostate (331-363 A.D.), a Roman Philosopher-Emperor who tried to fight Christianity and revive the worship of the Hellenic gods during his short reign.

It begins with a correspondence between two philosophers, Priscus and Libanius, during the reign of Theodosius I, many years after Julian's death. Together, the two conspire to publish Julian's secret memoir. Priscus sells the memoir to Libanius with some notes. Libanius writes on the manuscript as well, seething that Priscus keeps withholding sections of the memoir and asking for more money. Thus Julian's life work is interrupted constantly by the two philosophers as they berate each other, discuss morality and offer differing accounts of the history.

"Julian", amongst other things, is a criticism of the effects of power. From the moment his uncle Constantius murders his father from paranoia, Julian is abused by the Roman state with all its bureaucracy, intrigue and fear. In his secret dreams of power, he wishes to be Emperor and do things differently. As he first tastes power as Caesar of the West, he is energetic, destroys pointless ceremony and thwarts the powerful. But as his day as Emperor dawns, despite his philosophic training and morals, he finds himself miscarrying justice and making concessions to powerful men. Corruption leaks in: where Constantius had his decadent eunuchs leeching money and resources from the state, Julian has a cadre of dubious Hellenic priests and magicians making their fortunes from his rule. Paranoia begins to haunt him, just as it did his uncle. As one reads, one begins to ask, despite obvious religious differences, if Julian's reign would have been similar to his uncle's if he had ruled longer.

More than anything, "Julian" is a lament for the vanished Hellenic world. The main characters of the novel are all pagans. As Julian follows his quest to restore the old gods, everywhere he is confronted with omens that his efforts are too late. The old classical world is vanishing, replaced by a new, ugly world. As the pagans lament the shortness of Julian's reign and the fall of old Rome, the reader is struck with further significance of which the characters are unaware: that in little over a century, Rome itself will collapse under the weight of barbarian invasions and its own corruption.

"Julian" has also been called a critique of Christianity. I'm not sure that's exactly the case. Whatever Gore Vidal's thoughts on Christianity are, and I bet they are not that friendly, the anti-Christian sentiments of this novel are the time's own. The main characters, being pagan, are hostile. The criticisms levelled at Christianity are merely echoes of Porphyry, Libanius, Julian's known published works, and other neoplatonists. Is this really criticism or is it just journalistic retelling?

Despite definitions of what "it is", the anti-Christian sentiments seem to have stirred me up. Without a doubt, this novel was the impetus for my writing "My Damn-Fool Search for Religion" post - a post that seems to have lost my blog some readership, by the way. The hypocritical, sleazy and maddening origins of the early Church are examined: the contradictions in the Bible, the corruption of the Bishops, and the exportation of pagan rituals and gods as sacraments and saints. But the book also features what has to be the stupidest religious nightmare of all time: what is the Holy Trinity Made of? For those of you who are unaware of this debate in which hundreds of thousands of human lives were lost, what do you think? Are The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit made from the same substance or are they made from different substances, are they different people or are they made from the same substance but they're different somehow? Be careful how you answer, because 1500 years ago, your life would be in jeopardy.

So far, I haven't touched on the structure, dialogue or story of the novel. That's because, as far as I'm concerned, it's perfect. The story is thrilling. The characters are brilliant and products of their time, not 20th-Century-people slapped into an antique setting. Every detail is slavishly researched. If I ever write a book this thoughtful and excellent in every way, I would die a happy man. I give it my highest rating possible and recommend it as required reading for anybody with a brain and a thirst for knowledge.
5 arbitrary arrests out of 5

As a side note, this is something I have always wondered. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the background. Rome was an awesome place with awesome art. Then it got divided in half between east and west. The western half fell to barbarians, beginning what is known as the Dark Ages, when art, literature and intellectual thought were in a primitive state. The eastern half of the empire lived on for 1000 years as the Byzantine Empire.

To give you an example of how crappy the Dark Ages were, let's look at some coins:

Here's a solidus of Julian the Apostate from 360, before the Dark Ages. The profile is of good quality and striking. Obviously, somebody of artistic skill crafted it. The tails side isn't so great, but you can tell what's going on. There's a guy with a captive or body held in submission.

Here's a coin of Marcian, who became Emperor in 450, ninety years after Julian. Under his reign, Rome was sacked by the Vandals, which officially marks the end of the West. The bust is looking a little more cartoonlike for sure. But what the hell is that thing on the right supposed to be? According to Wikipedia, it's Victory. Victory is looking a little shabby, kinda like Rome itself was.

Here's Zeno, who had a reasonably long reign at the end of the 400's. Oh dear. Zeno himself looks like he was rendered by a talented six-year-old. Victory looks like a fallen angel with droopy wings. Did contemporary Romans have any sense of irony about this like we do?

Poor Emperor Maurice and his family ended up headless and floating in the Sea of Marmara in 602. Perhaps he was beheaded by his usurper, Phocas, who saw this coin and figured Maurcie was so ugly he had to die. Victory is at her most abstract yet. Any more abstract and she would be a crayon drawing of a head with legs and feet sticking out of it.

Things were worse in the Western half of the Empire, where they stopped making coins altogether. Germans were running around whacking the heads and penises off of statues. Then they all retired to Africa and had a big laugh.

So here's my question. What was the Byzantine Empire's excuse for having sucky art? The West was overrun by barbarians. They have a good reason for entering the Dark Ages. But what was going on in the East? Constantinople was never sacked by barbarians. Why is there such a shocking and lasting decline in the quality of their craftsmanship?

If "Julian" is to be believed, the ascendancy of Christianity caused it. At the time of Libanius and Priscus, the Christians were just closing down all the Hellenic schools. There are constant references to the new style of "ugly" art. Could it really be that the Christians had their own abstract and austere style of art that they favoured over the photorealistic tradition of the Greeks? Did Christians cause the Dark Ages just as surely as rampaging Germanic tribes?

I suspect the truth is not so clear-cut. But on the other hand, maybe it is. I won't know until I spend a little more time reading the history. I have all sorts of vile anti-Christian words dripping from my fingers right now, so maybe it's best to stop this post now before I lose more readers.

Maybe I'll read a nice book about Jesus next. I have to get rid of some of this Christ-anger. Maybe I'll read Ben-Hur. Incidentally, Gore Vidal wrote the original screenplay for the 1958 movie Ben-Hur. Just goes to show you that Gore Vidal has affected our lives beyond reckoning. He might just be watching you right now...

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

My Damn-Fool Search for Religion

I was raised an atheist. Then one day when I was fifteen, my kitten died in the dryer. It seemed unfair to me that such a tiny, loving creature would die meaninglessly. Thus began my quiet quest for divinity.

I began very cautiously. I was already aware that organized religion was repellent to me. One only needs to learn about a single crusade to discover that there is a down-side to large groups of grouchy people who think everybody else should think the same way.

It was when I was playing the last movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony in the Saskatoon Symphony's viola section that I was touched with the divine. Call it a chemical reaction in my brain if you must. But it started as a tingle that spread from my shoulders and filled me with euphoria. I felt something tug my consciousness upward. I soared even as my body played tremelo in place. It was fucking amazing.

While my search for the divine had been based completely in wishful thinking up to this point, I finally had some sort of indication. It was a physiological reaction of some sort. But I was unclear as to whether it was caused by Jesus, Mithras, a chemical reaction or midichlorians. (It was several years later that I learned of the existence of midichlorians from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. My midichlorian count is unusually high, you know). Whatever this feeling was, it was caused by music.

I decided to do some actual scholarly investigation on the world's religions to see what everybody had to say on the subject. Fruitlessly did I learn, fruitlessly did I wander. Did you know that the holy books and traditions of all the world's major religions are chock-full of useless information, contradictions and commandments now irrelevant to modern life? It's all "don't cut the hair above your ears" and Jesus getting mad at fig trees and this or that makes you unclean and "women, don't you contradict your husbands" and "Allah hates it when you hitch your camel like that, you know" and "when you die there's nothing: hurray!" and "when you die you float up to the top of the universe's skull and bounce around" and "welcome to heaven: here's your virgins".

I know what some of you are thinking. Organized religion has good aspects, it teaches morals, it has community and charity. Much of the music I was listening to after university had religious lyrical content which made me yearn for a religious community all my own. This is exactly what I was pondering when a girlfriend of mine invited me to Catholic services at Saint Thomas More chapel at the University of Saskatchewan. With some trepidation, I accepted.

Well, Saint Thomas More was everything I hoped it would be. It had (and has) a community of intelligent, enthusiastic worshipers. It has thought-provoking sermons. It has music and solemn traditions.

I desperately wanted to be a Catholic then. But I could not. Here's why:
1. The Old Testament is senseless and insane.
2. The New Testament was written from decades to over a hundred years after Jesus died. His lessons were preserved (mostly) through oral tradition, which is like a decade-long game of telephone in which Jesus preached something like "be nice to everybody" and we heard "purple-monkey dishwasher". Then several hundred years later, a bunch of people Jesus never met picked through everything and removed anything they didn't like.
3. Even assuming everything Jesus said was accurately recorded in the Bible, the Catholic Church is a huge, bloated, worldly organization which has amassed immense wealth, all the while espousing the beliefs of a homeless guy who asked us to live poor.
4. A two-second glance at the history of the Catholic Church - with its crusades, antipopes, illegitimate children, schisms, wars of conquest, child abuse cover-ups and Nazi lovin' popes - confirms that it would be an agent of pure evil if it were not alloyed with hypocrisy.
5. As Christianity spread throughout the world in its infancy, it appropriated all sorts of unwholesome gods and traditions from pagans and turned them into saints and holidays. Old-Testament God does not approve.
6. Saint Thomas More chapel's worshipers are not actually Catholic. I could have gone through that crowd and asked people if they thought contraception was evil and homosexuality is a sin. The answers I would have gotten, from the priests included, would vary significantly from what the Pope thinks. You get different answers from Catholics in Scandinavia, Africa or South America. Back in the day, this was called Heresy. But now it's called, "believe whatever you want as long as you give us money on Sunday."
7. And most of all, the Mystery of Faith is anti-intellectual. How does Jesus' blood banish original sin? The answer is: nobody knows, don't think about it. Shut off your mind and accept it.

I apologize if I have upset any readers. I strongly considered going back and deleting that last section. It's mean. But they are my reasons for not being a Catholic. By listing them, I don't mean to challenge your faith or convert you. It's not about you.

They almost won me, those Catholics. When I list my complaints, it is with deep anger from betrayal. Their community enchanted me and made me forget that Catholicism is a teetering tower built on a delusion, built on a sham, built on a lie with a solid foundation of myth. Somewhere under that dark tower is buried truth, but to unearth it would topple the whole structure.

I pick on Catholics, but honestly every religion I've investigated is guilty. Where people congregate and organize, power appears. Power is the great corrupter and turns any religious bastion into a fountain of wickedness that spews lies and guilt into the world.

As I again found myself metaphysically adrift in a leaky boat of my own devising, a simple phrase illuminated my dark world like a lighthouse. "King Kong died for your Sins". It's from a document called the Principia Discordia, one of the holy books of Discordianism, a poorly-known religion created in the 1950s based on worship of the Greek goddess Eris, appropriated as a goddess of change and chaos. It has been called either a joke masquerading as a religion or a religion masquerading as a joke.

Remember: KING KONG died for your Sins. It was the first phrase I read from Principia Discordia and it made me laugh out loud. As such, it is the only sentence from a religious tract that has motivated me to do anything. Honestly, I was never able to get my head around what Jesus dying has to do with original sin, so honestly, King Kong makes about as much sense. The Principia Discordia contains many such laughs and a philosophy that made me think seriously about the role of chaos and discord in my life. It doesn't ask me to do anything I don't want to do.

Though I had first read it a decade earlier, I began to seriously think about Discordianism as my religion. Eris-worship does not ask me to surrender my mind, does not ask me to speak to her through a priest who leeches money from me, does not make me feel bad about myself and helps me accept change when it occurs in my life. I decided to investigate further.

I joined an online Discordian forum in 2006, expecting to have philosophical discussions with good-natured and inquiring fellows such as myself. What I discovered appalled me. Even on this simple website which should have been fun incarnate, rigid power structures existed. The most avid users had formed a clique and expected new users to undergo a hazing ritual. Rather than engage me philosophical discussion, the clique argued with me using name-calling and concluded their posts with pornographic images that they supposed were funny.

I'm sure that from their perspective, their antics were hilarious. But to me, they were cruel and snobby. The lesson I've learned from all this is that I will never find a community of people to share my worship. Even Discordians, when they congregate, become insular and intolerant. It doesn't matter if your religious organization operates from St. Peter's square, a single mosque or even an insignificant internet forum. Power crystalizes like a kidney stone, halts divine flow in the holy urinary tract and causes significant pain.

It's been five years since I learned this hard lesson. Now I have but one simple religious observance. As commanded in the Discordian Pentabarf, I partake of no hot dog buns. But every Friday at the Cook household is now Hot Dog Day, when I joyously partake of a hot dog as also commanded by the Pentabarf. By doing so, I remonstrate against Judaism and Islam (no Pork), Hindus (no beef), Catholics, (no meat on Friday), Buddhists (no meat of animals) and Discordians (no hot dog buns). But if I miss Hot Dog Day, it's no big deal. As a self-declared Discordian Pope, I can completely rework the Discordian church as I see fit. While I don't necessarily believe there's a crazy lady named Eris running the show, I am at least satisfied that if she exists she's not mad at me for doubting her.

And here's the point in all of this. The Divine is not something reserved for certain places or persons. As individuals, I believe we all have the power to commune with the Divine, whatever you believe it is. We need not go anywhere or ask permission from anybody, we need not consult a priest or give money to anybody, we need not worry about what the community thinks. If you think something holy is out there, you need only pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a musical instrument, or simply clear your throat or head. While there is nothing wrong with discussing religion with others to discover your truth, I say to you that those who ask you to surrender your will, your intellect or your money to them on God's behalf are scoundrels. You can be your own church.

For those of you interested in not taking religion so goddamned seriously all the time, there are a number of religions other than Discordianism available for investigation. Check out Zen, for instance. It's classic. Christianity is to Judaisim as The Church of the SubGenius is to Discordianism: it's not exactly to my taste, but sequels are usually worse than the original. And of course, whenever fundamentalist Christians attempt to impose creationism on the public school system, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also desires its due.

Remember, religion is supposed to make you happy, right? As humans, we are never as happy as when we are laughing.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com

Sex in Canada

...and the title of this blog post alone will give it more hits than any other I've written so far.

I recently watched a Canadian movie by the name of "Young People Fucking". Mini-review: it was hilarious, candid and touching at the same time. Four couples and one mismatched threesome have sex in five separate storylines. It's like a romantic comedy without the hokeyness or the predictability. The dialogue is fantastic. It's a wonderful movie for couples to watch, provided feigned sex and unclothed boobs don't upset you.
4 1/2 awkward interruptions out of 5

A few years ago, Young People Fucking was at the centre of a Canadian controversy. The Conservative Government was set to pass a tax bill by the name of Bill C-10. Buried deep in this document was a section saying that if the government decided that a Canadian-made movie was "contrary to public policy", they could retroactively yank its tax credits. Canadian artists and filmmakers, after the bill was passed, noticed the clause and rallied the troops. The artists (correctly) pointed out that the vague wording would make filmmaking more risky, therefore less-likely to be funded by banks, therefore less-likely to be financed, and therefore less-likely to be filmed. Obviously films of a certain subject matter, as in ones involving sex, are riskier than others. The word "censorship" was touted, a stink was raised and then the issue just kinda faded out. Did the bill get defeated or something?

Anyway, Young People Fucking became the target of the pro-censorship crowd, eager to make this film an example of the kind of pornographic filth that Canada ought not to support. It was an easy target because of its title. But, as is always the case with conservative censorship scandals, the pro-censorship crowd obviously didn't go to the theatre to watch the film and back their claims. If they had, they would have seen how the show was about relationships and communication.

One of the over-arching messages of Young People Fucking seems to be that communication is poor or absent in each of the trysts. If the people involved had engaged in truly open, honest dialogue before they hopped into bed, the sexual experience would be much more rewarding and less awkward.

What a useful moral! We Canadians can be a frigid people when it comes to sex. We possess the urge to hide our sexuality, to repress public displays of affection, to hide our nakedness, and most importantly, secret our feelings. The most conservative amongst us believe that sex is for procreative purposes only, and these people have somehow managed to convince society that sex is bad, naughty and not-to-be-discussed.

And yet surprise babies keep appearing. Unmarried couples retire to shared beds and do it. Half-naked women sing banal songs and advertise products to us. One in every four workers accesses a porn site on the job every day, and even more porn is accessed from the privacy of Canadian homes. The efforts of morally-decent folk to the contrary, sex for social and pleasure purposes is here to stay.

Why do religious people and their prudish allies hate non-procreative sex and the human body? What is the societal consequence that these people fear will happen when their gay neighbors get married and do each other up the poop-chute? What disastrous THING will occur when mothers can freely whip out their tits to feed their hungry babies in public? What cataclysmic event is coming as the result of the internet porn industry?

Honestly, it sure beats me. I'd like to think that if I was a Judeo-Christian religious man, my faith would be strong enough to survive any pornographic assault. But as far as I can tell, sex is viewed as a temptation by these people. The love of Jesus is not always enough to sustain them and sometimes they want to do naughty things. They feel that open displays of sex and nudity will call them to a life of shame and drag them to hell.

Fair enough. But that's not my problem. I'm not religious in that way. Society's mollycoddling regarding sex damaged me when I was growing up and, honestly, I'm still recovering from it. Sex still embarrasses me when I wish it wouldn't. My urge to hide my sexuality still results in misunderstandings, hurt feelings and arguments. It's not my parents' fault. They did their best. If I had to grow up all over again, I think I'd rather do it in a nudist colony than the public school system so that sex wouldn't be such a big goddamn deal.

Canada's absurd obsession and fear of sex is hurting us. The only answer is open, honest dialogue regarding sex between all of us. But that won't happen anytime soon. If all Canadians spoke candidly and truthfully about sex with each other, the prudes would come to the alarming realization that porn, premarital sex, prostitution, homosexuality and adolescent sex are an unchangeable reality of humankind, that indulging in harmless perversions, fantasies and wanking doesn't make you a bad person, and the sexual tastes of other people do not affect the ability of religious people to get into heaven.

Let's take porn as an example. You discover that the people next door filmed a porno flick in their basement and people worldwide are watching it. How does this affect you? It doesn't. It's their business, their everlasting souls and their bodies. They're not going to tunnel into your house and film down there, nor will they force you to have sex with a stranger. The world goes on and if you're religious, Jesus still loves you.

I'll take it a step further. Suppose you discover that a man down the road paid the pretty Ice Cream clerk to have sex. Is your family any closer to hell? Nope. Did he pay your wife to sleep with him? Nope. So who cares? And furthermore, why was their tryst an arrest-worthy crime?

Much of the time, the prudes swell their audience when play the "protect the children" card. Yes, I agree. Children need to be protected. This means stopping predatory pedophiles, pimps and child pornographers from exploiting your child. Kidnapping, sexual assault and fraud are all arrest-worthy crimes.

But when the censors ask us to "think of the children", they seem to be forgetting that, as adults, it is our responsibility not only to protect children, but to teach and nurture them. Sheltering them from sexual information, particularly when they hit puberty, is not the answer. When puberty arrives, children are hit with powerful instincts to have sex, and some will do it no matter how much they have been sheltered.

Consider this: you're watching a movie with your nine-year-old son, Junior. Then suddenly the scrawny heroine whips her top off and starts kissing the hero. Many parents would cover Junior's eyes. But why? He's too young to have sex. He can't even understand why sex is appealing. What harm are those too-perfect boobs causing him? He's not going to have nightmares about boobs stalking him in the forest. Are you protecting him for his own sake, or are you just concerned that if Junior watches the scene, he'll ask a question that makes YOU uncomfortable, like, "Why are those people doing that?" And furthermore, why will it hurt him for you to explain it? His head will not explode, nor will yours. He's going to find out eventually and it might as well be you that prepares him. Wouldn't you rather he found out from open, honest dialogue than from tittering rumours whispered amongst classmates?

I remember when I was a high school student, the Catholic school up the road had the highest teen pregnancy rate of any school in the city. Coincidence? No. This was back in the days when the prudes had convinced the Catholic school board that sex education was a bad idea. Why on earth would you deprive teenagers, once they become capable of having sex, with valuable information about their sexuality? They need to know about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. Ultimately, as a parent, your child's decision to have sex is not yours. It's theirs. When they have the opportunity to have sex, if they have bad or faulty information, they will make equally bad choices.

I say these things as a new father. I know that much of the urge to protect children comes from a parental desire to keep their offspring innocent. When you raise a child from a baby, it's hard to see them grow up. But grow up they will. It's hard to believe that my little baby will be a woman someday. Honestly, I can't wait. As she becomes a toddler, a little girl, a big girl, a teenager and a young adult, I intend to help and inform her in every way I possibly can. If that means that I'm going to have to weather several uncomfortable conversations, I'm prepared. I will do my best to see that she does not join the ranks of the repressed.

So, dear Conservatives, mollycoddlers and censors: Canada is, or should be, a land of free speech. That means occasionally putting up with opinions, stories and art that you don't like. That includes stuff that's too violent, too sexy, too stupid, too smart and too gay for you. By all means create ratings systems and classifications that tell parents what their children will see in their entertainment. That's useful. Just never tell me what my kids shouldn't see.

If you inhibit entertainment so it fits your mold, you will inhibit open, honest dialogue. There are plenty countries of out there where the government stands for moral decency at the expense of free speech, and do you know what? They all suck.

Even Lot managed to raise a peaceful, God-loving family. That includes two daughters who stayed chaste, and they lived in Gomorrah of all places. If he can do it, so can you. In the meantime, quit trying to impose your primitive, early-agricultural religion on me and my family.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Thinking Free

Fatherhood looms. As I contemplate in this lull before a storm of chaos in my life, I have been considering what makes a good dad. One thing that troubles me is what I will expect from my little daughter as she grows into adulthood.

I've seen enough real-world examples of what having high expectations of children does. Parents grow disappointed when their children don't measure up. Children get low-self esteem because they feel aren't good enough. Relationships are strained and nobody benefits.

Yet I have to be honest with myself: no matter what I do to curb my expectations, they will still be present. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing. After all, it was the expectations of our parents that made us all into the people we are, whether we learned from them or fought against them. I suppose the problem is how hard I will fight for my expectations and how quickly I will relinquish them if I see they are hurting my little girl.

And what are these expectations? I can encapsulate them. Please, please, please, o ye powers of the heavens, let my little girl be a free-thinker. Let her always have curiosity about the world and never stop learning. Let her horizons be fluid and ever-expanding.

That's it. I don't care if she becomes the Prime Minister or prefers to live quietly. I don't care if she becomes the first Catholic female priest or if she becomes a pornstar. I don't care if she makes a hostile takeover of Microsoft or if she joins a hippie commune. Just let her become those things because she wants to do it and makes an informed decision. When fate points her in a different direction, let her see the proverbial compass and follow a path to her own happiness.

Free thinking has nothing to do with inborn intelligence. It is not the result of high IQ. Rather, free thinking raises IQ. All that is required of a free thinker is that she never closes her mind.

What is a closed minded-person? Based on what I've seen, this person believes that after their official education ends, so does learning. At some point this person decides that they have learned enough to survive. After that, they put responsibility for their decisions in somebody else's hands, whether it be a church, a political party, the television or a family member. Or they continue making decisions based on their limited worldview without doubting themselves. Either way, self-analysis is rare.

I firmly believe that free thinking is something that anybody can do. It is an awakening. Yet awakened minds can be put to sleep. That is truly what I fear for my child. I am sure that with an upbringing in my household, she will learn to think for herself. But I am terrified that others she meets in her life may teach her to shut off her brain.

What puts minds to sleep? Dogma. To be properly effective, dogma must be backed with emotion. Some dogma is enforced by communities who use guilt, anger or disappointment to control their members. Others create their own dogma through life experience and fear of losing control keeps them from examining it.

All of this makes me very wary of the role religion will play in the life of my child. Martin Luther said it best: "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." Refreshingly honest, isn't it? This attitude is present in all religions to some degree or another and in some cases it is a point of pride. It is incompatible with free thinking. It also scares the fuck out of me.

My instinct, which I must fight, is to try to shelter her from religion. It's not that I don't want her to have religion. I just want her to come by religion because it was her own decision, not because of somebody else's tradition or negative emotions. If she converts, I want her to convert in such a way that we can discuss religion without her getting upset because she hates to look inward.

Such a small and earnest wish: let her be a free thinker. Yet also so potentially devisive and destructive. It scares me. I must never stop loving her, no matter who she becomes. But I also must never stop challenging her. From the moment her little fingers wrap around my thumb and her muscles flex against it, to the childish moment she asks me about God, to the teenager-moment she says she hates me and my heart breaks, to the moment I she visits me with her own children, to our last moment when we say goodbye forever, I will never stop loving her and challenging her. As blog is my witness, her old man will never stop nudging her toward enlightenment, nor holding her when she needs it, as long as he has elbows.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

The Necromantic States of America

The last couple of years I have been working on a speculative alternate reality which it occurs to me I have not yet discussed here. It has been called, until recently, "A History of Southron Necromancy" but I am now thinking of as "The Necromantic States of America". It seems to be very important to mention it now because one of my short stories which is set in this universe is going to be published soon.

It all started one day when I was watching the news. I don't even remember what it was that I saw, but it once again started me fuming about the American South. My brothers and sisters, that place is seriously fucked. It's a land of delusion where fools command millions and ignorance is worshipped. It's a place where Christian values have been warped into a cult of greed and intolerance. I thought to myself, could The South get any more insane? At that moment I began to concieve of a way that it could.

I've had a soft spot for the American Civil War since I was a teenager. It is natural that my point of historical divergence should begin there. When I was a lad, I had a fascination with plucky underdogs so my sympathies lay with the Confederacy. I subscribed to the romantic view of The South as a land of free men invaded by a bully-nation of bankers and factory drudges, defending their homes and loved ones with chivalry and honor. I made the common mistake of believing that every Southerner was like Robert E. Lee. After a bit of historical research later in life I realized, "Holy shit. Those guys were a bunch of assholes!"

Side note: I sure am talking a lot of shit about the South, aren't I? Apologies. I could defend my viewpoint eloquently if I wished to explain my harsh words, but this post is not supposed to be about the history of Antebellum America. If you are filled with righteous zeal by my angry words, I would ask that you do a little rudimentary historical research on the years 1849-1860 and you'll see that the South had it fucking coming. Screw you Jeff Davis, Roger Taney, William Walker, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, Edmund Ruffin and John C. Calhoun!

Anyway, my history is an examination of what would have happened if the decadent slave-economy of the South had survived the Civil War. The immediate problem with such an idea is that slavery collapsed for a reason: it sucked compared to free-market capitalism. It gave great wealth to slaveholders and left poor Southerners poor. I believe the subjugation of America's blacks could never have survived into the 20th Century, that it would lead to widespread rioting and slave revolts and perhaps foreign invasion. Mechanization in the North was already beginning to outproduce slave labour by the start of the war.

The only way the slave economy could survive is if slaves were better, ie. they were cheaper, worked harder and had no will. Let's see here, what does that remind me of? ZOMBIES, THAT'S WHAT!

In 1860, an Oxford-educated and enlightened slaveholder from Mississippi named Bernard Welles begins a series of conversations with his slave Abigail. Abigail has been in the family for two generations, originally imported from Saint-Domingue. From Abigail, Welles begins to learn about African religion and Voudon, including the craft of raising the dead. After his plantation is sacked by Union marauders, he calls upon his educated friends the world over and forms the Initiates of Anubis, a society dedicated to saving the South from the invading Yankees and using the new art of necromancy to destroy the evil of slavery. After the war, necromancy becomes a state institution, indespensible in manufacturing, agriculture, the military and the home.

I rarely do anything unless I am burning with some sort of passion. For this project it is anger. I see the hypocrisy of so many Christians living in the South and other rural areas of North America. The Bible is very clear on certain matters: Thou Shalt not Kill, for instance. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God", sez Jesus, for another. Jesus wanted you to give up your worldly possessions and live the pure, non-violent life of an ascetic. Period.

Yet our world is crowded with pious Christians who believe that making money is a holy duty, who believe criminals ought to be killed and that God needs to be defended by taking the lives of unbelievers in other countries. There are millions of them out there right now, deluded fools who believe that attending church = heaven, that God is rewarding them with material wealth. Why? Because that's how their parents and grandparents lived.

The Southron gentleman of the Confederate States of America in 1990 lives on his plantation with his extended family and household of undead servants. His most recent servant, Natalya, trained as a housekeeper, is prized because she is white. She died in Russia and was smuggled to the Confederacy aboard a freighter on ice. Reanimated dead work his fields. The gentleman's son drives to the city every day in a pickup truck, which is built by zombies, to learn necromancy at the Society of the Black Roses. The Society is housed in a building near the airport, seaport and manufacturing zone which is surrounded by fortifications and undead soldiers to keep unemployed ruffians and revolutionaries out. Every Sunday the gentleman attends church, where the pastor reminds him that King David was a sorcerer and Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. After church he puts on a polo shirt and his extended family gathers in the compound for a barbeque. There he earnestly thanks Jesus for his bounty and they all chow down, secure in the knowledge that the Pearly Gates await them. This is his old-time religion and no power on earth can convince him otherwise. This, despite the fact that any citizen in any other country on earth recognizes that he is an unholy demon-blight upon the world who, according to his own religion, is going to hell.

Okay, I have to stop now. I just deleted a paragraph of angry jackassery about how much I loathe hypocritical Christians. Nobody needs to read that. Anyway, you get the idea, I'm sure. That is merely the inspiration behind the universe I've created. Each story deals with a different issue, particular point in Southron history or aspect of the effect of necromancy upon the world.

The publication of "Rosie's Knife" is an important first step in my writing career. If I can publish more short stories, the chances of releasing them in an anthology later is increased. What's more, my latest screenplay also occurs in The Confederate States of America in 1991. If I can create sufficient buzz around the universe, the screenplay stands a significantly greater chance of being noticed.

So brace yourselves, readers. The History of Southron Necromancy will unfold before you. (insert rebel yell here)

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Review of "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by Wade Davis

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a non-fiction book written in 1985 by Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist. It is his account of real zombies in Haiti, the poisons that create them, the Haitian secret societies and his quest for understanding Voudon. It is fascinating, creepy, beautiful and scary.



I borrowed this book from a friend's library as research material for a writing project. It is always a pleasure to pick up non-fiction that is well-written and exciting to read. Unfortunately, such styles are not "scientific-sounding", and as such seem suspect, sloppy, slipshod, and other bad things beginning with "s". From an impartial perspective, it is unfair that "interesting" and "scientific" are mutually exclusive writing styles, but what is one to do? Exhaustively listing facts is boring. To enjoy this book, you have to shut off that part of your mind that says, "Wait... give me more proof" and trust the author that he knows what he's talking about. Not being a botanist or pharmacist, I wouldn't know anyway.

If you're curious, his hypothesis about how zombies are created and maintained goes something like this: Firstly, a bokor administers a poison to a victim, the active ingredients being tetrodotoxin obtained from puffer fish mixed with venom from a toad, Bufo marinus. The poison causes the victim to enter a paralyzed, low-oxygen, yet conscious state which is often mistaken for death. After the victim is buried alive, the bokor digs up the zombie and forces them into hard labour while keeping them stoned on another poison obtained from Datura stramonium. It's a fascinating theory and apparently not all scientists agree with it, but like I said earlier, I'm not in a position to judge its merit. I can only say that it's compelling.

However, this is only part of the book. It is also an exploration of Haitian culture. Davis recounts his interactions with Voudon practitioners, peasants and the secret societies that rule outside Port-au-Prince. The creation of zombies is the ugly side of Voudon and Davis takes great pains to show the beautiful side as well. At the end of the book, the reader comes away with a wider understanding of the Voudon view of the universe, or at least as much as the Haitians allowed Davis to see.

*NON-FICTION SPOILER ALERT*

For all its fascination, the book has a slightly unsatisfying ending. While Davis makes it clear that his book is not just about zombies, much of it is. He has a great hypothesis and all that remains is for it to be proved by first-hand evidence and testing. However, he can't go through with it. He is given offers to witness zombie ceremonies by several parties at expensive prices, but he worries that by agreeing he will initiate a ceremony that wouldn't otherwise have occurred, thus condemning some poor slob to zombiedom. Thus his hypothesis is unproven and must remain a theory. It's understandable, but boo.

*END OF SPOILER*

So the Serpent and the Rainbow is a great read and has a pretty good theory about zombies, though sadly it cannot yet join the realms of scientific fact.
4 species of venomous puffer fish out of 5

Read more stuff at http://www.pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/