Blinded, Stoned and Excommunicated by Science

Um, Science? Dude, I'm in the wrong class

I saw this T-shirt for sale on the internet the other day: "Science Doesn't Care What You Believe." This got me thinking about the intersection of science and belief throughout human history.  Talk about abusive, dysfunctional relationships! I totally believe that scientists need their own "Me Too" movement for every incident that they have had to endure whenever some ignorant religioids disbelieve scientific shit that is ABSOLUTELY REAL, just because they're pretty sure Jesus would have disapproved.  Like these human bobble heads:

*Editor's Note: after widespread availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, every one of these women

 have died of the disease, except for the one in the upper right who was arrested for storming

the U.S. Capitol without a mask 

Is it un-Christian of me to hope that natural selection, a.k.a. evolution, removes their genes from the gene pool?  Come to think of it, they probably don't believe in that "Evil-lution" in the first place.  The thing that gets me about those dangerously irresponsible Barbies pictured above is that they just don't have any excuses.  They all live in the 21st Century and have the world of human experience at their fingertips, yet they choose to blame vaccines that can SAVE their autistic, learning disabled brats' LIVES for problems that are either genetic (read THEIR FAULT FOR HAVING CHILDREN) or environmental (read SHITTY FOOD ADDITIVES and POLLUTION ).  At least ancient people had a valid excuse: science hadn't quite been invented yet.

If you think about it, religion was really humanity's first attempt at science.  Why does it rain?  No barometers or high altitude cloud particulate gathers around, so let's invent a story: it's because the Corn God is pleased by your sacrifice of 500 prisoners' beating hearts, so he got Tlaloc to rain on the corn crops so that the People can have tacos, tortillas, nacho chips, tamales, burritos and fajitas.

Why is the sky blue? -it's the same color as the sky-goddess' eyes.  Where does lightning come from?  It's Zeus tossing lightning bolts at monsters and evil people.  And so-on.  

This all began to change in a major way during the Golden Age of Athens (AU-en Age for you chemists) when a certain subset of philosophers including but not limited to Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras and Eratosthenes began to look beyond the amusing stories of the gods and goddesses they had been brought up on.  Prior to this burst of Greek scientific inquiry, there had been serious scientific progress in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, building engineering, agriculture and animal husbandry, and even civil engineering.  All of these advances yielded practical benefits to the society that invented them.  

Some of these ancient engineers, such as the Chinese hydrologist Li Bing of the firm Li Bing and Son were actually deified- made into a god after they died- because people were so freaking grateful for what they did.  Li Bing's contribution was to control the disastrous floods on the Min River that would regularly rip whole villages from their foundations and kill all the people and animals in its path.  To the Chinese of the Warring States period, it was as if Li Bing had actually vanquished the bloodthirsty river god.

That's him on the left, but he's gotta go- he was just Li Bing, hahaha!

Staying with the Chinese briefly, it really cracks me up that some solid advances came about because of some pretty weird, pseudo-religious reasons.  Take that useful invention, gunpowder.  Chinese emperors and nobles were pretty much concerned with keeping all their money and stuff forever, and also living forever.  To help them with the second item, they hired alchemists to invent an immortality pill, but they accidentally invented shit that blew up.  This was then quickly put to use by Taoist priests who used firecrackers to scare away devils.  At some point, the army got a hold of it, tied some to an arrow, and presto, the world's first exploding missile.

And speaking of immortality? Medical historians are pretty certain that it was the Chinese who isolated mercury, iodine and arsenic from their naturally occurring compounds and used them in medicine.  These elements are great sterilization agents because they're so toxic.  However, they also have the unpleasant side effect of death, so it takes a really careful druggist and doctor to have, emm, healthy patient outcomes.  Weird as all this sounds, mercury was used up until the 20th Century to treat syphilis, which wasn't a problem in ancient China.

That is one seriously big-ass Greek fish

Going back to the Greeks for  a moment, I'd like to take the famous Aristotle down a peg.  As much as historians like to call him the first scientist, Aristotle was more like one of those Victorian gentleman amateur "natural philosophers" who indulged their curiosity about the world by traveling around, observing things and philosophizing about causes for what they observed.  Aristotle even went down to the bottom of the bay in a sort-of submarine called a bathysphere.  While this is very cool, it doesn't actually make him a scientist.  To do that; you need to add the scientific method of inquiry, something that would have to wait for Bacon, Newton and Descartes.

These three worthies were a bit closer to being scientists than Aristotle.  Unfortunately, they had the bad luck of existing at different times in history.  Bacon came up with the reasoning process known as inductivism, whereby observations lead to a general law to explain it.  Descartes championed rationalism, where reason, not previously philosophized explanations were the measure of human knowledge.  Newton more or less synthesized Bacon and Descartes' approach and created the scientific method, where the scientist makes a hypothesis, then tests it with rigorously careful and controlled experiences, which either confirms or disproves the original hypothesis.  This is then used to further refine the hypothesis until the ultimate is discovered.

Now I ask you, who can argue with that approach?  Apparently quite a lot of people, both then and now.  Although science owes its beginnings to religion, the parents didn't take too long to distance themselves from their smartypants children.  Take astronomy for example.  In China, Babylon, Baghdad and Mezo-America, the real stars were the astrologers, those pseudo-scientists who had the knack of relating what was going on down on the Earth to what was happening in the Heavens and --get this --predicting what was going to happen based on stars doing their thing.  Astronomers were the sleep-deprived, achy necked, math nerds who did the observations and calculations for the astrologers, who brought home the bacon by fixing errors in official calendars or predicting a prosperous reign for the local despot.  

Enter Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.  This quartet figured out: 1) the Sun is the center of the Solar System; that 2) the Earth and all the other planets go around it in; 3) elliptical orbits, and that 4) these other worlds are far from perfect (sunspots, moon craters, etc).  The religions establishment of the day did not waste too much time going after them.  Copernicus published after he died so as to avoid the inevitable shit-storm he knew would result from writing that the Church was all wrong.

I am Johannes Kepler
and these are not chopsticks

 Galileo wasn't as fortunate.  He was sentenced to house arrest instead of being executed because he recanted his view that what he had observed through telescope with his own eyes actually effing existed.  Brahe and Kepler both had run-ins with the theocratic state on their way to discovering the three laws of planetary motion.  These were science's awkward teenage years: breakthroughs followed by repression and charges of witchcraft.

Why were people so afraid of scientific advancement?  Part of the reason lies in the political power structures of the day.  Rule by hereditary monarchs relies on the religious establishment to legitimize their rule.  Attack the irrationality of religion with the logic of science and you'll provoke a response from the state who, quite rightly, sees any attack on religion as an attack on the state.  Another part of the reason is the sheer popular ignorance of the times.  The world would have to wait for free public education and universal literacy.  Science can be hard to get a handle on, and especially hard to believe if it goes against generations of traditional beliefs held by a people.  One final reason may be the generic one that people are usually afraid of change.  Seeing the world through scientific eyes requires a fundamental intellectual and emotional realignment of one's sensibilities.  Society was just not ready.  But what about later, when scientific ideas and technology had had a chance to percolate through the cultural zeitgeist?

Its now the 19th Century and science seems to have come of age.  Evolution explained creation, electricity explained lightning, and psychology provided an alternative to the confession box.  And yet it is in the 19th Century that the germs of scientific resistance begin to coalesce.  Because of the fundamental attack on religion that evolution represented --an attack at the very existence of God in the universe --the creationist narrative was born.  God created everything, including fossils, and evolution is just a theory, an evil one at that.  To the masses, new technology really looked like magic, something which they could somehow understand better than what it actually was.  And the methods psychology used to help people could also be used to shape and control their minds.

Skipping over the 20th Century's bloody wars and genocides, here we are in the 21st Century and science has taken one on the chin.  People have more information today than they did in pre-modern times, but they are no less ignorant.  Today is witnessing the rise of militant state-sponsored religious intolerance and extremist violence, fed by recruiting marginal personalities off of social networks.  We also see the rise of totalitarian dictators who command total allegiance to their word, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which also spreads their lies and disinformation.  Anything critical is branded "fake" or "sacrilegious."  Assaults are arranged on any variety of change, from changing sex roles, gender identification and advances in microbiology.  Medicine and technology are under attack in ways not seen since the days of the witch hunts.

Rigged witch-hunt!  -that's how they caught me :-(

Science is surprisingly ill equipped to deal with this current threat.  Scientists are by training and nature very rational people.  Their opponents are not.  In order to prevail, science won't have to win converts, because the evangelical anti-vaccine pro-life non-gmo crowd has things they believe and things they will never believe.  No, science needs to open up a can o' medieval whuppass on these ignorant dipshits.  Mandate vaccines as a public health measure.  Quarantine them and their dirty kids if they refuse.  Institute anti-propaganda laws and give some teeth back to the libel and slander laws.  Choke off their mega-churches and radicalizing mosques with civil taxes.  And do it pretty soon, or else we take a Great Leap Backwards.

The Separation of Church and State

Today's post focuses on those times and places in human history when government and religion either got along or didn't, or maybe they didn't even notice each other for a while, or maybe, like, Religion got all weirded-out and did some stuff that got the government all p-o'd and junk, which made Religion behave even weirder until government was all like, "Yeah, no, you can't ever do that again, so we're just gonna kick you and all your followers out."  So Religion was all like, "FINE, what-EVER, just don't go bother us right before you DIE and want to be saved from the ultimate unpleasantness that awaits you on the OTHER SIDE, because we'll probably just ignore you, so HA!"

Not very mature for a venerable institution like Religion, which actually predated government in the chronological order of sociological institutions.  This is because the first of what we might call governments were probably extensions of the family's extended cousin, the clan.  Humans are similar to dogs, cats and naked mole-rats in that they are social animals who like to live together in groups.  There are genetic and psychological reasons I won't go into here that evolutionarily favor species that can live together without killing each other or eating up all the food in sight, so until early humans figured this out and set up actual rules for living together in groups larger than a clan, Religion had the whole place to itself.  This is because humans are the Earth's only animals that practice religious rituals.  Note, for example, the complete lack of synagogues inside a termite mound.

How do we know humans practiced religion?  A combination of two things: they way they treated their dead, and the pictures they drew on rock walls.  As far back as 50,000 years ago, people were burying their friends and families underground, arranging the corpse carefully, and including stuff the dead person owned along with the body.  This implies a belief in some sort of an afterlife, where the deceased person will need his stuff in order to get along.  What would you like to be buried with?  If

Ok, there's Fred, Jacquie, Wanda, Billy, your Mom and some random dude,
but WTF, who is that HUGE guy-thing on the right?!?

you believe the song, Willie the Wimp was buried in his Cadillac Seville.  Now, about those cave-rock wall- rock overhang drawings: they seem to show supernatural beings interacting with primitive people.  Could these be ancient aliens? --or could they be Supreme Beings conjured from the minds of primitive artists?  Also, among the animal paintings at Lascaux cave in France, there is a picture of a fearsome cave lion that had been struck thousands of times.  This implies a ritual --a ritual killing of a powerful predator in this case.


Government and religion ultimately collided in that totally man-made, artificial environment called the city-state.  These places were breaking out all over the Near East (as opposed to the Way-the-f*ck-over-There East) in places like Jericho and Sumeria.  Historians are fairly certain that the earliest governments of these places were priest/kings.  Why?  Because up to that point, only religious leaders could convince that many people to do things they might not ordinarily do, such as dig and maintain irrigation canals, not immediately kill people who offended them in some way, or construct these really weird statues and temples dedicated to gods and goddesses,  In Sumer, the priests even had a corner on the sex-trade market.  The temple of Ishtar was staffed by priestesses who were literally prostitutes.  For a price, men could lie with a priestess who was specially trained in the arts erotica.  Even amateurs got into the act.  If a Sumerian girl wanted a husband and wasn't rich enough or pretty enough to get a lot of suitors, all she had to do was to hang-out at Ishtar's temple and give it away for free --just as long as the guy took her home and raised a family with her.

My victory over these infidel unbelievers is made all the more complete
by using my wind-up horse chariot to smash the city's idols!  Mwa-ha-ha!

Religious leaders had to take a back seat to military leaders once cities started raiding each other for scarce supplies, but religion was still important.  What would make an army fight even better than usual?  Why, a special blessing from a priest!  However, there was trouble on the horizon.  See, whenever a victorious army broke into the walls of an enemy city, the second thing they did was to trash that city's gods by smashing the idols and killing the priests.  The first thing the army did was, of course, wipe their hobnailed boots on the corpses of dead enemies.  Thus began humanity's first religious war, a war that has been raging off-and-on for about four thousand years!

Sometimes, religious leaders and government leaders in the same city got into spats.  These usually worked themselves out with select banishments or a few well-chosen executions.  Sometimes religion won; sometimes government won.  This was the state of things when the Roman Empire was forced to deal with a new religious cult that had started in one of its eastern provinces.

Colosseum cat-food time!

On the whole, Romans thought of themselves as very open-minded when it came to the subject of religion.  There was, in fact, a temple in Rome called the Pantheon that had idols of every god/goddess/religious-type-thing worshipped in every corner of the Empire.  Romans had their own religion, of course, which was bits borrowed from the Etruscans, Greeks, Carthaginians and stuff they had pulled right out of their own toga-covered asses, but they generally left the different peoples within the empire alone when it came to practicing religion, except when that practice included human sacrifice which, strange as it may seen what with their love for gladiatorial contests and public executions, the Romans totally hated.  Because the Celtic Druids were big into the old kill-em-for-piety's sake rituals, the Romans got rid of Druids wherever they found them.  So what were they supposed to do with this weird messianic cult of ex-Jews who reportedly ate flesh, drank blood, and nevertheless professed to love their neighbors?

The first Christians were, of course, Jews who followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant rabbi who had his own problem with the Roman state --it crucified Him.  After Saul of Tarsus' conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul, as he was now called, enlarged the Christian communion to include Gentiles, ie., guys who still had their foreskins attached.  Pretty soon, there was even a bunch of these Christians living in Rome itself --they had followed the Apostle Peter there and helped him set up a church.  All went swimmingly until the sect began to grow and flex a little political muscle among the Roman plebeians, the working stiffs of Rome, with whom the new cult was very popular.  Slaves liked it too.  Emperor Nero came up with the idea of blaming the Christians for the great fire during his reign ("Woah, I've seen fire during my reign," he reportedly sang from his own private stage during the worst of the flames), and thus kicked-off a kind of free-for-all on Christians.  Things got so bad that Christians were driven literally underground into these burial vaults called catacombs, where even there they were sometimes ratted-out by a jealous neighbor or a total dipshit.

The Mass is ended.  Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.  And Tiberias? Tell your mom to keep her big, fat mouth shut!

However, Christians hung in there (some at the end of their ropes) and eventually were made the official religion of the Roman Empire.  There was only one small problem: the Roman Empire kind of sucked at this point.  It was invaded by a bunch of Germanic tribes and one Central Asian bunch called the Huns, until nothing was left but the Greek part which historians later called "The Greek Part of the Former Roman Empire," later shortened to "Byzantine," just because.  So now that the Church was still relatively ok and the State was on life-support --at least in the West --the Church busied itself with setting up a hierarchy because it knew that the state would come around sooner or later and have it out with the Church.

Note to self: don't piss-off Henry I-
he's a really mean drunk!

And a mere 604 years later, trouble broke out between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over something called investiture.  Basically, this bit of silliness was over the question of who got to hand out Church offices like Bishoprics and Archbishoprics: the Pope or the Emperor?  To be fair, the Church was well-meaning, attempting to curb the practice of Simony, where Church offices were sold to rich people.  When Gregory's reform-minded clergy told the Holy Roman Empire's nobility that Church offices were no longer for sale, the Emperor himself got into the fray, sending off some nasty-grams to the Pope, calling Holy Father, "Hildebrand, not-Pope but false monk," and other such neener-neenerisms that made Pope Greg hopping-mad.  This issue even darkened the relationship between Henry I of England and Pope Paschal II, resulting in Henry's pal, Thomas `a Beckett, getting sliced-up by a quartet of Henry's knights in the basement of Canterbury Cathedral.

It wasn't until 1122 that H.R. Emperor Henry V and Pope Calixtus II settled the whole unpleasantness with the unappetizing-sounding Concordat of Worms.  The meat of the Concordat is something like this:  kings and emperors and, I don't know, Grand High Poo-bahs, have this stuff called secular power, with which they can make Bishops in their territory help equip an army if the place gets invaded.  Popes have this stuff called sacred power, with which they give Bishops the power and authority and the duty to go out there and save some souls for Jesus.  So yeah, after all the pushing, shoving and at least one murdered Archbishop of Canterbury, it all came down to a compromise between Church and State that puts Bishops under both authorities.  Still want to be a Bishop?

Now you would think that with this kind of sensible solution, there would never again be a problem between the Church and State, right?  I sure thought that!  But alas and alack, this was not to be.  See, there was this little dust-up called the Protestant Reformation that brought out some... issues... that had been swept under the ol' altar rug for about 350 years.  In England, a different numbered Henry --number VIII --completely kicked the Catholic Church out of England and set up his very own church just so he could get a divorce.  And that new church, the Anglican Church?  Yeah, the English King was in charge of it.  In Germany, there were a couple of small wars (the Schmalkaldic Wars) that ended with the Peace of Augsburg, which basically gave German princes the right to pick Catholicism or Lutheranism as the official religion of their territory.  Protestantism continued to spread to places like Sweeden and Switzerland and even to the Netherlands, which made some devout Catholic kings totally furious.

Things got positively out of control with religion and the state with the 30 Years War, which lasted, um, 30 years.  It pitted the Protestant nations of Europe against the Catholic nations.  Nobody really won, lots of people got killed, but the French --who entered the war late and on the Protestant side, which is weird because the country was run by a Catholic Archbishop --kind of came out on top by not losing as badly as everyone else did.  They even got to thrash their next door neighbors, those miserable Spanish, in the process.  Hooray for religious wars!

Those are the Spanish on the horses, wisely choosing to not make horse-kebabs on the ends of French pikes.

Church vs. State conflicts became a bit more subtle after the 30 Years War, and it mostly had something to do with how much influence States allowed the Church to have in their countries.  There were countries like Spain and England where a person's religion was basically ordered by the State.  In 1492, Spain kicked all the Moors and Jews out, then created the feared Inquisition to find people who had fake-converted to Catholicism but were still secret Jews or Muslims.  The Catholic Church would hang onto this much influence in Spain until the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the 1970's.  In Elizabeth I's England, she didn't really care of some English people were Catholic, just as long as they showed up once a month to an Anglican service.  Those who followed were less tolerant.  James I kicked the Pilgrim Separatists out, first to Holland, later to Plymouth, Massachusetts.  His son, Charles, got his head cut off because 1. he married a Catholic; 2. he probably was a Catholic; 3. he pissed-off the Puritan Parliament.  Oliver Cromwell then set up a Puritan military state in England and attacked Catholic Ireland because he was that much of a dick.  He even attacked the Protestant Dutch because he may or may not have gotten an STD from an Amsterdam hooker (ok ok, I just totally made that up- but the Anglo-Dutch war really happened).

In America before our revolution, Church and State had a mixed relationship.  New England started out pretty much as a theocracy lead by fiery Puritan Calvinist preachers, which went great until Salem and some other towns were convinced they were besieged by witches and hanged a bunch of mostly harmless old women who had a few too many pet cats.  In Virginia, they allowed so-called "dissenter meetings" such as Presbyterians and Baptists, but they had to pay a tax which was used to support the Anglican clergy in Virginia.  Maryland was basically set up as a place that English Catholics could go and, if they didn't starve or get killed by Indians, live in relative peace and quiet.  However, Maryland was soon overrun by Protestants, and Catholics had to put up with not being able to openly go to Mass without being molested by their neighbors.

I am Thomas Jefferson.  #*$! religion!

Enter Thomas Jefferson.  He was a young man who traveled in Europe, was a good student of Enlightenment authors, and although a nominal Anglican himself, was kind of bugged by Virginia having its own "official" religion.  I guess some of his best friends were Quakers, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics, or Presbyterians.  He drafted Virginia's Religious Toleration Statute, which was basically copied and stuck into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights which, along with Article IV, made the United States of America the very first country in the entire world that explicitly separated Church from State.

Over the years, lots of Supreme Court cases tested and further refined the "Establishment," "Free-Exercise" and "Religious Test" clauses of the Constitution, which has had the effect of really pissing-off the fundamentalist Christian right-wing wack-o's who basically want to unite Church and State and have THEM in charge of BOTH.  On the other side of the coin, atheists get all bent when they look at the money in their pocket and have to read, "In God We Trust," or send their kids to a school where the Pledge of Allegiance is recited, especially the "One Nation, under God" part.  There's basically just no pleasing some people!

Go in peace, and thank you very much.

There are a lot of religions in the United States today, some familiar, some exotic, some weird, and at least one completely preposterous religion.  I am referring, of course, to the Chapel of the Church of the Divine Elvis Presley, a "religion" that was invented by my friend, Voga Wallace, as a way to get out of paying his city property tax by claiming part of his apartment was a religious shrine devoted to --you guessed it --Elvis.  A small room that was probably supposed to be a pantry was outfitted with four Elvis posters lit by a dangling black light, an old guitar case was set up on a trunk, into which people were encouraged to leave free-will "Love Me Tender" offerings, and the perpetual "Elvis Light," a candle stuck inside an Elvis drinking glass, was always lit --whenever Voga remembered to do it.  And I am completely not making this up when I tell you that the city bought this charade, even listing it as one of the city's "places of worship"  on some grotty official publication.  That, despite the fact that the whole time I hung out with him, there was never one, not one person who visited Voga's stupid shrine!

Lastly, let me just say this: even though our state and religion are separate here in America, that doesn't mean that Americans aren't friendly towards religion in general.  Just look at the parking lots that surround mega-churches on a Sunday morning and you'll see what I mean.  So Iran can just suck it whenever they try to pass us off as the Great Satan or whatever.  I bet you there are more mosques in America than there are in Iran, tons more synagogues and tons-squared more churches to boot.  We just don't think our religious leaders should have a say in fixing potholes in the streets, or whether or not to go to war with some country whose religious leaders call us the Great Satan.  Get it?  So here's to religion and government: may they peacefully coexist as separate institutions because bad things tend to happen whenever they team-up.

OH NO! Zombies Ate My History Homework!

If your whole life (death?) revolves around watching the Walking Dead, watching the Talking Dead podcast, visiting Walking Dead fan-sites, reading Walking Dead graphic novels and fanzines, then your world --like so many others' worlds, Adjunct Proff's included --is on hiatus until the next series installment.  But not to worry: Adjunct Proff is ready to fill the breach in our sadly temporarily depleted lives by filling you all in on the origins and continuing influence exercised by fears of the Zombie Apocalypse on our collective zeitgeist (German for whatever is friggin' buggin' you now).

Zombies ate my zeitgeist!  Either that, or
there's a zeitgeist peeking at me when I pee!

So, zombies have been around since... "Weekend at Bernies 2?" --the zombie movies of the 1950's drive-ins?  --the days of Vaudeville shows?  How about ever since the first friggin' story that human beings bothered to scratch onto a clay tablet sometime during the Akkadian period of Sumerian civilization?  Yup, those wacky Mesopotamians are at it again --this time giving voice to humanity's fear of the Zombie Apocalypse.  It's all right here in the first real story ever cuneiformed: The Epic of Gilgamesh:


Ishtar spoke to her father, Anu, saying:"Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!"

Now I don't claim to be able to translate ancient Akkadian cuneiform, but that sure sounds a lot like any given day on AMC's "The Walking Dead."  Why do zombies show up troubling the minds of ancient Akkadians?  Was this a recurring problem, dead rising from the grave and eating the living?  

We turn next to the ancient Greeks, who knew a thing or two about fighting monsters.  Ladies with snakes for hair?  --half-man-half-bulls who lived in an underground maze?  --whirlpools with teeth?  No problem: the Greeks would kill 'em all, then sit down with Homer and tell him all about it so that he could stick their adventures in his next epic poem.

"To which mighty Achilles said, "D'oh!"

Everybody knows the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two poems made ancient Homer's rep as da mos' def-jam mutha of the Greeks, yo. Nobody knows about the Nostoi, yet another epic poetry spin-off of the Trojan War. This story follows Achilles' kinsmen, the Myrmidons, and their long, adventure-filled journey home from the Trojan War. On one island, guess who they come across? These guys:

“It was there on that island when they noticed the men of ragged appearance. 
Their skin was a dull pale gray and the scent of putrid flesh was upon them. 
Their eyes were black as beings void of souls, they approached the Myrmidons with all the madness of a wild beast.”

And who might these dudes be? I dunno, maybe WALKERS?!? Guess what the baddest-of-the-badass Trojan War veterans, a.k.a. the Myrmidons, did then?  Did they stop those ancient Greek walkers with precise sword-head-shots?  Noooooo- they ran for it and "cursed Hades for sending these fiends amongst them."  Wow, where's Michonne when you need her?

About three thousand years in the future...

Fast-forward to Ireland in the 700's.  Archaeologists have recently uncovered a pile of skeletons buried sometime in the 700's with --get this -- bricks in their mouths.  When asked why the usually sensible medieval Irish did this wack-burial-job, anthropologists hypothesized that they were buried with a brick in their mouth in order to prevent them from --wait for it --rising from the dead like a zombie!  I am SO  COMPLETELY  NOT  making this up!  Ok ok, St. Patrick may not have driven the snakes from Ireland (see my St. Patrick's Day blog for more on this) --maybe his miracle was keeping the medieval Irish zombies DEAD  AND  BURIED  instead of running around the Emerald Isle noshing on the living.

...and they're magically delicious!

I could go on and tell you about Voodoo and Rastafarian religious practices, as well as relate Christian beliefs in an end of days that will occur before the return of Jesus Christ from, ah, Rancho Cucamonga, but you already know that  if you're hard-core zombie-apocalypse-preppers like me --that, or the demographic targeted by "The Walking Dead."

So, what's my favorite zombie scenario?  I really, really liked that movie, "Shawn of the Dead," where this British guy, his slacker buddy and his girlfriend survive the British zombie apocalypse by hiding out in the local pub that she gives him grief about spending so much time in before the British zombie apocalypse.  Funny, witty, edgy and ironic without being annoyingly British smuggish.

Let me leave you with this one brain-stretcher.  As already blogged-about in her award-winning blog, Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess, and her husband, Victor, a.k.a. the saint who's still married to The Bloggess, once had a conversation that went like this:

Me: Oh my God, did you see the name of that cemetery?  “Resurrection Cemetery”.  What a terrible name for a cemetery.

Victor:  It’s because they believe in the resurrection of believers, dumbass.

Me:  Still.  Some things just shouldn’t be resurrected.  Just what we need is a bunch of damn zombies wandering the earth. 

Victor:  Yeah, that’s not “resurrection”.  That’s “reanimation”.

Me:  Same difference.  Although I guess “Reanimation Cemetery” would be slightly more disturbing. 

Victor: It’s not the same difference.  Zombies are reanimated, but they don’t have their previous mental capacity so it’s not a resurrection.  Technically it’s “zombification”.

So, just what IS  this resurrection anyway, hmmm?  Isn't it the same quality that FREAKS  US  OUT  in zombies?  It's like, Jesus  JUST  WON'T  STAY  DEAD!!!  But worse of all, it means that for 2013 years, a lot of people have been worshipping, have constructed an entire religion around, and have committed unspeakable acts in the name of  A  ZOMBIE!!!  Ponder that one until Rick, Karl, Daryl, Michonne and the whole live-and-undead gang return for Season 4 which will be, no doubt, Totally Killer.

...and, unlike all those other zombies, Jesus can also walk on water
--which makes him slightly more creepy, come to think of it!

Easter: Another Catholic Rip-off of a Pagan Holiday

OK, just what the heck does a bunny hopping down the bunny-trail, hiding colored hard-boiled eggs, have to do with the death and resurrection of a 1st century Jewish itinerant rabbi? (no, a rabbit and a rabbi aren't the same critter!  Jeesh!  Didn't you ever watch any Bugs Bunny when you were a kid?)  What about Easter Egg Rolls on the White House Lawn?  What's the deal with ham, lamb, duck and other tasty critters at Easter dinner?  Where do marshmallow Peeps come into the picture? When did this straightforward holiday (a guy gets horribly executed, dies, descends into Hell, rises, is seated at the Right Hand of God, and will come back later and judge everyone who has ever lived) get so complicated?

First it was the ADA complaining about all the sugar in chocolate bunnies;
now it's parents who won't let their kids talk to giant rabbits.  Sigh!

Like most things, it all starts at the Dawn of Time (about 5:27 am EST on April 1, 100,003 BCE [which stands for Before Crap Existed]).  For some reason, men and women like having sex and like having babies (men mostly --the closest most men get to having the 'baby experience' is having too much fiber in their diet).  They liked it so much in prehistoric times that they made little clay figurines of big, fat, healthy, pregnant ladies as a kind of votive offering to whatever force in the universe helped people to have a baby of their own.  You see, the human reproductive system is a bit of a mess.  Women aren't fertile all the time, and when they are, they don't really advertise it the way sensible animals do, with displays like swollen, red genitals, random sprays of  sex-hormones, or nicely hand-lettered signs saying "Let's boink!"  Which explains why men are horny all the time --they've literally got a 1-minute window to release the swimmers into the right gal, or humanity goes extinct.

There it is! I told you guys I had a map!

Over the years, female fertility became a matter of concern because scads of people were dying (they didn't know it was because they were drinking from the same river they pooped in), so fertility cults became all the rage.  And what's not to like about a cult that advocates lots of sex, followed by lots of babies?  The Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Mayan and Inca all had a fertility goddess of some description (the prettiest? Roman Venus, of course ;-))  And that's where things stood (lay?) when Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman Procuator of Palestine, Pontius Pilot, sometime around 35 CE (which stands for Crap Exists!)  We're not really sure of the year, because the four Gospels are a little fuzzy on details like dates; we do know it happened during Passover Week in Jerusalem.

"Always look on the bright side of life!" whistling...

Meanwhile, back in Rome, the people were probably celebrating the mystery cult of Cybele, a major fertility goddess whose main shrine was on top of Vatican Hill.  She had a lover/husband/consort/pimp-Daddy named Attis who's big claim to fame was dying in a blood-bath on the first Friday after the spring equinox and being reborn the following Sunday.  Sound familiar?  So, when Christianity made it to Rome from the provinces, Roman Christians celebrated Jesus' resurrection at the same time.  They must have figured hey, there's already a party going on --we'll just have our little get-together and nobody will notice (wrong - the Romans regularly used Christians as wild animal food in the Colosseum).

Nice kitty! Damnit, which one of you is wearing that catnip cologne?

Christianity survived Rome somehow (they steered clear of the Suburna at night) and took its act on the road, where it promptly bumped into several Germanic and Gallic fertility cults similar to Cybele's.  One was the Saxon cult of Eostre (who some people pronounced as Eastre), the Saxon mother-goddess extraordinaire.  Her big festival was right around the time that Roman Christians celebrated the Resurrection, so the early Church fathers simply hijacked the party and substituted Jesus for Eastre.  It was that simple. And because people weren't as sharp then as they are now, it was a long time before anybody noticed the switcheroo and by then, people had already started wearing cute little crucifixes on chains around their necks and going to Mass and all that, so they just kept Jesus and forgot about... what's-her-name.

It's Eastre, you dipshit.  Try and have a baby now, lol!

Not all of Saxon-Mommy's influence was stamped-out by the early Church, however.  The rabbit was one of her sacred animals, because everybody knows that rabbits breed like... well, rabbits (hey, she is a fertility goddess).  Bird eggs were also sacred to Eastre because of the life they contained within the shell (unless you like yours scrambled), so during her festival, parents would dye eggs pretty colors using berries or plants like woad and hide them around the village for children to find.

Easter's pagan origins were such an open secret that those no-nonsense-tolerated types, the English Puritans, forbade any Easter celebrations in England and where they had settled in America.  To be fair, Easter celebrations in England had gotten a bit out of hand by the time of the Elizabethan Age (what the exact age was, nobody ever knew because Liz always lied about her age.  And wore a wig), so much so that it resembled a whole village of Yorkshiremen staggering around blind-drunk and vomiting wherever they could and however much they had just drunk.

Being a Puritan is way more fun than Easter egg hunts.
Ok ok, being a Puritan blows.

Celebrating Easter in America didn't even really catch on until after the Civil War in the 1870's.  My guess is that the Civil War, with its 600,003 dead made the collective American mind snap, opening it to a flood of longing for the departed and a fervent belief in the Resurrected Christ as a way to cope with all the sadness of war.  So, while ministers and priests dusted-off their Bibles and put the finishing touches on their Easter sermons (sermen? sermans?), American people were bugging really old people for stories of how folks back home in England used to celebrate before Oliver Cromwell kicked the seven shades of shite out of someone for having the gall to celebrate such pagan deviltry.


But since Americans are Americans (our ancestors were tossed out of every decent country in the world), they kept the serious God-'n-Jesus stuff at the church and centered the fun holiday stuff around children, who are the perfect symbols of fertility if you stop and think about it.  Now all that was needed was to add a dash of chocolate, and the Americans had a perfect holiday.

I want to close this blog by saying that I totally buy the whole death-and-resurrection bit, because without it, Jesus would just have been some ordinary Jewish preacher who got the shaft (of the centurion's spear in His side, along with a crown of thorns, a cross and a vinegar-soaked sponge to suck on while He died [those Roman douchebags!]).  I believed He died for our sins and that He will come back one day when we least expect it.  I have to believe this, because otherwise, it's such a poorly written story that nobody would believe in Jesus and we'd all be stuck worshipping some crazy forest lady who had too many rabbits and a thing for eggs (see above).  Much mischief has been done in Jesus' name, but more good things have been done as well.  That makes JC OK in my book.  Happy Easter!

Yo, back atcha, Adjunct Proff buddy!  You da bomb!