Cleaning Out the In-Box: Pre-Hallowe'en Edition

A lot of email piled up while WC was photographing birds. Without much enthusiasm, WC will sort through the missives from the digital illiterati, wing-nuts and assorted True Believers.

There were three emails from folks who claim to have inferred WC is an atheist. Well, they didn’t use the word “inferred” but it’s what they meant. The letters warn that we are in the End Times, that the Apocalypse is coming Very Soon and that if WC doesn’t get his act together, he will not be Saved. One of the few advantages of six decades is a bit of perspective. The Christianists have been claiming the immediately impending End Times WC’s whole life. Hasn’t happened. Remember the pre-millenial hysteria in late 1999? The two (three? four?) failed predictions by Rev. Harold Camping? And when the Christianists bring this apocalyptic world view to politics, the results are even worse. Read Libby Anne’s recent take-down of the Christianist  Focus on the Family’s 2008 sixteen page predictions of horror called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” The Christianists were 0-34 in predicting the consequences of an Obama presidency. So please leave WC’s soul alone, friends, until your predictions get better than 50%.

Then were the seven emails from folks touting the value and reliability of off-shore pharmacies they had used, and asking WC to endorse them in this blog. Those same emails said that the recent FDA warning against online pharmaceuticals was just a conspiracy between the Federal government and the national drug manufacturers to protect their turf and keep prices high. WC’s college chemistry is insufficient and rusty. WC has no way to determine if pharmaceuticals contain what they are supposed to, and free of contaminants. For better or worse, WC relies upon the Food & Drug Administration to do thattesting. The FDA has something other than a profit motive to keep themselves in line. It’s imperfect. It’s admittedly imperfect. But better than an unregulated free market. Are you listening Paul Ryan? Mitt? Besides, WC isn’t looking for viagra just now.

Reader Ken P. wrote to remind WC of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s cynical and pessimistic take on the universe and suggested it explains part of the mindset of conservatives:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

- H.P. Lovecraft, ”The Call of Cthulhu“

When you consider the Bible’s view of mankind as present from the creation at the center of the universe, and what astronomy and physics have shown to be the truth – that mankind are arrivistes, located in a remote arm of a mid-sized galaxy in a sea of galaxies large beyond our understanding – you can see what Lovecraft is saying. And it’s scarier than any ghost, vampire or werewolf.

But still more frightening, scarier than any Apocalypse, more terrifying than grey market pharma, and more horrifying even than eldritch Lovecraftian horrors is the prospect of The Mitt becoming President.

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