Balloons are cool, and Roboseyo's epic brain-farts!

Super Slow Motion is cool, too.



Brainfart 1: Girlfriendoseyo got tickets for us to see Harry Connick Jr. in Seoul on Thursday night. . . but I forgot to find out which Thursday night, so I rescheduled some evening classes and everything yesterday, and asked my lady "Where should we meet to see the show tonight?"
She replied: "Oh, that's NEXT Thursday, not this one."

I felt dumb.

Took the free evening, but I have to make up those classes.

Then, after enjoying my free evening, brain-fart number two:

Yesterday afternoon I took a much-needed nap (because of lost sleep due to a kind of sh*t happens situation I needed to deal with for Girlfriendoseyo). Then I forgot to set my phone's "backup alarm clock" back on my normal morning wakeup time. Then, going to bed, I forgot to set my "Plan A" alarm clock, too. I was woken by my phone ringing at 7:10, one of the school receptionists asked me, "Where are you? Your 7am class is waiting for you."

Big brainfart. I take a fair bit of pride in the job I do, so I felt pretty bad about that.

On the bright side, my students in my OTHER (not angry at me) classes told me I looked very healthy and well-rested this morning!

Don't forget: help this guy out! He might have a medivac back to the US available to him, but he needs to raise funds, fast.

Help a fella out

Bill Kapoun is an English teacher in Korea; there was a near-fatal fire in his apartment, and he got second and third degree burns all over his body.

Unfortunately, his school did not cover him under Korea's health insurance system, and are now shirking any responsibility for his medical care, leaving him up a creek without a paddle. He's gonna have a lot of bills to pay, and has nowhere to get the money, so his sister is organizing an online fundraising campaign. I don't know him, but I hope strangers'd do the same if it happened to me.

Go here and help him out.

Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins: Part two: Creation/Evolution, Science and Anti-intellectualism

For the sake of length, attention span, and aesthetics, I moved my summary of Richard Dawkins' explanation of darwinism/origins here. If you want more background, read up! If you think you can go it without, read on!

To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. Background for the next essay. The next essay.


"Jesus" by Velvet Underground -- one of my favourite VU songs.

A name came into my mind as I was thinking about this whole Creation/Evolution thing. See, Darwin is not the first scientist whose theory flew in the face of conventional theology. Let's think for a moment about Galileo:

In 1633 Galileo Galilei was imprisoned for publishing his theory that the earth rotated around the sun, rather than vice versa. This idea didn't fit with the way the church understood scripture at the time. However, the inquisition found it easier to throw one guy up against the wall than to re-think the arrangement of the heavens. For them, putting Galileo in the wrong through sheer force of "because I said so," was easier than going through all that thinking.

If we look at this with a little perspective, I’m sorry folks, but the creationist lobby flying in the face of all the cumulative scientific evidence just doesn't wash any better than those priests arguing to Galileo, “That can’t be! The bible says. . . “. Arguing for the six-day, young earth creation in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is a losing battle, and the more bitterly creationists fight it, the sillier all Christians ultimately look.

Now, we shake our heads and snicker at how short-sighted and self-serving Pope Urban VIII and Robert Cardinal Bellarmine were when they released the hounds on Galileo; we tut-tut that they should have been open-minded enough not to impede the march of science, we intone that such blatantly obvious truths, based on growing volumes of observable evidence, should have been given more weight. . .

And three hundred years from now, I have very little doubt that people will sniff and snort in the same way at George W. Bush and James Dobson and the Kansas School Board and whoever else is trying to get Intelligent Design on the science curriculum. (Heck, the Kansas School Board is already being mercilessly mocked, and it isn't even a decade!)

How is this any different, really? It's the same dilemma: it's less work to dismiss a new idea than to factor it into a new, workable framework, but folks, citing scripture to disprove Darwin only further undermines the intellectual credibility of all faith, and undermining our own credibility, in a world with a multitude of voices competing for attention, is the very, very last thing we want to do!

Just as the church, after Galileo, had to reinterpret and retool the way they understood the bible's account of Earth's place in the universe, the burden lies on us to be intellectually responsible and re-examine our approach to Genesis creation story. Falsely setting up faith and intelligence as mutually exclusive sets religion on a path toward total irrelevance, so a tactical retreat is in order: we are wasting energy and credibility on losing battles, and it would suit us better to get back to the areas where the church still CAN have influence in the world: feed hungry, clothe naked, help prisoners, defend the defenseless, fight for justice, so that even if people can't agree that the bible (or any other holy book) is scientific, they can agree that Christians (or any other believers), through tireless effort, are certainly making the world a better place.

And you know what else, folks? Faith SURVIVED Galileo. Big G's publications weren't an attack, and they only damaged the church exactly as much as the church leaders proved themselves ignorant and dogmatic in response to Galileo's attempt to learn more about God's Creation. Faith CAN survive Darwin too, if we're willing to re-think this whole origin thing with open minds.

I am afraid that, if fundamentalism runs unchecked (both here and in the Muslim world), religion will come to be seen as a politicized, rallying point for dogmatism, a point from which one guards against new ideas, rather than one vantage point from which one can survey all the various fields of knowledge in the world God (presumably) created. If this drawing-lines-in-the-sand, belief-over-evidence trend continues, religiousity will slowly become marginalized, viewed as anti-intellectual and (next after that) outright superstitious, and then (eventually) anachronistic, a leftover of “those dark, old superstitious days of the bloody religious wars." Richard Dawkins will be proven a prophet!

There has to be another way.

To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. Background for the next essay. The next essay.

Blogoseyo: Pictures!

(I'm Stickin' With You, by the Velvet Underground: Just hit play and read)

Every year, sometime in early march, it seems Korean winter gets one last kick at the can before spring begins to shine around the corner. Last year, late February was uncannily warm, and then March was one of the most bitterly, hawkishly cold months I've ever experienced; most years, that last gasp of winter comes in the form of bit, fat-flaked, fluffy snow (I've blogged about this before).

Every year, sometime in April or May, dust from the Gobi Desert blows away in the wind, and carries up into the atmosphere, choking provinces to the east, and turning the sky in Seoul yellow. It's called the "Yellow Dust" and, as clear-cutting increases wind-erosion in China, it's been starting earlier, and getting more frequent and severe. Many Koreans (especially the asthmatic and elderly) wear surgical facemasks during the yellow-dust, and are encouraged to stay home during severe alerts.

Now normally, snow in Korea is considered extremely romantic. You phone your girlfriend or boyfriend, go for a walk at night, practice catching it in your eyelashes and pretend you're in a music video or a teen movie montage. This year, though, we had an ugly intersection.

As you can see, the sky has this pallid haze -- the light is really odd during the yellow dust, a little like the hour before sundown, but not as warm. It looks to me like the kind of light you might have in a zombie movie, while the hero's walking around the city and going "why is it so empty?"

(I love bad zombie movies. This is funny. Really.)



But that was the colour of the sky, when the snow started falling.


Gross, ugly, sticky, yellow snow all clumpy with China's yellow dust, so that I didn't want to go out and play in it.


One more zombie clip: zombies doing yoga. They're funny, ya?



Other stuff I've spotted out and about: the frequent sight of people trying to meet their friends, standing on the partitions that stop cars from driving on the sidewalk, always makes me smile. I've done it myself.
"Can you see me now?"
"No."
"What about now? I'm standing on a post."

To celebrate my coworker Sonober finishing her contract, we went out to a tuna sushi restaurant and went all out. Wow, it was good.


Another tuna restaurant wants me to check their manu (Konglish contingent for the post)

On Valentine's Day, girlfriendoseyo took me to a really nice restaurant near her house, where they present the food beautifully. It's a great place, and the decor is fantastic (restaurants with real atmosphere are few and far here). They have picassos and. . . another really famous artist's paintings . . . on the walls.

And even the dishes are works of art.
This was a 300 year old stone cooking brick.

That's either really gross, or really cool. . . I'm opting for the latter.

In Insadong, last weekend (or maybe the one before) the sun finally broke out, and this guy decided to honour it with a few OMs.


This sign is really funny if you can read Korean: the restaurant name is "Beer Valley" but because of the way Hangeul (the korean alphabet) transliterates English words [there's no "V" in Korean, for one], the characters could just as easily read "Beer Belly" as "Beer Valley". Hee hee.

I like the delivery motor-trikes. Sometimes you see some unbelievable mode of transportation here. Once I saw this guy sitting at the front of a big wagon, with what might have been a lawn-mower engine welded next to the chair where he sat, with the engine lashed to his wagon's axle, chugging along right out on the road, totally vulnerable, totally blind, unable to go faster than a brisk walk, snarling traffic around him everywhere he went, proudly unapologetic. Fantastic!

Many restaurants have live fish tanks, where you can choose what you want to eat.
Plus, you get to gawk at ugly deep-sea fish with suckers on their bellies!


This guy's a palm-reader/fortune teller. His little stand looks quite pretty at night in the winter, when he pulls the plastic drape around it to keep the heat in.

Near my school is a bell that used to announce when the market opened and closed each day. Once or twice a week they have a changing of the guard ceremony there. They wear traditional clothing and fake facial hair. One thing I love about living in Korea, and in downtown Seoul, is I get to share a crosswalk with people like this sometimes.


What do you love about YOUR town?

Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins, Part 1: Parameters

To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. Background for the next essay. The next essay.

Soundtrack: hit play and start reading.

(King of Carrot Flowers Parts 2 and 3, by Neutral Milk Hotel.)

What the hell are you doing, Roboseyo? Why do you zero in on the most controversial topic you can? I mean, everybody knows that religion, politics and money are poor form and bad manners at the dinner table.

True, true, it is bad manners. (Why do you have your computer at the dinner table, anyway?) But, you see, this guy named Richard Dawkins, a respected scientist, has written a book, and gained fame and notoriety by suggesting that, GASP! religion is not only wrong, but, to wit, the world would be better off if it disappeared entirely! (He even makes a case for why religion should not be privileged above other topics, and made "off limits" for any critical talk, thus, according to him, it's open season already, anyway.)

While my faith does not follow the exact pattern of my dad, Pastor Poposeyo, who sent me to Christian schools and everything (I chose the Christian university myself, though), my spiritual life is very important to me, and it enriches my life a lot (even if I don't talk about it often, and then only obtusely). Yeah, I've unorthodox'd the hell out of what I believed back in high school, but when old Dr. Dawkins publicly, articulately and unequivocally says the world would be better off if religion vanished completely, regardless of my mixed opinions and oddball postures, I stand up and take notice.

As humans often do when faced with a sustained and emphatic attack, many religious folks find it comfortable to write Richard Dawkins and his polemic off completely, either disregarding his rhetoric, or counterattacking.

However, I don't think either of those responses quite washes. If my colleague comes to me and says, "Hey, can we talk about the way you sing loudly to yourself and laugh randomly and suddenly at your inner monologue's jokes during office hours?" and I plug my ears and shout, "NANANANANANA" until she goes away, or call her a dum-dum-head and slap her with my brown-bag lunch, I'm not exactly winning friends, OR influencing people. Faced with a harsh criticism, I ultimately help my office-cred more when I try to look for the valid points beneath mean Sharon's* brutal honesty (even if she IS a shrew).

(Names have been changed to protect the privacy of shrew coworkers. Danielle.)

The hardest times in my life are the ones that taught me the most. . . might it not be the same with criticisms, that the harshest appraisal can teach me the most? Moreover, why WOULDN'T a group being roundly attacked listen carefully to those attacks. . . and rather than listening only to gather ammo for the counterattack, why not listen, and then root out the cause for those criticisms, and do away with them, pulling the rug right out from under such strident opponents? Scratch any criticism, however aggressive, however rude, and there's a teachable moment. . . if we listen. (Yes, I'm using first person plural to refer to the huddled hordes of spiritual people; hope you don't mind.)

Iron sharpens iron. Accountability helps me become a better person, and by the same token, I believe organized religions would be better served by listening humbly to Richard Dawkins' intelligent and not ungrounded attacks, than by simply ignoring or condemning him. Personally, I think Dawkins' book (and Christopher Hitchens' book, etc,) is a wake-up call of the highest order, friends, and urgent as indigestion! Whether he's right about everything or not, whether his information is all accurate and fair might be debatable, but what cannot be argued is that THIS is what modern religious practice and culture looks like to an outside observer, and THAT, dear readers, is a sobering thought.



My discussion of Richard Dawkins' attack upon Christendom and religiondom in all its stripes and shades, will come in four parts. This, the first one, will basically only outline the reason I'm writing, and what I am and am not trying to do with this series. The next one will deal with what Dawkins says about origins, and the way religions have responded to scientific claims about origin. The third one will deal with Dawkins' direct attacks on organized religion and practice in the second half of his book, and how I think religious leaders ought to respond to them. The final one will discuss, "what next" -- what is the outlook for the future of organized religion, in light of the attacks and criticisms discussed in the first three parts of the essay.

Parameters and Disclaimers:

So I read Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion"; I read it with an open mind, because if you've made up your mind what you plan to think about a book before even reading it, why waste your time? I headed in ready to be convinced (if he presented a convincing case), but also carefully attuned for bullocks (if he misstepped). If you're not willing to give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt, you probably won't agree with most of the rest of what I say here, so kindly move on. (Here is as good a place as any.)

In this series,

1. I AM discussing organized religion at large. To do this, I will paint with a broad brush. These are generalizations, and OF COURSE I know that not all religious people act in the way I describe; however, when a critic like Mr. Dawkins sees what he sees when he looks in from the outside, it means that TOO MANY religious people ARE acting in the way I describe (if they weren't, Dawkins would have no reason to aim his big guns at religion, and would have picked on somebody else, like maybe nationalists, or capitalists, cheese-eaters, or SUV drivers).

2. I AM dealing with material Richard Dawkins discusses in his book "The God Delusion" -- I may refer to a few other books. I strongly recommend you read this book, if you are not sure what you think about this topic, or if you are VERY sure what you think: an unchallenged victory is without honour, and an unchallenged belief is vulnerable both to attack AND manipulation. If somebody can recommend an intelligent, well-written and persuasive defense of God and religiousity, please cite it in the comment board! There are other books both for and against Christianity, faith in general, and God, but I haven't read them, so we'll just have to keep the focus narrow, to indulge my ignorance and laziness. (I do recommend "Finding Darwin's God" by Kenneth Miller, a defence of Darwinism written by a scientist who is also a devout Christian.)

3. I AM discussing religion as it is practiced in modern society; this won't be a philosophical or theological discussion; it will be a discussion of current practice and attitudes toward religion, as seen by a careful and interested observer (your friendly neighbourhood Roboseyo). The practice is the interpretation and embodiment of a religion's beliefs; the texts might show what we want to be, but the actions show what we are. As such, I am not here to discuss what Paul, or Jesus, or Mohammed said about religion, nor how I personally am spiritually fed; I am here to discuss how religion is practiced by its followers today, and how it appears to outsiders.

As THIS GUY says (about Islam, this time) here, "People say 'you can't judge islam by its followers' but that's like saying you can't judge a football team by its results. Islam is its followers" -- nobody cares what the playbook looks like if the team can't win on the field. Or as one might say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the recipe.

4. I AM trying to offer a look at current religious controversies that will be interesting to non-religious outsiders, and challenging to religious readers.

5. I AM trying to discuss the organized religions in general (because Dawkins' attack is a general attack on organized religions); however, like him, I was raised in a Christian family, so that's what I know. Some of my comments may be a little Church-0-centric, out of ignorance of the finer details of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., not because I think that they are irrelevant. Hopefully the principles I discuss are broad enough that they can be applied to other groups as well. Also: I live in Korea, and come from North America, so a lot of my examples discuss the North American and Korean church; this is not meant as a snub to Europe, South Asia, or anywhere else, but a simple concession that I don't know as much about them.

Also, in this series,

I am NOT trying to definitively prove God exists.

I am NOT trying to definitively prove God does not exist.

I am NOT trying to establish the primacy of one religion over another.

I am NOT trying to establish the primacy of science over religion, or vice versa.

I am NOT attacking you, personally, or your beliefs (really, I swear).

I am NOT ignoring the great variety of different ways people practice religion, and saying every religious person is the same.

I am NOT saying I approve of the strident, and some say shrill way Dawkins attacks religion.

As I said before, and as King Solomon (may have) said long before me, "Iron sharpens iron" -- clear, focused, intellectually vigorous thought begets more clear, focussed, intellectually vigorous thought, and right or wrong, Dawkins has given me a great deal of intelligently and vigorously argued thoughts about God and religion. This WILL sharpen my own thinking, trimming the fat of superstition away, and leaving only the muscular integrity of tested belief, and that, dear readers, is a good thing, no matter how you slice it.

To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. Background for the next essay. The next essay.