Sudden

I've been trying to piece together for myself at what point did I become an atheist? It's not like I woke up one morning and realized hey I'm an atheist, and yet at the same time, it kinda is. Not too recently I just realized that not only am I an atheist, but I have been one for some time and I didn't really realize it. I was trying to NOT be an atheist for the longest time. I was desperately clinging for years to the idea of a deity, long after it just stopped making sense.

Why did it stop making sense? I was born a Christian, into a Baptist family. I was raised by a woman who still strongly believes in the Trinity, and has personal anecdotal evidence to support her beliefs. Practically since birth I've heard stories from my mom about how during times of stress in her life she has heard her god speak to her. She has seen Him in out of the body experiences and dream-like moments of premonition. You can laugh all you want, but my own mother told me she met Jesus Christ. My own mother admitted to seeing the ghosts of recently departed people visiting their own funeral. These events were very real to me from childhood, because my own mother told me they happened, and I had no reason nor desire to ever question my own mother. My entire life, I have been strongly motivated to take everything and anything else I've ever learned, and make it relate to my mother's anecdotal evidence of there being a deity. If it didn't make sense, my mom trumped pretty much everything else, and for the longest time I never even thought about this. I never questioned it. No matter what else goes on, there's a God. Cuz Mom said there was. The alternative that my mother was either lying to me or delusional, was simply an unthinkable direction to allow my brain to go.

It's never sudden, but it's always sudden.

One of my favorite atheists, and a favorite long before I realized I was one myself, is Joss Whedon. He made a little TV series called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. One of the many episodes of that series written by Joss Whedon is called The Body. Quick summary for the uninitiated: Buffy is a vampire slayer who had saved her mother countless times from vampires and zombies and ghosts and monsters and even another vampire slayer. However, in season five Buffy found her mother fighting cancer, and cancer is something at which a vampire slayer is completely and utterly powerless. It's kinda hard to use a wooden stake against cancer. But Buffy's mom went into remission and everybody thought she beat it. Then one day Buffy comes home and Joyce is on the couch with her eyes wide open, and she's never getting up again.

So Buffy finds herself at the hospital later that same day, and the rest of her friends have all run off on various errands because after a loss like this everyone feels like they have to go do something to be useful or whatever, and Buffy's just sitting there in the waiting room and her friend Tara is sitting next to her. Tara had lost her own mother not long before this happened, and seemed to have come to terms with it. Tara and Buffy sit there alone for a quiet moment and Tara tries to think of something to say to comfort her friend. What comes out of her mouth has haunted me for years: "It's never sudden, but it's always sudden." They knew Buffy's Mom was sick, and had been fighting cancer all season, so her mortality wasn't sudden, but then they thought she was okay. So when she died from complications of cancer recovery, it was sudden. It's possible for something to be both sudden and not sudden.

I'd experienced that myself about when this episode of Buffy came out. My dad died in October of 1998 and this show was first broadcast in February of 2001, so dad's slowly failing health and then quick decline were still fresh in my mind when I saw The Body. I was right there with Tara when she said that to Buffy.

So from birth I was a Christian but around college (or was it high school? Actually I think as early as junior high) I found myself questioning first the Baptist denomination. It seemed petty for example to not allow dancing. Also, though I attended many different Baptist churches, they all seemed full of people more interested in showing off what they'd purchased that week than in exploring their spiritual awareness. Attending church seemed to just be something traditional to do and didn't have any actual meaning behind it. So as soon as I was old enough to not HAVE to go, I stopped going. I still considered myself a Christian, but prided myself in not being religious.

In the past ten or fifteen years I've thought of myself more as a Deist than a Christian. I still held as best as I can to Christian structure because it was like a security blanket, but I was painfully aware the god I believed in could actually go by the name of Jehovah, Yahweh or Allah as easily as "God." In fact, my impression of a god had to wear many hats. I refused to accept that any one denomination or religious doctrine was more or less right than any others. The more I learned about other beliefs, the more I found there were commonalities and well as contrasts, and that these different elements seemed as much byproducts of cultural evolution as anything. No one really knows who or what God is. There's a lot of guesswork going on.

And just who wrote The Bible? Men who were presumably inspired by God, and we are not to question the lack of credentials of these people. In fact whether it be a shaman or a pope or a televangelist, the only criteria that appears to be necessary to be a Man of God, is to have enough self-confidence to go around demanding people acknowledge you as such. Well, that and you have to be able to talk a good game.

Throughout history, religions are run by a select group of usually men with resources and connections and money, and they tell other people how to live their lives. Things they don't want the masses to do with wanton abandon are called sins and followers are told to deny the urges of the flesh with a promise of spiritual riches after life is over. Meanwhile, the lofty rich leaders wear expensive clothes and make grandiose temples to honor their god. Oftentimes throughout history, these rich and powerful leaders of religions are eventually discovered to also fall from grace but are often forgiven even if they eventually lose their power, only to be replaced by new leaders who promise to do better. It's a creepy viscous cycle.

These sins are more often than not connected to things that are deeply ingrained in "the flesh." Some of the advice makes perfect sense. Thou Shalt Not Kill is just good advice no matter how you look at it. However, then the religious leaders find caveats even for that 'sin.' For example, anyone who disagrees with the tenets of a given religion can be killed during a Holy War. Killing in self-defense is perfectly acceptable, and these leaders will say that their god told them to tell their followers to go kill anyone who disagrees with them, as they are heathen and do not enjoy the love of the One True God. There's a lot of One True Gods by the way. Almost as many as there are sports teams. So I knew all this stuff and more and yet still I found myself clinging to these beliefs that fit me worse than a T-Shirt from fifth grade.

So at what point did I lose faith? Or rather, at what point did I realize that faith is belief in something that can't be proven, and therefore makes no fricken sense whatsoever?

This past March I had an operation. My first. No big deal. It was a private big deal for me but objectively speaking it was a routine operation. I had an umbilical hernia which was the byproduct of poor exercise and overeating. My own damn fault. And the operation itself was standard and routine. I have never been given any reason to believe I should have had an out of the body experience or a near death experience. There was no moment while on the operating table where I flatlined.

Or so far as I know. I mean. I wouldn't know. I wasn't exactly there at the time it happened. I remember cracking jokes in the operating room, asking the doctor to please get this golf ball out of my belly button. Just take a golf club and whack it. Whatever it takes. I was in good spirits. I felt I was in good hands. Capable intelligent people whose careers revolve around doing this kinda stuff every day. I felt good, considering my gut was killing me. The anesthesiologist asked me to count backward from one hundred. I don't remember actually counting.

I don't remember anything. When you sleep, and then you wake up, there's still a sense that something was there between the going to sleep and the waking up. You may not remember any dreams or anything but there's a sense that time has passed. It's very vague but it's there, and we take it for granted.

I remember becoming conscious and it was very dark, later I realized it was cuz I was too weak to open my eyelids. I felt a sharp needle in my wrist and I didn't want it there, so I remember feeling my left arm reaching over to pull something out of my right arm, and I remember being restrained. Then I went to sleep. And then I woke up in a recovery room and pushed a button asking for vicadin. From the point of the needle in my arm to the point of the vicadin, that was normal sleep. That felt normal. However, the point before that between the operation itself and becoming conscious realizing there was a needle in my arm I didn't want there, that wasn't normal. That is Missing Time.

As I was being restrained from pulling the needle out of my arm, I recall being mildly surprised to be alive. There was no out of the body experience during my operation. There was no recollection of conversations that happened elsewhere in the hospital. I was not visited by family and friends who have passed away. I didn't get to shake Jesus' hand and marvel at the scars on his hands and wrists. I didn't get told I can't stay in heaven because it's not my time yet and I need to go back. There was none of that. I can tell myself it was just the anesthesia. That I wasn't supposed to remember anything because they just used strong drugs and there was no life after death moment for me because I wasn't anywhere near dying. However, if there were a god in the sky somewhere, it woulda been nice if he at least popped in at this point in my life and said hello. After all, he's on a first name basis with my Mom.

What I experienced can only be described as oblivion. There was nothing. When I actually die, that's what's going to be there. Nothing. And I won't have any emotional response to that because there simply will be no 'me' to have any kind of response to about that. At all. And that's the way it is. That's the way it's always been. One can choose to believe all they want but that doesn't change what actually is. There's subjective perception of reality, and then there's reality. You can believe in leprechans and aliens and the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot and unicorns and the Loch Ness monster and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri coming to feed on your brains. Believe in whatever you want all you want. If such things actually exist, it's not because you believed in them. There's no correlation between believing in a god and one actually being there for you when you have a golf ball stuck in your navel.

I can tell myself it was the moment of oblivion that suddenly turned me atheist. I can tell myself that. I can perhaps even believe it. Unfortunately, there's evidence supporting another explanation. Before I went into the operating room, a sweet lady visited me in while I waited for surgery. She was a priest and she had the papers I'd requested. The ones you sign telling people that after you become a vegetable and can't talk or think for yourself and there's no hope of ever being cognizant again it's okay to pull the plug. Those papers. So I signed them and she and I had a nice little talk and before she left she asked me if I wanted her to pray over me before going into surgery. I thanked her for the offer but said no. I honestly didn't think a complete stranger praying over me was going to make a bit of difference.

So I stopped believing before I stopped believing. It's never sudden, but it's always sudden.

Why Others Don't Watch Dollhouse

This originally started as a post over at Whedonesque, but at the last minute I decided to put it over here instead, cuz it got too long. I left a bit of this over there, but I wanted to get into more detail so I moved most of it here.

Dollhouse flies without a net. It's got limitations built into it that Buffy and the other shows didn't have. Dollhouse is more down to Earth which you'd think would make it more relatable to a wider audience, but it's more in your face about things without using metaphors like vampires or reavers to talk about uncomfortable subject matter.

That is for me its strength. It may also be what keeps some away. Dollhouse cuts very close to the bone in regards to the fragile nature of humanity. Many don't like to accept the fact that we are ultimately just conditioned animals with a vague sense of self-awareness. If we are conditioned properly, we'll see reality not as it is, but as whatever conditions us wants us to see it.

It's why we still believe in gods. The naked truth is far too painful.

Please let me preface this by saying I love Dollhouse. I plan to stay with it come hell or high water cuz I'm seeing it as an unique experiment in television storytelling. Something that I haven't seen before and I fear may never come again. Grey Hour. True Believer. Man On The Street. Epitaph One! How can these be episodes of the same show? They're different shows with a remarkably different feel to each of them, but under the same umbrella.

I hope Dollhouse stays with us a long time. I fear I may know why it won't. I also fear I may know why so many fans of Whedon's previous efforts seem to not warm up as quickly to his latest effort.

What makes Dollhouse better than any of Whedon's previous efforts (Yeah you heard me right. Better than Buffy) is that he's got no crutch. With Buffy and Angel he had magic mumbo jumbo to fall back on to explain stuff that shouldn't do what it does. With Firefly he used some technobabble but mostly it was just "it's the future. in space. by now we'll figure out how to do X" Gravity on a starship for example. Or how terraforming multiple moons made everything look like east Texas.

With Dollhouse there's very little of that. Granted "the chair" is a little technobabbley, but when you accept the concept that the human brain is just another computer, you're done. All the other pieces fall into place, at least for the first season. The scifi tech of the show isn't a crutch. It's not far fetched enough to be a crutch (as is evident when they add to it things like remote sensing causing blindness in Echo, or the silly lactating thing). It's more like a widget that helps set up the story but you can't put a lot of weight on the scifi tech of the series cuz it'll easily break. We're talking about technologies not as far fetched as one might think. We understand a lot more about how the human brain works than we did even a decade ago, and there's already tools that can rudimentarily allow direct control from brain to computer. We may be twenty years from being able to let a computer tell a body what to do. Maybe less than that. Concepts like hypnosis, brainwashing, conditioning, and voluntary (or not so voluntary) submission have been with us for awhile. The audience doesn't have to jump as far to get on board, unlike his previous work.

But along with a premise a wee bit closer to home comes limitations. Joss Whedon can't suddenly turn Echo into a rat or give her the powers of a god without upsetting the delicate world he's already fabricated. The rules of Dollhouse are more restrictive, and it's far easier for writers to paint themselves into corners where they can't get out.

It's more difficult for audiences to relate to characters whose personalities can go away never to come back in less time than a commercial break. I enjoy Amy Acker's work on Dollhouse, but I'm concerned it's all for naught. And the fact it's not by now all for naught has me concerned. Why didn't Topher wipe Whiskey before she left? Dr. Claire Saunders' is obviously glitching. She's figured out that she's not the original Dr. Saunders, but she's no longer just an Active named Whiskey. And she's got no idea who Whiskey was before she became Whiskey. So she doesn't even know what she is but she's self-aware, so Topher's torn about whether or not to deactivate her - wipe her and start fresh.

But last season it was established that Topher has no real moral compass. So the fact he's not 'fixing' Whiskey doesn't make sense within the confines of the structure that Dollhouse has already built around itself. This is just one of many little things about Dollhouse that I fear makes it difficult for some old viewers to ride out, and new viewers to jump on board.

Even a show as absurd and over the top as Doctor Who has within it very specific rules that it doesn't break. There's ways that the laws of physics work in that show which while crazy have an internal logic, a method to the madness. Buffy had that. Angel had that. I fear Firefly really didn't but there's not enough episodes really to prove that one way or the other (how many planets? how many stars? moons? where were they in relation to one another? the astrogation of Firefly is completely unrealistic. and don't get me started on the very concept of planet terraforming. or ship propulsion.)

I question whether or not the internal logic built early on in Dollhouse's first season is being kept consistent, or if its being thrown out in favor of making Echo lactate. Cuz each week we need something startling to keep the audience guessing. I question whether or not Dollhouse can hold up to its own scrutiny, and stick to its own inner logic.

If Dollhouse can't be true to itself, audiences can smell that, and like a dog can smell fear or sharks can smell blood, the end result of that gut reaction to a TV series lying to itself is.. well, it's never pretty.

Why I Watch Dollhouse

Over at Why I Watch Dot Com people are saying why they keep coming back for more Dollhouse, so I submitted my own reasons which I'm reposting here for completeness and cuz I haven't thrown up a blog entry in awhile. Dollhouse is on FOX on Fridays by the way, at least at the moment. Someone is spreading rumors that once again the show is under threat of cancellation. The ratings aren't great, so once again I find myself looking at a great show that presumably no one is watching. Well, I am, and here's why.

Why do I watch? I watch cuz Joss Whedon has never steered me wrong yet, but that's not why you should watch.

Other people might tell you Dollhouse deals with deep and meaningful subject matter while posing poignant questions that are pertinent and applicable to these difficult times humanity is facing in this century. Screw that. Sure it's deep and meaningful and all that crap. It's also fun! In the first few moments of the first episode, two people drive their motorcycles onto a dance floor. Why? I don't know why. It's crazy! You might scuff up the wood. But who cares? It's television! It's fun!

I watch cuz you don't know what to expect from this show. Why watch a show that's predictable?

I watch cuz the women are hot and the men kick ass.

I watch cuz the men are cool and the women kick ass.

I watch cuz Enver Gjokaj can say anything with a straight face.

I watch cuz I enjoy Eliza Dushku playing dress up.

I watch cuz Tahmoh Penikett can throw down a mean fight scene.

I watch cuz Fran Kranz knows how to do justice to WhedonSpeak.

I watch cuz Dichen Lachman surprises me every other time she appears on screen, and when she's not surprising me, she's dazzling me. She's got a smile that if properly weaponized could bring about world peace.

I watch cuz Harry Lennix exudes confidence, wisdom, and you can't tell from one second to the next if he's gonna make some pithy remark or take the other person's head and shove it into electronic equipment.

I watch cuz Olivia Williams has taken the most morally twisted and disturbing character Joss Whedon has ever conceived and breathed a life into her that makes her as real as the next new friend you will make.

I watch cuz Miracle Laurie had my heart at "lasagna."

I watch cuz this show is flying without a net. It's taking risks and going where other shows don't dare. Yes it's not perfect. You want your TV formulaic? Watch the news. Yes sometimes the writing falls flat on its face, but sometimes it soars beyond the stratosphere.

I Watch cuz I like my entertainment fearless.

I watch cuz it's a show that doesn't dumb it all down for me, even though sometimes I wish it would.

I watch cuz at first I thought The Attic was A Place, and then I realized it's more of A Condition. Then I thought it meant being dead. Then I thought it meant being physically dead but mentally cooped up on a hard drive. I thought maybe it's both A Place and A Condition. Then someone showed up in Epitaph One who shouldn't have been there, and now I don't know what to think.

I watch cuz it doesn't insult my intelligence, and it challenges that intelligence in ways that sometimes make me feel kinda stupid. But it's all good.

I watch cuz it looks great. It sounds great. It feels great. It's Dollhouse. It's on Friday nights on Fox. You should watch it too.

...while you still can.

We Invaded Them

This was originally a response to a post over at Facebook but got too long and Facebook doesn't like it when one gets verbose, so I'm putting it here instead. I was responding to Rick Yost who said: "Afghanistan- again we've moved in without a clear purpose or a plan to leave. I don't think we can win this particular fight?" I wanna start this off by saying I fully understand religion and pollitics are two places I really shouldn't open my big fat mouth. I want to continue this by saying I'm gonna anyway. I'm just doing it HERE which is my virtual home and not on Rick Yost's Facebook wall cuz that seemed kinda imposing on my part.

Now understand, we're laymen. Rick Yost is a phenomenal musician. I'm a guy who answers a phone all day. I don't even really have a real career anymore. My career went overseas and I don't know what I'm doing with my life anymore, but I look at my country and my world and the humanity I'm stuck with and I really feel no incentive to fix my life and make it something profound and wonderful. I'm basically just surviving nowadays. I don't really like to think much about why. I just try to get through the day to day. I can't do anything about the injustice I see all around me. Well. I can complain. I do that a lot to no one in particular. I'm rather powerless. So I whine a lot.

We are invading their country. I say "WE" in the same way I say "WE THE PEOPLE" when referring to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. I'm a part of this WE due to my place of birth. I didn't get a choice. Just like most people who live wherever they are and have spent their lives there don't get a choice. I can't just pack up and move to Ireland cuz I happen to agree with their politics more. I don't. In fact, I can't think of any place on the planet where I'd be content politically, so where I am is just as good a place as any.

No one asked me if it was okay for my tax dollars to be used to invade Afghanistan, and nobody went up to some middle aged guy in Afghanistan who makes a living answering phones all day and asked what he thinks about it. We didn't get a say in this, and yet by proxy we are each forced to be a part of this WE. Well. It's WE to me. His WE is a THEY to me and my WE is a THEY to him. I'm sure over there they got different words for WE and THEY and they write right to left where WE write left to right. Same difference.

Anyway. We invaded their country.

Maybe the government of Afghanistan asked us to come in, and maybe we invited ourselves because we think Al Qaieda is in there, and the Afghanistan government was powerless to stop us. I don't know. I imagine there were power lunches involved where our people talked to their people and they did lunch and then we did lunch. Whatever. We may or may not have gotten some kind of formal okay from somewhere to go in and that makes all this kosher.

We are invading their country. That makes us the bad guys. If a guy puts a gun to my head and then asks me to break bread with him, I'll smile and be civil, but only cuz I'm allergic to lead.

Since I was a kid I've been told by my elders that America is the hero. We're the good guys. I have since looked at American history objectively as an elder myself now. When were we heroes? World War Two maybe? That was only cuz what the Nazis were doing was pretty damn bad. We'd never make a concentration camp where we gassed masses of people, but we would ride a terrorist around a room naked with a bag over his head while making dogs bark at him. We'd threaten to drown him and then later tell people we were only pretending to drown him. We'd make terrorists climb on top of each other like high school cheer leaders making a pyramid. We'd never gas them. There's degrees of evil here.

I was born during the days of Vietnam and while I was sucking on my thumb and peeing in my Pampers, my elders would take a hill and the enemy would just dig underneath us. We napalmed babies. We tore homes apart. We burned down communities. We weren't being heroes then. We were stupid and crazy.

Where's our cape now? We look more like bullies to me, and I don't appreciate being on the wrong side of the argument due to my place of birth. I've had people tell me if I don't like how America does things, I should just move. That's ludicrous. I shouldn't have to move. I should be able to count on a representative government to represent me when dealing with other governments. They don't, cuz I'd never go into someone else's country and blow it up. I'd go into someone else's country and put my feet up on their coffee table. That's about as insensitive as I get.

Fantastic Fringe Part One

Before I begin, I wish to preface the following with this: my comparisons are based on what I know about these characters. You will no doubt disagree with me on some findings. For example, I have been informed that the Marvel Ultimate series of comics is a major revamp of what I consider to be canonical mythology, which for example claims that Reed Richards is younger than the other members of his team. I find that to be poppycock. Reed Richards has always been the oldest member of the Fantastic Four. His temples are gray for goodness sake. Some things there's no need to change when you retell a story for younger generations. When I discuss the Fantastic Four it's based on stories with which I am familar, particularly the comic books of the 1970s and 80s. Just as when I discuss Fringe it's primarily the first season, which as of this writing is all I know because there's this petty thing called linear time which keeps me from seeing future seasons of the series before they are produced. If there's Fringe novels or comic book adaptations or fan fiction or what have you, I'm not familiar with that stuff so please accept my limited capacities. I am after all only human.

The other day around the proverbial water cooler, a friend mentioned he'd read somewhere on the Web how someone compared the FOX TV series "Fringe" (going into its second season later this month) with the Marvel comic book series 'Fantastic Four.' Before having a chance to see the article in question, my mind already began racing with those implications. My first instinctive gut reaction was to scoff at such a thought. Comparing Fringe to The Fantastic Four is like comparing X-Men to The Brady Bunch, or DC's Justice League of America to any celebrity reality television show. Even if you stretched the premise to make it fit, at best you're illuminating coincidence and at worst you're wasting everyone's time. There are some commonalities to any and all character driven story-telling. There are formulas or recipes that writers use to draw out conflict and accentuate plots so as to maximize entertainment potential. One cannot create a group where all the characters are just duplicate puppets for the writer. Each must have its own voice. However, many writers utilize archetypes (and sometimes even stereotypes) to make it easy for the reader/viewer/listener of the story to catch on quickly to what the writer's trying to say.

Such archetypes are at times universal. The mad scientist. The self-absorbed wunderkind. The tough guy with a heart of gold. The quiet and reserved pillar of loyalty. A brief examination of your favorite television show or book or series of movies might reveal similar brief descriptions that you could then overlay on any combination of other shows or books or movies you hold dear. There's nothing new under the sun. When it comes to storytelling in today's modern world, the trick isn't to come up with something entirely new, but to take that which the audience is already familiar and utilize it in new and exciting ways.

Some readers may see the more obvious comparisons and contrasts that make this exercise even more irrelevant. The Fantastic Four utilize powers granted them by an 'accident' in space involving cosmic rays. None of the Fringe four can turn invisible or spontaneously combust or stretch their bodies and none of them are impervious to harm. Furthermore, the visuals differences in these characters is particularly striking. One can argue that the actress who portrays Fringe's Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Korv) would have made a far more accurate (particularly when looking at John Byrne's renderings of the character) Susan Storm than the actress currently being used in those campy movies. However, there are no actors on Fringe who would do a better job portraying The Thing than Michael Chiklis, who seems practically born to play the role. I'm dismissing the obvious contrasts, and hoping to focus primarily on character personality traits and interactions between the characters. In that way, I hope to show how there is a similarity among the foursome that's unmistakable, and perhaps a little more than merely coincidental.

Despite my immediate pessimism that such a comparison as Fringe to Fantastic Four held any merit or could reveal insight as to the inner working of either series or the writers behind them, I couldn't help but find the exercise of comparing these characters to be enticing and fascinating. Before reading the article that inspired my friend's mention of the idea, I already found myself seeing the most glaring and obvious connection: Reed Richards versus Walter Bishop.

Both characters are essentially the brains of their respective outfits, and the senior or eldest of their teams. Both gentlemen have devoted their lives to fringe sciences. Both gentlemen are easily distracted and forgetful, to the chagrin of those around them. Walter & Reed both suffer from inadequate social finesse and a general inability to see past their own egos, arrogance, and inadequacies to understand and empathize with those around them. This often leads to choices that some would find eccentric or even insane, but there is always a method to their madness; a modus operandi for their intentions and actions. These choices lead both men to think that under certain circumstances it is acceptable to use human beings as proverbial guinea pigs. It's also acceptable in both men's minds to utilize sciences that can dramatically alter our very perceptions of reality without first bothering to question the moral and social implications of such activity. This leads to amplify their anti-social tendencies and causes them to appear amoral or even unscrupulous in their undying search for truths in the universe despite the dangerous and even disastrous implications should they succeed.

For Reed Richards this has caused him to at times create devices that were intended to help humanity but sometimes became a nuisance if not a threat to mankind. I understand in more recent years, Reed's utilized his knowledge of alternate dimensions to create a prison for advanced humans that refused to accept the Registration Act, which in my book makes Reed essentially a criminal to the future of human kind. I see little difference in this Post Civil War Marvel Universe to Reed Richards and Tony Stark when compared to any assortment of super villains. It's a rather sad direction the editors of Marvel have chosen to go with the characters, but they're trying to entertain younger readers now who actually buy comic books rather than read about them at websites. So I can't complain. ..I digress.

For Walter Bishop this amoral behavior towards humanity in the face of scientific discovery has left him a mere shadow of his former self. We learn that twenty years ago he was working with William Bell on a wide variety of questionable experiments as they did strive to outsmart or outwit a potential enemy they had not yet met; essentially an alternate reality much like their own, but with people more inclined to use scientific discovery to pillage and ruin other alternate realities. This is the 'war' that is referred to throughout the first season. Bell & Bishop were trying to create super soldiers that would be ready to defend their reality from enemies both in their own reality and others. Where Reed Richards has been known to use alternate realities as prisons, a young Walter Bishop perceived alternate realities as war zones to protect his own.

When I read the accompanying article that inspired this madness, I see that they too found Walter Bishop & Reed Richards to be kindred spirits, perhaps cut from the same mad scientist mold. Well-intentioned Truth Seekers essentially too smart for their own good. This modern archetype dates back at least as far as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde. Some historians argue that one can go even further than that to the alchemists of the Dark Ages or even in times of Greece when Daedalus & Icarus tried to use knowledge and invention to fashion powers of the gods, only to be stricken down by the gods for their folly and impertinence. It's an old stock character concept, and a common trope many writers have used to facilitate understanding in their readers. When a character is revealed to a modern audience as a mad scientist or evil genius or even absent-minded professor, these phrases already paint a picture in the mind, without the writer having to describe much further detail, beyond how this particular character may differ from the stereotype that an audience anticipates. So this comparison is not out of the ordinary, nor is it uncommon. One could compare these characters to Doctor Strangelove or Doctor Horrible and get similar results. Still, it's fun to explore.

Perhaps even more fun is to explore how Bishop and Richards differ. Beyond the obvious 'stretch' thing, there's the fact that Reed is married to another member of his foursome, whereas Bishop is a widower. Reed is generally understood to be perhaps a little eccentric but aside from occasional bouts of paranoia or obsessive compulsive disorder, he's predominantly sane and only slightly socially inept on occasion. However, Walter Bishop is legitimately insane, and spent almost two decades in a mental institution because he was deemed unsuitable for public exposure to humanity without the constant supervision of a blood relative. Reed is more of a Type A personality, meaning he's assertive and driven and efficiently proactive in his behavior towards both his environment and his social requirements. Walt is more of a Type B personality. He's emotionally burdened, more easily distracted, tends to question authority and even his own behavior as being legitimate or necessary, and while in his youth he'd get far more done than perhaps he ever should have, in more recent years he'd just as soon milk a cow or read a fruit cup than get any serious work done, unless he's prodded by others to maintain focus. Reed's self-sufficient and can multi-task with little effort. Walter is at times studiously focused on one thing to a fault, and at other times will wander from work to play to curious meditation in a heartbeat. There's also drug use. While Reed is not theoretically averse to the use of psychedelics, he's rarely bothered to utilize them without good reason. Walter will dope up at the drop of a hat if left to his own devices. In fact there's evidence in the first season that he regularly self-medicates in order to function in the real world to a level expected of him, regardless of his personal inner turmoil or desires at the time. To put it bluntly, while perhaps cut from the same mold, these two characters are just not made of the same stuff.

I was hoping to churn all this out in one blog sitting, but there's too much material to cover, and I should probably go to sleep eventually. I'll have to continue this on into the weekend I fear. I hope to write a continuation of this soon that will compare Astrid Farnsworth to Sue Storm, and show how Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham share personality traits with both Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. I know you wait with baited breath. =)

Loony Libby

As the months seem to drag on in anticipation of the Final Season of ABC's hit TV series LOST, I find myself contemplating the questions that will probably never get answered. Also, when time and real life crap allows, I am still watching the old seasons again to refresh my memory on all the ins and outs and ups and downs of this crazy cockamaimee kooky show. Many things assault my senses.

I'm amazed at Terry O'Quinn's performance of Locke, as are pretty much all of us. I swear there are times when his very gait is a deliberate character choice as an actor. There are times when O'Quinn walks with a swagger that suggests his legs aren't even real: that Locke is moving on stilts. Like his legs are operating like a marionette on strings. I can't tell for 100% certain if this IS deliberate, or if the terrain of the jungle, beach, and sets like the cabin or the swan just naturally lend O'Quinn to maneuver himself in ways that would have made John Wayne envious. I'm not sure if O'Quinn was asked if he'd give us a concrete answer. He'd probably prefer letting us wonder.

I'm astounded at how Rose & Bernard are used throughout the series very selectively. Again I can't tell if this is deliberate on the part of the writers or producers or if they honestly can't get these actors more often than we've seen them. I personally adore whenever Rose & Bernard make an appearance. It's too precious and rare for my taste. However, I understand other fans are not quite as fond of them as I am. Whether intentionally or on purpose, I think the amount of use of these two characters is like the use of powerful spices in a gourmet meal. Too much or too little and you can ruin the entire presentation. Though I personally could do with at least one more Rose & Bernard centric episode before Season Six winds up, I understand objectively that we don't want to overdo their welcome. In fact if they remained behind as the other characters return to the present time, we may learn that "Adam & Eve" in the caves were actually Rose & Bernard. One white stone, and one black. They live together, and they die alone in the past, together.

Which brings me to what I really wanna talk about in this rambling monologue: the season finale of Lost season two dubbed "Live Together Die Alone." In this episode we see Desmond meet Libby. They meet in a coffee shop in the States. Why Desmond is in the United States is never particularly clear, but he has so recently arrived that he hasn't had a chance to change his british currency to American dollars. He mentioned the last of the American money he had went to cab fare.

Libby offers to buy his coffee, having never presumably met him before, and the two of them sit down at the coffee shop and exchange pleasantries. During their conversation, Desmond reveals to Libby (a complete stranger mind you) that he is going to compete in a boat race organized by a man named Charles Widmore (of whom Libby feigns ignorance) but that he doesn't have a boat. Libby tells Desmond that she has a boat, which was named after herself by her now deceased husband David. All this by the way sounds like a scene straight out of a Dickens novel like Great Expectations or Nicholas Nickleby. I mention that because of Desmond's fondness for the author. While not close enough to any particular dialog from a Dickens' work to be intentional, I get the sense that whenever writing Desmond scenes, the writers of LOST have a Dickensonian voice in the back of their mind. Desmond Hume is truly a Dickensian man. Riddled with strife, internal conflict, and unfairly laboured upon by friend and foe alike. He's Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and a young Ebenezer Scrooge all rolled up into one and given a Scottish accent. We also now know so much about Desmond's character from his youthful fascination with Penny to his decadent preference of booze, that dissecting his character is no less fascinating and delicious than carving a Christmas turkey.

However, for everything we know about Desmond Hume, we know less than a tenth as much about Libby. Most of what we know from Libby came from her own mouth and there's little substantial to corroborate what she says. She claims to have done some medical training, but became a clinical psychologist. Yet in her flashbacks we never actually saw her practice either. In fact we saw her in one of Hurley's flashbacks as a patient of Santa Rosa - not a shrink.

Libby claims she was married to a man named David, and that David died of an illness a month before she met Desmond. However, we've never seen her with anyone named David. In fact, the only David we know of in the series was a fabrication of Hurley's mind from when he spent time in Santa Rosa. The producers of the series have gone on record saying that Libby's David and Hurley's Dave are not the same character, but that still doesn't dismiss the curious coincidence. Again, coincidences are common occurrences in Charles Dickens' works.

Libby just happens to own a boat she's doing nothing with when she meets Desmond, and Desmond just happens to be in need of a boat. She happily offers it to him, having met him only that afternoon. He reluctantly accepts, after hearing her story about her dead husband. When the viewer first watches this, we are for the most part relieved. This is an opportunity of the writers letting us in on useful information. We know that Desmond competes in Widmore's race with a boat named Elizabeth - a boat that gets washed up on shore on the mysterious Island, leaving Desmond stranded with Kelvin and The Button for three years or more, before the arrival of the surviving passengers of Oceanic 815. Keep in mind here that while they knew of one another, Desmond and Libby never actually meet on the Island. Desmond escapes from the Island on his (Libby's) boat before the tail section survivors make it to the fuselage side of the Island, and Libby is killed by Michael then buried by Hurley & Kate before Desmond returns on The Elizabeth drunk as a skunk.

Desmond doesn't even know Libby was ever on The Island. No one has ever thought to tell him.

This is just one of the many things that make Lost unlike most any other series ever in the history of television. Most television is pretty cut and dried. Ross is doey-eyed over Rachel. Chandler is the sarcastic one who falls in love with the cleanfreak Monica who used to be fat. Phoebe's the crazy one who sings about cat odors, and Joey is the stupid one with the heart of gold who wants to be an actor. Not a lot of depth here. Fun. I'm not dissing Friends. For what it is, it's entertaining. It's just that the deepest the show ever got was to explain that the reason Chandler cracks jokes all the time is because his father was a transvestite. Not very deep, or even remotely logical. Funny.. but meh.

Lost can be many things to many people. If you just wanna look at the surface you can. You won't understand the details but you don't have to. There's people trapped on this Island against their will, and there's other mysterious people who seem to know more than they're telling, and they purposefully make life difficult for the people we're rooting for. If you wish to dig deeper, it's like Alice venturing into Wonderland. There's many layers to this onion and there seems to be no end to it. At least, not until the end of the series, but there's no way all these questions are going to be answered. I don't think the writers of the series even want to try to answer them all.

This is probably something that will never be explored. The many gaping holes in Libby's curious history will probably never be illuminated in season six. There's simply no need for it. The story has long since passed this moment between Desmond and Libby by. Why delve into it deeper?

The story at hand going into season six is whether or not Locke is dead, and if so, who the hell's been walking around pretending to be him the past season and a half? Has Locke ever even been Locke, or has he been nothing but a puppet since the moment his father pushed him out that window?

The story at hand going into season six is whether or not Jack and the others back in DharmaVille's past succeeded in affecting time by using a nuclear explosion to destroy the land which would have been used to build the Swan station which is believed to have been what shot Oceanic 815 down out of the sky in the first place? Did it work? Did the bomb go off? Or was it a dud? Or is the very Incident that Jack instigated a temporal disturbance that threatens to destroy the very fabric of space-time and therefore what caused the initial problem leading to their predicament in the first place? Were they always fated to be trapped on this Island, or by dabbling in parasciences they could not fathom, did everyone from Dr. Pierre Chang to Vincent the Retriever each do their own part to generate this fate for themselves?

Libby's been left in the dust. We'll never know why she was in Santa Rosa. We assume it is because her husband died and she was distraught over that. We will never know why she was on the plane. We'll never know why David got a boat and named it after her. We'll never know why she just gave the boat to a complete stranger in a coffee shop. We'll never know who put her in Santa Rosa and under what conditions these events occurred.

In a time leading up to season six when many actors are being approached by the producers of Lost, and information is leaking out revealing just how many past characters both alive and dead may be returning, the actress Cynthia Watros is nowhere near the top of the list of names being batted around. She has been very busy, making appearances in shows like CSI, The Closer, Family Guy, Gossip Girl, and upcoming movies like Mars and Calvin Marshall. However, not a peep about her showing up in even a flashback or dream sequence during Lost's sixth and final season. The last time we saw Libby she was haunting the tragic and starcrossed Michael as he postponed the explosion of the freighter long enough for some to survive.

What makes this bittersweet is that, again whether it was intentional or accidental, the lack of detail regarding Libby makes that scene with her and Desmond at the coffee shop incredibly unique. You can take it at face value if you wish.

[FLASHBACK]

[We see Desmond at a coffee bar counter.]

DESMOND: Just give me which ever one has the most caffeine in it, brother. [he opens his wallet] Damn, um, I'm sorry. I've just arrived and I spent all my American money on a taxi.

LIBBY: [putting money on the counter] I've got it.

DESMOND: That's not necessary.

LIBBY: It's just 4 bucks.

DESMOND: I don't suppose you have 42,000 more of those do you?

LIBBY: Depends on what it's for.

DESMOND: I was joking.

LIBBY: No you weren't.

[We see Libby and Desmond sitting with each other. Libby is looking at a brochure for a sailing race. There's a picture of Widmore on the brochure.]

LIBBY: So, a sailing race around the world?

DESMOND: I have 8 months to get into the best shape of my life. I'll tell you what, miss, I'm going to win.

LIBBY: And what do you get if you do?

DESMOND: What really matters is who I win it for. [he pushes the brochure toward her]

LIBBY: [looking at the brochure] Charles Widmore.

DESMOND: He tried to buy me off. And when I didn't take his money, he took away the only thing in the world that I ever truly cared about.

LIBBY: Who is she?

DESMOND: His daughter. I was unsuitable on several levels.

LIBBY: And what' the 42 grand for?

DESMOND: It's a wee bit complicated. As of yet, I don't actually have a boat. [Libby looks sad] Sorry, did I say something wrong?

LIBBY: I have a boat. It was my husband's but he got sick. He wanted to sail the Mediterranean—he never—he passed away about a month ago.

DESMOND: I'm sorry.

LIBBY: I want you to have it.

DESMOND: I can't take your boat, miss.

LIBBY: But you have to. He'd want you to.

DESMOND: What was your husband's name?

LIBBY: David.

DESMOND: And what did he name his boat?

LIBBY: Elizabeth. He named it after me.

DESMOND: Then I thank you, Elizabeth. And I shall win this race for love.

By the way, just for grins, look at the numerical significance in this scene for a second. Four bucks. Eight months. Forty-two thousand more. These are some of "The Numbers" that hold unique significance in the tv series Lost, as they show up repeatedly in a number of other places throughout the run of the show.

You can take this scene as it is. Two strangers meeting in a coffee shop and finding common ground; a way to help one another cure what ails them. It's a nice tender moment all by itself. No need to delve further. You can take it at face value and walk away entertained.

Or you can delve deeper.

What if Libby's insanity were more than a fleeting thing? We are led to believe what drove her crazy was the loss of her husband, but when she speaks to Desmond she claims David died less than a month before. If you look at the time table, she must have been at Santa Rosa before she met with Desmond, so she didn't give him the boat and then go insane. She was insane before she gave him the boat. We are less to presume that she got better which is why they let her out of Santa Rosa.

What if the reason she were in the hospital was because she's a pathological liar? What if everything she says to Desmond is a lie? She doesn't have a husband named David who named a boat Elizabeth after her. She doesn't even have a boat. We know her name is Libby because that's what the nurse calls her in Hurley's flashback.

If that's the case, how did Desmond get the boat? Why is it named Elizabeth. There's a number of ways to explain that. Perhaps Libby found a boat named Elizabeth (a common name for a boat) and stole it. She gave it to Desmond before the cops got to her, so when the authorities approached her about it she didn't have it in her possession, so they never found it. Perhaps they would have eventually investigated further and found Desmond, but by then he was already lost on the Island.

Another possibility could be that she wasn't just a pathological liar, but part of a Long Con that was being orchestrated to keep Desmond away from Penny. Libby feigns ignorance when Desmond talks of Charles Widmore, but what if she knew precisely who Widmore was because Widmore told her to tail Desmond and befriend him, then give him a boat that Widmore could rig in a special way to end up going off course during the storm and wind up on The Island?

This would mean Libby was working for Widmore. This would also explain why she was on Oceanic 815. Let's go back to when the Oceanic 815 crashed on the Island. Ben and the Others behaved as if they had been anticipating a moment like this. Ben immediately told Ethan and Goodwin to infiltrate the camps of the survivors pretending to have crashed with them, make lists of names and return to Ben for more details later. This was part of a well-orchestrated plan. Ben had been waiting for this moment. Now, why would he need lists of names? Well, so he could have Patchy over at The Flame to make up dossiers on everybody, which Ben then memorized so he'd know with whom he was dealing. The code phrases the Others used referring to these list used variations on the words good or bad. There were good people and bad people. Presumably this meant "good" people they could control or bring under their wing, and "bad" people who would become troublesome in one way or another aka "hostile" to their efforts.

What if Ben was looking for something else as well? What if the reason why The Others couldn't just welcome all the survivors with open arms and leis and pina coladas was because an unspecified number of people on Oceanic 815 were plants of Charles Widmore? What if Oceanic 815 going off course wasn't an accident, but intentional? What if Libby was one of the people, sleeper agents if you will, who were supposed to get on Oceanic 815, befriend whoever survived, and await further instructions that never came?

All of this is plausible and possible, without adversely affecting anything that is actually canon in the series itself, so long as the producers of Lost ever venture back to shed more light on Libby's past. Libby is an enigma. Like Schroedinger's Cat, so long as the box is left closed, Libby can be all or none of these things.

Is she a sweet innocent who befriended Hurley and fell in love with him? Is she a double agent working for Widmore who would have been eventually found out by Ben anyway had she survived Michael's target practice? Is she a crazy woman who bought Desmond a cup of coffee and lied about owning a boat because she wanted so badly for Desmond, a complete stranger, to be indebted to her so some day he'd fall in love with her? And she stole the boat then later threw herself at him? Did he spurn her advances and dare to call her crazy to her face, then took the boat in spite of her madness because he so desperately wanted to win the race for Penny?

Now THAT would be deliciously Dickensian.

Mr. Diety and the Planes

As quickly as I can describe this cuz I shoulda been in bed an hour ago, Mr. Diety is a web series written by Brian Dalton where he casts himself as Him the Judeo-Christian God in a snarky and provocative comedy that pokes fun not only at religion and culture but also humanity's shortsighted and arrogant need to quantify and label every little thing in the universe, even and especially that which we don't understand. I've been following this series for awhile. When I first encountered it I had already inched away from Christianity and was entertaining the notion that I was a "deist" and like Thomas Jefferson adhered to Christian teachings more because of the people around me than because I deemed it worthy of following. Thomas Jefferson went to church because that's where his voters would go, but he also edited the Bible to take out all the Miracles in it. My kinda Christian.

Anyway, now that I'm finding myself drifting even further from Christianity and questioning the very logic of assuming there's a god of any sort when He refuses to at least make special guest appearances now and then, I'm finding myself able to go back and watch episodes of Mr. Diety with another level of complexity. Before, I was finding it amusing in the same way I found Arthur Miller's Creation of the World and Other Business (a play that was popular among us drama geeks back when I was in high school). It's one way of looking at the concept of a diety that human beings can appreciate, but we can't ever truly understand the grand scope of what it must mean to be omniscient because He's God and we can't hope to ever properly do justice to His amazing awesomeness. Now, I'm watching these episodes again and finding it amusing I used to think like that.

The most recent installment as of this posting is called "Mr. Diety and the Planes. In it, Mr. D is talking to Larry his assistant. We learn the time of this piece (time is used arbitrarily in this series since Mr. D doesn't have to adhere to linear time) is the day before September Eleventh 2001; the morning two airplanes were hijacked by terrorists and crashed into the World Trade Center twin towers in lower Manhattan.

I've watched this twice and am about to watch it a third time. It's perhaps the best piece they've done to date. Not because it's the most funny, although it's got more funny bits in it than one would expect, given the subject matter. It's the best because not only is it funny, it is most thought provoking. It challenges the viewer to accept it on its terms, and to come to grips with how it makes one feel. It's one thing to question authority as Lenny Bruce did, or question our perception of reality as Emo Phillips and Stephen Wright have done. It's quite another to take how your audience is going to perceive the subject matter you pose, and then turn it on its ear.

A few years ago I got into an argument with some ppl about whether or not we will ever be able to laugh at Nine Eleven. Their argument was that it would never be proper, and those who believe that way should actively stop people like myself from finding humor in such a tragic event. My argument is the aphorism "tragedy plus time equals comedy." Given enough time you can find humor in anything. Needless to say, the argument did not end well, and I did not convince them any more than they convinced me.

I have been waiting for that time when enough time passes and we can finally look back not with anger or regret or mourning but with a wistful melancholy and a smile at lessons learned and memories made. I used to believe that there are some things which are sacred whether we want them to be or not. As I grow older, I have come to the conclusion that not only is (almost) nothing sacred, but in order to combat people like those I argued with years ago about this very topic, those of us who believe nothing should be sacred must actively seek out things that people think are sacred and tear them down.

Of course it'll never be appropriate to make fun of the death and loss. Perish the thought. That's not what this is about.

However, looking objectively and even cynically at how we respond to such tragic loss is a fundamental part of being human. We can't NOT laugh at our own shortcomings and incongruities when we face the tragedies in our lives and contrast it with irrational pleas to an invisible entity. This Mr.Diety skit grapples with a most powerful question: how can we ask God to spare some lives and not all? Larry suggests sparing the lives of those in the buildings, and D's response is what about the ones in the planes? This isn't done for humor sake. It comes out of the dialogue between these two characters organically and naturally, and we are left to pose that question to ourselves. Why ask God for anything?

If I asked God to let me win the lottery, what about the guy who was gonna win the lottery before my prayer changed God's mind? Why do I deserve it more than that other guy?

And who am I to think I know better than God what's good for me, or for whomever I'm praying? Since admitting to myself that not only am I probably an atheist but that it appears I've been one for awhile and just didn't really realize it, I've had people tell me they will pray for me. That's rather arrogant of them. I am not asking them to pray for me. I don't want them to pray for me. Especially if they're going to try to convince their god to let their opinion override His. I don't want that person praying for me to get his or her way. Furthermore, if God hasn't been answering my prayers for decades, why should I benefit from this other person asking for God on my behalf, even if they're asking for the same things?

If there is a God, and he made everything, including those of us praying to him, and he's omniscient and all-powerful, why are we even instigating a conversation with Him? If HE wants to talk to us, He knows where we are. We're on the rock He left us on spinning in space like ants on an apple. We're not going anywhere. He's obviously a very busy deity so we really shouldn't be wasting His time every time we want our favorite sports teams to score.

He already knows what we want before we know it, so why tell Him? If He wanted us to get it, we'd already have it. Obviously, for some reason, He doesn't want us to have it. He just wants us to want it. This is where I am when I cling to my Deism. I still have difficulty accepting the fact that a Universe exists solely from probability. In some ways it's far too perfect for that and in other ways it's far too imperfect not to have been created somehow by a self-aware entity. Maybe not a god per se, but a being so powerful that for all intents and purposes It would be a god to us. IF there is such a Creator, not just of Earth or of this solar system or of just this galaxy but of the entire Universe, then we're not his Special Little People. He's not fretting over the flotsam and jetsam that occurs on this little mudball. It's a BIG universe, and He's a Very Busy Guy.

If there's a God, He's not on our side. Thinking otherwise is arrogant and ethnocentric of humanity. At best, we are an occasional interest perhaps for amusement or even perhaps some small bit of enlightenment from his perspective, like a lab experiment is for a scientist or an ant farm is for a little kid. At worst He doesn't know we're here and if He did, He'd blight us out of existence because we're like a little piece of mold that could threaten to damage his pristine canvas that is the Whole Of Space. That's where I am now. I could change my mind tomorrow. Heck. Michael Jackson started as a Jehovah's Witness and reportedly converted to Islam a few years before he died. The once Catholic Madonna has gone from the whore of Babylon to some kind of mystic Kabbalah jew. Who saw that coming? Well, besides God.

Mr. Diety deserves more praise as a web series than it will ever get. Not just cuz it's funny. A lot of stuff out there is funny. This is funny and it makes you think. Speaking as someone who has spent my life failing to make people laugh or think, I can honestly say how terribly hard it is to do both at the same time.

Science Proves Religion

I'm having a problem with YouTube. Sometimes when I try to post a comment under a video, it doesn't save, and I'm forced to discard it. So I'm watching an interview with Penn Jillette and there's this guy calls himself BaneOfFreeSpeech. I don't know what the conversation was before this guy cuz YouTube's idea of a message board for videos is not intended for actual text communication. You're just supposed to comment on the video, not go into serious discussions about religion or science, but this BaneOfFreeSpeech guys says.

"this wont matter when science proves religion is a joke."

This is what I wanted to say in response.

What are you talking about!?

Galileo proved the Earth is not the center of the universe hundreds of years ago. The Pope's response was to excommunicate him, and then make him kiss his ring. Astronomy has proven there's no heaven. There's no throne in the clouds where God's hanging out. Yet ppl still believe!

Science HAS proven religion is a joke. A LACK of evidence is NOT evidence. The jury is not still out on evolution versus creationism. Yet religion is more powerful now than ever before.

I have been looking at atheism recently like it's a bottomless pit. I was born and raised a Christian. I don't know any other way. The past several years I've been standing on a precipice of Deism, looking back at what I see now as a very badly done magic trick and I'm looking forward at a big black nothing. Dark Matter is less imposing and scary than believing in nothing.

Belief in something that's not there isn't an answer. Belief in nothing being there is not an answer. Waiting for a third answer that actually is the answer? That's not working either. And if it came along, I'd be sceptical of it anyway.

There are a lot of things which forced me to put into question all my beliefs. If I've stopped being a Christian, it's not because I want to stop being a Christian.

I understand how Tarzan felt when Jane explained to him "there's a reason why they're all hairier than you are, dear. You're not one of them."

But Tarzan had Jane. And the Big City. And a deal for multiple movies and television shows and he got to be on lunchboxes. He was also fictional, which took the edge off the knowledge that everything he had known up to that point was fictional.

Atheists offer Ex-believers NOTHING but just a bottomless pit of this is what you want this is what you get. You honestly believe science WILL prove religion is a joke? It already did. The problem is, there's no punchline. It's a very bad joke.

Police Statuary

Last week I was walking downtown Dallas towards the Rosa Parks Memorial because I had to catch a bus. The first thing I noticed were the cop cars. The second thing I noticed were rainbow flags and picket signs but I don't recall being able to read what they said. To be honest, I was more concerned about the cop cars. Two of them were parked where my bus was going to be in ten minutes. I walked over to one of the cops and asked him politely if this demonstration was stopping the busses or if they were going to stop somewhere else. He glanced back at the cars and gave a sort of noncommittal answer. I continued on to my bus stop and looked around.

There were about a dozen people standing around Rosa Parks' statue. I couldn't tell what they were demonstrating about. Based on the rainbow colors in the banners and signs they'd already taken down, my first thought was towards the Rainbow Coalition, which has roots in the Black Civil Rights movement but was later usurped by homosexuals. I should point out that I don't recall a single black person among the demonstrators. They were all white. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't understand why a bunch of white gay people would be encircled around Rosa Parks. I'm sure there's a reasonable answer. I didn't care. I was waiting for my bus.

I believe in the right to free speech, but these individuals didn't seem to be speaking. They were just milling about. I soon realized that whatever it was they had been doing, they had already finished, and were just kinda packing up and comparing notes. The police were not 'in force' but they weren't sparse either. I'd guess there were about two demonstrators per cop. Some time later, on the Internet, I found myself reading a message board in which some nameless faceless somebody accused America of being a Police State. That phrase brought me back to this moment.

Standing there in the Dallas August sun, looking at the smiling face of Rosa Parks, permanently captured in bronze, smiling at whomever passes by regardless of race color creed or sexual orientation - a newly adopted hostess to downtown Dallas, surrounded by a bunch of white folk using her to underline whatever message they had, and those individuals surrounded by police. Surrounding the police? Well... Dallas. Us. All of us.

Walking up to the plaza and witnessing the aftermath of this little spectacle (one that no doubt the participants believe have somehow paved the way for resolutions towards whatever message they spouted that day but objectively speaking was a complete waste of their time and taxpayer dollars) one might have inferred that this is a police state. People gather together in public to make a statement and are immediately flanked by police officers. That causes one to pause and think that maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and we do live in a police state.

But if you looked at the demonstrators you'd realize these are not the people that could potentially cause trouble. Gay people standing in the middle of Dallas speaking their minds would tend to cause other nongay people to get angry. The demonstrators were mostly thin and frail and looked like they'd never eaten a hamburger in their lives. They're not a threat. However, if what they had to say pissed off someone who was not thin or frail and whose diet consisted of meat and beer and pharmaceuticals, then there might be trouble. The police were not there to stop the demonstrators from speaking. They were there to protect the demonstrators from people like me who would much rather catch a bus than listen to weirdoes carrying signs and banners in the middle of the Dallas August sun. I personally had no interest in accosting the demonstrators, but if I had such an impetus, I'd be the one hogtied on the ground; not them.

Police state? Who is policing whom? The cops weren't there to start a war. They were there to keep the peace. Sometimes that means meeting resistance with equal force. Sometimes that just means standing there and looking like statues themselves. Police state? Only someone who has never actually lived in a real police state would imagine that America is one currently. I'm not saying we're twelve to midnight, but at least in the small arena of the Rosa Parks Plaza, we're far from the End of the World.

Lost Again ...Naturally

Well it's that time again. The leaves are not yet turning colors. The temperature outside is not quite yet lowering. The MDA Telethon for Jerry's kids has not started yet. The fall season on television is several steps away from just around the corner, and no one watches television anymore anyway cuz we all watch on the Internet. Most importantly, ABC's hit television series LOST goes into its sixth and final season yet another six months from now. Boy. It seems like only yesterday and three months ago when it was nine months from now. My how time crawls.

Back during ComicCon there were rumblings about some kind of ARG (Alternate Reality Game for those of you who didn't know) that dealt with this sixth and final season. It's underway as of last night. Some kind of alleged "Dharma" party in California. There's also velvet paintings involved. I've been trying to follow along but it's making about as much sense as... well, anything else that has anything to do with LOST.

Let's take a gander at how far we've come and how little we've traveled.

The first ARG was great. In hindsight some would probably think The Lost Experience was terrible, but I have many fond memories following along with that one; particularly the story as it surrounded a young brunette named Rachel. You can still find the exploits of Rachel Blake over at YouTube if you search her name. I thought Jamie Silberhartz as Rachel Blake was outstanding. I'm disappointed that her career didn't take off after that performance, but apparently I'm the only one on the planet who thinks she was awesome. People don't appreciate improvisational acting unless there's a punchline every other second. Drew Carey saw to that. Jamie Silberhartz was for improv what a dancer is for ballet. She made it look effortless, but that was not easy what she did back there.

It reminds me of the actors who made The Blair Witch Project a success. Largely forgotten today, the original plan by the producers was to use that footage as a part of the telling of their bigger mythology, but when they cobbled the footage together they realized that from the twenty plus hours of footage captured by three actors with little to no experience behind the camera, they actually had enough material to make a full length film, riding solely on the performances of these three young talents. It really looked like build up to a snuff film. The only thing they didn't have were bodies. Some careful producing choices for the final act took care of that: less is more. The end result was a great horror story with very little gore. Hitchcock could not have done better under those circumstances, and I do not say that lightly. However, the producers got lucky. What makes Blair Witch work is the combined chemistry of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams.

When people learned that it wasn't really a snuff film, they blew it off, and now no one talks about it. I still place that film in my top ten, predominantly because I found Heather Donahue's improvisational performance to be real, heartfelt, gut wrenching, sincere, energized, and downright fun in a very sad creepy way. She is our Captain Ahab hunting down the whale. We believe she's the kind of person to lead these other two guys towards their doom. She's a determined young woman hellbent on fulfilling her fantasy as a documentarian to the point of refusing to admit when she's wrong until it's too late. Those who watch Blair Witch expecting blood and gore are disappointed to find three actors doing a hell of a fine job under far less than auspicious circumstances. The same could have been said for Jamie Silberhartz.

I mean think about it. During the first LOST ARG, Jamie Silberhartz was standing on the cutting edge of a frontier in the entertainment industry that they still haven't quite figured out yet, and she did so brazenly with no trepidation (at least evident in front of the camera) and she just threw it down. She had to convince her audience she was Rachel Blake and pull off monologues containing insane amounts of exposition. This is the kind of stuff that the LOST television series tries to show us rather than tell us, but that takes money and time. The people behind the first LOST ARG didn't have either, but they did have Jamie. A lot of what made the first LOST ARG work was riding on her back, and she pulled it off.

You may critique and scoff the finer details of her performance but for raw courage alone it was quite a sight to see. People don't remember her real name, but if you mention Rachel Blake to LOST fans, they'll remember. Rachel Blake may not have been canonical in the eyes of Damon & Carlton, but that wasn't the fault of Silberhartz's performance. It was the fault of what they gave her to say and do. Had the first LOST ARG been better managed, she would have had better material. Jamie Silberhartz took crap and made it gold. For that, she's been largely forgotten. I find that frustrating to say the least.

The second LOST ARG was far less memorable for me. Find 815 was essentially a lead up to the introduction of the frieghter into the story of LOST. I didn't follow it as closely, partly because it was even less canonical than the first one, but what was presented was bleak and stale. There were no breathtaking performances, and I must admit a large appeal for me regarding LOST is acting. What I did see in Find 815 didn't interest me a fraction as much as Silberhartz's work on The Lost Experience.

Then the Dharma fiasco of LOST ARG 3 that was cut short due to budget constraints and a realization on the part of the people behind LOST that even the little bit of money and time invested in an online game between seasons was not going to bring in new viewers. The verdict was in. By this point in time if you haven't been following LOST, you are lost. Jumping into season four for a newcomer is maddening. Those not already obsessed and addicted to LOST are waiting for it all to come out on DVD. More importantly, they're waiting to hear whether or not the end of the series actually lives up to the six years or so of pomp and circumstance. No one would remember The Fugitive if Kimball never found his one armed man.

Now we have Damon Carlton and a Polar Bear which stars Paul Scheer, a very talented comedic improvisational performer, most well-known for his work on The Human Giant. While I appreciate him as a comedian, I don't particularly appreciate the choice of casting him because his mere presence announces that this last LOST ARG is not going to be taken remotely seriously. The producers of LOST have given up trying to use this medium to tell stories they can't tell in the television series itself. It informs me that they believe the previous attempts to all be failures, and this time around they're just gonna be silly and not care about the end result. The first "clue" of this latest installment of ARGs suggested people should go to California and attend some party. That's a slap in the face to people like myself who don't find "getting a life" to be remotely interesting. I watch other people going out to parties and having a good time, and I honestly don't see the benefit to filling a room with strangers, loud music and large amounts of alcohol just to sweat on one another.

Paul Scheer is seen in video rummaging through trash outside the LOST production offices in California. He finds what we are led to believe is the front page of the script to the first episode of season six. The title shows "LA X." From this, everyone thinks now we know the name of the first episode. We do not. This was thrown out. It was found in the trash. This is for me essentially the metaphor with which I will measure this entire ARG. All that we're seeing are the ideas thrown out. This final ARG is all the stuff the producers thought about doing in this final season rather than actually do what they set out to do at the beginning. People want the bomb to go off. They want to see a reset. They also don't. The ramifications of that would ruin the series as a whole.

Many think we are looking at a Schroedinger's Cat in the eyes of Juliet Burke, and that there is an equal possibility the bomb's explosion will reset time as opposed to the other possibility that it won't. Either way, there's a belief that the bomb went off, and come next January we will see the repercussions of that. I have said this repeatedly in multiple forums and no one believes me: the bomb will not go off. It can't. Juliet's pounding away on an alleged nuclear bomb that hasn't gone off after falling through a hole drilled into the Earth. Do we honestly thing Juliet banging on it is going to make a difference? The white light we saw was a time hop, like several times before. There is no Schroedinger's Cat in the eyes of Juliet Burke.

Hurley, Jack, Juliet, Sayid, Miles, Sawyer, and Kate will all return to present time. Their time hopping will have been over. They will move in time but not in space. Juliet will be buried in the remains of the Swan station after its implosion back in season two. I think they're going to give us a death scene and then her presence will be occasionally felt late in season six when somehow they'll use a vision of Juliet to help bring to a close some emotional loose ends with both Sawyer and Ben. Beyond that, the character has fulfilled her requirements which is why the actress has a job now over at "V".

Sayid is also mortally wounded, but it's distantly possible to write out a way for Jack to get Sayid to Otherton's medical facilities where there might still be enough left to keep Sayid alive. I'm not crossing my fingers on that one though, because when Jack figured out Sayid never made the bomb active, Jack may just let Sayid die. Yes, I'm saying Sayid purposefully rigged the bomb to look convincing to Jack, but it was a dud. He never armed it. This is why it never went off.

Why? Because Sayid shot Ben square in the chest at near point blank range. Yet still Ben lives. Sayid knew better. Blowing up the area near The Swan station was not going to change anything. Whatever happened, happpened. When you realize that the planet Earth is a pale blue dot, you can't think that time can be changed that irrevocably. It has a way of course correcting, because the forces at work in temporal physics are universal. Time changed on Earth would effect the rest of the universe, but it's too small in comparison to not BE affected itself.

Like a pebble in the ocean; it's still going down.

So this ARG they're putting out to attempt to tide the masses between now and January will not tell us how the story is actually going to proceed. Like a deft magician, the producers of LOST are going to make us think we're getting clues when we're really just getting more smoke and mirrors. They CAN'T give us clues to the final season. It hasn't even started yet. They're going to point us as far away from the actual story as possible, for the same reason when you were a kid your mother didn't want you filling your belly with cookies before dinner time: she wanted you to eat your greens.

I'll follow the ARG along because in for a penny in for a pound, but so far I'm not liking it. Feels like a slap in the face to the dedicated audience that's hung out with them from the beginning. I know Damon & Carlton think this is like a final parting gift to we diehard fans. I know I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth. Still, I can't help it. I gotta ride this damned horse from now until January. It's gonna be a long six months, and I just wish the horse in question had better teeth than I do.

Who is Paige Railstone?

There are multiple conflicting opinions and facts regarding Miss Railstone. This is to be expected. Since she refuses to do interviews and somehow manages to draw crowds with little to no preceding formal publicity, it's very difficult to pin down where and when she's been in the world throughout her career. Records are undependable. I've found multiple occasions when she's allegedly performed in two or more places at once, in different countries. Those who have met her personally would not describe her as business-minded. Her brother operates as her business partner and keeps her on the go. She's more artistic-minded and very vague in answers to even the simplest of questions. "Ask if she wants some coffee. I dare you," one club employee was overheard recently, in reference to Miss Railstone. "I asked for her autograph once," a fan told me recently. "She said to me 'The Buddha's footprint would have more value to us both, and I'm not even Buddhist. Are you?' Then she kissed me on the cheek and left. I didn't wash my face for a week." She and her brother have no formal base of operations. Multiple addresses and PO Boxes have been attributed to them but Joey said recently to the press they "don't get snail mail." Their business is fluid and constantly adapting to their own needs. Some eyewitnesses have reported she only shows up at a gig with a laptop and some homemade DVDs in her backpack and somehow manages to pull off shows that range from ninety minutes to nine hours. One report said all she had on her that night was a cellphone and a bluetooth, but that may have been a Tall Tale. She often borrows equipment that's at the gig or that the region's local DJs bring to her. This means she travels light. She rarely appears early at gigs and rarely stays for autographs. Some find her behavior eccentric. Some find her weird. Some find her quietly reclusive and others find her extravagantly bawdy. Some say she's straight-edge (no foreign chemicals), and others have witnessed her with a Venti Cafe Mocha from the local Starbucks, or chugging RedBulls and vodka to get her through a set. She's definitely an enigma, and because of her transient and cryptic behavior, Miss Railstone appears to be whomever or whatever the person experiencing her wants her to be.

I Married And Divorced Janeane Garofalo

My reputation for stupidity precedes me. I don't know if this is actual irony or just the kind of irony that Alanis Morrissette sings about, but I wrote the following not five days ago. It's now the following Thursday, and I just happened upon my ex-wife on Facebook. So there is an outside chance she will eventually read this. I say 'outside chance' in that it's better than the odds of my winning the lottery, but not by much. I just apologized to her for having been an asshat several years ago. She doesn't seem to remember it. I should probably delete this entry, considering it's more recent evidence of my asshattery. However, I'm too much of an idiot to clean up my blog anticipating possible company. Besides, she knows how much I used to adore Janeane Garofalo. Hopefully she'll take it as a backhanded compliment.

There was a time when I was so hot for Janeane Garofalo and woulda done anything to breathe her air. She was my dream girl. When other guys in high school and college were drooling over Cindy Crawford or Uma Thurman or Elle MacPherson, I was starry-eyed for Janeane Garofalo.

Then I dated. Then I got married. Then I got divorced. Then I just stopped trying to get girls to like me at all. Many years have gone by and I have stopped trying. Every rare now and again a woman throws herself at me, but I stopped throwing myself at them. Women suck at catching you if you throw yourself at them. I gave up. If it happens it happens and if it don't it don't. More often than not, even if she's interested, it don't work anymore cuz I suck at catching too.

Janeane Garofalo's got fibromyalgia? My ex-wife had fibromyalgia. She's addicted to pain pills? My ex was poppin' pills. Janeane's an alcoholic? Garofalo is playing w/computers & doesn't know what the hell she's talking about? Garofalo & my ex-wife could be frickin sisters.

Thank God Janeane Garofalo would never give me the time of day. Feels like I dodged a bullet. In hindsight, when my ex-wife asked me to marry her, I shoulda told her no, then suggested she go find Janeane Garofalo. Woulda saved me a decade of heartache. Those two were made for each other. The sad thing is, it's a decade later and I'm still talking about my ex-wife. That's just sad.

And lying about her too, cuz let's be fair. She knew at least as much about computers as I do. She's not an alcoholic. It's just that in the third paragraph above, it wasn't as funny that my ex-wife and Janeane Garofalo only have two things in common. So I had to add a couple. Three's the magic number in comedy, but I went for four cuz I never know when to just go for three. I had to elaborate a little bit. Stretch the truth. Bill Cosby would do it when he went for the funny. There's no harm in it. Janeane Garofalo would appreciate that as a comedienne if she ever read this. She's not going to ever read this. I'm just pointing out that I got down the mechanics of comedy even if I'm not actually funny.

My ex-wife's never gonna see this. She hasn't spoken to me in years. As far as she's concerned, I'm dead, and she's probably better off pretending that. I don't know why I should give a shit if she found out I was out and out lying about who she was and whether or not she was just like Janeane Garofalo.

Now the two of them have a lot of boring things in common that just didn't make sense in the third paragraph cuz these aren't funny. They both have dark hair. My ex would pretend to be a redhead but it came out of a bottle. She was really a brunette just like Janeane Garofalo, who pretended to be a bleach blonde for awhile, probably for the same stupid vain reasons. They both have brown eyes. They both think they're fat when they're really not. They're both petite. They both have tattoos. They both like dogs. They're both funny ...occasionally. From a physical perspective they both turn me on. From an intellectual perspective they both turn me on. From an emotional and psychological perspective they both scare the mother fucking shit out of me. My ex-wife was pagan while Janeane Garofalo is an atheist, but nobody's perfect.

For all intents and purposes, I married Janeane Garofalo. Then Janeane Garofalo divorced me.

I didn't realize it when I was married. I just figured it out just now. Had I KNOWN when I was married that for all intents and purposes the woman I was married to was as Janeane Garofalo-ey as I was ever gonna get, maybe I woulda tried harder to not let her divorce me.. Nah. We were driving each other crazy.

I think if fate had ever allowed me to meet Janeane Garofalo for real, and ask Janeane Garofalo on a date, and she said yes (which would have happened before I got struck by lightning three times but right after I won the Powerball without ever having bought a ticket) we would have driven each other crazy, and Janeane Garofalo would hate me and never speak to me again. But Janeane Garofalo will never speak to me now, so the same effect has occurred without my having to be bogged down by the cause or the consequences.

I mean, Janeane Garofalo doesn't know me, so she doesn't hate me. But if she did know me, I guarantee you, she'd hate me. There are some certainties in the universe that are unmistakable. The way things are now, I'll never meet Janeane Garofalo. I'll never speak to her. She'll never get to know me. She'll never hate me. That's pretty awesome, if you stop to think about it. I avoided a lot of pain, and got the same result.

Of course sexually she would have rocked my world, and I would have left her disappointed. I'm never going to find that out for sure, but let's just assume the best possible scenario, and then look at harsh reality.

I'm gonna die miserable and alone, but at least I won't die with a high maintenence woman screaming at me until I have a coronary because I forgot to take Buttons and Marmaduke out for walkies again, and why the hell while I was out didn't I refill her prescription of vicadoodles?

All things being equal, I came out ahead.

Lost To Chance

When I try to explain my theories regarding the television series Lost to people who are roughly as addicted to the television series and its implications as I am, I often find myself up against a peculiar obstacle: science versus faith. I'm heavy in the science side of this argument. I find many fans of Lost are heavy on the faith side. It's like we're watching two different television series. I see a show in which the Man of Faith (John Locke) has literally sacrificed life and limb as well as sanity for what he believes to be true, flying in the face of all the factual evidence to the contrary. He so believes this, that the alleged Man of Science in this story (Jack Shepherd) has fallen for John's belief system to the point where he was willing to destroy an island with a nuclear explosion in order to reset everything. John had been blowing up submarines and buildings and underground installations in order to maintain the status quo. Now Jack wants to do the same thing with the entire fabric of reality. It's like science has lost to faith.

This is where I think we're seeing two different shows. Some look at Locke's plight, and they witness Jack's embrace of Locke's faith, and they think this is a good thing. It is not. The outcome of whether or not that Swan station gets built is not so humongous a thing that using a nuclear bomb to destroy the area and make it impossible to build there - that's not enough to rewrite SpaceTime. In the universal picture, you could destroy this entire solar system and it wouldn't make a hill of beans difference. We're just a pale blue dot. We are insignificant, and as Mrs. Hawking was fond of reminding Desmond, "time has a way of course correcting..."

Jack has given up on science and turned to faith. In fact, he's USING science in the form of Faraday's theory in order to destroy reality as it is, and force things into what Jack wants them to be. Even if Jack were successful, it would be a small victory, and what's destined to happen will eventually happen anyway, as Hawking's friend with the red shoes learned the hard way.

When Kate looks at Jack and sees that not everything in the past three years has been all bad, and she sees Jack wants to erase everything, she's crestfallen. I think we viewing this should be too. Jack's embracing the idea of destroying in order to create: he's essentially playing god. This is not how a hero behaves. This is not how science wins over faith. This is not how common sense and rational thought wins out over superstition and fear of the unknown.

In the first episode of this series, characters heard sounds coming out of the jungle and were terrified. They had no idea what was beyond those trees in the dark and that unknown was scary. The response for some was to not venture beyond the trees, but one can only live on fish and sunshine on a beach for so long. Others ventured into the canopy of the jungle and discovered that yes there are things that make scary sounds but once you meet them eye to eye you can either survive them or not. Allowing fear to petrify you is not living. Learning about what scares you is knowledge, and knowledge is power. Now we know what lies beyond the canopy of the jungle. When Locke looked at his earlier self banging on the hatch door, he could have walked up to himself and warned him, but he chose not to, because he needed that pain in order to become a stronger person. He didn't want to deny himself that experience.

As we wait these several months for the final season to begin next January, I can't help but feel sorry for the people of faith. The series can't possibly end on a note that indicates belief over (even speculative) science. I've been trying to figure out how I can explain to someone who chooses faith over science what is in store for them regarding the series, and it admittedly leaves me in a similar predicament with regards to science versus faith in general. This, I believe, is what the writers and producers of Lost are really trying to say: not that faith beats science or science beats faith, but that humanity as a whole and each individual specifically has to hammer this whole thing out for themselves. We have to either find common ground between what our mind knows to be fact and our heart knows to be true, or ultimately we have to decide whether to feel with our minds or think with our hearts. Every day.

I used to be like John Locke. I used to believe with every fiber of my being in a belief structure that appeared to make sense at the time, but only if it wasn't properly challenged daily, and I would look to reality to corroborate my belief structure, ignoring the parts of reality that didn't mesh with what I believed. In recent years that has no longer been sufficient. I had been satisfied in believing in a world where there was a sentient omniscient being that had a personal vested interest in the individuals that make up humanity. Unfortunately, Earth is not the center of the Universe, and Mankind is not God's most precious jewel. It is arrogance to presume otherwise. IF there is a god, and I see no convincing evidence on either side of this argument that Man has not made for itself, if there is a god it is a god who has far more important things on its mind than to help your favorite sports team win the championship.

There are simply too many facts that fly in the face of what I've believed for so long. I am finding myself having to accept what is actually there, or not there, rather than what I want to see there. As Mister Ekko once made clear to John Locke: The absence of evidence is not evidence, and one cannot rationally accept coincidence for fate.

Recently scientists have been investigating probability. I say recently. That's a misnomer. For many scientists that's really all they do. IF there is no god, no supreme entity that guides order out of chaos, than everything in the universe is purely built upon chance. I personally find this theory as absurd if not moreso, than the idea of a grey-haired man in a robe living in the clouds. I don't like the atheist perspective any more than I like the evangelical point of view. I think they're both wrong, but there's not enough evidence to clarify what's right; hence the unending argument between science and faith.

More specifically, some scientists have postulated that when you flip a coin, it's not a fifty-fifty outcome. With effort, it can be predicted. If one were to invent a machine that used the same amount of force in the same direction to flip the same coin repeatedly in the same exact way, the result should be the same every time. If it's not, then there are other variants that must be factored in. Air density. Gravometric variances. Whether or not there's a draft in the room. Et cetera. When you use your own hand to flip the coin, there's even more variables to consider. You can't use the same exact force every time. One time you're going to move your arm differently than before. You may place the coin under your thumb differently. Maybe you'll catch the first one and the second flip flies across the room. We humans are far from infallible.

There's also something called precession that comes into play. When you flip a coin, it does more than flip straight on a two dimensional x y axis. It also moves along the z axis in three dimensions. Sometimes you'd get a perfect flip but more often than not, along with the over and under tumble of the coin, you'd get a spinning effect. If you were to look at this in slow motion as it curved in the air, the coin would make a sort of spiral in the air. Again, with proper mathematics taking into account every variable, it could be predicted. However, there are so many variables involved that its near impossible and certainly improbable to go through all that trouble. So we don't bother to calculate all the variables. We just flip the coin and presume everything is left to chance.

We human beings perceive chance and consequence as totally beyond our control, and oftentimes it is, because we can't control everything. We leave the control up to whatever we believe to be that which is in control. Believers in a One True God percieve one omniscient being capable of making all those calculations with less effort than you or I take to bat an eyelid. That omniscient being is putting all these variables into play in order for an outcome that is ultimately beneficial to the universe at large and ourselves specifically, and when things go wrong we attribute that to a Devil, or to the unrighteous presence of others, or we deem ourselves unworthy of a better outcome for some reason. We believe we have failed our god and this is his punishment for us.

When you flip a coin, you can control how you flip it, but an act as simple as flipping a coin involves things you may not understand completely. That if you start the coin on your hand head first for example, that increases the odds, ever so slightly, that the coin will land on the same side with which you started. How you flip a coin can have an effect as well. With years of research and practice it is feasible one could learn how to flip a coin in just such a way to where the outcome can be measured and predicted and controlled. Just as a bowler can improve his release or a golfer can improve his swing, so too can a coin flipper improve his 'game.'

The problem is one can only do so much. A golfer could train and practice for years but he's never going to get a hole in one every single time. He can get closer than before with effort, but perfection will forever remain out of reach, because there are simply too many variables beyond one's physical capability. The difference of the green. The difference in wind speed and various obstacles in the way. Whether or not he's having a bad day may even sometimes be beyond one's ability to control.

Right now the television series Lost is for some like Schroedinger's Cat. We don't know the outcome. We know what happened before the proverbial box was closed, but beyond our speculation, we have to wait until Darlton open the box again come this January, so that we may witness the outcome. Proverbially speaking, is the cat alive or dead?

We witnessed Juliet pounding on a nuclear bomb that had already gone through more than enough pounding to go off if it was ever going to go off. She banged on it with a rock eight times and in that eighth time we witnessed the screen go from black to white. Some perceive that to mean the bomb went off. Others, like myself, assume that to mean a temporal event occurred like ones we'd witnessed previously. Again I assume that temporal event sent our Losties back to their proper time. Was this all caused by chance? Not exactly. There were many variables that were controlled by Jacob. Again, I assume that because he could 'sense' they were returning even as Ben & UnLocke tried to kill him. However, like a golf swing, Jacob could only do so much. He put many variables into play and let it rip. Whether or not there'll be a hole in one is something that only Schroedinger's Cat will know for sure before the box gets opened. We'll find out in five months.

You may believe the bomb went off. You believe that Jack's plan worked, resetting everything. That is in my opinion, a belief in faith. It simply doesn't mesh with all the evidence as I've cited before in previous ramblings on this topic.

I believe the bomb didn't go off. The white field we saw was just a temporal hop. That is my opinion, based on the evidence given in the television series. My opinion does mesh with what the producers and writers of Lost revealed prior to putting the show on such a curious cliffhanger. Still, belief is a form of faith as well. It's a belief in chance, given all the variables presented to us thus far, my outcome has a higher percentage chance of being right. Even so, mine is at best a fifty-one percent chance versus your forty-nine percent. This is just a TV show, and that's the best one can hope for before viewing the final chapters of this saga for ourselves.

If that's the best we can do with a fictitious teleplay, we have no hope to ever figure out one way or another with absolute certainty that there is a god. That doesn't mean there is a god. That doesn't mean there isn't. It means, at the rate we're going now, we may never know. Living breathing humanity will never figure it out unless we come at this whole thing from a different angle. Feel with our minds or think with our hearts? We may never know.