German Nuclear Power Update: A “Bizarre” Twist

In the ultra-stereotyped world of Germany’s Spiegel Magazine, the three most common words used to describe anything going on in America are “Fiasko,” “Debakel,” and “Bizarr.”  As it happens, on rare occasions, “bizarr” things happen in Germany, too.  In my last post I described the fine anti-nuclear posing of that country’s activist peacocks.  Well, according to Spiegel, another rare bird has just outdone them all.  Author and TV moderator Charlotte Roche has just offered to jump in the sack with Christian Wulff, president of the Federal Republic, if only he will refrain from signing a law to keep Germany’s nuclear power plants on line.  Apparently her husband has agreed to the deal, and Charlotte has assured the President that, ” I have tattoos,” just like his wife.  So far no one has reported seeing Wulff rushing to the drugstore to stock up on Viagra, but a commenter on the article demonstrates that the good, old German spirit isn’t dead:

Super! Now the President can show what kind of balls he really has by 1) Accepting the agreement, and 2) then signing the law anyway.

Charlotte Roche

Liveblogging Germany’s Nuclear Ninnies

As I write this, Der Spiegel is liveblogging the progress of spent nuclear fuel containers from the French reprocessing plant at La Hague to the German waste storage facility at Gorleben.  Germany’s nuclear ninnies have turned the event into low farce.  Activists have planned events all along the way to satisfy the need of even the most narcissistic of the country’s environmental saviors to strike heroic and pious poses, and ostentatious public piety is what Germany’s “environmental” movement is all about.  No matter that the only things these zealots will really accomplish if they succeed is to keep dirty coal plants on line to take the place of the reactors they shut down.  Other than pumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, the particulates and radioactive ash from those coal plants will certainly result in the needless deaths of hundreds of their countrymen.  That will be the reality of ending nuclear power in Germany, but reality means nothing to these people.  They are not in the street to save the environment.  They are in the street to pose as saviors of the environment.  It’s so, so satisfying to ride heroically forth against evil environmental dragons, taking care, of course, to make sure that as many of your fellow citizens as possible can see you in your shining armor, and nuclear energy makes such a perfect evil dragon.  No matter that the evil is imaginary.  They just can’t do without such a wonderful evil dragon.  To take it away would be like taking drugs away from an addict.  So the fake evil dragon must live on, even if it means feeding the real one.  Some examples from Spiegel’s blog of how Germany’s “saviors” are getting their rocks off:

9:15 The 1000 to 1500 activists from Camp Metzingen are attempting to reach the rail line. It’s unclear at the moment whether they’ve reached the lines. The first wave of demonstrators is lying on the ground with streaming eyes. Apparently the police used tear gas to keep them from the rails. Photographers were rudely turned away. (How noble! How heroic!)

9:35 Water cannons have been brought up along the rail line and are being used against those who are trying to damage the rail bed.

10:45 (Peaceful) Demonstrators have doused an armored police vehicle with tar and set it on fire.

1:02 PM “We don’t want violence (!!) but rather a debate (yeah, right) about ending nuclear power, and appeal to the police to renounce the use of force,” said Wolfgang Emke, a spokesman for a citizen’s group from Luchow-Dannenberg.

…and so the sorry charade goes on.  People like this will never listen to reason, because it would require them to give up the illusion that they are noble saviors of mankind.  Outside of that illusion, many of them have no life.  The evil dragon must remain evil, or the whole, rotten facade that supports their sense of self-worth will collapse.  That’s the reality of the “environmental” movement, not just in Germany, but in any other country one could name.  They’re just one more manifestation of what H. L. Mencken used to call the “Uplift.”   Those who are being asked to make real sacrifices to humor these people are getting increasingly tired of playing along.  They are starting to strike back with an ideological narrative of their own, and don’t mind being called names by their enemies.  They have heard the zealots on the other side yell “wolf” too many times.  The problem is that, with six billion plus of us on the planet already, as our population relentlessly increases, the real wolf (or more likely, wolves) will surely come.  When they do, all the heroic posing in the world won’t stop them.

DARPA’s “100 Year Starship” and Planetary Colonization

DARPA seems to have its priorities straight when it comes to space exploration.  The agency is funding what it calls the “100 Year Starship” program to study novel propulsion systems with the eventual goal of colonizing space.    Pete Worden, Director of NASA’s Ames Center, suggests that Mars might be colonized by 2030 via one-way missions.  It’s an obvious choice, really.  There’s little point in sending humans to Mars unless they’re going to stay there, and, at least from my point of view, establishing a permanent presence on the red planet is a good idea.  My point of view is based on the conclusion that, if there’s really anything that we “ought” to do, it’s survive.  Everything about us that makes us what we are evolved because it promoted our survival, so it seems that survival is a reasonable goal.  There’s no absolutely legitimate reason why we should survive, but, if we don’t, it would seem to indicate that we are a dysfunctional species, and I find that thought unpleasant.  There, in a nutshell, is my rationale for making human survival my number one priority. 

If we seek to survive then, when it comes to planets, it would be unwise to put all of our eggs in one basket.  Steven Hawking apparently agrees with me on this, as can be seen here and here. In his words,

It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.

Not unexpectedly in this hypermoralistic age, morality is being dragged into the debate.  The usual “ethics experts” are ringing their hands about how and under what circumstances we have a “right” to colonize space, and what we must do to avoid being “immoral” in the process.  Related discussions can be found here and here.  Apparently it never occurs to people who raise such issues that human beings make moral judgments and are able to conceive of such things as “rights” only because of the existence of emotional wiring in our brains that evolved because it promoted our survival and that of our prehuman ancestors.  Since it evolved at times and under circumstances that were apparently uninfluenced by what was happening on other planets, morality and “rights” are relevant to the issue only to the extent that they muddy the waters.

Assuming that others agree with me and Dr. Hawking that survival is a desirable goal, then ultimately we must seek to move beyond our own solar system.  Unfortunately there are severe constraints on our ability to send human beings on such long voyages owing to the vast amounts of energy that would be necessary to make interstellar journey’s within human lifetimes.  For the time being, at least, we must rely on very small vessels that may take a very long time to reach their goals.  Nanotechnology is certainly part of the answer.  Tiny probes might survey the earth-like planets we discover to determine their capacity to support life.  Those found suitable should be seeded with life as soon as possible.  Again, because of energy constraints, it may only be possible to send one-celled or very simple life forms at first.  They can survive indefinitely long voyages in space, and would be the logical choice to begin seeding other planets.  Self-replicating nano-robots might then be sent capable of building a suitable environment for more complex life forms, including incubators and surrogate parents.  At that point, it would become possible to send more complex life forms, including human beings, in the form of frozen fertilized eggs.  These are some of the things we might consider doing if we consider our survival important.

Of course, any number of the pathologically pious among us might find what I’ve written above grossly immoral.  The fact remains that there is no legitimate basis for such a judgment.  Morality exists because it promoted our survival.  There can be nothing more immoral than failing to survive.

The Daedalus Starship

Jesus Interrupted: Bart Ehrman and the Contradictions in the Bible

The fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible has been known to scholars for centuries.  Martin Luther famously called the Book of James “ an epistle of straw” with “nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it . . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle,” added that the Book of Esther was “without boots or spurs,” and called the authorship of the Pentateuch and several other books into question.  The great 18th century atheist Jean Meslier cited numerous contradictions, as did Voltaire, and German scholars in the 19th century pretty much demolished the notion that the Bible is the “inerrant word of God.”  Enter Bart Ehrman and his remarkable book, Jesus, Interrupted.  Ehrman goes through many of the most important contradictions, noting how easy it is to see them if the books of the Bible are read side by side, or “horizontally,” as he puts it.  Beyond that, he guides the reader on a tour of the historical Bible, describing what we know about the authors, why they often weren’t who they claimed to be, and why it’s important to consider what each of them believed about Jesus and was trying to accomplish in writing their books.  In a word, he describes the Bible as very much a human rather than a divine product.

As I do not believe in supernatural beings myself, what surprised me about all this was not the fact that there are many contradictions in the Bible, but Ehrman’s claim that this historical-critical approach to it has been taught to most of the graduates of our religious seminaries for the better part of the last century.  Most of our clerics are well aware of the facts, accept them, but, for one reason or another, have decided not to pass the word along to their flocks.  In Ehrman’s words,

…the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to paster churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

Ehrman is a refreshing author to read.  He comes from an evangelical Christian background, but eventually became an agnostic, although not, as he claims because of any doubts about the divine authorship of the Bible.  Unlike some of the “new atheist” authors, he doesn’t write with his Amity/Enmity Complex on his sleeve.  In reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, for example, one often gets the impression spittle is literally flying off the pages as he rants about the “American Taliban” of evangelical Christians, getting so carried away in the process that he repeats an urban legend about how James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, had  told the U.S. Congress that protecting the environment was not important because Jesus would come back soon.  Ehrman, on the other hand, not only does not condemn Christian belief, but claims that the realization that the authorship of the Bible is human rather than divine need not undermine those beliefs.  In his words,

Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

I suspect many evangelical Christians will agree with my own conclusion that this is rather an understatement of the degree to which the conclusion that the Bible is not only not divinely inspired, but full of contradictions, undermines Christian faith.  To believe that is to believe that, for more than a thousand years, God stood idly by and did nothing in particular to prevent generations of clerical charlatans from bamboozling his moral flock regarding matters that would have a critical bearing on their fate in the hereafter.  It is to believe that, 2000 years after the time of Christ, one can be a Christian, independently of any reliable information about what the man actually said and what his appearance on earth actually meant, just by making things up as you go along. 

I personally prefer to apply Occam’s razor.  The simplest explanation for all these Biblical contradictions is the conclusion that Christ was just another Middle Eastern soothsayer, like legions of others who flourished in the region for hundreds of years before and after his death, differing from them only in the fact that he was the most successful of them all.  It’s unsettling and a little scary to think that the great majority of the human beings on the planet actually believe in imaginary super beings. It’s more or less equivalent to the realization that we’re inmates in a giant asylum. 

It didn’t take Darwin to reveal all these religious impostures for what they are.  Meslier did a perfectly adequate job of it in his Testament more than 250 years ago.  The writings of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest are really just afterthoughts.  In spite of all their repetition of the obvious, our religious disconnect with reality continues unabated.  If we set any value on our own survival as a species, apparently it will be necessary for us to somehow find a way to become more intelligent.