I've found that a lot of my relationship fears vanish and my relationships become a lot stronger and more healthy when I start with certain assumptions: namely, that my partners want to be with me, that they see value in me, that when given the opportunity they will seek to make choices that honor our commitments and cherish the relationship we're in, that they are honest and can be counted on to behave with integrity, and that when they say they love me, it's because they do.
Often it seems to me that people base relationship rules on the assumption that their partners can not be trusted, that if given free action their partners will not choose to honor and nurture their relationships, and that their partners are harboring secret agendas involving dumping them when someone 'better' (whatever that means) comes along. I can't quite fathom building a relationship on those assumptions, nor why someone would want to remain in a relationship where they were true.
Ahh, the mysteries of life.
- Mood:
awake
Dear Owners
We are the Leading manufacturers-cum-exporter of complete Adult Body Jewelry like Nipple Rings, Nipple Weight Stretchers, Cock Rings.
We TRIUNE SKINMOD SUPPLIES exporting this Adult Body Jewelry successfully throughout the world. Your good-self kindly requested to please visit our web-site indicate items of your choice enable us.
The company in question is in Pakistan...and no, it isn't the same company that has offered to sell me sex toys from Pakistan in the past.
- Mood: amused
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Though I must say it isn't necessarily either/or. We have created a culture that has spawned both an unprecedented attack on civil liberties from on high, particularly under the last administration, along with a reactionary anti-intellectualism that openly scorns the quest for knowledge, giving us the worst of both.
- Mood: contemplative
*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***
This attack is currently live. DO NOT attempt to visit the URLS in this email if you do not know what you are doing!
The emails come from a phony From: address that is system@[thewebsitename.com]. Each email takes the form:
Attention!
On October 16, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the system may be offline for approximately half an hour.
The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail service and the system as a whole.
For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server software you should run SSl certificates update procedure.
This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your computer location. That's all.
http://updates.[thenameofthewebsite.com]
Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for possible inconveniences.
System Administrator
So for example if you have a Web site called "theweaselstore.com" and your email address is "headweasel@theweaselstore.com" you may receive an email claiming to be from: system@theweaselstore.com, which tells you to click a link that looks like
http://updates.theweaselstore.com.secure.s
Needless to say, the "patch" you download from this address is a computer virus.
This is one of the most sophisticated social engineering attempts I've seen to date. It seems to be going after a very specific group of people: people who own secure Web sites. The email itself is custom-tailored to look as much as possible like it comes from the system operators of the Web site in question, and the payload is delivered from a hostile server with a URL that has the address of the target site owner's Web site embedded within it.
My suspicion, though I have not taken the time to analyze the payload, is that it is a key logger, and that the virus writers are attempting to get FTP credentials for the target Web site.
Being able to hack secure Web sites would offer the hacker a treasure trove of advantages. First, secure Web sites may contain customer information, transaction records, payment histories, and credit card numbers for the site's customers.
Second, a phony bank or eBay site placed on a secure server is more convincing, because the phony site can be accessed using "https://" and will have the browser padlock indicating that the site is secure, which may help it to fool more people.
I've mentioned in this post how a Web address can be designed to fool people. It does not matter what's in the address except for the part in front of the very first / character; so for example if you see a Web address that looks like
http://www.ebay.com.ws.eBayISAPI.dll.sig
you are not on eBay. You can see where you are by looking at the part just before the first / which in this case is
http://www.ebay.com.ws.eBayISAPI.dll.signin.ru/?SignIn&ru=12345
a site called signin.ru in Russia.
Similarly, in the URLs in these hacker emails, the key part of the URL is
http://updates.theweaselstore.com.secure.
The computer virus is being distributed from a site called "ssl-datacontrol.com".
ssl-datacontrol.com lives on servers belonging to an ISP called trouble-free.net, which is now a subsidiary of another ISP called interserver.net.
Trouble-free.net is an ISP I'm very familiar with. As near as I can tell, the "trouble" they are free of is meddling trouble such as legal issues, or those pesky problems you might have with having your spam or phish site shut down; they have, in my experience, a long and ignoble history of hosting viruses, spammers, pirate software sites (notorious credit card fraudster and pirate Art Schwartz has been hosted on trouble-free.net for over five years), and other criminal content.
The whois for ssl-datacontrol.com is, unsurprisingly, Russian:
whois ssl-datacontrol.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain Name: SSL-DATACONTROL.COM
Registrar: ANO REGIONAL NETWORK INFORMATION CENTER DBA RU
Whois Server: whois.nic.ru
Referral URL: http://www.nic.ru
Name Server: NS1.CEDNS.RU
Name Server: NS2.CEDNS.RU
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 05-oct-2009
Creation Date: 05-oct-2009
Expiration Date: 05-oct-2010
>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:44:52 UTC <<<
Registrant ID: HEIGAAS-RU
Registrant Name: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Registrant Organization: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Registrant Street1: Orekhovyi boulevard
Registrant Street1: d.31 kv.72
Registrant City: Moscow
Registrant State: Moscow
Registrant Postal Code: 115573
Registrant Country: RU
Administrative, Technical Contact
Contact ID: HEIGAAS-RU
Contact Name: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Contact Organization: Elena V Zhuravlyova
Contact Street1: Orekhovyi boulevard
Contact Street1: d.31 kv.72
Contact City: Moscow
Contact State: Moscow
Contact Postal Code: 115573
Contact Country: RU
Contact Phone: +7 499 2678638
Contact E-mail: awoke@co5.ru
Registrar: ANO Regional Network Information Center dba RU-CENTER
So in short what we have is a very sophisticated, highly directed attack targeted at Web site owners who are using SSL security certificates on their Web sites, being conducted through emails which create a custom From address and custom attack URL for each specific victim.
The same rules apply to this as to all emails:
- DO NOT believe the From: address of an email. Ever.
- DO NOT respond to ANY security alert, question, or prompt you receive in ANY email. Ever. No matter who it appears to be from.
- Learn to read Web site URLs. DO NOT trust any part of a URL except the part immediately in front of the first slash.
- Mood: annoyed
Today's roundup is all kinds of interesting and fun stuff with no discernible theme. I'l try to categorize them as much as possible, but fair warning...this batch is all over the place.
Onward to the links!
Art
Liu Bolin: The Invisible Man
This might be called "I Can't Believe It's Not Photoshop!" Liu Bolin does the hard way what would be easy in Photoshop; he painstakingly paints himself, then photographs himself from a carefully calculated vantage point so as to vanish into the background. There are other Web galleries of his work as well, and he recently appeared in a real-life art gallery called the Vanguard Gallery, whose Web site seems broken at the moment.
The Underground City on Governors Island
Governor's Island is a small island off the coast of New York City which formerly housed a military base and a small town. In the 1950s, the government transplanted all the town's inhabitants and buried the entire town. Now it's being excavated, and the pictures are amazing. (Edit: Apparently, this place is a hoax.)
Building a Terminator
Or, "what some people with far too much time on their hands do with their action figures."
How-to images for designing a Big Daddy costume from the video game "Bioshock"
Flipping amazing. When I grow up, I want to be half as talented as this guy. I'd never heard of the game Bioshock, and this costume was enough to make me want to play it. Neat feature: the gigantic drill arm actually spins!
Science
New Scientist: How to Cure Diseases Before they Even Start
The advent of antibiotics wrote a new chapter on human health, but effective antiviral drugs are thin on the ground and tend to be extremely specific, often working only against one variant of one virus. A group of researchers is now working on a new class of broad-spectrum antivirals which, if they work, will do for viral disease like what antibiotics have done for bacterial infections.
HPV linked to lung cancer?
A study has found that a significant number of lung cancer tumors express genetic material from the human papilloma virus, the virus responsible for genital warts and cervical cancer.
This does not necessarily prove that HPV causes lung cancer--it's possible that cancerous cells are more susceptible to HPV infection--but it's certainly an interesting correlation. If HPV does in fact lead to lung cancer, this will make immunization against HPV even more valuable, especially in men, who are not often immunized now.
Canadian Startup Proposes Nuclear Fusion at Bargain Basement Price
Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy--cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited. Conventional approaches to nuclear fusion as a power source rely on fantastically complex inertial or magnetic confinement of hot hydrogen plasma. This approach, which is simpler and cheap, proposes using a sphere of molten metal as a kind of "anvil" to both contain and compress hydrogen to generate fusion power.
Single molecule pictured for the first time
Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule. What else is there to say? This is cool fucking shit, yo.
Can dogs see colors?
Turns out the answer is "yes;" dogs aren't colorblind the way we've often thought they were. However, they do not see the range of colors human beings do; their color vision seems to be limited to shades of blue, yellow, and gray.
Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens
I've written about this briefly before, I think. The technology is getting closer, and when it's here, it's gonna be a game-changer.
Humor
Why the Cops Won't Patrol Brice Street
A motorcycle, two patrol officers, and an insane attack squirrel from the darkest depths of Hell. I laughed so hard I almost peed myself.
Instructions for Baby
Timeless warnings for new parents everywhere.
High Weirdness
Wearable Robotic Eyeball
I...don't know what to think. Apparently, it's linked to the wearer's iPhone and is part of a video game, I guess. Japanese culture is weird.
Cat rides the daily bus for four years
And apparently doesn't have to pay a fare. Neat trick, that. Click the link and go "Aww...."
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
So according to Jacques Chirac, in early 2003 President Bush told him that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Sex Degrees of Separation Calculator
I didn't file this one under "science" because a number of the assumptions that the calculator uses strike me as somewhat implausible, or at least poorly supported, but it's a fun toy anyway. Put in your number of sexual partners and your age, and it tries to figure out how many people are in your extended sexual network. These things scale pretty quick, even if the assumptions the calculator uses are a bit liberal.
A History of Orgies
Kind of a fun article, even if it does end on the socially mandated "the orgy just does not seem such a good idea any more" note.
>Disabled Kids Walk With Jesus, Lefty Journos With Satan
An...interesting bit of artwork, supposedly inspired by a vision from God, in which we learn that the US Constitution was written by Jesus himself, the Founding Fathers were all devout Christians, and TV journalists are the tools of Satan. I wonder if I can buy it on black velvet?
Movie Mashups
Movie posters for one movie, done in the style of a different movie, funnier than you might think.
The Cost of Sexual Weirdness
My Human Sex Map project inspired someone to write about the social cost of expressing the variability and range of the human sexual experience.
And finally... Warning: If the Help Desk Thinks Your Question is Stupid, We Will Set You on Fire
- Mood: amused
The purpose of the mission was to create a large plume of dust from impacting the bottom of a deep cater near the moon's south pole so that the plume could be analyzed for signs of water ice. In that particular respect, it went swimmingly, no pun intended.
However, the mission also revealed something totally unexpected--a treasure trove of barking moonbats here on planet earth. The moonbats have set up a Web site in which they claim the LCROSS mission is a part of a conspiracy by a "powerful syndicate of military-industrial criminals" that was "inspired by fanatical terrorist airline hijackers" to bomb the moon. From the Web site:
Of course, there is much more behind this attack than casual scientific curiosity on whether or not there is water on the Moon. First of all, since the long-range accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles has never been proven to work, the LCROSS suicide mission serves as a live-fire test exercise for US war strategists with an interest in the precision of orbiting satellite weapons—in other words, the southern hemisphere of the Moon will be turned into a firing range, making this mission one giant leap for the global reach of space warfare. Secondly, LCROSS has been promoted as "the vanguard" for the US military-industrial-entertainment complex’s return to the Moon—according to NASA, finding water is a necessary first step for "building a long-term and sustainable human presence" there. Historically, the purpose of exploration has always been the exploitation of resources and the colonization of territory without regard for ecosystems or indigenous peoples, and clearly the Moon is the next territory coveted by imperialists.
This so-called "NASA experiment" is a hostile act of aggression and a violent intrusion upon our closest and dearest celestial neighbor. Does any love song or poem or fairy tale worth its salt not mention the Moon? Who can take a walk in the Moonlight with a lover and not feel the romance to your very soul? At night, when the Moon rules, we sleep, and we can visit the Moon in our sleep with ease. The Moon is our night light, our blanket, our grandmother, our mother—it is woman, child, domestic life, tides, bodies of water, liquids, circulation, comfort, nurturing, paintings by Remedios Varo, stories by Jules Verne, and so much more.
It's not entirely clear to me that the authors of this Web site understand what the word "ecosystem" means or why the moon doesn't have one, but I'm particularly curious about who, exactly, the indigenous peoples in question are.
On the bright side, at least they're not trying to deny that we ever landed on the moon at all...
- Mood: amused
---
1 Edited to add: Okay, so he didn't really get away scot-free. While on the lam, he was forced to endure certain privations, such as spending his time with his movie actress wife shuttling between a luxury penthouse in Paris and an enormous chalet located in an exclusive ski resort in the Swiss mountains, but if he wanted an ironing board or a new set of sheets, could he pop down to a Wal-Mart and get them? Could he?
- Mood: confused
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
zaiah and I have moved into our house here in Portland, I've set up my office in the basement. One of the things I've done since moving in is put a set of shelves on top of my computer desk, the very same desk where I spend a great deal of my time working for clients who tend to pay me late.But I digress.
Anyway, the cat Liam has taken over the bottom shelf on top of the desk, and likes to sit there while I work. In fact, he likes it so much that
zaiah put a small blanket on the shelf just for him.I spend my afternoons working at the computer desk, and Liam spends his afternoons on the shelf watching me. These pictures were taken over a span of about a week and a half or so.
Yes, I know my desk is a mess. Hush.
- Mood: awake
- Mood: bouncy
I'm considering, God help me, moving the whole mess to a content management system. I'd kind of prefer one that doesn't suck, but
figmentj says there's no such thing as a CMS that doesn't suck--the only thing you get any say over is how bad it sucks and in what way it sucks.Here's what I'd like:
- Security. I don't want to have to install security patches every three days and I don't want to get pwned if I don't.
- Flexibility. I don't want to port every page over to the CMS, but I do want to port big sections over. I want hard-coded, static HTML pages to be able to live happily side by side with CMS-managed pages, and the navigation to work consistently across all of them.
- Template flexibility. I do not want the entire site to have the same template; I do not want the whole thing to get poured into the same HTML containers. I want, for example, all the BDSM pages to have a consistent look, all the polyamory pages to have a consistent look, but I want to make the BDSM pages look different from the poly pages.
- Ease of updating. WordPress sets the bar here. When I log on to WordPress, if there's an update, there's one button that installs the update automatically--downloads the files, unpacks them, installs them, updates the back-end database, all with a single click and all without disturbing any settings or customizations. If WordPress can do it, I figure other people should be able to do it too.
- The ability to incorporate JavaScript (even if it's built against a library like Jquery or Mootools) into pages as I please.
- Compatibility with analytics tools.
- The ability to specify an exact URL on managed pages. This is very important. Right now, for example, my BDSM page at http://www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html
- An optional comment system that can be turned on or off on a per-page basis.
- Free and open source.
So, lazyweb, whaddya think? Am I living in a Utopian fantasy dreamland where naked mermaids cavort with dolphins under a cotton candy sky, or is this actually going to be doable? Is there a CMS out there somewhere that will do what I want?
- Mood: hopeful
- Mood: amused
zaiah's habit of drawing on me with Magic Markers. Last night she did an especially interesting bit of art that I have an especially bad photograph of; the one thing I don't like about my iPhone, which is in all other respects a life-changing piece of technology for me, is the crappy camera in it. C'mon, Steve, you can do better than this.But I digress.
Anyway, clicky here for ( octopus! )
- Mood: awake
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."
--Bertrand Russell, 1956
- Mood: awake
This story is number 17 in the project, and it's called Legacy. It's a meditation on transhumanism and uploading and what it means to be a copy, and it's quite beautiful.
aclaro, figmentj, datan0de, femetal...I think you guys in particular will enjoy it. Thanks to zaiah for the link.Warning: Reading this story made me cry.
- Mood: indescribable
If you have seen it already, you should see it again.
It seems to me that scientists and others who explore the physical processes of the universe are without question the very same people most filled with awe and wonder at what it offers.
Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: A Glorious Dawn
- Mood: contemplative
This episode seems to have a special theme: those whacky Christian fundamentalists, up to their silly hijinks in their classic laugh-a-minute way that we all know and love.
So without further ado, on to the links!
First up, we have this breaking news from Muckflash: Christian Group to Produce Clean Pornography.
The group, recently incorporated as the Southern Coalition for Progressive and Pure Change (an obscure sub-branch of the International Congress of Church and Ministries), will pay for the production of 5 films which they say will act as a “stepping stone away from iniquity” as viewers use the films as an intermediate step as they “switch paths from the sexually impure world of the devil to the white shining path of the Lord.”
“We’re envisioning a kind of ‘nicotine patch’ for the tortured souls that struggle in this world to find a Christian voice in the midst of a popular culture that has lost the Word of God in a heathen cacophony of selfish desire,” said Reverend Dr. Stanley Lovett, Founder and Executive Director of SCPPC.
Let's not forget the subtext of racism and good old-fashioned slave-era stereotypes about blacks, which tend to follow conservative Christianity like flies following a charnel wagon:
Dr. Lovett was willing to give a general description of the the first film, however. According to Lovett, Jodie and the Great Black Whale will feature an 18 year old missionary in Jamaica who is swayed by native temptors into working as an exotic dancer.
And just in time, too, because over at the God and Science site, we learn that pornography leads to sex with robots, and sex with robots leads to the extinction of the human race.
The data underlying the "radical" predictions laid out in this page come from scientific studies that have examined the pervasiveness and effects of pornography upon men and women. In particular, recent data show widespread acceptance of pornography among today's young adults as "an acceptable way to express one's sexuality."1 For males the acceptance rate is 67% compared to 37% for their fathers. Among young adult women the acceptance rate is 49% compared to 20% among their mothers. So, the rate of acceptance of pornography has doubled in just one generation. When those young adults raise their own children, the acceptance rate will probably be greater than 80% for both males and females. The step between watching pornography through technology and engaging in sex acts through an attractive technological object is not that far, especially when the object acts as if it were a real human being.
I don't know what's more silly about this article--the notion that human beings don't actually sex out to have babies and certainly won't go out of their way to have one if there's a convenient, non-baby-making alternative, or the even more insulting notion that human relationships are a dismal, unhappy affair, filled with complication and weighed down by erratic, moody women, and that anyone who could skip the whole sordid mess by having sex with robots would never want human companionship.
The Religious Right truly is the village idiot of American culture. These guys never cease to blow my mind with their bizarre misunderstanding of basic human emotion. They really, truly do not get it, on a level that borders on autistic.
Oh, and anti-intellectualism. Mustn't forget anti-intellectualism. Over on the NY Times Stanley Fish blog comes this astonishing condemnation of intellectual enquiry, Does Curiosity Kill More than the Cat?
Most conservative Christians seem content to keep anti-intellectualism as the subtext of their basic world view. Not so for Stanley, who puts it right out there:
In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship.
And finally, PZ Myers posted this little gem, which neatly sums it all up:
- Mood: amused
- Mood: amused
- Mood: aggravated
zaiah and I went shopping at Target for curtains for our new house.There are, as it turns out, a bewildering array of different kinds of curtains, in different patterns and textures, almost all of which are stunningly ugly.
One brand of curtain carried by Target is Eclipse brand curtains, which are entirely opaque and block out...well, let me show you. Apologies for the poor quality of the image; it came from my iPhone. The bit I've circled in red is the interesting bit.
- Mood: amused
Well, look no further! Here's an easy, step-by-step guide to building a religion of your own.
Step 1: Start General
"There is a divinity and this divinity created the universe." People are natural storytellers, and people are naturally curious about where they came from, where the stars came from, and where the ground they're standing on came from. But, people are also lazy, and don't want to spend years learning about the physical properties of the universe, or the mathematical models that describe the formation of the heavens and the earth. "God did it" is an easy explanation that appeals to folks, and you'll find that people will accept it wholeheartedly without one single shred of evidence.
Step 2: Work from the general formation of the universe to human beings
People want to believe they are special. People adopt worldviews that are inherently self-centered; if you tell a bunch of folks that god made the universe, people are going to want to know if god made them. "God made the universe with a set of immutable natural laws and then those laws took over to form, over many millennia, us" just isn't satisfying for most people. It's not a good story.
You want to tell folks that your god made them specifically. This, too, you will find accepted without question or proof; people are already halfway to believing it before you even begin, because it's a damn good yarn that appeals to their inherently self-centered worldviews.
Plus, you'll find it useful for the next step.
Step 3: Since god created human beings, he must have had a reason for doing so, right?
Human beings are inherently prone to promiscuous teleology--the tendency to believe that things happen for a purpose. It's not enough for us to look for the explanation about how things came to be; we also want to know why. This appears to be a side effect of a hyperactive sense of agency, which has a positive survival value; we see agency because it helps keep us alive. It's easy to mistake a shadow for a burglar, but people rarely mistake a burglar for a shadow!
Anyway, appealing to this sense of purpose will help reinforce your religion in the minds of the people you talk to. It's a great shot of self-esteem; "God has a plan for me!" It helps personalize your religion by appealing to people's inherent self-centeredness. And it's massively helpful in establishing the creeds you'll be using a bit later.
The notion that your god has a purpose for humanity makes the next step logical and easy to swallow:
Step 4: Since god has a purpose in creating us, there must be a right and wrong way to live. The right way to live is in accordance with this purpose; the wrong way is in defiance of it.
This is a step that's surprisingly subtle in its ramifications. Anyone who believes that your god had some reason for creating human beings is going to find this easy to believe also; you won't have to sell this point. And it opens the door to all sorts of distractions you can easily use to deflect conversation away from anyone who wants to challenge the assertions you made in the first three steps. Just bring up the philosophical idea of "free will," assert that your god wants us to live according to his plan of our own choice, and any inconvenient conversations that start to head too close to "Well, how do you KNOW god created the universe?" will quickly become bogged down in the semantic morass of free will and determinism. You can trap the conversation in this mire for decades.
But, now you have a problem. Now you have to figure out some kind of way to codify what the right way to live is, because people are going to want to know. So far, you've been able to skate along without offering even the tiniest scrap of evidence that ANYTHING you say is true; people will believe you because they want to believe you. But once you start telling folks what the right way to live is, people are going to want to know how you know.
This is a problem that's never been completely solved; look at all the other religions and you'll see that folks really like to bicker about this stuff. But there is a solution that works well enough to get you by, and that is:
Step 5: Tell people that your god writes books.
Books are awesome. You can claim that your god gave the book to you by divine revelation without also leaving the door open to other folks saying they've had revelations that contradict yours, because where's the book? You don't have to remember all the various tenets of your religion, because hey, they're in the book. You can fend off challenges to your authority by referring back to the very book that you wrote to begin with. It's brilliant!
It doesn't even have to be a very good book. It can be filled with contradictions (your god created the world, then created man, then did some stuff, then man got lonely, then your god created woman; no, wait, your god created man and woman at the same time). It can make assertions that are provably false (the Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel). Doesn't matter. All you really need is a story that sells the book--some kind of tale that'll help people accept that the book is actually written by your god.
A story involving magical plates made out of gold hand-delivered to you by an angel is good. If your imagination fails you, though, you can always just say that you sat down and thought about it really hard and it came to you.
Step 6: Sell the books by preying on natural human drives
We'll use two emotions here that are often called 'negative,' but as we'll see, thinking of these as negative emotions is nonsense! They're positively wonderful for helping you to get people to believe what you want them to believe.
The first is fear. In your book somewhere, you have to say that people who don't believe this book will have bad things happen to them. This is a must. It doesn't matter what the bad thing is, provided it's bad enough.
If you're a traditionalist, burning forever in a lake of fire is good. So is being ground beneath a wheel or being torn apart by demonic dogs. If you're more modern, you can talk about how mysterious spiritual entities will be drawn to unbelievers and clog their thetan energy or something.
People tend to fear death, so playing on that fear is brilliantly successful; you can do it directly, by telling folks that anyone who doesn't believe your book will die; or indirectly, by telling them that they don't really die, but if they don't believe your book they'll come back to life in an undesirable form.
I recommend the latter, because it gives you a natural hook into the other emotion you'll want to use, which is greed. Tell people that they can have things they want and they will be happier if they believe your book. Again, you can do this directly, by saying that people who believe your book will never die but will instead go on to a wondrous place where the streets are made of gold, they will have stables full of hot women who want to fuck them, and they'll be able to create worlds of their own if they like; or do it indirectly, by describing how people who believe your book will become successful and wealthy. (They might not, but that doesn't matter--if you're doing this properly, you will! Should someone tell you "I believed your book and I haven't become rich," you need only say "God is testing you.")
By this time, people will believe your book because they'll be too damn scared not to.
You might think that people would say "Wait a minute--you mean your god prepares pits full of fire and razor-clawed wolves to tear us apart because he has a plan for us and wants us to be happy? How on earth does that make sense?" But you'd be surprised.
Step 7: Lay down the rules
This is trickier than it sounds.
A natural beginner's mistake to make is to set down a bunch of rules for people's lives that will cause them to act the way you want them to. Remember, though, you're dealing with human beings, and human beings are notoriously resistant to changing the way they behave, even when they think that behaving the wrong way will cast them straight into a burning pit full of lava and body thetans.
And also, people are excellent rationalizers, who are very crafty at making up reasons why rules they don't like don't apply to them.
So you have to be careful. You can't just write a bunch of rules without thinking about what the folks yu're talking to are already doing.
Successful religions succeed because they do not try to set morality; they instead cater to the various prejudices, bigotries, and moral beliefs that people already have.
If you live in a slave society, you will not gain any traction if your book says that god thinks slavery is wrong. More likely, you'll get arrested as a public nuisance.
Similarly, if you live in a racist society, you won't gain any followers by telling people that god says blacks and whites are equal. if you live in a society where women are second-class citizens, you're not going to get too far by saying that god wants men to treat women well. You can't just go making new rules willy-nilly; even if you've sold people on all these ideas so far, they're going to balk at actually changing their moral code.
So, the professional instead makes a list of all the various prejudices that the people around him already have, then writes the book to justify those existing prejudices. That way, your book becomes an easier sell.
Don't worry that the prevailing cultural prejudices will change over time. Nobody's actually going to read your entire book anyway; only the parts of it they like. If you write in your book that your god thinks that slavery is a pretty neat idea, and then centuries from now slavery is abolished and people start believing that it's morally wrong or something, they won't say "But wait, this book says that god is OK with slavery! That must mean that god is immoral!" Instead, they'll simply stop reading those parts of your book. It'll be like a little secret, you know?
If you find yourself in a place where you've run out of ideas about what sorts of rules to write about, write about sex. There's always someone doing some sex stuff that his neighbors don't like. You can milk that for thousands of pages, if you want to.
Step 8: Sell the book
If you've written the book correctly, this step is already halfway done. Make sure you feature prominently in the book or (better yet) in the story about the book in some way. Making up stories about your lineage helps.
You don't really have carte blanche to write whatever rues you like into the book, but there's nothing stopping you from putting a few things in there to benefit you. If you sell yourself and sell the rules that benefit you at the same time, you're golden.
It's important to sell yourself in the book because remember, folks will believe that the book was written by your god. If the book makes you out to be special, that will give you legitimacy, and your legitimacy will help you get folks to accept that the book was written by your god. It's win-win!
At this point, you're basically done. It's important not to get too ambitious, though. A good messenger of god knows his limits; if you make a practice of boinking all the townspeople's wives like Joseph Smith did, there's bound to be talk. Similarly, if you try bringing your book and its rules into places that have different prevailing prejudices like Paul did, you may come to a sticky end, which is what usually happens to moral leaders who try to lead rather than follow the morality of their flock.
Instead, I advise stepping away from the day-to-day management of your religion once it becomes established. Let the faithful manage the enterprise; they'll really believe it, so they might even work for free. You can distance yourself from any messes they manage to get into while still collecting generous stipends from your religion. Play your cards right, and by the time you die, you, too, may have a $600,000,000 ranch in California!
- Mood: chipper
