Pixel Scroll 4/19/18 This Scroll Intentionally Left Blank

(1) WOTF NEWS. Writers of the Future Contest quarterly finalist Benjamin C. Kinney has withdrawn his story and posted this statement on his blog:

Earlier this week, I received a phone call informing me that my final submission to the Writers of the Future contest (first quarter 2018) had been selected as a finalist. However, after contemplating the information1 that past winners have shared about the contest in recent weeks, I have withdrawn my finalist story from consideration.

I would not judge anyone for their past (or future) decisions to be involved in the contest, whether or not they act(ed) out of ignorance. After all, many writers – myself included – have long treated this contest as a normal fixture of our community. I hope my choice will help encourage others to reexamine that assumption.

For myself, no award is worth supporting an organization that has hurt and misused so many friends, fellow authors, illustrators, and human beings.

(2) THE FIRST ONE IS FREE. Episode 1 of “James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction” is free at iTunes.

(3) FANFIC AND HISTORY. The Organization for Transformative Works (the closest thing to a central hub for transformative works fandom) is currently running a membership drive, and has highlighted their Open Doors project for the preservation of fannish history: “Your Donations Preserve Fannish History!”

Have you ever gone back to look for a fic you read years ago and found out it’s disappeared from the internet? We’ve all been there. As fandom grows and years go by, countless thousands of fanworks disappear every day—entire archives go offline every month, and with them treasures are forever lost to fandom and future generations of fans.

That’s where Open Doors comes in! Open Doors is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), dedicated to preserving and archiving fannish voices. It works with the Archive of Our Own (AO3) to protect your old favorites from other places around the web. Your donations give us the resources we need to continue this work. In 2017 alone, Open Doors was able to preserve almost 43,000 fanworks thanks to your support!

(4) AUCTION OF ROLLY CRUMP COLLECTION. Gwynne Watkins, in “See Rare and Wonderful Disneyland memorabilia From Small World, Haunted Mansion, and the Enchanted Tiki Room Before It Goes on Auction Block” on Yahoo! Entertainment, says there is a big auction on April 28 from the collection of Rolly Crump, who was an animator and designer of Disneyland rides in the 1950s and 1960s.

I remember the flying saucer poster from the days when it was first in use.

(5) THE MANGA EXCEPTION. James Davis Nicoll isn’t always dialed up to 11 about unfinished series: “Halfway to Nowhere: On Enjoying the Narrative Journey”.

Like so many other readers, I am frustrated by interminable series that never end. I complain. Loudly. Publicly. In print (well, HTML). I do this because it’s the right thing to do. I may have a twinkling of a hope that some authors will wake up and conclude their series. But that hope is as long-lived as a firefly. Alas.

I do make an exception for works in which the destination is never the point, in which the goal is simply to enjoy the journey.

Take, for example, Hitoshi Ashinano’s classic manga series Yokohama Kaidashi Kik?. …

(6) OMAZE. Omaze features a chance to meet Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke as the prize in its new fundraiser.

  • Hang out with Emilia Clarke (the Mother of Dragons herself!) over lunch
  • Get a sneak peek of what it’s like on the top-secret Game of Thrones set in Belfast
  • Be flown out to Northern Ireland and put up in a 4-star hotel

Every donation supports the Royal College of Nursing Foundation.

The Royal College of Nursing Foundation provides vital support for the nurses, midwives and health care assistants who care for us and our families day in and day out. The Foundation encourages young people to join the nursing profession, funds education and training opportunities, lends a hand to those struggling to meet the rising cost of living and provides advice and support to get their lives back on track.

A funny video of Emilia Clarke trying to spill the beans:

…Watch Daenerys Targaryen’s behind-the-scenes tour of Game of Thrones! Spoiler: Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo) may or may not make eyebrow-raising cameos.

 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • John King Tarpinian forwarded Brevity’s Hollywood-inspired dinosaur pun.

(8) ROBOPROF. They haven’t taken over the teacher’s job….yet! “Robots are helping pupils to learn in Finland”.

Elias, the new language teacher in a school in southern Finland, has endless patience for repetition, never makes a pupil feel embarrassed for asking a question and can even do the “Gangnam Style,” dance. Elias is also a robot.

Elias is a language learning solution comprising a humanoid robot and mobile application, currently being trialed in a year-long pilot program at alongside a maths-teaching robot at a primary school in Finland’s third-largest city.

The robot can speak 23 languages and is equipped with software that allows it to understand students’ requirements.

(9) EPISODE RECAP. Daniel Dern says:

Episode 3 of Netflix’s Lost in Space comes remarkably close to where one of the characters could say (with alarm), “Our hovercraft is full of eels!”

(Close, as in, not a hovercraft. Or even a Lovecraft.)

(10) HERE’S TO YOU, MISSING ROBINSONS. Geek Interviews delivers an “Interview With The Robinsons.”

The cast of Netflix’s Lost in Space might be lost in the show, but in reality, they are pretty well-versed in pop culture and could navigate around the many questions we tossed at them. Geek Culture caught up with the stars of the Robinsons family in Tokyo, consisting of Toby Stephens, Molly Parker, Taylor Russell, Mina Sundwall, and Maxwell Jenkins.

 

(11) ANON. Trailer for Anon coming to Netflix.

Sal Frieland is a detective in a world with no privacy or anonymity; where everyone’s lives are transparent, traceable, and recorded by the authorities; where crime almost ceases to exist. But in trying to solve a series of murders, Frieland stumbles on a young woman known only as the Girl. She has no identity, no history and is invisible to the cops. Sal realizes this may not be the end of crime, but the beginning.

 

(12) THE PRO CIRCUIT. The BBC covers “The harsh realities of being a professional ‘girl gamer'”.

Trolls told Leahviathan to “get cancer and die” and made rape threats because she promoted a game they didn’t like. She is pragmatic: “They bother me, but I know by and large, they’re not real. I try to just separate them from the reality of what I do.”

It’s imperative to learn how to cope with the scale and intensity of the vitriol that can sometimes be experienced. Ignoring trolls and refusing them the attention they crave is a key strategy. Alternatively, calling their bluff and trolling them back in a positive way often helps defuse the situation. Leahviathan also has a moderation crew who help manage abusive comments.

Leahviathan doesn’t reveal her surname or where she lives, which is quite common for live streamers. It’s important to preserve a little bit of privacy.

(13) HUSH-A-BOOM. “The return of a secret British rocket site”. Maybe not that secret as they were testing engines, which would have been noisy; now, noise reduction is part of the research program.

… Originally a World War Two training base for bomber crews, RAF Westcott became the Guided Projectile Establishment in 1946, and was renamed the Rocket Propulsion Establishment (RPE) a year later.

One of RPE’s initial roles was to study seized Nazi rocket planes and rockets – like the Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet, the V1 Doodlebug and the V2 ballistic missile – and also learn what they could from captured German rocket scientists, some of whom stayed on as employees and worked at the site until the 1960s. “As an apprentice at Westcott I well remember seeing a V2 rocket in its trailer, a Messerschmitt Komet and a Saunders-Roe rocket plane,” says Ed Andrews, a Westcott veteran who now helps look after the historic site.

…In addition to such safety concerns, Westcott’s new rocketeers will have new environmental concerns to worry about, not least because the site is a bit of a wildlife haven – with kestrels, rabbits, deer, red kites and bats amongst its occasional inhabitants. “We have had to relocate some bats from some old buildings to make sure they are kept happy,” says Mark Thomas, chief executive of Reaction Engines.

“We’ve also done a huge amount of work on noise reduction. The five-metre-high wall around our Sabre test stand is for noise suppression and we expect a remarkably low level of noise as a result. But tests will only run for short periods in any case,” says Thomas. That’ll please the neighbours: former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s country pile is next door.

Whether British-based rocketeers can create a resurgence at Westcott remains to be seen. But at least they now have a chance. Just last week Reaction Engines secured a massive £26m ($35.9m) investment from aircraft and rocket maker Boeing and jet engine maker Rolls-Royce….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Where Did Time Travel Come From?” on YouTube, the Nerdwriter traces the origin of time travel stories to Charles Darwin and the nineteenth-century utopian romance.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Meredith, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Danny Sichel, Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

131 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/19/18 This Scroll Intentionally Left Blank

  1. @Contrarius

    I believe I saw mention of July 31st for voting.

    Lots of people are mentioning on twitter that they are getting their packet entries sent in this week, so I’d take a wild guess that they’re aiming for end of the month for release.

  2. David Shallcross references YKK, a string of letters I know only as a zipper manufacturer, coincidentally (I’m sure) also Japanese it seems. Funny, I thought.

    Steve Davidson is pretty confident his atheism is “based entirely on logic”, the sort of assertion that always sets alarm bells ringing. I don’t think people usually come to conclusions about anything important to them based entirely on logic. Steve’s “many years of study” suggests religion is important to him on some level.

  3. @Contrarius: Congrats on joining Worldcon 76! The Hugo Awards web site says voting will open in April and continue through the end of July.

    Worldcon 76’s own page just says “balloting ending around sometime in July (it depends on exactly when Worldcon is that year.” Clearly this is some kind of boilerplate description, since they know when their own con is happening! LOL, methinks someone should update that page.

    I don’t recall any specifics on packets, but I imagine work’s ongoing and they’ll get sent when ready. tough to predict how long herding cats, er, creators may take, eh? 😉

    ETA: Aw, ninja’d by Mark (Kitteh)!

  4. Mark: If anybody has a suggestion for what they’ve like to see from File 770 in 2017 as part of my Hugo Voter Packet, send the link to my email — mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com

    I moved my mother to a new skilled nursing facility this week. Between that and writing up the misadventures of JDA, I’ve had zero time to work on my packet stuff. Which is due today, theoretically!

    Maybe I can crowdsource a list?

  5. @StephenfromOttawa – That’s hard for me to relate to, as well. I realized don’t have the capacity to believe very young, and though I put a lot of hours into reading and debating and discussing the issue later on throughout my teens and early 20s, I’ve never seen a logical argument pro or con that works. It’s just not a thing that can be determined logically. It’s ultimately a personal choice – do I want/am I compelled to believe, or am I unable/would prefer not to?

    I didn’t mean to start any sort of faithful vs. atheist argument here, though, by responding to Cora’s musing. I know there are Filers of both stripes, and I don’t like to come off as disrespectful.

  6. (5) Aria ended some time ago, too — both in Japanese and English. I do love the anime, it’s like taking happy pills without any side effects. Recommended for all ages, particularly if you’re femme. Also has great cat characters.

    @Beth: The other books are going to have to really be amazing to best “Summer in Orcus”. If it had been around when I was a kid, I might have liked it better than Earthsea. It certainly beats Narnia.

    @Heather: I came across an Honorable Mention as an Amazon freebie and it was terrible even by those standards. I gave it one star b/c there is no zero. The basic idea was fine, but the execution sucked. Honorable Mention is a participation trophy.

    I just can’t even with the whole Scientology thing, how badly it’s hurt or killed people, scammed and enslaved them, the ableism, and the SWM RWNJ of it all. I hope the reputable judges, etc. resign and leave it to the hacks it deserves. Starve the beast. Maybe this new upswelling of commentary will make it easier for them to gracefully decline the “honor”.

    @kathodus: You’re half right. It started as a money-making scam. From the very beginning. Heard this first-hand from guys who were there toiling in the SF salt mines with ElRon and thus hanging out professionally. They’re all dead now, alas, so I shan’t name names. But they went on to write classic books, and he went on to become a morbidly obese drug-addicted insane cult leader. I mean, at the end, he went full Col. Kurtz sans Doors song and airstrikes.

  7. @Mike Glyer – This should be representative of your writing, or of articles on File770? It looks like you’re asking for material from this site, author aside, but I often misread.

    There are several pages/posts that have become standardish here in the past couple years that I frequently refer to and find very useful and informative.

    For instance: https://file770.com/?p=33961 (2017 recommended SFF).

    I also appreciate the memorial posts. There are a bunch of others that come half-way to mind, but I’ll have to poke around and find them.

  8. kathodus: I realized [I] don’t have the capacity to believe very young, and though I put a lot of hours into reading and debating and discussing the issue later on throughout my teens and early 20s, I’ve never seen a logical argument pro or con that works. It’s just not a thing that can be determined logically. It’s ultimately a personal choice – do I want/am I compelled to believe, or am I unable/would prefer not to?

    That’s exactly how I’d describe my personal stance. Though I do believe that reason and rationality have a lot to do with it, I don’t pretend that my position is anything other than a value judgment on my own part. And as long as other people don’t attempt to do harm with their position, or to force their position on me, I’m fine with that.

  9. Kathodus: Stuff about the site. Something that you think was really good, or funny, etc.

    I didn’t write that many narrative posts last year, so a lot of what I need about my own writing specifically I already have.

  10. My latest Hugo nominee reviews:

    New York 2140: I really, really wanted to like this book more than I actually did. There’s so little fiction out there facing up to climate change, and even less that isn’t crushingly depressing! But there are just so many problems with the New York City he describes that I can’t in conscience give it more than 3 stars.

    The first thing that hit me was that this near-future NYC has no racial/ethnic partisanship, neighborhoods, tensions, or consciousness. The thing I only was sure about when I got to the end: no queer people, either. There’s a lot of poetry, quotes, and infodumps about Why People Come To NYC Even When It’s Crazy, but without mentioning the big sparkly queer reason.

    Looking around the internet now, I see that KSR has no personal internet presence: no personal website, no twitter, no FB or LJ. He’s writing about a revolution, but he doesn’t know how revolutions work *right now*. This gives his picture of the near-future a retro feel, for me.

    The Black Tides of Heaven: Holy cow that’s good. Gender, magic-and/or-technology, mining Asian culture, revolution, Airbender echoes: this book checks SO MANY of my interest-boxes.

    Zeitgeist, coincidence, influence? — this is a closer, in-focus look at the type of gender system in Provenance (except that Yang’s doesn’t have “neither” as a possible choice).

    Voting for Best Novella is going to be *hard*.

  11. Halfway through A Skinful of Shadows. Wombat vs. Hardinge. I have no idea what I’m going to do (and I have much more reading ahead).

  12. @Mike Glyer

    I don’t think I’ve been around consistently enough to have anything especially insightful to suggest, but maybe look through the top hits posts if it has to be done in a rush? Although those sometimes favour controversy which may or may not be something you’d want to focus on.

  13. Mike, maybe include one with some of the poetry? (I think of it as “flash poetry”, like “flash fiction”.)

  14. Kendall on April 20, 2018 at 4:35 pm said:

    Methinks someone should update that page.

    I’ve submitted the update request.

    We expect the ballot to go live before the end of April, and voting will be open through July 31, 2018. The announcement on the Hugo Awards web site says this, but admittedly it’s at the very bottom of the announcement.

    The Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards team is working on the Hugo Voter Packet. It’s a real cat-herding enterprise. When there are enough responses to release a package, we’ll make an announcement. Based on past history, I rather expect that there will be additions to it straggling in over the next few months even after we publish it.

  15. I’m a Christian agnostic, because the Christian stories have meaning for me, but I know full well that we can’t know what is true when it comes to the existence or non-existence of divinity, much less any details about that. So I am a laid back believer in divinity, and I also believe that other religions are seeing different facets of the same divinity, using names and stories that are meaningful to their followers. I also believe all people are loved, whether they are believers or not, and that God doesn’t interfere. It’s up to us to deal with the world’s evil.

  16. @Kevin Standlee: Thanks. And yeah, that’s where I got the “end of July” thing from – I love the Hugo Awards site! 🙂

  17. Kevin Standlee on April 20, 2018 at 7:19 pm said:

    The Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards team is working on the Hugo Voter Packet. It’s a real cat-herding enterprise.

    It will have herded cats in it.

  18. @kathodus: I’m curious how you think Scientology “started as a troll”; Hubbard has been widely quoted as saying ~~75 years ago that the way to true riches was to found a religion, although S claimed not to be a religion (until H concluded that the U.S. tax code would do better by him if it were, per what I’ve lightly read). I’m also surprised by your connecting it to 1970’s self-help, as it was significant before then (per my then-time observation).

    @steve davidson (following up Lenora): I felt about the way you do when I was in high school. I now call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist (“militant agnostic” when god-pounders get under my skin) — but I’ve seen enough people who are both brighter and wiser than I am, yet believe in at least some abstract god, that I don’t argue the deficits of religion per se. People who insist that I accept their religious strictures, on the other hand….

  19. @ Chip: The version I remember hearing was that it started as a bar bet. Hubbard said the quickest way to get rich in America was to start a religion, somebody else in the group dared him to try it, and here we are.

    My religious views are delicately balanced between atheism/rationalism and the Sentient Universe (aka “the Force”, although I also think of it as the Goddess). I was raised in a moderately religious household — what are now called “twice-a-year Christians” — and I find that it provides me some emotional comfort to think of there being a supernatural consciousness in the Universe. But I’m also aware that just because I find it comforting doesn’t make it true, and if pressed on the subject I’m more likely to declare myself atheist.

  20. Thanks, @Mark, @Kendall, and @Kevin! I’m trying to get a better handle on how much time I have to cram in more reading, and this helps!

  21. I used to call myself agnostic, under the impression that “agnostic” translated to “not taking a position on belief” whereas “atheist” was taking the stance that there ain’t no gods. That lasted until someone presented a cogent argument that gnosis is about knowledge and theism is about belief, which really aren’t the same thing and thus shouldn’t be seen as points on the same spectrum. Therefore, he continued, it is possible to be an agnostic theist (“I believe but do not know”) or a “strong atheist” (asserting knowledge of nonexistence) and that most who call themselves “agnostic” would be better described as taking a “weak atheist” or “agnostic atheist” (“do not believe but do not know”) position.

    I like the logic in those delineations, and in my life I have gone from various degrees of theism (from fundamentalist Southern Baptist through generic Christian to generically deistic) to my current “moderately strong atheist” position. In sum, I’m pretty confident that the material world is all there is, but I acknowledge that I could be mistaken and am willing to consider testable evidence to the contrary.

    On the subject of religion vs. cult, I actually took a semester-long course on the subject in high school (a private religious institution!), which took the position that the difference between a cult and a religion was really more a matter of cultural acceptance (normally achieved through size and age) than anything else, and “cult” was a perjorative label for any new, small religion with which the speaker disagreed. To the teacher’s credit, although the course was structured to feature one “new religion” per week and amounted to “here’s what they believe and do, here’s where that differs from Christianity, and that’s why they’re wrong,” he did set one of those weeks aside to put Christianity under the same microscope. The parallels between the “cult brainwashing techniques” we learned about in class and the “church summer camps” I’d attended were striking once pointed out, and I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

  22. @Rev. Bob —

    gnosis is about knowledge and theism is about belief, which really aren’t the same thing and thus shouldn’t be seen as points on the same spectrum. Therefore, he continued, it is possible to be an agnostic theist (“I believe but do not know”) or a “strong atheist” (asserting knowledge of nonexistence) and that most who call themselves “agnostic” would be better described as taking a “weak atheist” or “agnostic atheist” (“do not believe but do not know”) position.

    That’s sort of the classification system that Richard Dawkins uses, though I’m not going to go look up the precise details right now.

    I consider myself an agnostic, probably more specifically described as something like an atheistic agnostic. I don’t feel the presence of a deity and don’t see any strong evidence or special need for one, but I also don’t see any strong evidence for the absence of one either.

    I’m also not especially anti-religion; while religions have done a lot of bad things over the centuries, they have also accomplished a lot of good things. It’s easy to see the ways in which humans have deep-seated psychological needs to believe in something like an all-powerful parent overseeing and protecting them (the world’s most extreme Daddy complex) and how such beliefs may improve people’s lives whether or not the beliefs have any basis in reality.

    If I had to participate in any religion, if not Humanism, I’d probably go for either Buddhist or Unitarian-Universalist. If it’s good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it’s good enough for me. ;-D

    Gems of Jeffersonian anti-Trinitarian snark, just because I can:

    “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” ~ Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams (April 11, 1823)

    “The Christian god is a three-headed monster, cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

    “No one sees with greater pleasure than myself the progress of reason in it’s advances towards rational Christianity, when we shall have done away the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three[…]I have little doubt that the whole of our country will soon be rallied to the Unity of the Creator…” — Thomas Jefferson

  23. @Contrarius:

    I suspect we’re pretty close on the religious spectrum, just from slightly different perspectives. That is, I take Occam’s Razor to the matter of an unevidenced deity and conclude “probably not,” where you appear to look at the same notes and say “toss a coin.” Some difference, to be sure, but IMO nothing to feud over. 😉

  24. Well, since I inevitably seem to have triggered this discussion, I might as well weigh in.

    By “noisy atheist” I meant those atheists who just cannot shut up about how atheist they are and how the religious people are wrong, wrong, wrong. If these noisy atheists are writers, they may well write something about killing the god or the angels they claim not to believe in (yes, this is a thing – I have a list of examples). I sometimes also call them insecure atheists, because they constantly have to tell everybody that they don’t believe in this god stuff anymore. Meanwhile, the quiet atheists are people who simply aren’t religious and often don’t really get religion either, but they don’t feel the need to tell everybody about it and will probably say, “I’m not religious”, when asked.

    As for myself, I consider myself a quiet atheist. I was raised in a Protestant Lutheran milieu, attended religious education at school and even went through confirmation. Now Lutheran Protestants, at least in North Germany, are very rational about their religiousness. And so I was told that most of the stories in the Bible are metaphors, that they don’t recount what really happened, but are a human attempt to explain God’s work. I was pretty okay with this version of Christianity and could go through the motions (and still can, if required, e.g. for a funeral or weddding, i.e. I don’t feel offended when asked to enter a church or pray or participate in a service). However, I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body and never did and eventually viewed the Christian religion mainly as a metaphor and a means of giving comfort to people who needed it. And while Christianity had nice stories, I eventually found out that other religions had nice stories as well and that some of them were actually cooler than Christianity’s and that I didn’t really believe that any of them were more than stories. After a run-in with a couple of people who were very, very pious (and they would tell you all about it) and yet pieces of crap as human beings, I decided at about 16 or 17 that I wouldn’t pretend to believe in this god thing no more, because it attracted too many unpleasant people and God, if they existed, did nothing about them. I remained formally a member of the Lutheran Protestant church until my early 20s, when the local church fired the pastor who had been with our parish since I was born and whom I liked a lot (plus, I was friends with his son). I didn’t have a problem with his successor, but I still left out of protest about how badly our pastor had been treated (and was pretty disappointed that nobody even listened to my reasons and tried to persuade me to stay, but that they just sent me a bill for leaving the church).

    In US terms, I’m probably agnostic, but I don’t like the term and it’s not one that’s used over here either. I don’t much like atheist either, because it is too associated with the strident and noisy atheists I can’t stand. So when asked, I mostly say “I’m not religious” and leave it at that.

  25. Cora: I still left out of protest about how badly our pastor had been treated (and was pretty disappointed that nobody even listened to my reasons and tried to persuade me to stay, but that they just sent me a bill for leaving the church).

    WHAT.

    I really hope that you didn’t pay it. 🙁

  26. @Contrarius–

    Christian God is a three-headed monster–spurious quotation

    Earliest known appearance in print: Charles Bufe, The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations (San Francisco, CA: See Sharp Press, 1992), 200. (This source claims that the quote is from a letter to Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr.)

    It appears to be assembled from paraphrases and misquoted of bits and pieces from various Jefferson letters and writings, put together to create a “quote” far more comprehensively harsh than anything the real Jefferson said about the religion quite a few of his fellow Founders believed in.

    When a quote is too perfect, and attributed to too perfect a source, always check it out.

    The other two sound more plausibly Jeffersonian, but it’s past 2am, and I haven’t checked them.

  27. If we’re weighing in, I’ll note that I’m also one of Cora’s “quiet atheists”. I’m actually a bit divided, just as Christanity is, itself: I am a weak atheist regarding the god that, say, Randy Smith believes in, and quite likely the one that Lenora Rose and OGH worship – I regard their god as something that would be nice if true but which I can’t see any reason to think actually is. Some other Christian gods, by contrast, I take on faith aren’t real. I expect all of you can think of examples readily enough.

    I do find Christian theology quite interesting as a system of thought, even if much of it strikes me as obviously false.

  28. @JJ I think that Germany, like Switzerland, has “state churches”: a number of faiths have official recognition in that you declare yourself a member on your tax return and pay to them as part of your regular tax bill. Leaving such a church, for individuals, is perfectly possible but requires an official declaration, rather than just staying away from certain buildings on Sunday.
    The situation is odder for corporations, which in most of Switzerland pay church taxes as well, and can NOT get out of that obligation.

  29. I find myself wavering in the militancy of my atheism. In the face of efforts to turn the state into an instrument of religion, I tend to become more outspoken. On the other hand, I find many of the “new atheist” leaders (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) doctrinaire, repulsive, and well along the way toward establishing cults of personality as a replacement for traditional religion.
    I also consider myself firmly rooted in the Christian tradition, and to some extent value Christian culture. Walking around our society without any knowledge about one of the long standing forces that shaped it is a form of illiteracy to me.
    Lately, I’ve started attending services at the Church of St. Coltrane. I would describe their approach as using Free Jazz as a direct appeal to our better natures, bypassing overly sectarian doctrine.

  30. @microtherion:

    Agreed on church/state issues, but I can see the value in having a Dawkins or Hitchens around. It’s generally a bad idea for only one side of a debate to be able to field fire-breathing, capable public defenders. Tends to lead to that side winning the day and trampling the rights of the other (more polite/soft-spoken) side, which I regard as a bad outcome. See, for instance, the gun control issue in the US – the pro-gun faction flashes the cash and has plenty of public speakers who are willing to be rude, whereas the pro-control faction tries to be reasonable and gets exactly nowhere. It’s taken a crew of brash, well-spoken high schoolers to begin turning that around.

    I might not invite Dawkins to dinner, but I’m glad he’s out there speaking up against those who would embrace theocracy.

  31. The first time I heard the term apatheist, I thought it was a joke. It turns out not to be, and it strikes me as eminently reasonable: “someone who is not interested in accepting or rejecting any claims that gods exist or do not exist.”

  32. @Kevin

    Another correction for that Worldcon 76 Hugo page…it says “fifteen categories.” We’re at 17 now plus the 2 non-Hugos.

    Yay! For voting until July 31! Going by last year, I was conservatively estimating mid-July. Happy for 2 more weeks of reading time.

  33. My turn? Okay. I’ve been down on religion before because of some of the crap they have pulled and still pull, but a class I took a couple of years back convinced me that there’s something kind of good in all that somewhere. It’s been a good spur to creative types.

    My core position is that I shouldn’t believe something just because it would be nice if it were true. I haven’t seen anything in the way of evidence to make me stay worried about the fate of my ineffable soul, so I shrug and try to be polite, but occasionally agree or disagree with someone on one side or the other for reasons that seem persuasive enough at the time.

    Merry Christmas, and kick Pat Robertson’s ass.

  34. @Lee: I hadn’t the bar-bet story; it sounds a bit pat to be true. The straight claim is repeatedly attested but those may also come from a single report being spread. OTOH, the claim is characteristic; Hubbard may well have written 35,000 words in a week, but he appears to have been a con man from very early (cf the de Camp reference and the watch story). Paul Malmont’s two recursive SF novels paint him in a light that is unflattering but not out of line with other accounts.

    @OGH: here’s hoping your mother’s new home works out well enough that you don’t have to spend so many spoons making sure she’s OK.

  35. A religion doesn’t have to have an omnipotent creator deity, or a money collecting organization. I’m a non-ethnic non-sectarian buddhist, with which I have lots of personal experience.

  36. @Chip
    I’d heard that it started out as a bet, possibly when drunken, between Hubbard and some other writers, and IIRC, John Ghod. (I heard that back in the late 70s, from someone who’d been in fandom since the late 60s.) So I suspect it’s close enough to the truth.

  37. I have a family that is deeply divided on religious issues. Although there have been many times when that was very difficult, it has also been instructive. At some point, I personally just decided to opt out of the discussion. I think the breaking point came when my husband and I were not married in a church, which sent the Evangelical wing of the family through the roof. Many Bible verses thundered at us and our evil ways and our evil marriage! After being battered by all the judgment, I decided that religion was an intensely personal thing and I don’t have to tell anybody what I have chosen. I do attend Passover and bar and bas mitzvahs within the Jewish wing of the family because they happen to be warm and interesting events and we enjoy them. But I would say I probably moved from what people generally understand as agnostic to what people generally understand as atheist some time ago, but I don’t get why I have to pick a label around the theism concept one way or the other.

    Prickly independent types who resist labeling, unite! Except if we united, our prickly exteriors and disparate opinions would annoy each other and we would end up dispersing rather quickly, I suspect.

    (And why do I always post right after PJ Evans whose avatar looks so much like mine?)

  38. We make God in our own image. Tell me about the god you worship, and you are telling me about yourself and what you value.

  39. @Lis —

    Christian God is a three-headed monster–spurious quotation

    My apologies for the inaccuracy — but the accurate version of that quote is the same in intent:

    “”the hocus-pocus phantasm of a god, like another Cerberus with one body and three heads had it’s birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.” — letter to James Smith, 1822

    Further from the same page:

    “The phrase “cruel, vengeful and capricious” may come from Jefferson’s letter to William Short of August 4, 1820, in which he described the God of the Old Testament as “a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”3
    The reference to “fools and hypocrites” was probably paraphrased from Jefferson’s statement in Notes on the State of Virginia, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”4”

    As for my other two quotes:

    “”[T]he truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. and the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. “– letter to John Adams, 1823

    “[N]o one sees with greater pleasure than myself the progress of reason in it’s advances towards rational Christianity. when we shall have done away the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding, reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus, when, in short, we shall have unlearned every thing which has been taught since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples[….][T]he religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconcievable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce it’s founder an imposter. [….]I have little doubt that the whole of our country will soon be rallied to the Unity of the Creator, and, I hope, to the pure doctrines of Jesus also.”– letter to Thomas Pickering, 1821

    You’re welcome. 😉

  40. @Mike Glyer: What @Chip Hitchcock said. I went to sleep thinking, “I should’ve said some encouraging words to Mike on the blog,” and am finally back. I hope things go more smoothly for your mother and you and your family now!

    Thanks, Chip, for reminding me!

  41. Kendall: Thanks to you and Chip and others — the encouragement really does help.

  42. @Rev. Bob —

    I suspect we’re pretty close on the religious spectrum, just from slightly different perspectives. That is, I take Occam’s Razor to the matter of an unevidenced deity and conclude “probably not,” where you appear to look at the same notes and say “toss a coin.” Some difference, to be sure, but IMO nothing to feud over. ?

    We are even closer than you think. I also think there is probably not a god — but “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy”, and I’m open to being proven wrong.

    Additionally, I gotta say I look a little side-eyed at people who consider themselves strong atheists. I mean, strong atheism takes just as much faith as strong theism does — neither claim can be proven empirically — so I don’t really “grok” how they justify their position as being somehow superior to religious faith.

    But to each their own!

  43. @JJ @microtherion

    I think that Germany, like Switzerland, has “state churches”: a number of faiths have official recognition in that you declare yourself a member on your tax return and pay to them as part of your regular tax bill. Leaving such a church, for individuals, is perfectly possible but requires an official declaration, rather than just staying away from certain buildings on Sunday.
    The situation is odder for corporations, which in most of Switzerland pay church taxes as well, and can NOT get out of that obligation.

    That’s more or less it. In Germany, some large religious organisations, mainly the Lutheran Protestant and Catholic church, are allowed to levy “church tax” on their members, which is collected by the state. In my case, I was a student and didn’t have any income above the tax limit, when I left, so I of course asked why I had to pay for leaving the church, since I didn’t pay church tax. Whereupon I was told – by the tax office, not the church – that everybody who left the church had to pay and besides, my father had income. “Yeah,” I said, “But my Dad isn’t even a church member.” It didn’t matter, we still had to pay, because they were just about to change the law, so that church taxes could be levied on non-earning husbands, wives and adult children of people who were not church members. Coincidentally, this change also prompted my mother to formally leave the church shortly after me.

    I’m very much opposed to the church tax system, but I don’t see a chance of it changing anytime soon. It’s not that I think church services should be free, but people should pay for the services they are actually using. And coincidentally, whenever I set foot into a church, whether for a funeral or wedding service or just as a tourist, I make sure to drop a few coins or more into the collection box. However, I don’t think people should pay just because they were baptized as babies when they were too young to even consent.

    There are also some other highly problematic laws regarding the non-separation between church and state here, which also have hardly any chance of being struck down, though the European Court recently struck a blow against church employment laws. This is also why I find the noisy American atheists so irritating, because they get worked up about what are IMO non-issues such as crucifixes, roadside shrines or nativity displays on public ground (pretty common here and I like them, since many are artistically interesting) rather than actual problems.

  44. @Mike —

    I send you much sympathy too. My father went into a skilled nursing/rehab facility just a couple of weeks ago after a bad fall — fractured his femur and had to have his **third** replacement hip installed. He is not at all happy with the place he’s staying, and very anxious about when and if he’ll be able to get out of there, so I feel yer pain. Fortunately I’m only about an hour away, so I’m currently spending a couple of days a week over there with my mom, but I know at least a little of the stresses you’re going through right now!

  45. So am I the only agnostic religious person here? Hard to believe, if you’ll excuse the expression.

    Cora, I overlap heavily with what you said above about stories from various religions. I find them cool, too. I lean a little more toward belief than you do. In fact, I hope for some of it to be true, especially since my husband died. I really want to see him again.

    There seems to be a real divide in Christianity, as there is in politics, between people who see religion as a love-based, supportive and justice-oriented system, and those who see it as a controlling system, sometimes with attendant hatred. I am not phrasing that quite right, I think. I don’t see rules as an inherent problem. They aren’t big in my personal religion, but I have observant Jewish friends who have told me that, for them, their religion’s rules keep them constantly mindful of God, and that the rules themselves are not the important part. So that seems to me almost like rule-following as a meditative act rather than a controlling act. Rule-following Christians seem to be much more about control, and maybe some Jewish people are as well – I can’t claim to have had this conversation with more than a couple of people. But I found the dichotomy interesting. It reminds of ritual for mindfulness, which I have experienced doing Christian monastic daily offices at my favorite Anglican convent or at home, and have also experienced in Wiccan or quasi-Wiccan ritual.

    Edited to add: sympathy and support for you, Mike and Contrarius.

  46. I’m very bad at remembering to utter comforting words and to understand how and when they should be said (I am being tested for autism as well as ahdh), but I have been thinking a lot of you lately, Mike. I do not know what I can do to help, but whatever you need.

    Contrarius, sorry to hear this. Hope he gets better soon.

  47. Hi everyone. Thanks for the support, I really appreciate it.

    Question for Mike: I noticed that the 2018 WOTF results got announced here on File 770. Will you consider whether to discontinue this practice? The decision is yours, but I think it’s one of many possible steps toward de-normalizing the contest. (That said, I do understand the counterargument – the contest’s issues are no mark against the winners or their stories.)

  48. Thanks, @Lenore and @Hampus! But it sounds like Mike has much more responsibility for his mother’s care than I do for my dad’s, so he deserves much more of the sympathy!

  49. @Benjamin C. Kinney,

    Speaking for myself, I would prefer if Mike continues his usual practice.

    There are a number of topics Mike covers that I wouldn’t, but they are noteworthy in some way.

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