The Binary Circumstance

It’s been many years since I’ve eaten a Hostess Twinkie but I sure ate plenty of them as a kid, and Hostess Cupcakes.

Now there’s a book, Twinkie, Deconstructed, that traces the origins of all 39 ingredients in a Hostess Twinkie back to their source.

From MSNBC/Newsweek:

At the heart of the book is the fundamental question: why is it you can bake a cake at home with as few as six ingredients, but Twinkies require 39? And why do many of them seem to bear so little resemblance to actual food? The answer: To stay fresh on a grocery-store shelf, Twinkies can’t contain anything that might spoil, like milk, cream or butter.

You mean, anything like real food?

…it can be unsettling to learn just how closely the basic ingredients in processed foods resemble industrial materials. Corn dextrin, a common thickener, is also the glue on postage stamps and envelopes. Ferrous sulfate, the iron supplement in enriched flour and vitamin pills, is used as a disinfectant and weedkiller. Is this cause for concern? Ettlinger says no, though you wouldn’t want a diet that consists solely of Twinkies. Ultimately, all food, natural and otherwise, is composed of chemical compounds—and normal ingredients like salt have industrial applications, too. Still, it gives you pause when he describes calcium sulfate, a dough conditioner, as “food-grade plaster of Paris.”

Sam Harris is debating Andrew Sullivan on Beliefnet.com and the whole thing is all too boring for me.

Objective Reality is not subject to the outcome of a debate.

Andrew Sullivan is a lost cause. People who have psychological need for a God-loves-me-better-than-anybody-else view of existence have more difficulty giving it up than a drug addict has giving up his drugs. That is at least partly due to the fact that religion has social rewards that drug addiction does not. Stealing to support a drug habit is illegal but stealing tax dollars to support religion is perfectly legal, socially acceptable, and widely practiced by the current administration.

But I’m sure the “debate” is good for book sales and Sullivan’s blog readership.

God either exists or he doesn’t. It’s a binary circumstance. Those who believe God does exist have never throughout the course of human history produced any evidence to support their belief.

What’s to debate?

Experiments will take you much farther than any debate if your goal is to discover the truth.

Check out Sam Harris’s books. I recently finished his Letter to a Christian Nation which I enjoyed even though I didn’t find a lot that was original in his arguments. I admired the fact that he pulled no punches when attacking the irrationality of religion. He does, however, seem to hold some irrational beliefs of his own when it comes to his implied alternatives (read socialism) to a “Christian” or religion-based nation.

If you want a real rational, Mensa Member’s view of existence, you’ll have to read my book.

The DaVinci Code turned out to be a much more interesting and thrilling movie than I expected it to be from the reviews.

It is often said that movies are never as good as the books that inspire them, but having never read the book, I cannot make that comparison. My impression is that people who read the book were very disappointed in the movie.

For me it was like watching Casino Royale, the most recent James Bond movie. It seemed contrived in a way to create a sense of drama and to produce thrills but the story was jumbled and confusing. All the thrills, puzzles, and violence, even the self-inflicted kind, seem to exist so the viewer will never look at the story too critically. I had difficuty knowing who was on whose side at different points. Nonetheless I still enjoyed it and its interesting take on the origins of Christianity.

Anybody who’s read anything beyond the official Bible about Christianity knows that the Catholic Church edited the gospels to include sections favorable to protecting their own power over individuals while throwing the rest away, so the basic premise was not new to me and seemed perfectly plausible.

Most of all it was fun to watch my belief that religious people live in their own fantasy worlds–and will do anything to protect their fantasies–enacted on film. I doubt most people saw it that way, which is probably why they didn’t like the movie as much as I did.

Other books related to The DaVinci Code.
Other DVDs related to The DaVinci Code.

The Natural History Museum in Oslo has opened an exhibit about homosexuality in animals.

But the Natural History Museum in Oslo has gone one better. As America’s religious right fulminates against homosexuality, Europe embraces gay marriage, and leading homosexuals such as Martina Navratilova denounce scientists in Oregon for attempting to make gay sheep straight, the Naturhistorisk Museum is stepping squarely into the heart of a controversy that dates back to at least AD1120 when the Church Council of Nablus described homosexuality as a “sin against nature” .

It is staging a government-financed exhibition in its august halls that shows that homosexuality — far from being unnatural — is actually rampant in the animal world. Against Nature? is the first exhibition in the world dedicated to gay animals, claims Petter Bockman, its bearded and ponytailed scientific adviser, who also happens to be the University of Oslo’s leading — and only — frog expert (there are not many amphibians, gay or straight, this far north).

The facts have been staring scientists in the face for years, Bockman says, as he stands in front of the gay giraffes. “It’s fairly easy to see because the giraffe’s sex organs are not what you’d call modest.” The problem, he contends, is that when researchers are confronted by such behaviour, they choose to ignore it. They claim it is irrelevant to their work, or fear ridicule or the loss of their grants if they draw attention to it. They prefer to describe two animals of the same sex frolicking with each other as “competition, a form of greeting, ritualised combat, things like that — even when we are talking full anal intercourse with ejaculation”.

While I’m glad to see such an exhibit take place, stolen property (taxes) should not be used to fund such events any more than they should be used to subsidize religion.

Politics and science do not mix well. Once science is politicized, it is no longer science. Reality is not dependent upon the outcome of a vote.

For more on homosexuality in the animal kingdom, check out Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance.