Consider a long hallway. So long that in either direction, it fades into the distance. In the middle there is a walkway. On the right, like in an airport, is a conveyor belt moving forwards. On the left is a conveyor belt moving backwards. There are no handrails and it's easy to get on or off a conveyor belt.

You are walking along the walkway. People pass you going one direction or the other from time to time, sometimes passing you by, sometimes passing in the opposite direction. Sometimes you walk together a while with someone, sometimes you nod and wave and it's over in a moment.

You become friends with someone near you and begin to walk together. You enjoy your time, the company makes you happy. Sometimes your friend speeds up a little, and you have to speed up too to stay together, or the same happens but slowing down. It's the pace of life. More and more you walk together. Eventually you fall in love.

Then your friend wants to see more of what lies ahead, and suggests you both get on a forward-moving conveyor belt. You think it's a good idea and would gladly join her. But she gets on the conveyor belt going backwards.

All of a sudden she's moving much more slowly than you are, even though you haven't slowed down. Your friend speeds up some to try to match you, and says, "Where are you going? I thought you wanted to be together!"

You say, "I do, but you're on the wrong conveyor belt!" Your friend is hurt and says, "Don't criticize me." You are baffled. "I'm not," you say. "I love you and don't want to lose you. I'm not judging you–you're just on the wrong conveyor belt."

Your friend is hurt. Your friend reads a book and cries with her friends and tells you you need to take more ownership. "You say I'm wrong all the time." You don't want to fight; you slow down even more; but your friend keeps falling behind. Now your friend has to work even harder to keep moving forward with you. It exhausts her just to keep up. "It takes so much energy," she says. She tries her best to keep up, but all she feels is you pulling away. She slows; it all takes too much effort.

Your friend wants you to fix it; she sees how you aren't working as hard as she is. You share what you have with her–you give her food for strength, you sing her songs, you tell her you love her, you tell her not to quit; you give all you have. But she is demoralized and falls further behind. "I work so hard. I put in so much and you so little," she says. You try again to point out she's on the wrong belt; "I'm not placing blame, I swear," you plead. "How else do I tell you this isn't my fault?"

You are crying. You don't want to lose your friend. But you do not want to go backwards. You have been there already. You want to move forward, and you want to move forward with your friend. But you can't. It's not your fault, but you can't. You have to choose.

If you carry forward, your friend will call you cruel. Your friend will think you have walked away. Your friend's heart will be broken, like yours, but she will also feel betrayed. You speed up and down for the longest time, hoping eventually she will see, sometimes even getting on the belt with her for a time, to her great relief. When you get off again, she wonders why you've left her. You don't want to choose. You want her to get off the belt going backwards. You want her to see that it wasn't your fault. That it never had to happen. You try. She doesn't. You choose.

Anyone who's met Nick S. knows he's smart, insightful, and delightfully droll. When he calls you out on something, it's worth taking a hard look at yourself. He left a comment on my last post, Three Vague Words on Pottery Prove the Bible True, in which I claimed it was a wild leap of exaggeration to take an archaeological artifact of dubious value and hold it up as evidence of the literal truth of a Biblical parable. (Read the comments thread here.)

His comment was:

Yes, religious minded people can accept silly things to support their view of the world. It's a consequence of a preference for convenience and comfort rather than truth, I suspect. But then, the non-believers accept equally silly "truths" in their longing to discredit a worldview driven by faith and powered by something bigger than themselves.

Isn't it just as silly when people say things like, "hey I read the The Da Vinci Code, so now I know the truth, and I can stop thinking about such things"? Scientists too, in their sometimes-mad quest for more knowledge can also believe silly things. (Eugenics anyone?) Last time I checked there wasn't a lot of compelling evidence to sustain string theories and an 11-dimension universe, but people still talk about those ideas, and ideas like them, as if they were uncontested fact.

I value both faith and science, but I think if you wish to point out the foolishness of some religious folks, then it is only fair to also point out the excesses and foolishness of the knowledge-worshiping or narcissistic non-believers.

Nick, I can always count on you for a thoughtful and challenging comment! I wrote a response but it was too long to go in the comments thread, so here goes:

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Imagine, for a moment, you are a skilled archaeologist, having devoted years of your life to the uncovering, cataloguing, and assimilation of physical artifacts. You are on an expedition in Sweden, doing research into Scandinavian artifacts in the hopes of illuminating the lives and history of Vikings. One of the artifacts, one of many you publicly announce to little fanfare, is a shard of pottery. Only three words of the old language are clearly legible: "slave," "king," and "judge."

Those three words, common in Viking stories and legends of the day, say nothing about what or whom they refer to, and could be anything from a child's reader to an epic poem. A minority of modern Scandinavians still believe in the Viking gods, and they proudly insist that it refers to Odin–who in Norse mythology (oops, I mean in their truth) is the "king" of the gods, the head of the twelve "judges," and to whom male "slaves" were sacrificed during blót festivals. What more proof could any rational person need? Odin is said to have visited Uppsala, Sweden in person–the king of the gods walking on earth–and those three words on the pottery prove it!

The next day, all of Sweden is abuzz with wonder. The neo-Vikings rattle loudly in the media that their ancient beliefs have been shown true. A week later, their exaltation spreads to the world's newspapers, which pick up the story and spread it uncritically and with arresting headlines. "The God Odin is Proven Real," the stories read, "By Startling New Archaelogical Find." You are now a hero to neo-Vikings everywhere: you have just proven Odin.

Sound implausible? Read on.

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A friend of mine did something kinda snippy today and didn't apologize though she definitely should have known better, especially after having it pointed out to her. So I had some fun and made the following graph. Where do YOU fall on it?

No one should ever have to choose between doing the right thing and being happy.

It's a variation on what's sometimes called a Hobson's Choice (though Wikipedia has just informed me that it's more correctly called Morton's Fork). It's also pretty similar to Sophie's Choice.

I was reading this article, where the author says, "Psychologists assumed that their patients wanted to be happy, failing to notice that, for many people, being good is more important than being happy." Made me realize something. Wherever society is immoral, its members must choose between being good and being happy. You must make the choice, though it's a choice you should never have had to make. The rule holds regardless of the size of the society; it can be as small as two people or as large as everyone.

What's wrong with a world that forces this kind of choice? Keep reading.

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'Nuff said.

A couple of years ago, I played a joke on a new friend. Instead of laughing about it, she accused me of harassment and breaking and entering. Granted, it wasn't a very funny joke, but I wasn't aware the penalty for a comedian bombing was so severe. So I'd like to post a warning for any practical jokers out there: never, never play a joke involving somebody's car, house, or computer without getting notarized forms signed in triplicate that they're planning on getting the joke.

First, a little background. This was not the first time I planted a joke grenade on someone's computer. Allow me to describe just three prior offenses.

In college, back when "sound cards" were brand new and nobody but geeks like me knew how to record or play sound on computers, I changed my friend's computer startup sound. He was ahead of the technology curve himself and had managed to hook it up to his stereo, so the next time he booted his computer, he got blasted with a deep-voiced recording of God instructing him to fill his disk drive with potato chips. (For the record, he denies following the instructions.)

A couple years later, my girlfriend was running sound for a play that was being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'd rigged up a system for them to run the sound cues off of a laptop computer–way ahead of its time back in 1997! When she got to Scotland and booted it up, the joke grenade deployed and she got a very cute romantic animated message from me.

A few years after that, I installed a widget on my brother's computer so when he booted up, he got HAL9000's eerie red light on his desktop, reporting loudly that all systems were functioning perfectly.

If you haven't detected the pattern yet, let me describe it bluntly: these jokes are not very funny.

But they're kinda cute in their own way. They're just stupid little joke grenades. They're mildly subversive, in a spirit of fun, and you wouldn't think someone would respond to one by suggesting she might file a harassment suit. Right? Then keep reading.

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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.

So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:

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