"Tell Them I'm Coming!" - Go See the Movie "Hidden Figures" Today!

Mike Victor  January 2, 2017

Happy New Year! 

Three pieces of advice to start the new year off right:

1.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures. 

2.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures.

3.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures.

Repeat as desired. There is no maximum dose.

I saw this film yesterday with my wife and younger daughter and her friend and must tell you - had I three thumbs, all would be solidly up. One of the best films I have ever seen, no question.

If you don't know the setup, it's based on a set of true stories about a pioneering group of African American women in segregated 1961 Virginia who managed to challenge, overcome, and eventually change institutional and cultural racism that said that they could not do what they were in fact doing. The central character - whose real life details are even more amazing than the film had a chance to portray - is an African American math whiz named Katherine Johnson whose parents recognized her extraordinary aptitude when she was in the 4th grade, pulling her out of the segregated school that only went to 6th grade (whose material she already mastered) and putting her into one of the few African-American private schools in West Virginia. She entered high school at age 10 and graduated from college at age 18 (summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in math and French), then pursued graduate work in mathematics.
At NASA,John Glenn was so impressed with her that he personally insisted that she double-check all of the numbers as part of any pre-flight checklist. "If she says the numbers are good," Glenn said. "I'm ready to go." It would take her a day and a half to double-check the computer's numbers but when they were the same, Glenn was ready to launch. 

Katherine Johnson literally wrote the book on the complex math of space travel and orbital trajectories.

Earlier, she had calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 May 1961 flight from liftoff from splashdown, creating a new mathematics in the process. She did the same for the Apollo 11 moon shot and the start of the Space Shuttle program before retiring. 

"I computed the path that would get you there," she said of the moon shot. "You determine where you were on Earth, when you started out. We told them how fast you would be going and the moon would be there by the time you got there." [IBD]

NASA recently commemorated her with a new building built in her honor, saying that she "literally wrote the textbook on rocket science... Few Americans have impacted the cause of human exploration so extensively." 

 One of the critical problems she solved was calculating the exact time that the lunar landed needed to take off from the moon in order to dock with the orbiting command and service module. 

 On November 24, 2015, President Obama awarded her the highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Today she is 98 years old.[IBD, NASA]  

This movie hit on every issue near and dear to my heart: 

• social justice and progress; 
• the fight against racism; 
• the fight against sexism; 
• the fight against ignorance;
• mathematical and scientific triumph; 
• the ability of a society to do anything it puts its mind to when it comes together and is willing to fund the effort;
• the wisdom of children.

Sure, the movie sticks to a well-trodden formula, but does so with such deftness and understatement - it always pulls back before getting intolerably maudlin or heavy-handed - that it really, really works. It portrays in a very visceral way the extraordinary, mind-numbingly stupid racial desegregation laws and mindset in a Virginia whose state laws ignored the recent Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a "states right" anti-federal government mindset sadly very much alive today in the South. Everything is segregated from library books to water fountains to coffee pots to restrooms - that last leading to a fantastic scene with an infuriated Kevin Costner character taking a sledgehammer to the Colored Restroom sign. 

I know this history but to see it so graphically portrayed on screen is breathtaking in its shock effect. I kept shaking my head with real shame that this happened almost in my lifetime (I was born just a couple years after the events in the film). There was nothing preachy about the director's approach, which was perfect, just laying it out there as part of the backdrop with the principal characters arguing among themselves about how much to fight and how much to accept, with all going through a certain learning process (as per the formula for this sort of film).
My response in seeing the movie was the same as that of Taraji Henson, the actress who portrayed Johnson when she first read the script:  "I just remember initially being angry," she told NBC News.  "Here we have these women who changed the course of America, the history of this nation and we don't know about them." 

As an added plus, a cute crop of kids - the children of the protagonist - cheer along a budding romance that is done with such tenderness that it really gets you. I usually roll my eyes at such parallel plots, understanding their necessary role in the genre while wishing the film would just get on with the main story, but this romance was well-thought-through and beautifully-executed. I am no sap, in other words, but it worked for me.

The movie also reminds us that our federal government - so maligned by the right - actually does many things pretty damn well. NASA has to be Exhibit A (with the CDC and NIH not far behind) but close behind is the pioneering role the feds - starting with the military during the Eisenhower administration - played in leading the charge against segregation (as an added bonus, we are also reminded that not all things private are good, as when the boneheads sent over from IBM to get their massively over-budget and behind schedule mainframe computer to work can't even anticipate the size of the door needed to install the machine, much less actually get it to function.

I had only three minor disappointments with the film.

Only one mathematician was in the credits (10 NASA consultants were) which was perhaps why the math shown was not always convincing in its authenticity. Certainly, she would have used a slide rule at least in a scene where she wows an audience with a calculation that goes from position to displacement to re-entry velocity to splash down latitude and longitude; this could not have been done in the limited space allotted or without consulting some additional source - latitude and longitude mathematics are quite complex, involving sines and cosines and a correction for the bulge in the Earth around the equator and you cannot just do these things in your head. Would it have hurt to have her sneak a peek at a slide rule, a book of logarithmic values, or some other reference? I always feel a bit cheated when a movie-maker assumes that no one in the audience knows enough to know what is possible and impossible to do unaided. But I will withhold this criticism if the purpose was to make mathematics look cool.
Katherine Johnson was no wallflower, hesitant and deferential as portrayed in the film.  Instead, she peppered engineers with questions, always insisting that she understood the why of any problem, something the (white male) engineers reportedly respected and welcomed, not shot down as in the movie:

Katherine once remarked that while many of her colleagues refrained from asking questions or taking tasks further than merely ‘what they were told to do,’ she chose instead to ask questions because she ‘wanted to know why.’

For Katherine, finding the ‘why’ meant enrolling in high school at the age of 10; calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s trip to space and the Apollo 11’s mission to the moon; and providing the foundation that will someday allow NASA to send our astronauts to Mars. She literally wrote the textbook on rocket science. 

We are all so fortunate that Katherine insisted on asking questions, and insisted on relentlessly pursing the answers. We are fortunate that when faced with the adversity of racial and gender barriers, she found the courage to say ‘tell them I’m coming.

  - NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman

The other disappointment had nothing to do with the film itself but with the audience. In the limited release screening I saw on a rainy New Year's Day, the theater was only half full and the audience was predominantly African-American, a group that doesn't need to see this film to be reminded of what is at stake if we pretend we live in some post-racial, color-blind, merit-based society, of what we have to go back to if Trump lives up to his promise to Make America White Again. I hope every young black girl (and boy) sees this movie and is inspired, but I also hope the rust belt blue collar whites chanting All Lives Matter! see this film and understand how recent and cruel institutionalized racism is in America and how maybe, just maybe the stereotypes reinforced by centuries of such thinking might persist today (and therefore require active federal oversight of the former states of the Confederate States of America as they draw up voting districts and impose voter ID barriers to voting).

But the audience cheered and clapped - when was the last time you saw that? - and at times I felt more that I was in church than a movie theater. It's that kind of movie.

Take a friend. Take a child struggling in mathematics or who thinks that science is only for boys. But go. And enjoy!

Neil deGrasse Tyson's Dark Matter Movie Notes from Hayden Planetarium

December 28, 2015

Saw Neil deGrasse Tyson's Dark Matter Movie at  Hayden Planetarium yesterday.  Here are some notes I jotted down while watching the film to save you a trip.  You're welcome.

13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang (derisively named by its detractors) started emitting energy and matter. 

Mount Wilson in the 1920s was the largest telescope in the world at the time.  Andromeda was a pulsating star.  By studying it carefully, Edwin Hubble was able to figure out that it was much brighter than our sun and much farther away than the edge of our galaxy.  By studying its red shift and that of thousands of other galaxies, he was able to determine that the galaxy was expanding.  

Andromeda is over 2 million light years away, so we see it now as it was 2 million years ago, long before humans walked the earth. 

Light from the farthest galaxies started out billions of years ago. 

No matter where you are in the universe, you seem to be the center of it with everything expanding out away from you at an ever increasing rate (things farthest away are moving away from you faster than things that are closer).

The universe used to expand at a greater rate than it does today, the opposite of what was once thought theoretically before it was carefully measured empirically.    Its rate of expansion seems to have been accelerating for at least the last 5 billion years or so. 

The universe is cool (only 3 degrees Kelvin on average) and getting cooler as it expands.  At the time of the Big Bang it was hotter than the sun is today. 

In 1964 at Bell laboratory in New Jersey, microwave radiation from the Big Bang was first recognized as cosmic background radiation.  Mapping it allows us to know the distribution of matter and energy.  Blue areas are more dense and where galaxies form.  Red areas are enormous voids.   The cosmic background radiation marks the visible edge of the known universe. 

In 1995, the Galileo space shot released a probe that parachuted down into the atmosphere of Jupiter to measure the amount of heavy hydrogen in this enormous "cold storage locker" that trapped and preserved elements from a time much closer to the Big Bang, 4 billion years ago.   The amount found was consistent with predictions made by those positing a Big Bang. 

Most matter is not made of matter at all but of dark matter which must account for the additional mass necessary to hold galaxies together (the observed matter doesn't suffice).  It's thought that galaxy clusters are held together by a network of dark matter. 

Trillions of stars in a galaxy distort the gravity around it, but the distortion is greater than the observed matter. 

Supernovas massive explosions resulting from two colliding ghosts of old stars.  They occur at a rate of about 2 per century per galaxy. 

Matter and energy are the same, interchangeable per Einstein's e = mc². 

The universe appears to be about 70% dark energy with dark matter making up the bulk of everything else. 

Normal matter is only 5% of the universe. 

The universe must be bigger than the part we can see (the part whose light has reached us already).  Some believe it's infinitely large, others that it is perhaps 4 or 5 times as large as the visible universe (the part we can see). 

Science is not a liberal conspiracy

But is science simply a revealing of the wonders of god's creation?  
Well, if one believes in a god or gods that created everything, then by definition those gods should get credit for all the good and bad things we see in the world, so in a circular sort of way, one's faith could be reinforced by the wonders of science as they are now revealed in our secular age. 
But the problem with this is that it assumes a partnership between religion and science which certainly was not there for much of European Christianity. From the burning of scrolls and later books on the writings of antiquity (which were seen as pre-Christian and therefore pagan) to the persecution of Galileo and the insistence on teaching creationism and abstinence-only education in the place of science today, Christianity has mainly come kicking and screaming into the scientific age. It is a sad indictment that Christian Europe for about a thousand years knew less about the planet - its shape and size and relationship to the sun - than did pre-Christian Greeks. The real flourishing of science did not occur until the Enlightenment, which was a secular (or at least deist) movement hostile to religious mumpsimus. 
One of the founding myths of Judaism and Christianity - the original sin for which women have to suffer labor pangs and men must work, and for which some Christians began to believe Jesus had died in atonement - involves a hostility to knowledge and curiosity. Adam and Eve were not punished for mass murder, gang rape, or torture, but for an illicit fruit-picking expedition (helped by a talking snake). Was it any coincidence that they were happier when they were ignorant, and what does this tell us about the Jewish and Christian relationship to empiricism and exploration of the world as we find it (as opposed to obedient, unquestioning acceptance of religious authority)?
Finally, the sacred texts of Judaism then Christianity had the opportunity to educate the world to the wonders of science and math but either chose not to or were simply incapable of it (the biblical authors were far less educated about scientific and mathematical matters than many of their colleagues in antiquity). This of course badly undercuts the argument that an omniscient god was either literally writing or at least being channeled by these authors, since such a god surely would have known about the shape of our planet, the wonders of light transmission, and genetics (which makes a mockery of the exclusively male family inheritance chains given in the bible (where Abraham begot Isaac, etc.) since a child inherits 50% of genes from each parent, who are therefore equally important, however Jewish and Christian societies demeaned women). Why would such a god hold back on stories that could have amazed, instead telling much smaller ones that he must have known (being omniscient) we would discover were nonsensically false with time? 
As Carl Sagan put it best, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

What would have been truly "amazing" in the bible...

Here is what would have impressed me in the bible: a formula for cement. The Romans invented it, Christian Europe unlearned it for a millennium. The arch (ditto). Mention in even metaphorical form of DNA, inheritance, evolution, the relationship between mass and speed and time (far more mind blowing than burning bushes), mitochondrial DNA inherited from those nameless biblical females (and only the females), a spherical earth, a heliocentric solar system, an approximation of the speed of light (out at least an understanding that the sun is necessary to generate light, something the genesis authors apparently did not know), the emptiness and vastness of space (and therefore the special place of our life supporting planet). Insects with the correct number of legs, animals not known to biblical authors, pi, zero, decimal points, algebra, logarithms, the normal and power distributions, plate tectonics, carbon and uranium dating, radioactivity.
Repeatedly we are told in the bible that various audiences were amazed usually by some momentary suspension of the laws of physics, but don't you think even a single vaccine, antibiotic, or lightbulb would have been infinitely more amazing (and useful, the sort of thing a compassionate, all knowing father would show his children)?

Do Atheists Really Lack Faith? And Why is Mediterranean Monotheism the Default Hypothesis?

"Everyone, atheists included, can benefit from meeting people with different beliefs — or lack of beliefs" concluded a recent NPR story on atheist displays in a San Diego park.
Why is atheism always framed as a "lack of beliefs" (or sometimes a "lack of faith").  A scientist who conducts an experiment and has a negative result (such as finding Drug X is no more effective than placebo at treating Y) does not lack faith; she simply has ruled out one more hypothesis in which to place her faith, thereby honing in on those that are more worthy.  We don't define modern physicians by what they don't believe in (as "those who lack faith in humoral theory" for example). 
And only in religion would anyone claim that the failure to prove that Drug X is effective must mean therefore that Drug Z21753912789a4361.2 Version 4 MUST by default be effective (and the only drug that is effective).  Nonsense. 
The default hypothesis in science is the null hypothesis, the idea that something does not work or is no more effective than placebo.  (As Karl Popper made depressingly clear, scientists never prove anything, only fail to disprove it.)  Why is it that the default hypothesis for so many in Europe and the United States is that god is a single Jewish male with a strikingly Northern European visage in a toga floating in the clouds who visited Palestine about 2,000 years ago and hasn't been seen since?  It's such an extraordinary, bizarre claim or set of claims.  Of course, this does not mean the claims are incorrect - the fact that light is both a particle and a wave is pretty weird but turns out to be true, as best as we can tell - only that they should not be the DEFAULT, the go to explanation if other explanations cannot be proven, as though this explanation was itself proven. 
Technically, there are no atheists (agnostics is the more scientifically correct term) anymore than there are scientists who have successfully proven that a drug works.  But this is a very narrow, philosophical distinction that is unhelpful on a day-to-day basis.  I cannot prove that my seat belt will save my life on any given trip, but you damn well better believe I buckle up.  So although no one will ever be able to disprove - in a Popperian sense - all of the god hypotheses that societies have generated, it is fairly easy to prove that the null hypothesis (there is no personal god and if there is, his existence was almost certainly not restricted to Palestine during .0000000574% of the Earth's existence) is close to infinitely more likely. 
Here is another thought:  all except for the most tolerant of mystics are atheists to all gods except their chosen ones.  Monotheists such as Christians (side-stepping the idea whether the Trinity and the tens of thousands of saints are multiple gods) are atheists to all gods but one.  Some of us go one god further. 

Seeing Jupiter for the First Time

Lucy insisted we go outside the other night to look for shooting stars.  Although I didn't want to - it was cold and I was tired - after a few minutes of pointing out the few things I knew to her (the rest I made up) I decided to get out the telescope Isabella won when she got second place in a school science fair years ago.  After a lot of jiggling to find the right lens and focus it just right, I found Jupiter, and we both spent twenty minutes or so looking at it, trying to hallucinate bands, definitely seeing its 4 moons.   When I was a kid, I remember the first time I saw the planets through my Sears Best telescope and what an awesome experience it is to realize you are looking across such unfathomable distances at something so unfathomably large in real time.  It is a completely different experience than seeing it in a book, as different as spotting a dolphin in the ocean yourself versus seeing a picture of one in National Geographic.  I am glad Lucy had that experience.
Before she went to bed, she insisted I read her something about Jupiter and the next day it must have impressed her so much that she drew a picture of the planet and its moons and the swirling, never-ending storms on its surface with lightning 1,000 times as powerful as that on Earth. 

Lucy's careful schematic of a shooting star which she claims to have seen (unconfirmed, but so what?) as well as Jupiter ("Jepdr") which she knew from school was the largest planet in our system.   She drew a clock like a good scientist to indicate what time she looked at the planet, and drew the moons she saw when she looked through the telescope.   She even drew a compass to indicate North (we were actually looking South but I had just shown her the Northern sky with the Big Dipper and the North Star earlier, so she got them a little mixed up - that's OK!).

 "Jupiter has storms all the time" - yes it does!  I don't think she was trying to anthropomorphize the planet - this was her rendition of the red dot she saw in a photo (unfortunately, my telescope does not have that sort of resolution!).

 This sort of innocent wonder and capacity to be amazed should never be killed in school and I am so grateful that at least for now it hasn't been, only fostered.

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The Case for Multiculturalism

What is the alternative? 
Who decides which of many cultural possibilities should be the Monoculture, and which of the many others should be Multi? 
Has there ever been a civilization or empire that has thrived without multiculturalism? It seems that the richest countries and societies, like the richest estuaries, benefit from the best of all contributing cultures. 
Is not multiculturalism simply the cultural extension of a free market of ideas, each competing and blending in an evolutionary, dynamic process, so that most of us today are unaware that the potatoes we eat are a recent import from Peru, our coffee and chocolate are imports from American indigenous culture and horses (if you live in America) are a contribution by Spanish culture a few centuries ago to a continent that had no horses (their closest American relatives seemed to have been hunted to extinction thousands of years earlier)? 
Should we not use paper, eat pasta, or use compasses simply because these are developments of Chinese culture? 
Do we eschew maps because they were invented in Iraq? 
Or do we avoid Hindu-Arabic numbers (as Florentine bankers were forbidden to do in a spasm of anti-multiculturalism in the 1200s) because they are non-European in origin? Do we mandate a return to the Roman numeral system that had neither decimal points nor zero, not to mention negative numbers or any capacity to do complex calculations by lining up digits on papyrus or paper?
Do we forbid Judaism or its outgrowths, Christianity and Islam, because they are all Mediterranean imports that crowded out Norse and other native religions? 
Do we ban democracy, a Greek import, or the Christmas tree (a German import), or the Yuletide log (a Scandinavian import)? 
Do we ban firearms, since they were invented by Chinese culture, or cars, the internal combustion engine, jet planes, rockets, submarines, interstate highways, or Volkswagens, since they were invented by Germans? 
Should we forego stock exchanges, since common stocks were invented by the Dutch? And should we prevent our military forces from continuing to use the metric system since this system was created and standardized during the French revolutionary in protest of the idea of a using measuring anything in the the length of a king's "foot"? 
I do not know what development we will be foregoing in the name of stamping out multiculturalism, but we would live in a grayer, poorer, more miserable society if we spurned all advances and developments not home-grown.

If any of the following were in the Bible, I might just believe...

  

Fundamentalists allege that the Bible represents the "inerrant word of God" as Jerry Falwell among others put it: 

 The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

The god described in this inerrant text is omniscient, meaning all-knowing, not just of things that were but of things that will be.  As our understanding of the universe's creation unfolds, Genesis, the bible's creation stories (there are actually two mutually exclusive ones in the same text) appear not just inerrant, but wildly off the mark.  Claiming our planet is only a few thousand years old is as big an error as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York City, for example. 

Thanks to the poetic nature of the bible, it is sometimes possible for fundamentalists to wriggle out of embarrassing omissions.   The absence of dinosaurs, for example, can be explained by a single reference to "giants" roaming the land, never mind that this interpretation would incorrectly make dinosaurs coexist with us rather than precede us by hundreds of millions of years.  

Trying to force this deeply superstitious, misogynistic, scientifically- and geographically-challenged text to fit unfolding reality is increasingly difficult.   This even side-steps why this book of all possible holy books was chosen (have fundamentalist Christians read the Rig Veda - in English or Sanskrit - considered holy to 900 million Hindus, for example, before rejecting it?).

Since it has become almost unsportsmanlike to continue to point out the gaping logical and scientific lapses in the bible, a work clearly not ready for prime time (or our time at least), why not instead work backwards?  Using the same poetic license of the bible's authors and editors, imagine what a truly omniscient god might have told his scribes to scribble, particularly if he really wanted to wow them.  

Mention of any of these natural wonders in a book meant to explain all things would have attracted converts and settled pointless internecine bloodshed and persecution.  Yahweh speaks frequently and often of other, competing gods of whom he is jealous, indicating he was not so much denying their existence as competing with them.  

So why would he not not mention quarks or protons or anti-matter, or the incredible depth of time?  Why did he not let people know how small they were relative to their own planet, the population of cultures of which they were completely ignorant, to Jupiter, to the sun, or to their own galaxy, not to mention their expanding universe?   Wouldn't this humble them more than telling an elaborate story of a great flood, a story that would make no sense to anyone who understands that 90% of biomass lives in water?  

Had someone been able to foresee quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, and evolution thousands of years before these things were understood, THAT would be impressive, even miraculous.  It might have even settled the question of the existence of god.  

And so ... were something like this in the Bible, I might just believe: 

And in that time there appeared among them a great teacher who traveled from the east and spoke in a strange manner of an advanced civilization that had invented paper, the compass, and ships many times larger than Noah's ark. 
This teacher spoke of a vision he had of a time to come that was even more amazing than this Kingdom of which he spoke, which he called the Middle Kingdom, but all suspected to be fantastic, since everyone then knew the World to only be as large as the One Great Empire of Rome which occupied the land inhabited by the monotheists who believed in One Great God they called Yahweh but who seemed powerless to help them against the Romans of many gods who regularly suppressed their uprisings with great bloodshed and many crucifixions. Yet the people were still restive and wanted the Romans to leave so they could go back to their ways, but this man spoke of a land even better than the land of milk and honey the One Great God had promised to Abraham. The teacher's vision caused multitudes to leave their tent to hear him, but this worried the religious elders greatly who gathered to ask what should be done with this Gentile from the East. A decision was made but before they could act, the great teacher gathered together his students and told them this story that was passed secretly by one who was there:
In the beginning there was a tremendous concentration of matter, of everything that now exists and much, much more. In a fraction of a fraction of a second everything expanded across an unimaginable expanse met with anti-matter and 99% of it was destroyed immediately. What was left expanded, stabilized, and electrons found protons and the first hydrogen atoms began to coalesce. Hydrogen gas collected under incredible pressure over vast periods of time and heated to a degree where the repulsion of the positively charged nuclei was overcome and a great unleashing of energy created entirely new matter. The light that reaches our face from the morning sun is nothing more or less wonderful than the energy emitted from this process, carried to us across a distance so vast it takes several minutes to reach us. We see and feel the sun not as it is but as it was several minutes ago. Wrap your minds around that.
And while you do, consider that our sun was not formed first; no my brothers and sisters, other stars collapsed, died, exploded, spewing the newly created heavy elements resulting from the fusion of all these nuclei that eventually ended up as the stuff that makes up our bodies and our world. For truly I say unto you that our bodies are made of star dust. We, my children, are what is left of that grand and mysterious process the evidence of which will be detected one day by future men and women (yes, I tell you my brothers, women will one day not be despised and shut in their tents and told to remain silent in the presence of their husbands - some will not even take husbands but live independent and happy lives, and will be able to time the number and frequency of their children) all these things will come to pass and so many more, for if I were powerless to predict these things, the things of men, how could I possibly be believed when I claim to speak of metaphysical things beyond the realm of men? 
But I do not speak of these things for I have no way of knowing them one way or another. I can only know what I can see and sense and this vision that came to me was as real as any. Are you not tired of the old, small, jealous gods, always plotting and scheming and fighting over a world that is so small? I bring you the universe entire, expanding and so much larger and vaster than we could ever imagine it. I bring you pulsars and quarks and neutrons and protons and strong and weak forces. Let me tell you about the universality of gravity, that elegant force that always and everywhere seems to obey certain laws that can be reduced to the simplest of variables - tell me, my brothers, the weight of an object and its distance from another object, and I can tell you its gravitational attraction to that other object. And all objects, even the tiniest mustard seed, imperceptibly exert this universal force. And let me tell you that anywhere you stand on this planet, if you drop a stone it will be accelerated toward the center of the earth at 9.8 meters per second-squared, terms that may mean nothing to you since until the French Revolution which is a great upheaval in the Roman territory now called Gaul, there was no such thing as the meter, developed to liberate ourselves from measuring things by the feet of kings, and until a man named Galileo who will live not far from the center of the great empire now occupying our land and oppressing our people, but long after this empire has collapsed - yes, this too shall come to pass - developed a water chronometer, there was no accurate way of measuring time, certainly not in small units. 
But if your scribes can tell you of lakes of fires and 700-year-old men and you take it on faith, can you not also open your minds to far more amazing ideas that happen to be true? It shall come to pass that this 9.8 meters per second-squared will be a constant gravitational force on the surface of the Earth, but that since mass and gravitational force are inversely proportional, the moon, which men will visit in great vessels propelled by fire and walk upon its surface, has only one-sixth the gravitational force of the Earth, so that those men can bounce upon it and lift heavy objects with ease. In space whose vastness and coldness will terrify future thinkers once it is understood, there is no gravity at all, and water floats in giant spheres as will your body when you travel there, as your greatest of great grandchildren someday will. 
Oh, there are so many wonders to share with you, wonders far more mind-expanding than the silly stories of floods and houseboats and women created from ribs. Let me tell you about evolution and the vast expanse of time, and of our kinship with all living creatures, even the lowly earthworm which, brothers and sisters shares 40% of our genetic code as we do. 
What is a genetic code? It is something even more amazing, a set of instructions handed down from parent to child, from generation to generation, present in every cell that has all of the information needed to make each of us. All of this information is stored in a pattern of 4 different chemicals, the order of which determines how every part of every cell is to be made, how much, and when it should be shut down or sped up.
Think of that, my children - each of you has half of your genes from your father and half from your mother - despite your persecution of women, they are as important to making you you as your fathers and your father's fathers. And in fact, all of us are conceived female but to become male a gene turns on which makes us insensitive to a chemical called testosterone and that tiny difference makes all the difference - all the wonderful and sensual differences - that distinguish men from women.
I call you my brothers and sisters and children even though I do not look exactly as you and my tongue stumbles on the sounds you use so freely because these differences are truly as of nothing. We are all brothers and sisters and share common ancestors who looked very little like us and might even consider as food if they met us today. But all tribes of Israel and all people everywhere belong to the same species and share almost all the same genes with very few differences, minor ones really, that make us appear to be a bit different than we really are. 
And did you know, my children, that you need not fear or be repulsed by your bodies and its excretions anymore than you should be repulsed by the husks remaining after the grain has been harvested? Did you know that men have seeds not unlike the pollen of plants and like plants, many more seeds will be cast than can ever fertilize the ovum of women, and many more conceptions will occur than will ever survive to term, and that many more babies will be born than can ever survive to have children themselves, but that a time will come when people will find ways to keep babies alive, almost all babies, not fewer than half as is now the case, their first year of life, and that they will develop technologies that will allow a man or woman at birth to expect to live and reproduce with a success rate we cannot even begin to imagine. Wo unto him today who has fewer than a dozen children or his name and his genetic material will not be passed onto the next generation. But once these wonders of the new age come to pass, clean running water that you can drink without sickening, pipes to carry your waste into a central place so it does not contaminate your drinking water, vaccines to make illnesses that have plagued us for eternity bad memories, and wondrous medicines that really work, for those with or without faith, because in those times to come men and women will understand that your immune system made up of countless white cells floating in your blood stream are what fight infection, and that many illnesses thought to be demonic possession now because they frighten us and we are powerless to do anything so we make up stories to explain what we do not know will be understood to be nothing more than chemical imbalances that a pill taken once or twice a day can cure or treat forever. 
No longer will those who hear voices telling them to murder their children be treated as prophets or allowed to carry out their plans. Instead, they will be treated with compassion and the voices will leave them and there will be peace in their families who will understand that diseases of the mind, like diseases of the kidney or the lungs, have nothing to do with the moral goodness or badness of the sufferer. Such knowledge may throw all religious experiences into question, especially by those who are doctors specializing in these illnesses and who see firsthand how the words of a sick man and the words of a charismatic would-be prophet are indistinguishable but both respond to treatment. 
Our entire sense of reality will be threatened by this new awareness that so much of what we see and seem is a function of chemical reactions, understandable and in many cases changeable for better or worse. Other scientific fields will challenge our sense of stability and fill us with humility. We will learn the age of the earth is not in the thousands of years but in the thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands of years. Most of the earth's history did not involve us because people did not evolve until the last fraction of a second of earth's hour. We are close relatives of the chimpanzee and slightly less close relatives of the gorilla. The chimpanzees have 99.8% of the same genes as we do, my brothers and sisters, and at this awareness, some men will cringe and like the fable of Adam and Even want to seek refuge in their ignorant innocence, but once these things are learned, they cannot be un-learned. 
There will be creatures discovered many, many times more massive than the greatest land animal, the elephant, living in the ocean right now, unknown to our scribes because they never bothered to travel to those great oceans. These enormous whales as they will be called (not the large fish in that silly story of Jonah) are mammals like us and actually dwelled on land for a time before deciding to return to the sea. But they did not evolve gills again so were forced to hold their breath under water and blow it out of a great hole in their heads when they surface. 
And did you know that all life began in water and that even today most life remains in water. If all living creatures were piled up and weighed, it will be discovered that over 9 parts of every 10 of that mass will live in the water. This will make that silly story of Noah and his house boat doubly absurd since a flood that threatens land creatures will be welcome to the 90% of life that has not evolved to live on land. 
I do not mean to shock you, my children, but look carefully at your bodies. Did you know that you are all of you farms, cultivating tiny forms of life that the men and women of future generations will call microbes? Some of these microbes make you ill, but most of them live in peace and are essential to digesting your food and eliminating your waste. You have more of these microbes than you have of cells. And each cell, remember, has a complete set of instructions to make you you. There will come a time where if a man struggles with another man or with a woman (for in those future times, women will be considered as people too, and slaves also, since slavery will be ended and all laborers paid for their wages and free to work for another master or not at all) and commits murder but no one witnesses the crime, did you know that people in that time will be able to use as little as a hair or a tiny piece of skin and find within it the set of genes that is unique to that one person (unless he has a monozygotic twin, but I digress)? The science of crime will surpass the science of the courts of that time, and juries will be swayed not to understand what this means, but many innocent men will be set free when it is clear that the hair or the skin or the blood at the scene of the great struggle was not theirs? One piece of hair!
Now look again at your hands and tell me if they are mostly space or of matter? I tell you this: most of the universe including most of you is empty space. Even the densest bone or rock or piece of metal is mostly space. The mass of everything is contained in the nucleus, which is as tiny relative to the electrons swirling around as the tiniest mouse is to the largest of our temples, but imagine if all the weight of the temple were in that mouse and the rest was empty space. Each atom is like this and your body is made up of billions and billions of atoms, all attracted to each other by a complex array of forces, but none actually touching. 
And as the Greeks once knew but our scribes have forgotten, we stand not on a plane but a sphere and we revolve about the sun once every 365 and a quarter days and our sun is but one of billions upon billions of other suns that appear to us as stars not because they are smaller - many aren't - but because they are so distant. Wow unto him among us who does not understand the incredible scale of forces not known no but one day to be tapped by scientists in a country on a continent our people do not know exists, forces that exist in the tiniest center of an atom, where protons and neutrons are clustered together and can be unleashed by splitting that atom and destroying a city and all of its women and children and oxen and cats and dogs, dropped from a machine made not of wood but of metal, a light metal alloy yet to be developed, powered not by a sail but by a series of tiny explosions of a purified liquid extracted from the fossil remains of great creatures that our scribes do not even know died hundreds of millions of years before our species appeared. Yes, I tell you that men will untap these forces then regret the terrible destruction they have wrought, because in those days to come people will not accept the divinity of total war, of genocide of entire peoples, the way King David at the Battle of Jericho commanded his men to slaughter not just all women, children, and babies, but all animals too. In those days to come there will be great and prodigious slaughter but there will also be a great outcry against that slaughter and this outcry will come loudest from those who do not follow our Yahweh or any god at all. Yes, I tell you, that this and so much more will unfold.
These modern people will speak of rights and war crimes and trials not of religious authorities or kings but of men and women - for in those days there will be judges like Judy - common men and women like them. Even kings can be tried for trying to violate a housemaid but even in that day, the king will be able to afford a much better attorney so may go free.
They will introduce words alien to our ear but well known to our Greek predecessors such as democracy and republics. They will give all of their citizens, not only men of noble birth, the right to vote, although not all will use that right. 
They will have amazing talking boxes that will transmit talking images of men and women talking 24 hours a day, not needing candles because electrons stripped from the nucleus of certain chemicals will give off an energy - created when an current of those electrons passes through a resistor - that causes a filament in a glass bulb to glow and turn night into day. These talking boxes will carry not just images of talking heads but also of ladies wrestling each other in enormous vats of mud and dogs balancing themselves on wheeled wood devices they will call Skateboards. This great talking box will amaze but also distract and even though children at that time can be amazed with the fact that a beam of electrons traveling at the speed of light is hurtling into space and then coming back down again to form those pictures, images, and sounds, they will find this less interesting than watching cats jumping into and out of a cesspool. 
There is so much more, my children, but I see that the religious authorities are coming now and do not like the commotion I have created with my teachings. They are asking if I have been given a permit to speak and if I am of the right sect and I have traveled so far I honestly can't remember who is considered the right sect here - have I passed from the land of the Pharisees or am I still in the land of the Samaritans? 
They are taking me away and perhaps will break my body on the rack or burn me alive as all are commanded to do who follow the jealous and angry Yahweh, but these visions I have of the future are true and I hope that one of you who has ears has heard and will write down the truth so that when false prophets come, theirs are not the only fables who are propagated through the ages. 
Think for yourself my children. If you hear my screams from the Temple basement, it is only the elders doing what they feel they must do to maintain order and keep women and Gentiles and all of you in their place. Forgive them for they know not what they do. But explore, be truthful, and follow the truth wherever it takes you. Many are called to this path of painful exploration, but few will follow. It is a lonely path and expect to be mocked and derided by those who have not studied and do not know. No one is blinder than he who will not see. I cannot lie and say I have seen a god I have not, but I can imagine a future without this god and it is a good and prosperous future, free from the petty superstitions and prejudices of our people, divided like all agrarian people into warring tribes and factions that hate each other more than they hate the Romans. 
But even the Romans are farther along the path than we are and do not fear scholarship and science as we have been taught to do. Yes, they have their augurs and their high priests but they also have so many gods they don't take any one of them too seriously and leave each other alone to make their own choice. 
Well, I must go now because I live in a time and place where we have no choice; our god is chosen for us by who our father happens to be and what piece of dirt we happen to be born on, but I tell you that in the time to come, the universality of all things will make the pettiness and silliness of our world view shrink to insignificance. 
Peace be with all of you. What need I fear if the world and the elders are against me as long as the truth is on my side?

You Cannot be Pro-Life but Oppose the Environmental Protection Agency

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Either President Obama is playing a much deeper game than I appreciate (always a possibility) or he has completely caved to the Republicans when he recently over-ruled the EPA. 

Let's face it:  the Far Right will never give President Obama credit for what he does, so he should stick to first principles.  Most Americans do not realize, for example, that President Obama in effect lowered taxes, by preventing the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule, and proposed a deeper set of budget-balancing cuts (with no new taxes) than the measure ultimately adopted.  He doesn't get  credit for playing nice with the schoolyard bullies who still call him a socialist, Muslim, Kenyan-born, black-power-advancing, government-growing, tax-and-spend liberal (not that those are all bad things, but the maddening thing is that none are true).  

President Obama is a milquetoast right of centrist who is drifting further to the right in an attempt to appease people who will never invite him to play their reindeer games.  He did not get the memo but the all-white Tea Party did not take to the streets 28 days into his administration mad, mad, mad and wanting to "take their country back" because of anything he did or proposed to do.  They are simply furious about who he is, a black man with a D after his name, even though the daylight between his policies and the white guy who handed him two wars, a recession, and a set of disastrous, budget-busting, non-economy-growing tax cuts on his way out of the White House is at times indistinguishable.  

Obama risks losing his base in a calculated move to pre-empt Texas commercials about all the Texas coal-burning plants that would have to close (or so they claim) to comply with stricter EPA rules they knew were coming but somehow never bothered to make the necessary changes.  As with the budget, it was a game of chicken and Obama blinked.  

The spectacle of a few thousand Texans unemployed, rolling blackouts (during record heat waves and out-of-control forest fires) is probably a gift Obama would rather not give to Perry and the Texas fossil fuel industry.   Rolling back the regulations' implementation until at least after the election was a wise move politically but a stunningly retro move environmentally.  The EPA estimated that the regulations due to go into effect in 2012 would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year.  As long as those bodies are not seen falling from towers in lower Manhattan, it's almost impossible to get a television-addicted American audience to be moved into action.   Why save a life when your power bill might go up a nickel a day, or you might be forced to turn your thermostat up 2 degrees in summer and down a couple in winter?  Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting such a thing a few decades ago.  He wasn't wrong, just early.  

I wish President Obama would get out ahead of these fossil fuel apologists and pre-empt their arguments.  He should be making any or all of the following points:

• The EPA is a pro-life agency.    Sensible regulations of the emissions of pollutants and carcinogens saves far more lives than futile attempts to prohibit abortion.  (Why futile? Consider the experience in Latin America where abortion rates are higher despite almost universal prohibition, and of Western Europe where rates are lower despite far fewer restrictions than in the United States.)  Put bluntly, you cannot be pro-life and anti-climate.
• Protecting the environment and energy independence are national security issues.   It makes no sense to send young men and women halfway across the world to protect our access to our energy drug of choice when we could enter a program of recovery and declare our energy independence both by decreasing demand and diversifying supply away from non-renewable sources. 
• Protection of the environment and sustainability are religious mandates.  Sustainability should resonate with evangelical Christians (as it is beginning to among some such as Jim Wallis), Obama should remind Americans of faith.  It is a strange and narrow belief system that respects only fetal life, but has such scant regard for the health and safety of post-natal life, or of life in rivers, streams, and oceans, god's creation (according to every major religion) toward which we must show responsible stewardship, not mercenary disdain.  Not a word in the Bible commands us only to do what is right if it does not threaten job creation, or asks us to balance the life of a child against another shekel of potential profit.  There is nothing wrong per se with making a materialistic argument, but let's not cloak it in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist clothing.   I cannot speak with authority for those adhering to  Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, or any of a few thousand indigenous belief systems, but I do know that those of us who are the spiritual equivalent of independent voters find the utilitarian calculus life versus profits to be deeply troubling and morally offensive.  If human life really is sacred, then it cannot and should not be pitted against the marginal inconvenience of tuning down a thermostat or putting on a sweater.  
• Government should not be protecting one industry (fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists) over another (millions of green jobs we can not even imagine yet).  When the government forces companies to pay the true cost of the air they pollute, then yes, all things being equal, the price of each unit of energy using fossil fuel technology will rise from where it had been when the companies were using our rivers, oceans, and atmosphere as a free dumping ground.   The fossil fuel industry, which last time I checked was plenty profitable, chooses to pass that cost onto consumers or to fire workers or close plants, so be it, but if their model is not economically viable once externalities are eliminated, then that is the free market talking.  They also have another option:  pay their top executives less or return less money to shareholders, or some combination of the above.  The fossil fuel industry is presenting us with a false dichotomy anyway, threatening massive job layoffs and rolling blackouts unless they can continue to use our resources without paying for them.  Many rice plantations in the South collapsed and the cultivation of cotton became less profitable after plantation owners were forced to pay their workers but this does not mean that the government should have refused to end slavery simply because the cost of this new regulation would have economic consequences.  Many candlestick-makers went out of business when the light bulb was invented but does this mean the government should have manipulated the market to protect the candlestick industry as the coal industry wants the government to do now (failing to price something like air or water that has definite value but cannot be efficiently priced without a referee in the game is just as manipulative as artificially increasing the price of something the government does not want you to buy, such as imported goods hit with tariffs or light bulbs slapped with fines).   I don't know what percentage of the economy should be oil, natural gas, coal, solar, wind power, geothermal, or pure research, but let the marketplace decide.  Ironically, the marketplace cannot decide if we continue to act as if water and air are free, in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry which gobbles up or pollutes these things over competition that does not.  
• Those who think we should not innovate, adapt, and grow are Luddites and defeatists. The status quo fossil fuel shills are convinced that America must fail where the Japanese, Europeans, and even the Chinese (finally) are making major breakthroughs.   Why do Republicans think Germans are so much smarter than Americans?  Why have they already declared defeat before even entering the arena?  The rest of the world is not waiting.  If we hesitate, they will eat our lunch. 

I hope President Obama can come out swinging.  Part of me is thinking he is getting all the ugly stuff out of the way early before his campaign really kicks off, but when he goes on the attack against those who have said so many untruths about him, I hope he can choose not just to engage but to frame the debate. 

Rapture Prophets Do Not Know Their Own History (Or Some Fundamental Math)

May 20, 2011:   You know this rapture nonsense is getting out of hand when the New York Times (versus the Post) covers it with some seriousness (Rapture Prophecy Tests Family Split on Belief).
But these guys have no idea how old and tiresome this end of the world prediction business is. It's embarrassing and useless, sort of like predicting exactly at which point ocean your  plane will crash into a mountain.  
Most fundamentalists have probably never heard of  Sabbatai Zevi (-1676) but should get to know him.  He claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and had a huge international following.   But at the age of forty, he was forced by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV to convert to Islam or die.  He chose the first option and by all accounts lived the rest of his life in relative peace and comfort. 
This created a scandal and international embarrassment among his followers so deep most of us, including those who have studied religious history, may not have heard of him.  Karen Armstrong goes into this episode in some detail in her wonderful history of fundamentalism, The Battle for God.   Religions tend not to focus or dwell on their many false trials or predictions, giving us the illusion of a single, unbroken chain of authority.
Those who believed in Zevi were sincere, god-fearing people.  They probably could have passed a polygraph test had one existed at the time.  No doubt they were filled with joy at the fact that Yahweh had been so kind as to choose the .0000008% of the Earth's existence (see below) they happened to live in to bless them with his one and only messenger, but they, alas, were wrong.
I have lost count of the number of people who have predicted the end of the earth in my lifetime alone.  Some have been correct in a very narrow sense of the world (their world ended when they killed themselves) but predicting your own suicide is not my definition of clairvoyance. 
But forget all the biblical numerology no doubt someone used to predict that Saturday will be the mother of all weekends.  We need not know anything about the contents of the black box used to make a prediction if the output is so absurdly low as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible. 
Let me explain.  As someone unlucky enough to have been in an earthquake, I like to compute the odds of being in another one anytime I visit somewhere seismically active.  If I find that the last major earthquake in a region was 900 years ago, and that only 3 were recorded over 3,000 years of history, let's say, I will be much less anxious than if I find that over those same 3,000 years, a powerful earthquake occurred every century.  If you are visiting this area for 1 week, then, all things being equal, your probability of being in a devastating earthquake during your visit will be equal to 1 in 5,200, arrived at by reducing the 1/100 risk of an earthquake per year by 52 (the number of weeks in a year).  
We can use similar logic to determine the odds of the earth ending during our lifetime.  Without knowing anything about metaphysics or scrutinizing ancient texts, by using 4.54 billion years as the best guess of the age of the earth, and the observation that it has not ended yet (but will one day), we can then ask the odds of it ending during our lifetime.  Let's be optimists and put our lifespan at 80 years, the rough life expectancy at birth of someone living in the West, so we can divide 80 by 4.6 billion to determine the probability of the earth ending during any individual's life span.  
As you can imagine, this is a very, very small number, about 0.0000017621145%, or 1 in 56.75 million.    To put this in perspective, the odds of winning a single state lottery are 1 in 18 million (or over 3 times as great).  Someone claiming that the world will end in his lifetime is 3 times as stupid as someone announcing that he will win the lottery.  
But the mathematical case against fundamentalism has only just begun.  Most of those predicting the end of the world are already adults, not newborns with 80 years of life ahead of them.  A reasonable assumption would be that on average, those holding this belief are halfway through their lifespan, reducing the window of prediction to 40 years.  They are not predicting that the earth may end in anyone's lifetime but in theirs, which is half over.  This increases the odds against them to 113.5 million to 1.  Now the person predicting he will win the lottery looks 6 times smarter than our rapture-anticipating fundamentalist.  
But there's more.   Fundamentalists are not predicting a range but a specific day for the earth's demise.  Let's assume for the sake of kindness that they beat the 113.5 million to 1 odds and get the lifetime part right.  What are the odds then that the earth will end on any given day of their lifespan?  1 in the number of days in 40 years, or 1 in 14,600 (40 x 365). 
But since there are 113.5 million 40-year time windows in the earth's history, we must multiply 14,600 times 113.5 million...  drum roll, please.
The odds of the earth ending on any given day equals 1 in 1.675 trillion.   To put this in perspective, this is the number of seconds in 53,077 years.    
So to state that the odds against fundamentalists are astronomical is beyond an understatement.  And when you consider that these are the same people using the same document that led them to date the creation of the earth to about 4,000 BCE, an error of proportional magnitude as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York.
Of course, even educated people agree with fundamentalists that the world will end.  But this remote future astronomical event is not what the Rapture crowd is predicting (nor is any sane astrophysicist predicting that the earth will end on July 2 of the year 788,1974,994).  
There are certain events so unlikely and sources so unreliable that those predicting the end of the world on Saturday - or any day - are as wrong today as followers of Zevi were in the 17th Century.  

Should the Bible Be Read Only Metaphorically? Where Does the Bible Imply or State This? And What Useful Metaphors Are We to Derive?

I wrote the following retort to "Is the Bible True?" by David Lose, written 4/1/11, in which he essentially argued that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally:


So the Bible should not be read as a physics textbook... fair enough.  But is it fair or logical to read a text metaphorically that demands literal obedience and belief?  The Bible's authors wrote with a rigid, often lethal authoritarianism.  They were not making metaphorical suggestions you can choose to interpret but Laws and Commandments and even historical and scientific accounts whose truth you are commanded to believe or die.  Perhaps the Bible is being metaphorical when it commands its readers to be concrete and literal, but such an interpretation requires ignoring its tone, spirit, and letter. 
Nothing in the Bible implies that its authors or, by implication, the single god they claim to represent, cares about or is interested in our opinion (unless of course it deviates from that of the authors, in which case we will be punished eternally).  
But if the Bible were intended as only metaphor, why put such painstakingly absurd detail into it?  Why not use qualifying language such as "about" or "approximately" or "as far as we know"?   If I give exact measurements and precise numbers, the implication is that I know of what I speak with a certain level of detail.   If I tell a friend that to find my house, they must drive for 554 feet at a heading of 89 degrees after taking Exit Number 47-B on Highway 149 East, my friend can assume I am not just making this up.  If it turns out my house is actually a few thousand MILES beyond the 554 feet I so confidently reported or that there is no Exit 47-B (or Highway 149 for that matter), then I have a serious credibility problem.  My friend would have a right not only to be angry at me for dishonestly claiming to know something I didn't, but for wasting her time in an elaborate attempt to deceive.  
In the same way, why did the authors of the bible chose to wow us with certain numbers?   Why not say Noah lived to be an old man than make the ridiculous claim that he built an ark at age 500 and died over 3 centuries later?  Why claim that Cain lived 910 years, Seth lived 912 (Gen 5:8), and that Adam was a father at the ripe old age of 130 years (Gen 5:3)?   Are we to be impressed with the claim that Methuselah lived to 969 years (Gen 5:27) (the Biblical longevity record-holder)?   You need not be a physician to understand such claims are absurd.  
Why painstakingly list each generation from David to Joseph in Matthew and Luke, only to have not a single intervening name overlap?  And since Joseph was not the father of Jesus does this not mean the descendant of David part of the prophecy was unfulfilled?   Why have Jesus tell his followers with great certainty that some of them will not have tasted death before the Kingdom of God is ushered in yet 2,000 years later we are still waiting?
Why make an attempt to date the creation of the earth to about 4,000 BCE, the proportional equivalent of claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York?
I think it is far too kind to claim that authors of these fabrications never intended for us to actually take what they wrote literally.  But even if all non-fundamentalists who have seriously read the Bible and the history of its creation understand that it is useless as literal history or science, how is this rambling collection of works even metaphorically useful?  
What profit a man to know the authors of these books thought their god was angry, homicidally so, and murdered all living things (except those Noah saved in his house boat (which was exactly 450 feet (300 cubits) long  (Gen 6:15), a size we are to believe could contain 2 of every species of animal on the Earth at the time?) because he didn't like how men used the free will he in his infinite wisdom gave them?   What truth are we to infer from a god who asks fathers at times to murder their children and demands a constant stream of burnt slaughtered animals offered in sacrifice from his trembling subjects?   When each of Lot's daughters gets her father drunk in turn, has sex with him (Gen 19:32), and then bears the product of this incest (Gen 19:36), what moral lesson are we to glean from this?    Why are we to admire Lot, a man who earlier offered his daughters to be gang-raped in order to appease an angry crowd in Sodom (Gen 19:8)?    
And how is a modern person supposed to accept the alleged perfection of a document that clearly condones slavery, empowers parents to sell their children into slavery or kill them of they talk back or work on the sabbath or wear clothes of mixed fibers or eat shellfish? Love this god, appease him, believe this book or this wise, compassionate deity will torture you forever and ever after you die.  The devotion demanded here is not the loving choice made by a free soul but a desperate attempt to propitiate a murderous, sadistic bully, the type we tell our children should be reported to authorities, not appeased.  
When I read this nonsense clearly written by men writing with great authority about matters they knew nothing, but conveniently intoning that women should shut up and listen to their husbands (1 Cor.14:34-36), slaves should obey even abusive masters (1 Peter 2:18), and all those worshipping the "wrong" god in the wrong way should be ethnically cleansed along with their animals (Deuteronomy 20:10-17), I get the same creepy feeling I get reading a Steven King novel with three notable exceptions.  
First, the plot of the Bible is far less coherent or compelling (it could have used a good editor and closer collaboration between the authors to at least keep the fiction internally consistent).  It is rambling, over-inclusive, and at times pointless.  Whatever poignancy might be nursed from the poetry of god's breathing life upon the waters and his seeing that this creation is "good" is badly undermined by his murderous conclusion a few generations later that this creation is so bad that it must be annihilated (with the exception of a single family and whatever animals he can gather).   Reading the two mutually exclusive Genesis accounts is a bit like reading the joyful wedding ceremony of a man who ends up murdering his wife and all but one of his children a few pages later. 
Second, no one believes King's novels are nonfiction.  No one wants to use them as a road map, a guide to family planning, or a substitute for geology or biology textbooks.  
Third, King does not condone the evil he portrays, as do biblical authors.  Horror is horror because it violates certain universally accepted norms.   Parents murdering children, supernatural spirits terrorizing mortals, carefully-thought-out torture rituals are all things that King's characters attempt to prevent, avoid, or fight.  One can glean a moral from his stories, one of compassion for the outcast, the odd, the weird who so often find themselves possessors of a special gift that has the potential to save the innocent from forces intent on terrorizing.  The biblical authors not only do not consistently offer such a moral, but often its polar opposite, siding with the supernatural entity that commands Abraham to murder Isaac, or Jeptheh to murder his daughter, for example.   Our only hope is to propitiate, appease, and perhaps even emulate this cruelty (one of many unfortunate logical conclusions of those who insist on using this book for moral guidance) in the hopes that we might avoid some of these horrors ourselves.  
Why do we twist ourselves into knots to make this dusty collection of books condoning everything from incest to genocide to slavery to infanticide fit into our modern world?  There is no wizard and I will pull back the curtain and expose his fraud.  There may be a god or gods but this collection of books, so absurdly and immorally transparent, establishes nothing.   Telling me I must believe something or be tortured forever may elicit obedience from some but threats and intimidation should never be substitutes for the truth.  The fact the authors felt it necessary to make such threats badly undermines their credibility, already in shreds thanks to scientific techniques they never could have imagined would one day expose the fiction they were creating.  Only a bully needs to threaten you to believe something; the greatest truths are self-evident and self-reinforcing.  
Nobody needs to tell me I will go to hell to prevent me from stepping off a high ledge, plunging into an ice cold pool of water, or murdering my children.  A host of instinctive and empirical forces make it almost impossible for me to do any of these things.   Why on earth are we to believe that something as important (at least to the biblical authors) as which god we worship and how would not be as hard-wired?  
In areas critical to survival and reproduction, we were created with self-protective instincts, drives, fears, and appetites.   It makes no sense that something as important as our spiritual preservation would be outsourced to a collection of anonymous authors from one place and time a few thousand years ago.   Why on earth should we seek answers about things we cannot prove (such as where we go after death, if anywhere) from people who have been so wrong so often about things we can now prove or disprove?