One night when I was about eight, I decided that I would not conclude my bedtime prayer with “Amen.” I thought that praying was like making a phone call, with a ritualized beginning (”Our Father…”) and ending (”Amen”). Only between those two incantations could God hear me — like opening a channel to the away team. I decided that if I didn’t say “Amen” I could leave that channel on and thus make my whole life one unending paean to the Almighty.

Of course being eight years old I pretty much forgot about this the next time something profound happened, like getting a new Trapper Keeper. The next clear theological memory I have is from one afternoon in CCD when I asked how we knew that the Bible was true. The instructor, some poor girl a decade younger than I am now, answered that we didn’t know for sure but instead relied on our faith. At the time I found that unsatisfying. I was looking for some corroborating scientific evidence, having recently learned what science was. Of course, her answer was the only possible one.

Harris’s book is an attack on this and all other forms of faith. Although his examples of the damage caused by religion include obvious cases like the Inquisition and the Holocaust, he’s obviously not writing to convince 16th century Spaniards or Nazis. His targets are contemporary practitioners, especially well-meaning liberal Westerners who want to have it both ways: taking comfort in the history and tradition of Abrahamic religions but discarding the contradictory or flat-out unpleasant messages in its texts.

In my Catholic high school, someone once asked if Gandhi and Buddha were in heaven. “They are,” we were told, because their teachings were in the spirit of Jesus’s message. That same year we were subjected to a guest speaker on abstinence, and part of her routine included massive amounts of misinformation about birth control. I remember thinking then, as Harris does now: why do modern Catholics politely ignore prohibitions about belief in false gods but obsess over premarital sex (a topic which did not seem to especially interest Jesus anyway)? If Gandhi’s going to heaven anyway, why not be a Hindu? The food’s better.

The End of Faith can be a difficult read, even for an atheist. He explicitly rejects any “sensitivity” towards religious belief — in fact he considers this one of the West’s greatest internal threats — and it’s astonishing how transgressive this language can be. Dismissing religion as the ravings of primitive humans is just not how people talk (outside of the internet) even if some atheists do privately. Most of us, I think, try to be considerate of our friends and family. Harris is mad at us too.

Harris has been criticized by atheists, surprisingly, for not going far enough. He claims outright that paranormal phenomena have been shown to exist, and invokes Terence McKenna more times than a scientific rationalist should (i.e., ever). The book ends with a discussion on meditation, and while I get where he’s coming from (that rationalism does not equate to spiritual emptiness or the absence of wonder), it closes on an unpleasant New Age note.

There’s something seductive — and therefore, history tells us, dangerous — about thinking you’re on the correct side of a religious argument. It doesn’t matter from which end of the political spectrum you approach the book; Harris is neither right- nor left-wing. For him it’s equally true that Islam sanctions terrorism as Christianity promotes misogyny and persecution. (Actually it’s pretty much okay to equate every organized religion with misogyny.) His great fear is that these doctrines, codified when foul weather and disease were caused by God’s wrath, now influence people with access to nuclear weapons. In Harris’s worldview, only an unwavering support (I almost said belief) for strict rationalism will save us. And hey, guess what? I’m a strict rationalist. Now I feel great.

I’m not sure that’s right either, but I don’t have a better answer.

MOOSE ATTACK

We are having a house guest tomorrow so tonight I kicked off my vacation with some CLEANING.

Normally I am a slob, but sometimes when I start cleaning things get a little out of control and I lose all sense of proportion. For example, in the kitchen: I did not just clean all the visible surfaces. I also got on a chair and cleaned the most inaccessible of the cabinets, as if our house guest was going to show up, nod appreciatively, and then immediately begin inspecting our pantry. Actually, this particular house guest may do just that.

Anyway, I threw out anything that satisfied one or more of the following conditions:

1. Had moved with us from our previous house two years ago
2. Was in a plastic bag
3. Was unidentifiable

Curiously, almost everything I tossed looked about the same. I am pretty sure the set of six things included at least:

1. Textured vegetable protein
2. Panko bread crumbs
3. Dried coconut
4. Rolled oats
5. Different bag of textured vegetable protein

Several months ago I threw out a whole container of textured vegetable protein because it was contaminated with pantry moths. The thing is, I can remember purchasing TVP only once, and for one use (veggie chili). I like it in veggie chili but not so much that I would keep buying it. I am starting to suspect it can undergo mitosis, and then gather itself snugly into little plastic bags.

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution is a history, in a way, of the expression of evolution. Told from the point of view of humans (who else?), it moves backward in evolutionary history visiting the major junction points where our species’ ancestors branched off from other groups. As the book progresses, the leaps (in form and function, as well as time) get progressively greater, ending with the origins of the first forms of life on Earth, estimated to be almost 4 billion years ago. The shtick of the book is that at each of these “rendezvous” between groups, a particular organism at that junction tells a “tale” which illustrates some principle of evolution.

I know a fair amount about hominid and primate evolution and pretty much nothing “before” that, so I found the later chapters more captivating than the first. It turns out I often didn’t know what our ancestors were.

I appreciated that Dawkins doesn’t shy away from the complexities in evolutionary history, but I wish the book’s structure were different. He reminds the reader repeatedly that the notion of progress as applied to evolution is pure nonsense — it’s nothing more than an expression of observer bias. To us, the notion of moving from sea to land, from four legs to two, seems obvious and natural. In reality, evolution moves in no particular direction at all, and even in our own history there are regressions and backtracking and the repeated “re-invention” of features.

Think about the evolutionary perspective of a bird. To them, mammals are an evolutionary dead-end: a minimally notable subplot in an unbroken chain from sea to land to air, from proto-reptile to dinosaur to bird. Humans managed to achieve flight only by over-engineering some unrelated organ (the brain) and constructing devices that surpass bird flight only in altitude and speed, but not even remotely in grace, agility or endurance. One imagines the pinnacle of evolution, from the point of view of a swift, of almost never having to set foot on land in an entire lifetime.

There are weirder trees to imagine: what would a fish think of the evolution of a whale? (”What a pointless digression were lungs and legs”, probably.) And the eusocial insects would be amazed that primitive forms of relatedness were still hanging around.

Dawkins can’t help but grumble about creationists throughout, but it’s mostly constructive: he cites the number of times the eye has independently evolved (nine) and there’s a good amount of space devoted to homeobox genes and their role in macroevolution. But I got the impression that he was holding back, if only because he knew he had The God Delusion in the pipeline.

Overall, it’s a good book, especially for people who enjoyed biology in school but haven’t kept up with the extraordinary discoveries enabled by molecular DNA analysis (dogs and the most recent common human ancestor are both from Asia, who knew?) Next up: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Dawkins buddy Sam Harris.

Our greyhound is commemorating the Fourth of July in several ways, some simultaneous:

1. Hiding in the bathroom
2. Compulsively drooling
3. Panting
4. Running upstairs
5. Curling up in the corner
6. Shivering uncontrollably
7. Running downstairs
8. Panting

Keep setting off those fireworks, guys!

“It’s funny because of the orthography.”

I finally purchased some Pimm’s.

The story about how I became obsessed with acquiring Pimm’s is extremely boring so I won’t reproduce it here. It is enough to say that the moment this afternoon when I retrieved a case of Tremont Ale, stood on it, and reached up onto a high, neglected shelf at The Wine and Cheese Cask to retrieve my dusty prize was a highlight of the week.

The Pimm’s cocktail, as we interpreted it:

• 1 highball glass, half-filled with ice
• 2.5 oz Pimm’s No. 1
• .5oz Drambuie
• Juice of 1/2 lime
• Club soda
• Sprig of mint