jameswharris

Reading Synergy

Sometimes I luck out and read two great books about different subjects that reinforce each other’s ideas and make each book more powerful. Earlier this month I read Half The Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Now I’m reading The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, about comparing modern society to human societies of the past. Jared Diamond makes a case that human behavior is different under state governments than how we lived under pre-state societies. Diamond describes life and psychology in hunter and gather cultures, as well a chiefdoms and tribal societies. It might surprise you that there is much in the two books that overlap, but then any two books that chronicles so many cultures around the world are bound to overlap.

Half the Sky is introduced by saying 60-100 million women are missing from the current population. Kristof and WuDunn point out that gender selected abortion, infanticide, the favoring of male children to receive medical care over females, enslavement, torture and other horrible social practices explain the missing females from the world’s population.

Jared Diamond also describes how pre-state cultures are hard on females. His book explains why these cultures practice infanticide and gender selected abortions when they have access to technology. What Diamond essentially says is our modern way of life is new and that humans lived much differently for millions of years before the advent of state controlled governments.

Most traditional cultures, as Diamond calls them, fought constant wars over women, food, land and natural resources. Societies were male dominated and women were possessions. Polygamy was the common marriage arrangement which inherently treats women unfairly.

If you blend the two books together you see that the world is going through a transformation. We’re shifting from traditional cultures to state cultures which over time has abolished slavery and moved towards monogamy and fairer treatment of women.

Kristof and WuDunn make a case that if we change how we treat women, we’ll change how societies operate, and thus reduce terrorism and war, and increase economic activity and freedom for all individuals. Diamond indirectly says states protects individuals and frees them from constant warring and violence, which is mainly caused by males seeking personal revenge and retribution. He also points out the ownership of women causes much of the violence in traditional societies.

There is a synergy between that and the TV show I’m watching on DVD, Hatfields & McCoys. The two feuding families were more like two feuding tribes. I find further reading synergy between the above and the book Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne describing the history of the Comanche Indians, and The Old Testament. The Old Testament is a history of the twelve tribes of Israel conquering the Canaanites, and later about the twelve tribes of Israel trying to survive the onslaught to two state run societies, The Babylonians and The Romans. Empire of the Summer Moon is about the Comanches fighting the onslaught of the United States of America, another state run society.

For most of human history we live and fought each other as small groups. The standard operating procedure was kill your enemy, enslave the women, and adopt the children. The Old Testament illustrates this perfectly. Sometimes God told the Israelites to kill everything that walks and crawls when they invade a village, and sometimes God told them to kill only them men and keep the women and children. The tribes of Israel acted no different from the Comanches. Whether they were as cruel in their torture was not noted in The Bible, but I expect it was pretty much like what we saw between the Hutu and the Tutsi.

The upshot of all these books is individual freedom, peace, gender equality, the semblance of justice comes from state run governments. If we don’t want tribal societies like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda then we have to promote strong central governments.

Kristof and WuDunn don’t go into this directly. They just advocate uplifting women where we can, but what that really means if Jared Diamond is right, is we have to eliminate old traditional ways, which is a kind of cultural imperialism. Diamond is very fond of traditional societies and thinks we can learn from them, and that might be true, but he knows we can’t maintain all the old ways. This is best illustrated in his introduction when he compares 1961 New Guinea people to 2013 New Guinea people. The World Until Yesterday is an extremely important book.

In a pre-state society, safety is living very close to your tribe and your tribal alliances. It is extremely unsafe to venture far and meet strangers. Nearly all strangers are considered enemies. If you are alone and meet a group of strangers expect to flee or die. If you are with your friends and find strangers in a smaller number, expect to kill. This is the basis for our xenophobia. It worked the same for the Hatfields and the McCoys.

In a state society we learn to trust strangers. We can safely travel the world as long as we don’t venture into traditional societies. When you go to France you don’t expect the Frenchmen to kill you. That won’t be true in areas where people still live by traditional ways.

Kristof and WuDunn inadvertently make the case that lingering traditional societies are killing off women, or cruelly oppressing them, and that we need to spread strong governments into traditional societies. What they explicitly advocate is finding gentle ways of changing social customs in traditional societies to be more enlightened about women. If you read Empire of the Summer Moon you’ll see how 19th century people wanted to gently change the Comanche. It didn’t work as planned. I doubt changing the Taliban will be any more of a success.

Strangely enough, the real vector of change is television and the internet. Knowledge is homogenizing. Citizens of traditional cultures resent being forced to change. Practices like infanticide and female genital mutilation are natural, if not holy and good to them. It is insulting to these people to tell them their ways of doing things are evil and grotesque. But if they are given a choice they sometimes choose to change on their own. Television and the internet help them see their choices. Kristof and WuDunn say helping women will cause positives changes too. That’s a great hypothesis to test.

I highly recommend reading Half the Sky, The World Until Yesterday and Empire of the Summer Moon together for the strong synergy of ideas. All too often we think our way of doing things is the right way, and everyone else’s way is wrong. Many people advocate cultural relativism, but I don’t. I believe individuals are more important than cultures. There is no superior culture, but I advocate the maximum protection of the individual with the goal of giving everyone the most freedom possible. That avoids the which culture is better issue. Of course, individual freedoms tend to homogenize societies because it does away with violence, gender bias, slavery, polygamy, and all kinds of other culture beliefs that tend to color individual cultures.

JWH – 1/28/13

The Shelf Life of Nonfiction

I buy books faster than I can read them, and some books go stale before I get around to consuming them. Fiction is often timeless, but for nonfiction, most books have a shelf life. A ten to twenty year old science book is usually not worth reading. Books about politics and economics go bad even quicker. And books about current events and pop culture have practically no shelf life at all.

Yesterday I started reading Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age by Paul Graham, published in 2004. When this book came out, the back of the dust cover had seven high praising blurbs, but I think time has tarnished the luster of its big ideas. I’m not singling out Paul Graham for criticism, but using his book as an example of what time does to nonfiction, and to compare it to how fiction holds up better over time.

For example Graham writes about nerds and geeks and speculates on the nature of popularity and how it appears that being smart is a good thing before and after high school, but not during. Eight years later, this essay seems dated because the topic has been well covered since. However, when I think of great stories about nerds and geeks, I think of King Dork, a 2006 book by Frank Portman, Sixteen Candles, a John Hughes film from 1984, and Freaks and Geeks, a TV show from the 1999-2000 season. Graham’s nonfiction essay has few reporting details, other than some vague personal memories. Graham was abstractly talking about the reputation of being smart among high school students, and if you were clued into his message it might have felt insightful in 2004. It doesn’t in 2013.

Most of the essays are still somewhat appealing, but were probably much fresher as blog or magazine pieces at the time. You can read them here, and in particular, “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” I think the fictional accounts I mention above clearly show why nerds are unpopular, and these art forms have lasting power. Now, this isn’t meant to criticize Graham’s essays. I write the same kind of essays myself for this blog, and I often wonder if my ideas wouldn’t be better presented as fiction. Social commentary often works better shown not told.

I wonder if 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder would hold up to rereading today? It won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Tracy used an abundance of actual details, and reported on the lives of engineers designing the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 minicomputer. No one cares about that minicomputer today. I found the book riveting at the time, but would I now? Readers today might care about the history of the subculture that built it, but it would be an esoteric read. I need to get a copy of The Soul of a New Machine and reread it to see how well it holds up 30+ years later. Few people will ever read The Soul of a New Machine today, but many will keep watching movies like The Social Network (2010) long into the future.

Sure, some nonfiction books do have lasting power. People still read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin from 1859 and Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau from 1854. Would more people understand these books if they were made into movies?

When I pulled Hackers & Painters off the shelf to read last week, I also pulled Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (2007) by Edward Humes, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir (1999) by Jerry M. Linenger, and Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) by Edmund Wilson. The Wilson book is the most famous, but only known to literary theory historians probably.

These books are all worth reading, but do they really hold up? Off the Planet offers the gritty details of being an astronaut and is far more realistic than any science fiction book. And think about that. Few people read about real space travel, and millions embrace highly unbelievable space opera in books, comics and movies. For the most part people just prefer fiction to fact.

Monkey Girl is a serious book. It’s an important book. It’s about the teaching of evolution in schools and the legal actions against it. A subject always in the news. Monkey Girl is brilliant reporting on reality, with thousands of details and ideas to chew on. I think that’s a clue to the success of nonfiction lasting. Nonfiction must report details, not speculation. A book like Eden’s Outcast, John Matteson’s 2007 biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson Alcott is timeless – until another biographer puts in more work that overshadows it.

I’m slowly moving from being a fiction bookworm to a nonfiction bookworm. We’ve always cherished and judged great novels as art, but I think we need to apply the same attention to nonfiction. Most nonfiction published is no more lasting than a newspaper, but some nonfiction books do have a long shelf life and we need to consider them as art too.

Yet, why does fiction have so much more lasting power than nonfiction? I’m reading South Wind by Paul Douglas, a fictionalize account of British expats living on the island of Capri published in 1971. Would a nonfiction travel book written at the time be more informative? Before that I read Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick, a fictionalize account of 1959 life in Marin County, California. I found it totally compelling.

What does fiction have that nonfiction doesn’t to make it enduring? How is it we often find fiction more educational about the past than nonfiction books?

Writing nonfiction that’s powerful and lasting, should contain an abundance of facts that our collective soul won’t want to forget. Either from research or reporting, nonfiction that’s as powerful as fiction must contain an overwhelming collection of vivid details about life in another time. Strangely enough, it’s the accumulation of significant creative details that make fiction powerful. Fiction can be lies that last for centuries. Few nonfiction books last very long. They are always superseded by books with better facts, but some nonfiction books do last. We need to identify and think about them.

Here is Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books. There are many wonderful books on this list, but most of them just don’t convey the concept of classics to me. I’ve only read nine of them, and read parts of a few others. I often reread great fictional novels, but rarely reread a nonfiction book. Why?

That’s another kind of shelf life. I keep my favorite novels, but I give away the nonfiction I admire.

JWH – 1/22/13

Retirement-Trading Money for Time

I’ll be 62 in November and I want to retire soon after that. I don’t know if that’s prudent, because waiting until I’m 66 would get me a lot more money, but it’s what I want. My friends Mike and Connell have always been industrious ants to my carefree grasshopper self. Both have been tight with their money, never spending much, always saving and investing. I didn’t start saving until late in life, but luckily I’ve been working for the state of Tennessee for over 35 years and have a pension coming. Enough to live on if I spend wisely, something I’ve never done.

Living like a grasshopper is possible before retirement, but after retirement its an ant’s life for sure. I’ve got to learn to pinch pennies and that’s going to be a new lifestyle for me. CouponBug here I come. I expect those old adages like a penny saved is a penny earned, or waste not, want not, will become way more meaningful after my retirement.

If I can’t change my spending habits this year, it’s probably a sign I shouldn’t retire. Soon a fixed income will become a reality. What they really should call it is a fractional income. The fraction I must embrace is 6/10th. Every month this year I need to prove my retirement worthiness by only spending 60% of what I normally spend. Luckily, since Susan started working in Birmingham, I’ve been learning to cut expenses. I think I’m close already, I just need to fine tune my penny pinching ways.

The trouble the 40% has to mainly come from causal fun expenditures, like eating out, cable TV, buying tons of books and music, going to movies and plays, buying gadgets and computers, etc. I could save hundreds a month if we sold the house and I got an apartment. Susan works out of town and has her own apartment, but I live in house she grew up in that we bought after her parents died. The cheapest way for me to live would be to sell the house and move to Birmingham, but I don’t want to do that because I have so many friends here.

When I look at my credit card statement it has lots of unnecessary charges. Charges for stuff I can’t be buying after I retire. If I was like Mike and Connell, I would have never developed such bad spending habits. They’ve been telling me this for decades, I’ve just haven’t listened. It’s amazing how much stuff we buy that we don’t need. Or how much stuff we pay too much for, or how much stuff we just plain waste. I buy $6 worth of grapes, but I let $3 worth go bad.

A word to the young, from a guy who didn’t listen. Every dollar you spend now is a dollar you won’t have in the future. Well, I never listened to that kind of talk either, but I guess every essay needs a message.

Essentially what I’m doing is trading money for time. I’ve always wanted more time, here’s my chance. Luckily I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to retire and travel the world and lead the good life. I won’t have the money for that. What I want is time to read and write, I want to listen to music and write fun computer programs. I want to systematically study the history of science and literature. Maybe I’ll learn to play the guitar, but I always say that, and never do.

I’ve got 500 hardback books waiting to read, and 200 audio books queued up to be listened to. I’ve got several novels, and hundreds of essays and short stories I want to write.

I want to spend a lot of time just snoozing and napping. I actually want to read all those cool websites and blogs I’ve been bookmarking, and watch all those movies and documentaries in my Netflix queue. Awhile back I bought the complete run of The Rolling Stone magazine on DVD. I’d like to read all the record reviews and listen to those albums on Rdio. Awhile back I bought a DVD of all the “Amateur Scientist” columns from Scientific American. I’d love to go through them and do some of the experiments. I want to program a time-line database. I want to learnt to program in Python and write programs that teach me math. I’d like to build my own super computer (by year 2000 standards) for modeling visual data.

I’m Henry Bemis and I finally have time enough at last. I just hope my glasses don’t break.

Now this paradise of time is going to cost me. Eating out for convenience won’t be practical. Spending money to go out to a play or movie just to spend two hours with a friend will be wasteful. Buying a new tablet or computer because it’s new and different will be an insane act. I have four computers, an iPad, two Kindles and an iPod touch. That’s a kind of CPU luxury will be silly in the future.

I now buy 10 books for every one I read. After I retire, I need to read 9 books for every one I buy. I need to become a library patron again.

I’ve been living without cable for a couple years now. For the price of Netflix and Hulu I have more great TV to watch than I can cram into a lifetime of 24×7 couch potato living.

Many people I know have dropped their land lines and switched to a smart phone. I’ve kept my land line and use a dumb cell phone that costs me about $8 a month. My 12 year old truck just passed 71,000 miles, so I figure I can drive it another 20 years. Susan began working out of town five years ago and I started cost cutting then, but now I’ve got to get deadly serious about not spending money if I want to live without working.

And in a way that’s such a weird concept, to live without working. I’ve been working for four decades. Will retirement be like my growing up years? Or will I be growing down?

There’s more to preparing for retirement than just living cheap. Work has always been a major social outlet, so I’ll need to psyche myself up for spending a lot more time alone. Less money and fewer friends maybe, but hopefully do more with those fewer people, a lot more. Most of my socializing costs money. I need to invite people over. I need to learn to cook for people and plan inexpensive activities at home. Oh yeah, that means I need to learn how to cook and host parties.

My friend Peggy who recently retired says her problem is time management. She says she never gets anything done because she always feels she has all the time in the world. I hope that doesn’t happen to me. Of course, I might be fooling myself.

That’s the thing about planning for retirement, you really don’t know what it will be like until after you retire. Wouldn’t it be funny that I’ll finally get to give up the old 9-to-5 and then discover I was one of those guys who was happiest working until they died? I don’t think I will be. All the people I know that have retired have said retiring has been the best thing in their life and they are busier now than ever before.

JWH – 1/21/13

Windows 8 Nightmare

My old friend Connell called me up tonight to update me on his saga of getting a new laptop with Windows 8. From the last installment I had thought everything was great. Connell is not a computer guy. He’s been using Windows XP for years and never went to Vista or Windows 7. Both Connell and my wife Susan bought a new laptop with Windows 8 the same week. Susan wanted Windows 7, but none of the stores had a machine that came with it, and she didn’t want to custom order one from Dell or HP. Both Susan and Connell bought their machines and set them up without my help. I thought that was a good sign. I did help Susan by giving her a Windows Easy Transfer cable and telling her how to use it.

Connell was quite angry when he called tonight. Susan’s initial calls claimed Windows 8 wasn’t too bad, but since then she’s been running into some problems, mainly frustrated that some of her games aren’t Windows 8 compatible. It’s frozen up a couple of times and she had to hold the power button down until it shut off. But she loves her new machine anyway, especially that it doesn’t run hot like her old laptop.

Connell’s biggest frustration has been with the Charms bar. He can’t get it to open when he wants it, and it opens when he doesn’t, driving him crazy. Neither know how to go deep and configure their machine, or find options when they need them.

I’ve set Windows 8 up three times now on test machines at work. I can use it, but it’s a pain in the ass, and it’s butt ugly. I really, really, really dislike Windows 8. Windows 7 is my all time favorite operating system, and I have OS X on an iMac at work. I’m worried what will happen if I want to buy a new machine and my only choice for a PC is Windows 8. I guess I’ll have to choose between Linux and OS X, and since I’m too cheap to buy a Mac, it will be Linux. By the way, I put Ubuntu on my iMac as a dual boot and I really think Ubuntu looks great on an iMac. But I won’t spend $1200 for that either.

Connell is planning on taking his laptop back and getting a Chromebook. I’m curious how that will work out. Susan is adapting to Windows 8, but she mainly plays Farmville and GameHouse games. She’s going to give me her old laptop and I’m going to buy a SSD drive for it and put Ubuntu on it. I wonder if she’ll want it back?

I’m also thinking about buying Android on a stick for my television and experimenting with it.

What’s happening is Windows 8 is forcing people to consider alternative OSes. At work I’ve decided not to roll out Windows 8. We can still get Windows 7 from Dell. Many of our professors are now wanting Macs. The iPhone and iPad have convinced many of our Windows users to try iMacs and MacBooks. We were 95% PC, but that’s changing. I still push Windows 7, but the tide might be turning. Windows 8 will only inspire more switching. I’ve already gotten several calls from people buying Windows 8 for their home machines. Some have asked how can they put Windows 7 on their new machines. Luckily I don’t have to support home machines, but I tell them they need to get used to Windows 8, because going back to Windows 7 is costly and time consuming. Microsoft should make a Revert to 7 disc and give it away. Connell was told he could pay $60 to have Windows 7 put on his machine from the store where he bought his new laptop, but he thought that was insulting and a ripoff. You shouldn’t have to pay $60 to fix a new machine.

Microsoft, I think you need to pull a Coke Classic and bring back Windows 7.

JWH – 11/14/13

How Religious Concepts Are Spread Like Computer Viruses

This is a book review of Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels, but I’m going to go about it in a very round about way.

How the Concept of Heaven Came to Be

Once up a time there was a man named Jesus. He was an ordinary human. He was not divine. He was not God. We know next to nothing about Jesus and can’t even prove he existed. We are fairly sure he did exist and that he said some interesting things about compassion and love, but even that is speculation. We know if he existed that he died. Everyone dies.

After he died his friends began to remember him through oral story telling. He must have made a great impression on them. At first they told stories about what he preached. Those stories were told to other people. The stories spread and grew. Story tellers began to embellish on those stories and Jesus became something new.

The storytellers developed a whole life around Jesus, telling more than than just messages. He was deified. He was giving magical powers. And the stories grew and grew. Decades after his death people began collecting those stories and writing them down. Some of those stories were attributed to men who had known Jesus personally, but it’s doubtful those men actual wrote the gospels. Then a man named Saul had a vision from Jesus, and he began preaching about Jesus and spread stories about Jesus far and wide, especially to people who were not Jews, to the pagans. Saul became Paul and invented Christianity. The myths of Jesus caught fire in the minds of men living around the Mediterranean in the first century.

We know dead people can’t talk to the living. We know the dead don’t return to Earth. We know the people in the first century were very ignorant, illiterate and superstitious. We know the followers of Jesus were marginalized people. We know the followers of Jesus were persecuted. We know the poor people of the first century lived extremely hard lives. They wanted escape from cruelty, poverty and death. They believed the stories of Jesus. They believed because they had nothing else.

As the stories about Jesus spread, what was promised to the believers of Jesus? Jesus could conquer disease and death. Jesus promised eternal life. Jesus was God, and he could give you anything you wanted if only you believed. Ideas about Jesus became very powerful ideas. Ideas about Jesus eventually overthrew the Roman Empire. Ideas about Jesus have survived for two thousand years and spread to billions of people.

We know life after death is not real. We know God does not exist. We know people aren’t born from virgin birth. We know magic does not exist. So how did these ideas survive and spread? How is belief in fantasies so much more powerful than reality?

Words and ideas do have power. Ideas and concepts do spread. Belief and fantasy is far more powerful than facts and reality.

The logic against God is overwhelming, but the power of belief is even more powerful than logic. Why?

Jesus no longer exists. Ideas about Jesus do exist and are so powerful as to almost be indestructible. Ideas about Jesus aren’t immortal, but as long as believers exist they will thrive and spread. How are ideas able to become this powerful and spread so thoroughly?

Heaven

There was a time when the concept of heaven didn’t exist. The idea of an afterlife is so old that it’s impossible to trace. We think Neanderthals believed in an afterlife. We know the Egyptians believed in an afterlife. The ancient Jewish people didn’t. One Jewish friend told me once that if modern Jews think of heaven or life after death it’s because they’ve been corrupted by Christianity. I’m not sure Jesus promised an afterlife, but sometime after he died, his followers started using the promise of eternal life as a selling point for Christianity.

Where did the idea of heaven come from? Well, one specific place is the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It describes Heaven quite specifically that is completely different from most people’s concept of heaven today. How did the heaven in the Book of Revelation get to be the heaven we know today? And which heaven. It seems every person that’s heard of the concept imagines it differently.

The Tree of Ideas – Forking Branches

Here’s a chart I’ve borrowed from the Internet to show how ideas branch, and how new ideas even merge with other ideas. If I were to give a chart that tracked this history of the concept of heaven it would have billions of nodes.

In the computer world when programmers argue over a programming project, they’ll split into two groups and each take the source code and develop new versions separately, in the manner each want. That’s called forking. Judaism and Christianity are a fork. Judaism and Islam are a fork. Christianity and Mormonism are a fork. Every different Protestant sect is a fork. Every personal view of The Bible is a fork. Some people want to believe in the literal truth of The Bible and cut out all the middle forks of religion, but every personal interpretation is a fork.

But smaller ideas fork too. Religions are composed of many, many concepts, even thousands, so it’s very hard to pinpoint any whole subject exactly because it’s components are always forking and mutating.

If God exists and is all powerful he could just appear in the sky, on every TV, on every cell phone, on every computer screen, on every Game Boy, once a year and tell us all who is is and what he wants from us. The Book of Revelation is like many of the books of The Bible where the writer is extorting its readers to all act the same way and it uses the fear of God as the stick and the promise of heaven as the carrot.

Go read The Book of Revelation. Use this link which has a modern easy to understand translation. The Book of Revelation has the most descriptive accounts of heaven and hell in all of The Bible. Read it carefully. The Book of Revelation’s description of heaven sounds no different from hell to me. Here is the description of heaven:

10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.

13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west.

14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls.

16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long.

17 He measured its wall and it was 144 cubits thick, by man’s measurement, which the angel was using.

18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass.

19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald,

20 the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.

21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass.

22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb

2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

From this description most concepts of heaven have forked. Heaven is a meme that entered the collective consciousness almost two thousand years ago and has infected our minds like a virus ever since. It has forked so many times that it’s impossible to reassemble all the mutant paths. Nonetheless, heaven is just an idea, that’s all. It’s an idea people want to be real, but it’s not.

Is this your image of heaven, a building that one translation of measurements of the time would make it slightly smaller than Australia, with no sun or moon or sky, lit only by the light of God. Some people rationalize The Book of Revelation by claiming it’s symbolic, but then why isn’t the rest of The Bible symbolic?

Does Christianity merely promise an afterlife of living in the biggest mall on Earth where you spend all your time admiring God? No, Christians loved the idea of immortality and life in heaven, but they’ve constantly reshaped each.

Heaven is an idea that has infected the world and constantly mutates. It’s an ancient meme. It’s a mental virus.

Generally, ideas, once introduced are hard to reclaim, like the contents of Pandora’s Box. But, in the early days of Christianity there was a war of ideas and many were erased from the minds of men. Or almost. See The Book of Revelation wasn’t the only book of revelation going around when they assembled the Bible. All the others were repressed and destroyed so the one we have today is the officially divine version. So why did early Christians insist on John of Patmos’ vision?

Book of Revelation

One of the most powerful pieces of writing that has ever existed is The Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation has inspired religions, believers and artists for eighteen centuries. If we could trace all the ideas it contained, forked, mutated, inspired and generated, the list would be staggering. The Book of Revelation has generated more false beliefs than any book in history, except maybe The Book of Genesis. However, stories about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and Noah don’t really match up to the power of the second coming, the final judgment, and life in heaven and hell. Just look at the Left Behind movement, which came from The Book of Revelation, and deeply affects politics and society today.

Again, I recommend reading The Book of Revelation in the New International Version here. It’s a fairly quick read, and for all its legendary reputation for having confusing symbolism, it’s quite straight forward and explicit once you know few historical clues. 666 is a numerical coding for Emperor Nero probably, and the whore of Babylon is Rome. Basically The Book of Revelation is a declaration of war on the Roman Empire. The Jews are God’s chosen people, the Gentiles and Pagans are evil and unworthy. Like most of the other books of The Bible, it nags the good to follow God’s laws and warns the bad of his wrath. However, this time, John is given a preview of what’s to come. Basically God and Jesus will rescue the chosen, the elect, the 144,000 people’s whose names are in God’s book, and the followers of Christ, and then kill everyone else.

Elaine Pagels, a scholar specializing in the Gnostic Gospels and Apocrypha books of The Bible just came out with Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. Her book is a short overview of The Book of Revelation, what it’s about, why it was probably written, how it’s significance grew until it was included as the final book of The Bible, and finally how it beat out many other books of revelations to become the book of revelation in the Christian belief system.

My friends often wonder why I read books about religious history. They figure since I’m an atheist I would have no interest in religion. But I am fascinated by history, information theory, science, philosophy and how ideas are created and spread. How religious concepts go viral is just as fascinating as how computer viruses are created and spread. Since humans are not computers, many people dislike this analogy, but you might be surprised that ideas are like viruses, infecting their hosts and spreading through social contact. The theory isn’t new. It’s slowly spreading itself. The science of infectious ideas is called memetics, and the idea that memes are “Viruses of the Mind” was first proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1991. A newer book by Richard Brodie called Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme takes this concept further.

While Dawkins and most atheists study how religious ideas are spread in our contemporary world, I find it worthwhile to go back to the beginning of Christianity and see how its most powerful memes got started in the first place. An excellent of example of this kind of study is Pagels’ book Revelations. Another book that covers the same territory Forged by Bart D. Ehrman, that also came out in 2012.

Let me be very clear in my position – anyone believing that The Book of Revelation is about anything other than 1st century politics is spinning out new memes. There is no such thing as divine revelations or prophecy. We know this is true for two reasons, science, and the fact that all people we’ve examined in modern times that proclaimed revelations or prophecy have proven to be insane. But for some reason modern people think that ancient people really did receive revelations from God and angels and were given the power to foretell the future. Those are just two of the memes that grew out of The Old Testament and even older religions. We have no way to track down the originals of those meme, revelation and prophecy. They are very ancient concepts that have spread all over the world to all religions. They probably originated separately in various parts of the world.

The Book of Revelation by John of Patmos does create many original memes we can track through the centuries. One of the most fascinating aspect of Elaine Pagels’ book, and of Forged by Bart Ehrman, is how early Christians used their religious beliefs for political purposes. Their rhetoric, tactics, motives and argumentative styles are almost identical to contemporary Christian fundamentalist thinkers and the political pundits we see today on Fox News.

The Book of Revelation has a lot of mysteries that I am not interested in. Many people want to believe that the John who wrote The Book of Revelation was also the John who wrote the Gospel of John, and many of those people want to believe that John was also the John the Apostle. Most scholars consider them three separate men. But authorship is an issue that I am interested in for a different reason.

When Jesus lived, and even that’s open for debate, he had a few followers. How did Christianity go from a few believers to billion of believers? How did the early Christians spread their ideas, especially after Rome started a program to exterminate them. How did they keep spreading their ideas until Christians were the rulers of the Roman world? How did Christians codify their beliefs into a book that spread their beliefs across the whole world? Strangely. the story is far more political than spiritual.

How did Christian ideas spread like a virus infecting untold billions of people through the centuries, even after better, and more rational ideas developed? I believe they used certain techniques that made their memes more powerful. They include:

God told us (revelation)
Jesus taught us
Jesus died and was reborn (it’s funny how people just accept this idea of proof of Christianity)
the disciples taught us (Gospels)
Jesus reveal to us after he died (Paul, John of Patmos, etc.)
we will live after we die (heaven didn’t exist as a reward until after Jesus died, but it was a huge selling point)
the scriptures taught us
allegories and coded works
forgeries, fakes and forked ideas

One way to validate your idea is to not claim those ideas are yours, but God gave them to you. Very few people get away with being a Prophet with a message from God. The next best thing is to claim your idea was given to you by a Prophet personally, these are the disciples that knew Jesus. But if you weren’t part of the original twelve how do you validate your ideas? Paul claims to have met Christ on the road to Damascus in a vision. That’s pretty convenient, and he got away with it, even though he taught a message of Christianity that was distinctively different from Peter and James and the other apostles. In today’s world there are countless people who hear from God and Jesus but we don’t take them serious.

As Bart Ehrman points out in Forged, that back in the early days of Christianity there were a lot of people with ideas, mainly political, that wanted their ideas accepted, so they wrote using another name. Ehrman shows how many Christian scholars believe several of the books in the New Testament are forgeries of this kind. Mostly people after Paul’s time using Paul’s name to get some things done. What John of Patmos does is claim he got his revelations from a vision of Christ. He was attacking Rome in an allegoric and coded document. He had to hide his true meaning because the Romans would have killed him. For centuries other people have used The Book of Revelation as the basis of their authority to attack social and political conditions in their own day. The entire second coming, left behind meme comes from The Book of Revelation, even though it was intended the first century and not the current. Coding your ideas in allegoric visions usually doesn’t work, but thousands of writers have cribbed from this story.

This kind of claiming authority worked for the first few hundred years until it became very hard to believe anyone knew the original guys, or that any of their writings were still left undiscovered. Today we always doubt people who claim they got a message from God, except that it’s been pulled off rather well twice since Christianity began, by Islam and The Church of Later Day Saints.

Today we get people who claim they know what God thinks and they try to speak for him. Here’s a horrific example that came out after the Sandy Hook killings. Watch this video till the end, so see how their logic is refuted.

The logic used by the people to promote prayer in school is the same logic that was used for form Christianity and take over the Roman Empire. There were writers in those early centuries that attacked Christianity for its illogical premises, but those works have been mostly destroyed. For a religion claiming be based on the lamb, the early Christians were as aggressive as lions. Pagels told of a bishop who foiled the power of his enemy, a powerful intellectual monk, by writing the monk’s biography and having him believe everything the bishop did.

Reading about early Christianity is the study of political power of memes. Christianity spread spiritual memes like belief in heaven and hell, but it mainly spread political ideas that developed the Catholic Church. Pagels chronicles the early Christians who believed very differently from modern Christians. The Catholic Church, which became the orthodoxy, had many opponents which the orthodoxy labeled heretical. These opponents had different ideas as to what Jesus taught. We can never know what Jesus really taught because the orthodoxy wiped out the heretics and all their writings. Well, victors always get to write history, except in the 20th century we discovered a couple caches of documents hidden by the heretics 1800 years ago. Elaine Pagels has made a life-long career of studying these documents and they give us vague tantalizing clues to the early Christian years and how various memes were created.

If religion is a virus of the mind, what is the anti-virus? Obviously logic and science are not the answer. They do work against religion, but their effective rate of cure is very slow. Scientists are learning that humans are not logical and rational, but are powerful rationalizing creatures. Most people’s desire to believe in an afterlife is so powerful they will do anything to maintain that belief. This is particularly perplexing because the details of what immortality will be like are extremely vague. Other than not dying, the most common benefit of the afterlife is getting to meet dead family and friends. Most people expect a pleasant existence in the afterlife but have no specifics of what that will involve. The Book of Revelation does provide a lot of details, but I can’t believe people actual find them appealing.

We live in a reality obscured by ideas. John the Apostle and John of Patmos did know the power of “The Word.” Like Plato they believed their ideal concepts were reality. They thought their concepts were purer than reality. Their visions became memes that have infected the minds of men ever since. Will we ever be cured of these fantasies?

We live in a world were the majority of people live lives based on delusions. They fiercely campaign for political changes based on their delusions. They demand that all people follow their delusions. They demand that all morality be based on their delusions. And many of them are willing to kill to get what they want. All for a virus of the mind.

JWH – 1/13/13