Happy Hallowe’en!

My boys are not very excited about Hallowe’en this year, and I will be in class this evening while they hand out the goodies, so I really am not participating much at all.

Usually, I am in costume at work and read spooky stories to trick or treaters, but not this year. This year we are not dressing up at all, or reading either. However, I made myself a Hallowe’en pin to wear, which you may or may not be able to see below, where it is reposing on the first full skein of Wool of the Andes for #2 son’s sweater. The sweaters I am working on right now are gray and navy blue (that is Pipes under the gray one), so neither will make interesting pictures.

Mostly at work right now I am apologizing to people and sending them away empty-handed because we don’t have what they need. Also I fluff things and spread them out to disguise the lack of stock. Soon it will be like those Soviet grocery stores we used to hear about in elementary school back when I was a child. Our teachers always painted lurid word-pictures for us of how little there was in Soviet grocery stores, compared with our dozens of different brands of toothpaste.

The boys are not excited about Hallowe’en, but #2 son is excited about Thanksgiving, and in particular the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which he assures me is his favorite time of year. That is of course Advent, and I like it a lot too.

We are expecting both the girls home this weekend, and that is also very exciting. #1 daughter is working till 10:00 at night right now, and then they will be leaving tomorrow on a 27-hour road trip to get here, but once she arrives it will be serious fun around here. The wedding, which will include dancing and karaoke, and the tapas party, and we are thinking that we will try to squeeze in a turkey dinner since #1 daughter and son-in-law won’t be here for Thanksgiving.

So we have a lot to look forward to. 

I am also looking forward to some spirited discussion of The God Delusion. #1 daughter and Son-in-Law both are very big on spirited discussion. They haven’t actually been reading much of the book, and #2 daughter hasn’t even received her copy yet, but I may have enough scornful things to say to start a conversation, and once it is started it can be counted upon to continue.

Elizbit posted an interesting review of The God Delusion last week, and if you click on her name, you can read it. This guy is more scornful than I have been, but he makes some very interesting points. And of course he has read the whole book.

I have moved on to the next section, and I think Dawkins may be back on form. He is going to tell us how religion is bad for us. Lots of people say this, of course, including some of you guys on your xangas. There is always a large logical problem with that claim, though. Namely, religion is so basic to human beings (it is one of the ways that archaeologists decide whether a particular primate is human or not) that it is like the joke about pregnancy being caused by rain — 100% of pregnant women have been rained upon, so pregnancy is caused by rain. Claiming that bad (or good) behavior is caused by religion is just like that.

Dawkins takes this bull by the horns in his next section. Religion, he says, is as common among humans as heterosexuality. Since it is clearly a waste of time and resources, it must be for something.

When Dawkins talks about wasting time here, he doesn’t mean that people’s prayer time takes away from their TV-watching. He does say that sort of thing elsewhere, but here he is talking specifically about reproductive success: anything we do that doesn’t ensure procreation and raising our offspring to procreate successfully is a waste of time, since it doesn’t keep our genes in the gene pool. Keeping our genes in the pool is, Dawkins has said many times, the entire and only point to life.

Heterosexuality has obvious advantages in terms of keeping those genes in the pool, but religion’s usefulness in this matter is less clear. Since people keep doing it, though, Dawkins has faith that there must be an evolutionary explanation.

So today, as you prepare for trick or treaters, or carve your jack-o-lantern, or work, or put the finishing touches on your costume, or make your home ready for guests, or shape popcorn balls for your loved ones, ask yourself: Will this keep my genes in the pool? If not, it is a waste of time, so just skip it. In this way, we can attain the amazing reproductive success of insects, who rarely waste time doing anything but procreating and eating.

Just something to think about.

  Once the wedding gift was off the critical list, I returned to my regularly scheduled needlework and finished the Log Cabin Socks for Socktober. In the absence of any suitable replacement for the yarn I ran out of, I used Ozarque’s yarn-splitting trick. The difference in gauge was enough that the two socks are not quite identical, so I will simply have to keep them for myself, rather than considering making a Christmas gift of them.
I don’t think I’ve ever given anyone socks for a gift, since they seem so utilitarian, but these are pretty snazzy. I may end up making a pair for someone.

There were beignets for breakfast and Hallowe’en cookies, and hanging out watching football and cooking shows. I teach the Senior High Sunday School class, and we had an interesting lesson on Christian responses to popular culture. Our materials distinguish five options: assimilation, consumption (by which they mean choosing among options of popular culture), engagement (two-way conversations within popular culture), appropriation, and condemnation. Hallowe’en makes a perfect example. Appropriation of popular pagan customs by the medieval church, condemnation by some of our local churches, and so on.

It was a good thing there were interesting discussions at church, because at home there was mostly just the grunting and shouting that goes with guys watching football.

I took the opportunity to continue with The God Delusion.

Dawkins has some more arguments in favor of God’s existence that he wants to brush aside before he gets to his own argument against the existence of God.

As far as I know, there are two orthodox positions on faith: first, that everyone is offered salvation through faith in Christ and can freely accept or reject it; and, second, that faith is a gift from God. (I should mention that Dawkins is talking primarily about the Christian understanding of God, and entirely about Christian arguments for God.) So I was inclined, in my reading of this chapter of The God Delusion, to think that it was all pretty artificial. That is, since proofs of God’s existence are irrelevant to His existence and to faith, why bother, except to fill up a chapter?

However, I find that there is a long and respectable history for these arguments, something which you might already have known. If you find this interesting, you might check out this link to the chapter on the subject in The Handbook of Christian Apologetics. It begins by addressing the question of whether there is any point to these arguments and goes on to lay out twenty of the most popular ones. Dawkins discusses eight. One of his is new to him — “the argument from admired scientists” — and is just a replay of his earlier “Yeah, well, those scientists may say they believe in God but they are just pretending,” which indeed he continues to bring up over and over. All I can think is that he hears this a lot at cocktail parties and just can’t stand it any more.

My personal favorites are the Moral Argument, which Dawkins leaves out, and The Argument from Beauty, which he answers by saying that it is silly. I’ve written about both of these before. Dawkins wrote whole books on them (The Selfish Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow, respectively). I just don’t find Dawkins’s arguments convincing. He is very good at arguing, in general, and deeply committed to proving that our moral sense and our ability to create are either byproducts of biological processes or evolved to make us more reproductively successful, but even he can’t prove it.

Okay, all of this was just leading up to the chapter “Why There is Almost Certainly No God.” I approached this chapter with anticipation, expecting some interesting points to make up for the dullness of what came before.

Here it is: if there were a God, He would be a complicated thing, and complicated things don’t exist without evolving from simple ones. He would have to be omnipotent and eternal, which clearly is impossible. He would have to be — godlike.

Now I have a lot of sympathy for general rejections of the supernatural. If I were to lose my faith and return to a position of agnosticism, it would be because I just generally don’t believe in supernatural stuff. But “God can’t exist because He would have to be the kind of God described in the Bible” is not a cogent argument against the existence of God.

This book had better improve.

Pumpkins were the main thing yesterday.

We did go to one of the local bakeries for some of their cranberry-pecan bread. It makes amazing turkey sandwiches.

And we did our other errands — hairdresser, grocer, etc. — and then to the pumpkin patch…

… where we found this handsome vegetable…

… which #2 son turned into this fine fellow.

I finished binding the runner. Now it will get as much embroidery as I have time for before time runs out.

And the back so you can see the stitching. I always want to see the backs of quilts.

Thanks to Dingus6, I found the Death Clock, which assures me that I am halfway through my life. Also that I will perish in July. On the 25th, in fact. There I’ll be, a few years short of my hundredth birthday, hobbling slowly through Back to School, and I will suddenly keel over, in the middle of helping someone decide whether they can tolerate a liter measurement set in which the beakers are not all round. They’ll be sorry they were so obstreperous.

I am going out today to buy Hallowe’en candy, and you probably are too. #2 son is coming with me to make sure that I get good stuff, by which he means candy that he will want to eat, since he is too old to go trick or treating any more.

But I intend also to buy candy that has not been produced at the cost of child and slave labor. I hope you will do the same. It is not a difficult thing to do. If you are not familiar with the problem, you could click here to learn about it. Click here if you think it is no longer a problem.

Some people choose to boycott chocolate entirely, or all chocolate grown in Cote d’Ivoire, but this is a very poor country which relies on chocolate exports. Most growers are small family farms, where children work alongside their parents. Refusing to buy chocolate from the entire country harms these people as well as the growers who have bought children and forced them to work under brutal conditions. Some members of the chocolate industry are making sincere efforts to pay fair prices for cocoa beans, allowing growers to hire workers, and to help provide education and safe working conditions for children working with the beans.

So at our house we choose not to buy from Nestle, the company which has been the most blatant and unrepentant about the problem. Hersheys and M&M/Mars told congress they would make their chocolates free of slave labor by July 2005, but went with a PR campaign instead. If you pass up these three, and let them know why, you will be doing a good deed. Click here to contact Nestle, and you will also find links to many more companies and a lot of information on the subject.

We buy chocolate from Black & Green, Lindt, and Ghirardelli. You can also find Dagoba, Newman’s Own, and Rapunzel. All organic chocolate is safe to buy, because the oversight of organic growers limits opportunities for worker abuse, and eliminates the problem of children working with pesticides. Land o’Lakes recently joined the list of fair trade cocoa producers, but they produce hot chocolate mix rather than candy — just wanted you to know if your kids, like mine, are hot cocoa mix fans.

If you think that the fair trade chocolate is too expensive, there is plenty of other candy out there.

In addition to candy buying, I have errands and housework and needlework and reading to do. Light reading. I have already done the heavy reading for the day, and my report on it is coming up.

In chapter 3 of The God Delusion, Dawkins clears out of the way all the usual arguments in favor of God’s existence. Just quickly, you know, before he presents his argument.

One of the arguments he mentions is the claim that scripture provides sufficient evidence of God’s existence. I began the section confident that he was going to point out that the Bible is only evidence for God if you already believe in God ahead of time. Nope. He suggests that the Bible doesn’t constitute good evidence, and that there are factual discrepancies and things in the Bible.

Excuse me? The Bible says things about God’s existence like “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In what sense can that be considered evidence for something? If you have a group of people who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and they want to use the Bible as evidence for and against the Doctrine of Election, I’m with you, but I fail to see how the Bible could be held, in the absence of faith, to be evidence.

But let’s go along with this. Let’s suppose that someone has said to Dawkins that the Bible is a written record of whole scads of people’s experiences with God, and that it is therefore, as a historical document, evidence for the existence of God. Let’s examine it as a historical document giving evidence about God.

First, since Dawkins has elsewhere in the chapter refused to consider any personal experiences with God (he agrees that personal experience of God is very convincing for the experiencer, but discounts it entirely otherwise), we have to remove all personal experiences of God from consideration.

We have to cast out the poetry. And, I suppose, all the stuff that isn’t directly about God.

We also know that our ideas about how to report things are vastly different from those of people in traditional societies. The entire idea of evidence has changed radically since the Bible was written. I say “we know,” because anyone who has studied anthropology, history, or literature knows this, as does anyone who has spoken with people from non-technological cultures. I am tempted to do a Dawkins trick here and say that I simply don’t believe that Dawkins doesn’t know this and suggest some reason for his dissembling, but I will resist that temptation. Let it suffice that we know it, and use that information in our reading.

We are obviously not left with much. When we examine what the Bible as a historical document says about God that does not rely on people’s personal experience with God — oh, and I think that Dawkins wants us to cast out the entire Old Testament on the grounds that it is silly– we are left with the historical record of Jesus. Who repeatedly refused to convince people that he was God.

In fact — and we might have to look at a lot of stuff Dawkins won’t consider in order to notice this — God is simply not in the business of proving His existence.Why this is so is an interesting theological question, perhaps, but Dawkins isn’t really looking at theological questions here.

I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in this section. If you are interested in this topic, you will probably already have read his sources, or others like them, and having Dawkins tell you his favorite bits, interlaced with snarky comments, is not enlightening.

Here is the table runner. I am showing it to you both vertically and horizontally in hopes that it will look different from the last time you saw it.

I have completed the applique, some of which was just pinned down in the last picture. 

I have also completed what you might call the structural quilting — the stuff that holds the layers together and highlights the basic geometry of the thing.

When you make a quilt, you prepare a sandwich out of fabric with a layer of batting in the middle. When you quilt — that is, stitch through all three of those layers — the part you quilt lies flat and the parts that are unquilted puff up.

This is what I like best about quilting. This is the point at which you decide which of the many possible combinations of shapes in the piecing you want to highlight. You can also put in new design elements and pictures and stuff.

In general, I like close quilting that makes a complicated texture.

 But some people like the puffiness, rather than the flatness you get with close quilting.

I don’t know about the bride for whom the table runner is intended.

But I am thinking that I may go ahead and put the binding on tonight.

Normally, you do all your quilting and so on before putting on the binding, because the quilting changes the size of the of the thing. But I think that I could, with a project this small,  put the binding on carefully and then quilt just enough to keep the puffiness to a desirable level

If I do that, I can then just embroider and quilt as much as I have time for, knowing that the runner was essentially finished and could be given at any time. If I do the normal thing and finish the quilting and embroidery first, I could find myself next Friday night doing the binding at midnight.

The other thing I might do tonight is attend the Master Chorale concert. I am not singing with them this year, but I enjoy their concerts.

However, my husband doesn’t want to go, and I did not organize a friend to come along. I know that the modern way would be to call up all my friends on their cell phones after work tonight, but I am of a generation that invites people ahead of time. Asking people at the last minute implies that you only thought of them at the last minute. Plus, people usually have a plan for Friday night by Friday morning, even if that plan is just putting the binding on a table runner.

And so many of my friends who enjoy choral music are singing in the concert…

I can go by myself, but I know that the chances of my leaving my home to drive somewhere by myself at night when I didn’t promise anyone that I would — well, let us assume that I will be doing that binding.

Chanthaboune has a funny post about the modern way of inviting people, if you want to see a young person’s take on it. You can click on her name in the “subscriptions” list at the left. I still haven’t figured out how to put in buttons, but I think the subscriptions list works.

It has been very quiet at work lately, and yesterday’s rain made it even more so, so I had plenty of leisure to think about a conversation on evangelism that Sighkey and I had, and to extend the thought further to the entire idea of agreeing to disagree.

Ozarque (if I understand her view correctly) considers any discussion that ends in “agreeing to disagree” a failure of communication. I think it depends on the communicative goal of the conversation.

Sometimes our goal is to persuade someone. Yesterday, for example, That Man was showing me his new spreadsheet. He was pretty excited about it, but the computer was not cooperating. I was able to persuade it to do some of the things he wanted at one point while his back was turned, and was emboldened by this to suggest that he try my special method of working with computers.

“I just do random stuff till something works,” I explained.

That Man continued staring at the screen.

“Why not just try ‘find’ under ‘edit’?” I suggested.

He explained why that would not work. I continued to press him to try it. I used a cajoling voice and nicely-judged frequency of nudging. Of course, it did work. This is because of a special branch of Murphy’s Law that ensures that when a person who knows what he is doing is showing something to a complete tyro, the irrational suggestions of the complete tyro will work when the reasonable attempts of the expert do not.

Had I been unable to persuade him, That Man and I might still be standing there. I would have failed in my communicative goal.

But a discussion seems to me to be a different thing altogether. Some topics are a matter of fact, and we can look to a handy reference book to solve the question of who is right, making for a very brief discussion.

It has been pointed out to me that not everyone uses reference books in conversations. It was phrased more strongly than that, but in fact we do it all the time chez fibermom. Just yesterday #2 son was telling us about the natural pedometer of the ant. #1 son expressed polite scepticism, and #2 went helpfully to his source, read it aloud to us, and rephrased his claim more precisely. #1 son and I responded with fascinated murmurs. I felt that this showed the boys had been brought up right.

If it is clear and indisputable that one view is right and the other is wrong, there is, it seems to me, no point in discussing it. For most nonfactual topics, though, there are many different ways of looking at the same set of information. Blessing was telling us recently that she was charmed by cowboys, pirates, and firemen. I see the charm of pirates, but the other two groups hold no special fascination for me. A customer weighed in on the side of Schwan’s men. Now, a guy who brings ice cream to your door may have some automatic appeal, but I have to say that I have never found any special sexiness there. However, like Voltaire, I would defend to the death that customer’s right to harmless speculations about her Schwan’s man.

Well, probably not to the death, but Voltaire was most likely exaggerating a bit himself.

There are some topics on which more than one viewpoint seems to me to be equally just and well-supported. For these topics, such as stem-cell research, I read and listen to everyone’s viewpoint in order to make up my own mind. These may be the most interesting things to talk about.

There are subjects on which I am unlikely to change my mind, but which are still very interesting. I like to know others’ thoughts on these things, and am particularly interested to hear a new and different idea. Recently, for example, I was expressing a conventional point of view on strip bars (a big political issue locally, from time to time). My interlocutor said that his objection to them was that you were doing something specifically intended to be arousing, and then there you were with a bunch of guys. I would never have thought of that on my own — and it doesn’t change my views — but it was quite an interesting point.

I am particularly interested in knowing why people hold positions that strike me as incomprehensible. I greatly appreciated Jamie’s explaining her support of President Bush, for example, and Partygirl’s explanation of the Catholic custom of indulgences. So often this sort of question can’t be asked without offence, so we run the risk of going along without ever grasping the point. A willingness to discuss these topics without rancor makes not only for good conversation, but also for greater understanding between groups.

But then there are the things which we believe so firmly that we want to make other people agree with us. This is where evangelism comes in. “Evangelism” properly refers to the proclamation of the Christian gospel, but is often used by extension to describe other sorts of proselytizing (I looked this up to be sure). The word is used in different churches to describe different things, ranging from buttonholing strangers to ask if they are saved, to setting up coffee in the hall.

As I have said before, I understand the reason that the evangelical groups are so aggressive about their attempts to change other people’s beliefs. For one thing, they believe that God told them to do it. But beyond that, they also believe that they are personally responsible for whether or not other people spend eternity in Hell. I don’t even believe that I am personally responsible for whether or not I spend eternity in Hell, so of course I am not going to pester people to change religions.

But I do believe that I have a measure of personal responsibility for child labor and slavery — and that you do, too. I believe that my ability to persuade people to support Fair Trade can lead directly toward the end of slavery in our lifetimes. Do I seize every polite opportunity to mention this? Of course I do. This is evangelism of a sort, it seems to me.

And does it go with respect for other people’s views? No. I am prepared to respect the views of any passing follower of Poseidon, to consort with known Republicans, and to listen with interest to the views of people who despise books, but I truly have no respect for alternate views on child labor. This is not a topic on which I am prepared to be open-minded.

The Wooden Overcoat, my current book for the Autumn Reading Challenge, is filled with people who are open-minded on the subject of murder. This is amusing in a book, but if I knew anyone who sincerely held those views, I would do my best to change their minds. And turn them in to the police if it seemed necessary.

Dawkins, in The God Delusion, shows an evangelical level of devotion to atheism.

In chapter 2, he states the hypothesis which he intends to disprove in this book: that there exists a supernatural being which created the universe. He goes on to object to agnosticism, which strikes me as a perfectly respectable position. He offers us a continuum of levels of belief. At either end is complete and certain knowledge — either that God exists or that He does not.  In the center is agnosticism, the view that it is impossible to know for certain whether or not God exists. The other views include belief that God very likely does or does not exist, and living one’s life on that assumption. Here is where Dawkins puts himself, and I would choose that option too — though on the other side from Dawkins. Dawkins is not prepared to tolerate anything closer than his own position to faith in God. I look forward to learning why, since he doesn’t seem to think that belief in supernatural beings will lead to everlasting torment. In fact, from his other books, I would assume that Dawkins would have to say that belief in God is merely a byproduct of physical processes, like sweat, so why should he care? But he does. Passionately. The suspense mounts.

Having responded with pique to agnosticism, Dawkins proposes that it is highly probable that there are sentient beings elsewhere in the universe that would seem godlike to us. This is thrown in to make the point that such beings would not be supernatural, but would have evolved from simpler life forms just like us. I find the existence of  godlike extraterrestrials a less plausible hypothesis than the existence of God, and one which rests on far less evidence, but Dawkins likes it.

There is, as you know, one other topic on which I am capable of evangelical fervor: namely, that socks are not hard to knit. But I am still able to entertain the hypothesis that I could be wrong.

The fact-checking is complete and I am sending it in. I am not happy with it.

For those who are wondering what I am talking about, I have been fact-checking an entry for the state history encyclopedia. It has to do with a former Miss America from our state who appeared on the cover of Playboy and boasted about a liaison with a former president, as well as acting and making mosaics and writing a children’s book. Confirming the facts about her was not that difficult (The Expert went direct-to-DVD in 1994, in case you were wondering about that), but there was also a note on the entry asking me to try to find some good sources for her. I could not do so. Every source I came up with sniggered over her and none bothered to give any information about  her life. “Beauty queen…” and “former beauty queen” were about it for biographical information. The ones that bothered to talk about her career also generally had nude pictures of her, so you can tell the level of respect we are looking at here.

The moral of the story seems to be this: if you do a couple of scandalous things in public, it doesn’t matter how many years of other accomplishments you attain, you will always be a smutty story. Oh, if you are a woman. I should have mentioned that. I think that men can do scandalous things and still have a few articles printed that include biographical information beyond what most of us know about Nell Gwyn.

While I may not be happy with my work in this case, I am very happy to check something off my list. My to-do list does not seem to be getting any shorter. I had broken the wedding gift table runner down into bits and written some down every day, just so I could check things off, but that did not work. I was supposed to be embroidering it yesterday, but I have not yet finished the applique. So it is just another thing I can’t check off. 

When I am feeling sleep-deprived and pressed for time and slightly overwhelmed, as I am right now, two things fall off the edge of my personal horizon: housekeeping and the whole exercising and eating right thing.

This is not the best thing to do. I ought to think to myself, “Here I am feeling pressured, so I should take good care of myself and provide myself with a tidy haven of cleanliness and order to come home to.” But the truth is, I let my housekeeping routine and fitness routine slip two and a half months ago at the height of Back to School, and have never really gotten back to them. Things are better in both areas than they were then, of course, but I am only sporadically keeping up: I am getting to the gym two or three times a week and managing little more in the way of housework than the HGP assignments, dishes, and laundry.

It is because these are things I can let slide without having to apologize to anyone for them. If I am unprepared to teach Sunday School, or unpracticed at rehearsal, or missing class, or not finishing expected presents, then I have let someone else down. When I only get an hour a week of exercise, don’t take the time to prepare vegetables, and leave my house in a welter of papers and fabric scraps (that’s my mess; the shoes and weights and gym clothes and stuffed sheep on the floor are someone else’s), I have only let myself down.

But that matters, too. So I am promising myself today that I will accord my regular daily schedule the same degree of importance as the things I have scheduled with other people.

Back to my applique.

After writing this, I remembered that Sighkey had asked me whether I had been falling behind at this time last year, and I went back and read my post for this date in 2005. It was also on the subject of feeling pressed for time. Am I dull or what? It also mentioned the difficulty of fitting costumes and gift-making and stuff in with gym visits, although I appear to have been content with the state of my housekeeping at the time. But that entry pointed out that I was having to carve out enough time to sit on the couch knitting and reading novels, to sew while watching movies, or to listen to practice tapes while baking cookies, all things generally considered leisure. So while I am fretting over finding time to read gossip about beauty queens and send out party invitations wihout giving up my gym time, I will strive to maintain a sense of humor about it. There is enough of the ridiculous in my complaint to keep it from being worth complaining about.

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins. I have read all his books. I saw him last week on the Colbert Report, and he seems to be a very nice, twinkly, grandfatherly sort of man. He had the air, while going through the unusual process which is a Colbert interview, of someone trying to join in wholeheartedly, if with imperfect understanding, in a  child’s game.

So it is not completely surprising that his newest book, The God Delusion, starts off like an extended example of l’esprit de l’escalier — the things he would have responded to the maddening things people say to him, if only he weren’t such a nice guy.

“Lots of scientists believe in God,” people must have said to him. His response? “No they don’t! No they don’t!”

When Einstein talked about God, as he often did, he didn’t mean God. Repeat ad lib with the names of other scientists. This is not all that convincing. In fact,t here is a point at which Dawkins claims that Stephen Jay Gould just flat didn’t believe what he wrote in his book about God and science, but must have been being conciliatory. Stephen Jay Gould is another of my favorite writers, but no one would call him conciliatory. Dawkins must be projecting his own twinkliness, or perhaps just desperately trying to get around the fact that, well, lots of scientists believe in God.

Not that it matters. If he could claim that, say, the Pope was really an atheist, that might have some strength to it as an argument. But scientists are not ipso facto experts on God, and whether or not they believe in God doesn’t actually constitute evidence for or against the existence of God.

Dawkins even claims that fear of being persecuted for atheism causes people in modern times to pretend to be religious. I live in the Bible Belt, and the nearest an atheist could come to persecution here would be the fear of being prayed for against his or her will. That argument — with the possible exception of politicians, for whom being strongly committed to any religious viewpoint including atheism can be dangerous — is silly.

Another maddening thing people seem to have said to him is that “You have to respect people’s beliefs.” He quotes H. L. Mencken on this, to the effect that we have to respect a man’s religious beliefs to the same degree that we have to respect his belief that his wife is beautiful. Mencken wrote Treatise on the Gods, which I quite enjoyed. If you have read it, though, you know that Mencken’s views on religion, and indeed on respect, are very far outside the norm.

This argument has some virtue, though. It is true that we in the U.S., even in our laws, do tend to take the position that something required by a person’s religion trumps all non-religious matters. Employers have to give Friday afternoon off for prayers, but would not consider doing so for a person’s fondness for taking naps on Friday afternoon, though it may be just as sincere.

And we do have an almost ridiculous devotion to respecting religious beliefs. I am sitting here right now trying to think of an example, and cannot, because I fear that a wandering member of the group I choose to describe as ridiculous will be offended, so I guess that proves it.

This extends, of course, to atheists, but that would ruin Dawkins’s other argument, so he ignores that fact.

So that is the first chapter of The God Delusion. I confess that I went ahead and read the second chapter, but I will be waiting for the others in my read-along to catch up and comment before I say anything about that.

   The book Quilts from the Quiltmaker’s Gift has a whole section of stretches and safety tips for quilters. I’ve always found that sort of risible, but after spending twelve hours working on this over the weekend, I appreciated a good soak in Batherapy. Sore fingers goes without saying.

So when I needed a break, I cast on for #2 son’s sweater. You can see the ribbing sitting on the quilt frame.

Actually, I was trying Ozarque’s trick of splitting the worsted in order to finish the poor Log Cabin Sock while it is still Socktober. It is possible, though time-consuming and irritating, to split the yarn, but unfortunately half a strand of worsted does not equal sport weight, so I was contemplating the next step, when #2 son approached me.

“You’re not working on my sweater,” he said. I reminded him that I was just going to finish up the sock first.
“Is that the same sock?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said in some consternation.
“Prove it.”
I was struck dumb. His brother joined in. “We want evidence.”
“Yeah,” said #2 son. “Forensic evidence.” He seemed to feel that this clinched the matter.

Since the yarn splitting trick wasn’t actually working anyway, and in the absence of any source of the sport weight yarn, I put the sock down and commenced his ribbing instead.

I cannot read while quilting, let alone doing applique, so it was not until I took my knitting break that I was able to finish the little mystery I was reading and begin my next creepy book for the Autumn Reading Challenge.

During the challenge I have already read The Little Friend, a bit of modern Southern Gothic; The Black Opal, a basic gothic romance; and a collection of classic ghost stories. I figured a bit of black comedy would round out the group. So I am reading The Wooden Overcoat by Pamela Branch. An early scene has a roomful of murderers at dinner, with one of them constantly watching the others for fear of being done in by them. It is masterfully done. If creepiness with humor appeals to you, this would be a good choice.

For the HGP, this is pantry and closet week. We are to begin addressing Christmas cards, but I haven’t bought or made mine yet. We are to get our holiday card picture done, and I am in the happy position of having a new picture of all four of our kids plus our son-in-law. It is a blue jeans snapshot on the front porch, but I love it. I do not usually send pictures, but I think that I will this year. I have cartoonified and shrunken it so that it will not be recognizable (I am not allowed to post recognizable pictures), but you can still see how cute they all are.

 We are also to send out invitations for Thanksgiving and order our turkey, two things that I do not need to do. We only have family for Thanksgiving, and my dad cooks one turkey while my husband’s company gives us another. I already put some snickerdoodles into the freezer over the protests of my sons, so the “goodies in the freezer” job is done. We are also to put a meal in the freezer, buy 1/8th of our gifts, spend 1 hour each day on handmade gifts (in my case, that has gone by the board while I complete the wedding gift), and sneak some nonperishable holiday foods into the grocery cart.

If you were not ready for the HGP when it began in August, or have not merely fallen behind a bit like me but have fallen out completely, there is another chance. The Christmas Countdown started yesterday. This is a 6-week plan that does not include cleaning and organizing. They are telling us to get our holiday plans together in one notebook today, and suggesting that people who are beginning their handmade gifts now should go with small things. There is also a recipe for pumpkin cookies. The countdown has daily tasks, and I plan to check it daily so as to catch any of the things I did not get done when I should have.

Fact-checking is not going to be on that list, I know. I intend to complete that this evening, and if I haven’t found a good source, then I will just have to send it in tomorrow without one. Such is life.