The Future of Sport is Footie.

Battlestar Galactica's overly complex sport, Pyramid, cannot compete with the real world simplicity of Soccer.

The two great blind spots in scifi are sports and religion. There are a few cases where made up games work - I seem to remember the contests in Tron were pretty great, but they were extremely simple. Maybe that’s the trick, if your going to make something up out of whole cloth, less is more. The Force was a solid and sketchy exception to the rule on the religious side. Battlestar Galactica was the worst offender on both counts. "Pyramid" sucked (SO BAD!), and while the set up was really promising - monotheistic robots vs polytheistic humans, the opportunity was squandered. The show degenerated into new-age-ish pap (even new-agers have more depth then that show). Both sports and religion subtracted from that show, but that is almost always the case. 

What got me thinking about this is I spent the last few days watching the World Cup with my very patient friend's Michelle Vaughan & Felix Salmon. I am not a sports fan at all. Felix & Michelle were really great at explaining all the ins and outs of the rules (Felix is a Brit, Michelle is married to one), the dynamics of the teams, the heats (or whatever) and the other various what what (only about 10% of what I was told could have possibly been absorbed by my wimpy non-sport brain).

The Anglican Communion Has The Force

My brother-in-law, Steve Mesler, just published a modest proposal on his Huffington Post Blog about the economic value of legalizing Gay Marriage. It's a fun and friendly piece and worth reading.

When he told me his idea for the post I told him about a homily my father gave (my father is an Episcopalian Priest) while I was visiting him on the West Coast this past spring. As it happened while I was out west he married a young couple. Because I was there, and available, and his son he asked me to assist him during the service (this entailed wearing a frilly red and white alter boy outfit straight out of Heaven Help Us - I so love my dad).

Steve ended up quoting my father's homily at length, The part where my dad spoke about gay marriage in particular. I thought I would just post a bit he did not quote in his post (but he does provide a link to my fathers' entire response to his request for the homily).

Before the wedding I was pretty much obsessing about the fact that I was going to have to appear in public dressed as an alter boy so had not thought to ask my dad what he was going to talk about. When the time came he spoke at about the Church's long struggle to incorporate sex into religious life. He pointed out that the early church was apocalyptic, so all sexual unions were suspect:

There are plenty of signs of patchwork efforts to reconcile biology and apocalyptic expectations, but nowhere are there any indications of church “blessings” of sexual unions – of any kind, never mind same-sex. Other sex is not necessarily better, may be more troublesome, and leads to all kinds of new questions. It might be fun to ask the fundamentalists what they make of Paul’s (that’s Saint Paul’s) warning that a man who resorts to a prostitute for sexual union becomes “one flesh” with her.

Somewhere in the 10th or 11th century – at least one thousand years into this so-called Common Era some newly-married couples began a custom of presenting themselves in the “porch'’ of a church, where, at the end of the Liturgy, the presiding and assisting Clergy came, from the altar, said some prayers and sprinkled them with water of blessing, then leading them back up to the altar rail to make their communion. (Still, the blood runs thicker than the Holy Water, was the cynic’s way of assessing the value of these rites.) “Not that there’s anything wrong with this” was the message (to anticipate Seinfeld), even though monasticism is still better and a way of gaining credit on the divine ledgers.

Now, another thousand years have passed. Old ideas about marriage, its nature, its social purpose, its stability, and its sanctity have been steadily questioned ever since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the discovery of reliable birth-control. This has occasioned a great deal of uneasiness, as any disruption of custom and expectation is bound to do, and with this comes viewing with alarm, denunciations, and rear-guard efforts to paste up the shreds of patriarchal history.

Knowing this, there is certainly a touching confidence revealed in the continuing idea that sacred ceremony can serve to safeguard any personal (and commonly all-too-often impermanent) efforts at fidelity and solemn covenant. When same-sexed couples who treasure each other’s being in the world want to present themselves somewhere regarded as sacred space, and to act in what they want to be a sacred way in declaring their desire to love and to cherish each other throughout the vicissitudes of mortal life, it seems grudging to argue that they must be refused whatever strength and consolation may come through a priest’s prayers and acts of blessing. We can only hope that now, in a turbulent time of change, it may help them, when they encounter refusal, to remember that for one thousand or more years any sexual union of any kind was refused this blessing.

My father the Rev. Robert L Powers marched in Selma Alabama in March of 1965, answering Martin Luther Kings call for religious leaders to join him in and support the Civil rights marchers. I am very glad that he and the Anglican Communion are are out in front again. There is more to read. Again I urge you to check out Steve's post.

A Theory Explaining Lost.

I think the island is a roadside picnic, and that Jacob and the Smoke Monster (my band’s name, I called it) are three-dimensional protrusions of fourth-dimensional beings. Seriously.

I watched Lost at the Bell House last night after a spectacular performance by the band Previously On Lost. (Great show -soooOo geekcore – Frank Zappa meets Rocky Horror. I’ve had their song Wherever San Go stuck in my head all morning. Watching the show with a live audience was really fun too – a lot more fun then I was prepared for.)

After the show I heard a half dozen people talking about their theories, and ended up being interviewed by some guys about my own. I’ve been mulling mine for a couple years now and everything I saw on the show last nights leads me to believe I’m right.

I came to Lost late, so by the time I started watching, the Purgatory Theory had already been floated, convinced pretty much everybody and thoroughly debunked. My impression is that the guys writing the show may have started out with purgatory in mind, but after that theory took off they made a course correction.

I think the best explanation for what is happening on the show is a story called Road Side Picnic by Arkandy and Boris Strugatsky. I ran into the story in an essay by Fredric Jameson, in his book Archaeologies of the Future – which is only to say I am a geek, but I don’t want to give the impression that I have a huge library of vintage Eastern Block scifi on my shelves.

The concept of the Strugatskys' story is very simple: An encounter with an alien species is going to be so radically strange that we will be like ants trying to decipher the evidence left over from a roadside picnic. Imagine the scene from an ant's perspective. There will be matted grass where a blanket was laid out, cigarette butts, chicken bones, apple cores, a pool of oil and a deep rut left the departed couples car.

To the ants the apple core and chicken bones are the equivalent to finding pools of water that heal people or a massive magnetic anomaly power source thingy. The sudden appearance of a deep rut is the equivalent to an island that can move. Evidently I am not the first person to make this connection (I just saw that Lost is mentioned at the bottom of the story’s Wikipedea page – I’m a little devastated), but I think the next part is still mine.

In Arthur C Clark and Stanley Kubrick’s story 2001: A Space Odyssey human astronauts on the moon are confronted by a perfect geometrical figure – a rectilinear Monolith (and magnetic anomaly) - on the eve of the third millennium. The Monolith in their story was a fourth dimensional artifact: "How obvious—how necessary—was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!"

Clark and Kubrick’s story – intentionally or not – echoes Edwin A Abbott’s 1884 book Flatland, in which a 2-dimentional figure named A Square is awaiting the new millennium in his den when he is confronted a perfect geometrical figure, in this case a 3-dimentional sphere. Because A Square is two-dimensional, he experiences the sphere as a miraculous circle that can grow and shrink and has god-like powers of movement and perception (just like the Smoke Monster and the Monolith).

Abbott explains that higher dimensional beings are able look inside lower dimensional beings – That just as a 3-dimensional sphere can look ‘inside’ the closed figure of a square by looking down on it from above (a direction A Square can’t imagine), a 4th dimensional being, like the Monolith or the Smoke Monster, can look inside 3-dimentional being, like Dave Bowman or Jack, from the perspective of the 4th-dimention.

And just as the Monolith appears mysteriously from its extra dimension of hyperspace, and the Smoke monster appears and moves in ways that are mysterious, Abbott explains that from A Square’s perspective the sphere can wink in and out of A Square’s 2-dimensional world simply by going up or down, a direction the flat square has no experience with.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it...

But here’s what I am curious to see: how will the writers of Lost come down on the difference between God and god-like? In all three stories the higher-dimensional beings – the Sphere, the Monolith, Jacob and the Smoke Monster (totally called it, mine) - have a moral dimension. Right now it appears the Lost guys are going for a good and evil split, lets hope they have someone with a theology background writing for them. Clark and Kubrick had a lot of NASA advisors, it’s to bad they didn’t reach out to the Anglicans for technical support as well.

In Flatland the 2 dimensional A Square soon realizes that while the sphere is a higher dimensional being it has no claim to moral superiority. That although the sphere’s powers of movement and perception are god-like in comparison to 2 dimensional beings, A Square is confronted by the reality that god-like is not God, and the sphere has no moral insight to match its x-ray vision and uncanny powers of action.

Abbott was a theologian writing at a time of heightened excitement about the moral revelations that might be supplied by the 4th dimension. It was thought by some at the time that the ghosts contacted during séances might be higher dimensional beings.

Clark and Kubrick's story echoes Abbott’s, but 2001 makes the error that Abbott felt was being made by Spiritualist. Clark said he and Kubrick joked that they had made the most expensive film about God in history. And Kubrick asked, “How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill -- as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?”

But while the world is filled with asymmetrical power relationships, there is no single grain of evidence to support a correlation between power for action and moral insight. After all we can imagine the British Empire as a boot and Gandhi as an ant, but even so the god-like power of the boot for action has no corollary moral infallibility.

I hope Jack and the other human characters on Lost are given a more interesting moral dilemma then the two-dimensional choice between good and evil.

Pat Robertson is a Sith

Sith Lords: Pat Robinson and Emperor Palpatine

Secular life has been under attack for a long time now in America and abroad. And while I was interested to see the books by the New Atheists won a wide readership and have garnered a lot of attention (both positive and negative), our shared secular life should be defended as atheist. By doing so secularists are ceding valuable rhetorical ground to religious reactionaries like Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden.