The pledge

Moon Phase: Waxing Crescent
Weather: So so very cold

You might remember that a few years ago an atheist by the name of Michael Newdow succeeded in getting a federal appeals court to declare the words "under God" in the pledge unconstitutional, but that the Supreme Court threw out the case on a technicality. Well, he's back on the case, now joined by other atheists, so once again we might have a chance at getting the words removed. Predictably, the fundies are up in arms over this, which is just so stupid. Can you imagine how pissed they would be if our pledge mentioned Ganesha instead? But no, they just can't seem to see the world from someone else's perspective. A good example of that bias is this article (from Human Events Online, a conservative news site), which is titled "Newdow Sues on Behalf of 'Pantheist' 3rd Grader". "Pantheist" needs to be in quotations? Like it's not even a real religion, just something made up. Can you imagine anyone putting quotes around Christian, Muslim, or Hindu?

Anyway, I'm really hoping we win this time. It's a travesty that our country has so many promotions of the Judeo-Christian god everywhere, especially since it's a recent addition due to communist panic. This isn't just about atheists, either. Plenty of people in this country believe in gods other than Yahweh, and it's an obvious violation of the First Amendment for the government to force children to pledge to the Judeo-Christian god. Thankfully, this was never a problem for me; we only had to recite the pledge in elementary school, and I didn't become an atheist until I was 13. But when I became one, it started to bother me that they were still forcing kids to do it, and I was always complaining about the "In God We Trust" on dollar bills. Hmm, maybe if we win this one, we can fix that, too. You know, ever since Lawrence vs. Texas I've felt a new sort of hope about the court system. Even if the legislation from our now overwhelmingly right wing government gets completely out of hand, the courts can still throw it out, and they're at least a little more concerned about the constitution than Congress. When it comes right down to it, there's just no excuse for things like this, and I think enough of the Supreme Court recognizes that to take another step forward for civil liberties.

National Cathedral

Moon Phase: Waxing Crescent
Weather: cold as shit and snowing (can you tell I'm back in Wisconsin?)

I went to the National Cathedral last week and spent several hours wandering around taking photos. I ended up taking about 50, but these are the best. The National Cathedral isn't nearly as cool as Notre Dame, but it does have some advantages, such as the fact that it's only a mile from my house, and it isn't nearly as full of tourists. It doesn't have the centuries of history of Notre Dame, but it's still a nice gothic revival building, with some interesting features, such as the stained glass window which contains a moon rock, and there's a gargoyle shaped like Darth Vader.

Tsunami thoughts

Moon Phase: Last Quarter
Weather: Cloudy and 58F (warm for January!)

I've been thinking about this tsunami ever since I heard about it last week. The death toll has climbed to over 150,000 now, and I bet it'll top 200,000 very soon. Things like this really make me wonder how anyone can believe in God—I know it's an old atheist argument, but it's still valid: what sort of benevolent god would allow such a thing—and more importantly, cause it? I've never heard a satisfactory answer. All they ever say is "He works in mysterious ways", which is just evasive bullshit. People like to comfort themselves by thinking that there's some rhyme and reason for all the suffering in the world because they find that easier than admitting that there may be no reason at all. But personally, I would prefer there not to be a reason—aside from the fact that logically there can't be, I would much rather think that suffering happens for no reason, just as a result of a chaotic and constantly shifting universe, than because someone chose to cause suffering, chose to create a world where evil exists when it doesn't need to. And it wouldn't need to, if God were omnipotent—He could create any sort of world he wanted, could create humans who can appreciate good without needing to experience evil.

Humans have always invented stories to explain the things we couldn't understand, blaming the gods, whether they were callous like the Greek gods or caring like the Judeo-Christian one. But they're just stories. This tsunami didn't happen because God willed it that way; it happened for purely physical reasons and without regard for the lives it would destroy. And it might seem as callous as the Greek gods, but nature isn't unfeeling or indifferent, it just doesn't take sides. Why expect nature to choose organic life over the inevitable shifting of tectonic plates?

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't mourn. That many lives extinguished in so short a time—I like humans, and it makes me sad to think of all those people gone, all their loved ones suffering that loss. And the other life forms, too—how many plants torn out of the ground and washed away, or drowned in salt water? One nice thing, though, is that the animals mostly escaped: they felt the water coming before the humans did, and left for higher ground.

First digital photos

Moon Phase: Waning Gibbous
Weather: Blue sky and surprisingly warm

I had a good xmas. I of course celebrate the winter solstice and not Christmas, but my atheist/agnostic parents like to celebrate xmas on the 25th, even if they don't particularly care about Jesus' supposed birth. Quakers traditionally didn't celebrate Christmas, because they said every day is sacred and celebration is unnecessary, but nowadays most Quakers do Christmas, at least in our branch. So my family does the tree and the decorations and the presents and the visits with relatives. We have traditions that I still love—going out to dinner xmas eve, then coming home and lighting candles and reading A Visit From Saint Nick and The Polar Express, drinking egg nog (well, soy nog in my case—I'm no longer vegan but I just can't stand milk anymore) and eating xmas cookies. On xmas we get up and open presents: I got a digital camera, an Olympus C765, with 10x zoom, 4 megapixels, and pretty good manual controls.

So, onto the pictures, the first ones I've taken with my new camera:

A couple of pictures I took from the car on the way to my cousins' in Virginia on xmas. I really like the way the telephone wires are angled, which was just pure luck. I decided to turn that one black and white because it has such great lines.

Monday morning I woke up early so we could leave for my cousins in Philly, and when I looked out the window I saw that beautiful golden light spilling over the buildings onto the trees, that specific shade and intensity of sunlight that you only see in early morning. So of course I had to take some pictures of it. I never see sunrises; I'm never up early enough. But when I do they just blow me away. Visually, the light of a sunrise is probably exactly like that of a sunset, only backwards, but it feels very different, because I'm still just waking up.

A couple of pictures I took at MLK park in White Oak, where there's a lovely little pond. This was around 3 in the afternoon, but you can see the sun is already setting, turning the sky yellow. Canada geese (no, not "Canadian", Canada) are one of those bizarre native species that have capitalized on the suburbanization of the landscape, have grown tremendously in population and become something of a nuisance, much like invasive non-natives. They just love the Maryland suburbs and they land in parks and leave their crap all over the place. But I still like them; they've got a sort of earthy grace.

Last week I was up on Rockville Pike with my mother doing xmas shopping, and the sky was just amazing. It had been raining off and on and the clouds were starting to thin out but the sun was setting, turning all the clouds into lovely mixtures of red and purple, with bits of blue sky in between. Over in the east, there was a rainbow for a bit. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn't have a camera with me; after all, why would I ever bring a camera along to a place as ugly as Rockville Pike? But I guess even a place like that can bring unexpected beauty.

Notre Dame

Moon Phase: Waxing Gibbous
Weather: Cold and partly cloudy

I took this photo in 2000, when I visited Paris as a sort of school trip while I was homeschooling. I may not be Christian, but Notre Dame de Paris is a sacred place to me. I just love gothic architecture, and Notre Dame is a wonderful expression of it--and it's easily the most famous gothic building in the world. There's something very forest-like in a cathedral's tall pillars and stained glass windows, which filter light like leaves. In the book Native Roots, Jack Weatherford suggests that humans try to mimic the forest in our architecture, and I think he's right:

Something of the forest can be seen even in the column clusters of Greek and Roman temples, and in the cathedrals of Europe. After the Europeans destroyed most of their great forests and covered the land with farms, manors, castles, and cities, they built large temples such as the cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres...The interior of the building reaches toward the sky, and the builders decorated it with multicolored windows that let light stream in as though coming through the trees...No matter how urban humans have become, something within them still longs for the forest.

Notre Dame stands in the middle of Paris on an island in the Seine known as Ile de la Cité, and the island has been a sacred site for millennia. Construction on the cathedral started in 1163; before that, a smaller church, the Saint Etienne Basilica, stood on the spot. During the Roman Empire, the Romans built a temple to Jupiter there--and Jupiter, incidentally, originates from the same Indo-European thunder god as Yahweh, the god that Christians now worship in the same place. There are suggestions that the Romans built the temple there because it was already a sacred place to the Gauls, who held ceremonies on the island to honor their own gods.

Probably what I felt when I stood in that cathedral was merely the beauty of the architecture, the darkness broken by candlelight and stained glass windows. But maybe I could sense what made that place sacred to all the people who have stood there over the years. Our modern religions focus worship toward the skies and perceive the world temporally, but animist cultures see the world in spatial terms, relating to events by location rather than time. Sacred places are the centers of these religions, and the people of these religions emphasize the spiritual bond between them and these locations. Standing in a place like Notre Dame, I can understand that sense of sacred place.