Spiritual, but not religious

Turns out someone already wrote a whole book about this, though he doesn't seem quite that critical about it (from the excerpt, anyway). The book is called Spiritual, But Not Religious and it is published by Oxford University Press (Hey Brian, get me a free copy!) It has somewhat middling reviews.

An excerpt is here: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/109/story_10958_1.html

It basically makes the distinction between the public worship of religion and private worship of spirituality. He is able to give demographics (though he does not cite his sources in the excerpt):

"A large number of Americans identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious." It is likely that perhaps one in every five persons (roughly half of all the unchurched) could describe themselves in this way."

"We also know a few things about today's unchurched seekers as a group. They are more likely than other Americans to have a college education, to belong to a white-collar profession, to be liberal in their political views, to have parents who attended church less frequently, and to be more independent in the sense of having weaker social relationships." (Fruity liberals!)

But though Fuller doesn't seem as critical as I, he notices the same contradictions:

The "spiritual, but not religious" group was less likely to evaluate religiousness positively, less likely to engage in traditional forms of worship such as church attendance and prayer, less likely to engage in group experiences related to spiritual growth, more likely to be agnostic, more likely to characterize religiousness and spirituality as different and nonoverlapping concepts, more likely to hold nontraditional beliefs, and more likely to have had mystical experiences.

and:

The confusion stems from the fact that the words "spiritual" and "religious" are really synonyms. Both connote belief in a Higher Power of some kind. Both also imply a desire to connect, or enter into a more intense relationship, with this Higher Power. And, finally, both connote interest in rituals, practices, and daily moral behaviors that foster such a connection or relationship.

My crusade against the spiritual.

I have a lot of distaste for idiotic fruity liberals, by which I usually mean hippies and their ilk. Not all of them, of course, but a vast majority, or at least the ones I seem to come across. People with whom I am ashamed to identify with as a liberal, because they are idiots and say stupid things like I am voting for Obama because in my gut I just feel he is the right person. It almost makes me want to be a conservative, but two weeks ago I spoke to a random girl who wore a utilikilt but was defiantly red, and she was even more aggravating. And I'm sure there are much worse than she.

Anyway, my crusade against the spiritual basically comes down to the fact that being spiritual is just an easy way for people to pretend they aren't religious even though they really are. Now, I hate religion with a passion. I see no difference between Scientology and Catholicism. (Scientology only seems more silly because it is newer. Older religions have the benefit of being spoon fed at an early age. Too bad for Suri Cruise.) There are differences, of course, between the spiritual and religious. They're spelled differently, for one. Religion is organized (outside of Yoga parlors), for two. But really, they're both illogical beliefs, rooted in absolutely no proof, and, if anything, proof to the contrary.

Science can't explain everything, but it attempts to with a rigorous and evidence-based method. Scientific knowledge is continuously accruing, and there is simply no excuse to be religious these days anymore. There probably hasn't been for at least the past century. Perhaps there was a time when religion seemed worthwhile as it provided a means to an end. But as the great Mencken said: "It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities." Mencken also said: "The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion." And Einstein wrote: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

Idiotic fruity liberals will, of course, as per their presented image, decry such things as creationism. They will be pro-science and get their news from NPR. And yet they will accept astrological bullshit (just for fun, they swear), become "one" with nature, and tell people they're "not religious, but they're spiritual," as though believing in spirits was somehow an enlightened and advantageous state of being, more than the average atheist and certainly more than rudimentary religious folk. They spew faux-intellectual thoughts (which, no doubt, they heard on NPR that same morning or read in some tract or pamphlet) without having considered what they're saying themselves. They read about issues without reading into them. They are bandwagon liberals who want to appear smart but don't really know what they're talking about.

I was talking to my roommate a few days ago about my new crusade. Now I'm not talking about my annoying, crazy, vegan roommate, who of course is exactly one of these idiotic fruity bandwagon liberals, but the one that I like who is generally thoughtful and reasonable. Anyway, she said that she wouldn't loudly announce it, but that she'd consider herself spiritual. So I asked her what she meant by this. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in spirits of trees and animals? And she replied that she simply thought there was a higher being than humans. Like god? No. You know, life is so complex, it's not just randomness. And I said do you know what that is? that is intelligent design. And she denied it. But that is precisely what it is. Spirituality is the belief of something superhuman and supernatural. It is supersilly. I don't know why the spiritual get a free pass. It is as intellectually squalid as religion.

What is strange about all this is that I think the hardest things for people to believe are things they cannot see (hear/feel/smell/etc.) with their own eyes (senses.) People can read and grasp Einstein's theories of relativity, and yet they won't really believe that a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. It is natural to be skeptical of things that you can't see and seem illogical, and yet most of this world is willing to blindly follow babbling psychopaths go on about gods and higher authorities and heavens and hells.

To all the spiritual people, I say, stop being so disorganized; arrange neatly and be horrified to discover yourselves no different than the religious.

Spammers know me so well.

I got spam the other day. It wasn't advertising anything but merely making a statement:



In other gossip, Ariel is cheating on Eric:

What more in the name of love?

"We are a proud people."

The Mayans, Japanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Batswana, Latvian, Georgian, Uruguayan, Antarctican, Danish, Chilean, Vulcan, Bolivian, Australian, French, American, and certainly the Monagasque ("We are small but proud!") are all proud people. Is there a nation of the non-proud? Even countries that are officially ashamed are secretly proud. (The hippies and idiot liberals (not all liberals) of the United States are outspokenly ashamed of our country, but damn proud of themselves for being so loudly ashamed. They like to talk about moving to Canada but they will never actually do it.)

(In something of a contradiction, most religions view pride as a sin. But this is generally ignored. Gluttony, in the US at least, is also widely ignored.)

So perhaps all people are a proud people, but not everyone can be equally proud. Usually it is the downtrodden, war-beaten, raped, and indigenous that speak up most about being proud (we're willing to give them that much after we take away their land), but that doesn't make them any more proud than anyone else; it just happens to be all they have left.

What I would like to do is develop a measure of proudness (dealing specifically with National Pride, as opposed to proudness of ethnic, cultural, or familial groups, or of the personal variety.) Voluntary military participation is probably a good starting point; people who are willing to die for their country are probably prouder than people not willing to die for their country:

National Pride (Pn) = Voluntary Military Participation (M) / Population (K)

This is imperfect, however, because a country with a more technologically advanced military doesn't need as many people to keep their country from being taken over by another. So we should control for military might, by multiplying by the amount of military spending per capita:

Pn = (M/K) x (Total Military Spending (S)/K) = MS/K^2

This result is skewed towards countries that are less populous, lack natural borders, and fight a lot. In other words, it is too pro-Israel. To adjust for this, we should adjust based on amount of war activity:

Pn = (MS/K^2) x Wadj = MSWadj/K^2 , where Wadj is the War adjustment factor .

Next, in addition to fighting, there is also a cultural element to National Pride. I think we can reasonably measure this by the amount of flags sold per capita:

Pn= MSWadj/K^2 + Flags Sold (F)/K = MSWadj/K^2+F/K

You might argue that I should adjust for aesthetic quality of the flags, but frankly, if my country had an ugly flag, I'd have less pride as well.

So there you have it. The unit of measure for pride should be Lions. So. By this measure, we can see that the proudest people are the Irish. They have 17,844 Lions of Pride. Plus one Bono.

One year.

Date	Flt	Depart	Arrive	Stops
09 May 07	83	New York, JFK 7:20pm	Seattle, WA 10:51pm	0

I went to Vegas and all you get is this lousy blog post.

I went to Fabulous Las Vegas for the first time and liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Actually I expected to like it: It's a big party, what's not to like? I was armed with a paycheck, and spent all of it.

The Vegas strip is like the most extravagant strip mall there is. They have other towns in miniature there. It feels like a city as an amusement park. Vegas is full of fake boobs. I've never seen so many fake boobs before. (I've never been to LA.) But they weren't all fake, and I tried to chat up the cute hostess without fake boobs at Stripburger and she let me take a (sadly blurry) picture of her.

I went back to Stripburger another day to try to find her but failed.

In Rome, I was amused by a headless angel:

and though I haven't been back to New York in awhile, I did get to New York, New York:


I dislike gambling in theory because it is designed so that you will always lose in the end (how is that legal?!). But in practice I enjoy it. And how brilliant casinos are to change all your money into these colored chips. I'd have a hundred dollars on the craps table at any given time and think nothing of it at all. I'd toss five dollar tips to the dealers, ten dollar throw-away bets here and there, and it felt like nothing until I took stock at the end and realized I was really quite a bit in the hole. After realizing how much I was wasting, I decided to just go ahead and not worry about it. Like spending money on food, or Cirque Du Soleil shows or whatever else. I didn't feel rich, but money seemed really trivial. Those people there are geniuses. At the buffets, I parked myself and ate massive amounts of food. I figured that this was my one chance to beat the house: the odds weren't quite in my small-stomached favor, but if I persevered, I thought I might have control of the outcome and win. I believe I did.

Funnily enough, my favorite hotel/casino was Hooters. It is somehow the most family-friendly place there. I don't know why but it is. Families would roam around. Kids ate at the restaurant. (great wings!) There's something nice and warm about it. And when the scantily clad dealers took all your money, they were somehow warm and apologetic about it. Not cold and clinical like everywhere else. Ah Hooters! I give a hoot...

When I was finished with Vegas with time left before my flight, I walked to the airport to prove that it could be done. It can. I was starting to think there was an airport admission fee because airports all seem blocked by a big maze of highway and appear only accessible by vehicle. But if you follow a very narrow sidewalk, cross some large streets that have no intersections, disregard the fact that there is no one else walking, and have an hour or so to spare, the airport is indeed pedestrian-accessible if not quite pedestrian-friendly. This test should be done at every airport. Maybe I'll give JFK a shot next time.

This weekend I ...

Hiked up a mountain with Kate and Andres:
Made Gnocchi with Ragu Bolognese:


I forgot to take a picture of the finished dish, but please note that I am the only person you know that owns a gnocchi board. That is because I am a True Italian. (As is clearly shown in the photo at top. Also, I am getting fat.)

Platonic solids

Why isn't the food pyramid called the food triangle? Is there a hidden backside of cellulite, transfats, and monosodium glutamate?

Tricks of the mind.

Sometimes you hear about people for whom it was love at first sight, or that they knew right away he/she was "the one." I wonder if anyone has ever said this about someone ugly. This love at first sight thing, I think for me, really just means I saw a pretty girl. It's all a trick. But if I one day think this about an ugly person, then I would be sure it were really true.

My inner hunger.

I have an inner hunger. It speaks to me in a hushed but stern tone: French Fries.

I am mute.

Here is my phone bill from last month:


I averaged six minutes of phone usage a day!

Four Star Hotness!

Ordering (substandard) food here in Seattle entails a new system that I was hitherto unfamiliar with: Waittress: "How spicy you want? One to five stars." Sometimes the scale only goes up to four stars, but it always seems to be in stars, even though stars have absolutely nothing to do with spiciness (why not just one to five?), and if it does, it would have more to do with the quality of the spiciness than the quantity. Anyway. I am used to the east coast method of answering "How spicy?" with "A little."

The whole system is messed up because there is no frame of reference. Even when you get accustomed to the scale of one restaurant, it's all lost at another place. One place's five stars is another's three. And maybe they adjust for the customer. If a white person walks into a Mexican place and asks for five stars, the chef might snicker and make it pretty spicy, but not too spicy. But if a Mexican walks into a Mexican place and asks for five stars, he might get the whole enchilada. (Sorry.) And if a woman walks in, the rating might automatically be halved.

Anyway. If I really wanted to be an asshole, I should answer in Scoville Heat Units. I think I prefer about a thousand. In the mean time, I'm sticking with non-spicy foods.

Awkward thing no. 242112392 I dream of saying

Random salesgirl at store: Can I help you?
Andy: I'm lonely.

I'm just a boy with a new haircut and that's a pretty nice haircut

When I get a haircut, I always say, "Do whatever you want," and I always get a similar haircut.

And what is it with hipster girls and mullets?

Appreciation Inflation

Every morning, when I get off the bus, I say thank you to the bus driver. I do this because everyone else does it and I don't want to seem rude, but I am not going to do it anymore; not because I want to be rude, but because it is inaccurate and a degradation of language.
We've become overly polite and thank people for doing things they're supposed to do. Like thanking the postman when he brings you mail. It's his job to bring you mail and he gets paid to do it! And these are good jobs. It's not like they're doing us a favor, or performing a job that is difficult/underpaid/or doing something no one else wants to do. From now on, I might say Good Morning or Good Afternoon, but I'm not thanking them anymore. I'm not apologizing to the homeless anymore, either. When they ask me if I can spare any change, I am going to say no.

Do Not Pass Go.

New five dollar bills with more color were introduced recently:



Apparently, the US Dollar has become so worthless that the Treasury decided to just go ahead and make it interchangeable with Monopoly money.

Put your clothes back on young lady!

A friend once said to me, with some disgust, that many of the girls I pointed out as being attractive while we were walking around were slutty looking. I denied this at first (vehemently), but then realized it is absolutely true. Slutty girls ARE attractive. That's the whole point. If slutty girls weren't trying to attract men (if not specifically me) with their provocative clothes and pouty looks, then they wouldn't dress that way at all. Who am I to deny them success after all the trouble they went to?

My most awesome dream.

In the hour between after being briefly woken up by my roommates being loud getting up and when I actually got up, I had the most narratively cohesive dream I have ever had. It is like a mish-mash of various folk and fairy tales and flowers for algernon, and someone should tell me if it is lifted entirely out of something. But anyway:

By some scientific process, which involved cells or sperm or something, I invented a half animal that could speak. This part of the dream I forget a little, but I am sure it is scientifically sound. I paraded my new pet to my friends and we drove around, and it was pretty cool. She started growing and looking more and more like a girl, though I knew she was still part animal, and we hung out a lot because she had no one else. She had shoulder length dark hair, cut at a severe angle rising towards the back, and was easy to take around because she was unfamiliar with everything. I didn't quite trust her though, and by the time she was my height, she was growing at such a fantastically fast rate, I began to get scared that she'd become much larger and then eat me.

Because of my fear, and my innate greed, I resolved to take her to the zoo and sell her for a lot of money. So I told her we'd go for a walk, and she trusted me of course, and somehow this was a really really long walk to the zoo. She continued to age, but without getting taller or bigger, and halfway to the zoo her hair had gone gray and she had become tired from the walking, and I had become guilt-ridden about my awful plan to sell her to the zoo, so I brought her back home.

I realized I loved her, and we had a brief moment as she was lying in bed, and then she died of old age.

And then I woke up and I was sad because it seems inevitable that I am going to lose anything good that might ever happen to me.

Giving Bush the finger

I should really take my economic stimulus tax rebate and donate it to the Democratic presidential nominee.

Speaking of Lint

Am I the only person who finds it immensely satisfying to clean the lint filter in the dryer?