Film review: Inception (no spoilers)

Following in the tracks of Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this film takes a speculative look at how the brain works while maintaining at least some level of plausibility, unlike the case of the Matrix franchise which seemed to have been a case of special effects run amuck.

Inception examines the possibility of one or more people entering the dream of another and thereby manipulating that person’s dream to discover secrets or, as in the main storyline here, plant the germ of an idea in the mind so that the person thinks it originated spontaneously. I found it to be an interesting film. It plays with the age-old question that everyone has speculated about at some point about how we would know whether the lives we perceive we are living are real or a dream.
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Rapture, we hardly knew ye

Well, it is time to wrap up the Rapture stuff. It was fun while it lasted and for me at least it provided some amusement to see the kind of idiotic certainty that religion can give people. It was also amusing to watch mainline religious leaders squirm as they tried to argue that believing that the Rapture would occur yesterday was crazy while believing that the Rapture will occur some time in the future was quite sensible.

So here are some final thoughts.

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So long, and thanks for all the kitsch

This will be my last post. I expect to be taken up to heaven shortly at 6:00 pm eastern time with all the other true believers.

rapture.jpegSome of you will be surprised that I will be among the select few, since I have been making the case for atheism and making fun of all religions, including Christianity, and thus would have seemed a sure bet for hell. It is time to reveal the truth. This was all a ruse on my part. I was deliberately trying to drive people away from Jesus because I was working as a double agent for the CIA (Christ Indoctrination Agency). Jesus wanted to weed out all those whose faith was weak enough that they could be swayed by atheist arguments. Jesus wanted only the truest of the true believers, those who are willing to completely abandon all evidence and reason and logic, and instead put their complete trust in the words in an old book of dubious origin and so he and Melvin and Harvey created this agency to carry out this task. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and most other atheists also work for the CIA and are in the top ranks of the organization, so you will have the seeming paradox that heaven is going to filled with people who were considered dyed-in-the-wool atheists on Earth. Life is full of these little ironies.

Some people say that 2% of the world’s population, or about 130 million, will be saved but they are wrong. There aren’t that many true Jesus lovers and heaven would not want to admit any riff-raff. We are a pretty exclusive community and only 144,000 people will be saved in the Rapture.

So I will soon be off to get my wings and harp and enjoy the delights of heaven, such as singing hosannas and hanging out with the Cherubim and Seraphim, whatever the hell they are, because the Rapture manual they gave all CIA agents doesn’t say. I am guessing that they are a comedy duo like Laurel and Hardy who perform their act between the hosanna sessions.

So goodbye and remember that the world actually ends on October 21. Until then you will experience five month of tribulation, which is not going to be a walk in the park. But cheer up. However bad the tribulation period is, remember that when it ends, it will be even worse in hell. And don’t forget to wear clean underwear for the underworld, ha, ha! (Just a little Rapture humor.)

God and the US constitution

There is a person named David Barton who has been pushing the idea that the US was founded as a Christian country and that the separation of church and state was not intended to be a guiding principle. He is widely quoted in evangelical circles as an authority on this topic and has been influential in setting guidelines for high school textbooks.

In early May, Jon Stewart invited him to The Daily Show which is where I first saw him. Barton struck me as a fast talking snake oil salesman who knows how to impress people with seemingly erudite knowledge and to my irritation managed to steamroll Stewart.

To his credit, Stewart realized that he had been snowed so last week he brought on a genuine constitutional historian, Richard Beeman of the University of Pennsylvania, author of the book Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, to set the record straight. (The book is on my list of things to read.)

You can see all the interviews.

David Barton part 1:

David Barton part 2:

Richard Beeman part 1:

Richard Beeman part 2:

Rapture update

Today’s Doonesbury cartoon continues his series on the Rapture

I also received this link from reader FuDaYi about people having fun with the Rapture with parties planned for the big day tomorrow. One person (an atheist, of course) is even offering pet care insurance for people who want to make sure that the pets that are left behind when their owners get taken to heaven will be looked after. This raises the serious theological question: Why don’t pets get to go to heaven? What kind of god would deny people the company of their beloved pets? I personally wouldn’t want to spend eternity without Baxter.

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Not everyone is enjoying the publicity this event is garnering. “When we engage in this kind of wild speculation, it’s irresponsible,” said the Rev. Daniel Akin, president of the Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. “It can do damage to naive believers who can be easily caught up and it runs the risk of causing the church to receive sort of a black eye.”

Of course it does. The church deserves to get a black eye because they are the enablers of these people. His concern about ‘naïve believers’ being misled is hilarious since that group constitutes his entire base. If you encourage people to believe in nonsense, you shouldn’t complain if they believe in nonsense that is different from the nonsense that you believe in.

Probe into banks by New York Attorney General

The Attorney General of New York state has opened an investigation into the practice of mortgage loan packaging by the big banks and investment firms like Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. It was these practices that led to the real estate bubble and subsequent collapse.

This is a hopeful sign since we cannot expect the Obama administration’s justice department to take any serious action since the White House has long been a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street.

Matt Taibbi, who has been relentless in driving this story forward, is cautiously hopeful that something meaningful might come out of this.

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era.
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The reason this is such a potentially deadly investigation for the banks is that they seemed to be so close to getting away scot free. There is another investigation into the banks’ mortgage abuses by the states’ Attorneys General, led by Iowa AG Tom Miller, that was rumored to be headed toward a settlement, despite the fact that nothing like a complete investigation has been done.
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Such a desire to get some kind of deal done and sweep the mortgage mess under the rug once and for all seems almost universal among high-ranking politicians, and particularly in the Obama administration, which has acted throughout like it wants more than anything to simply get all of this over with and put in the past.

I am going to wait and see how this turns out. The oligarchy is going to close ranks and pull out all the stops to defend itself and preserve its privileges and get away with a plea deal that involves just a slap on the wrist and fine.

How religion warps thinking

The many widespread and massive evil acts that god commits in the Bible (the story of Joshua being one) should logically undercut any religious belief in such a god. But the desire to believe is so ingrained in some people that they are willing to abandon the logic and evidence that they use in other areas of their lives in order to maintain the things they were indoctrinated with as children.

The best defense against charges of an evil god would be to concede that the Bible is pretty much entirely fiction. This should be easy to do since the evidence against the historicity of almost everything in the Bible is so overwhelming that one has to suspend all critical faculties to retain any credence. But of course religious people cannot do that. Believers have to cling to the historicity of the Bible, at least in its basic storyline and the main events, because they have nothing else.
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The McGurk effect

Blog reader Henry sent me the link to this clip from the BBC program Horizon of what is known as the McGurk effect, that shows that when the brain receives two different inputs, one aural and one visual, the brain forces you to register just one. Lawrence Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside explains this effect and demonstrates how in this particular case the visual overrides the sound.

If we cannot do such a simple act of multitasking, imagine how unlikely it is that we can do more complex and challenging multitasking.