h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Founded in the late 18th Century, the US, with its constitutional government, often provides us with a laboratory for representative democracy. It's interesting - and sometimes informative - to look at what these people do with their republic in order to see what kinds of pitfalls there are for the rest of the planet.

Sort of like a Star Trek episode, really.

Now, there are people in PR who wonder why I often write Guide Entries on the subject of odd quirks of US history. 'Old hat,' they say. 'Not relevant,' they say.

Bah. It's ripped-from-the-headlines stuff. I'll show you.

Recently, h2g2 has published two Guide Entries on weirdness caused in the US by the 1860 election and the Civil War:

A87772792 - Education and the US Civil War: Confederate Readers and Dixie Spellers

A87767509 - Town Line, New York, USA - Last Bastion of the Confederacy

You might notice that the first one is on the Front Page right now. (That's just an accident, we happened to have the pics ready.)

Now, how is Confederate Education relevant to today's internet news?

They're at it AGAIN, people.

People all over the US, unhappy with the outcome of the latest election, have flooded the White House website with petitions to secede. I'm not making this up.

The website is: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/homepage

Of course, the media are having fun with it.

Philly.com suggests that this might be a good thing, if it gets Confederates off I-95: http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20121119_The_upside_of_secession.html
The Philly.com guy points out that a lot of these petitions are badly spelled. So they might benefit from those Confederate primers, see?

TIME magazine points out that even Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who is fairly far right, says you can't really do that:
http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/19/can-texas-really-secede-from-the-union-not-legally/
Although one has to admit, letting Texas secede is a tempting idea…Elektra wants to start a petition to give it back to Mexico. She says this about once a week.

Stephen Colbert, the satirist, is from South Carolina, home of all things Secesh. As early as last year, he drew attention to the possibilities (and it's a funny video):

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/386232/may-12-2011/if-at-first-you-don-t-secede

The Onion has its take on the issue, as well, in the form of random opinions:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/secession-petitions-filed-in-all-50-states,30400/
We like the lady who said she wasn't comfortable living near so many foreigners…

As they said in my childhood, 'Save your Confederate money, boys, the South shall rise again!'

The thing is, they'll all write their own national anthems.

PS There are also petitions to revoke the citizenship of the thousands of people who have signed secession petitions. One of these petition wants to exile these people. Hm...

And several cities, including Atlanta, Georgia, and El Paso, Texas, want to secede from their states and remain in the Union.

The petition from Austin, Texas, says it all:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-city-austin-texas-withdraw-state-texas-remain-part-united-states/TDD212hQ

"There are also petitions to revoke the citizenship of the thousands of people who have signed secession petitions. One of these petition wants to exile these people. Hm..."

This takes me back to this:

The late German satirist Günther Neuss once asked: "Könnte man nicht die Todesstrafe einführen - beziehungsweise ausführen - für Leute die sie vorschlagen?"

(What if we introduced - respectively carried out - the death penalty for people who suggest it?)

'He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.' - The Bible.

A nice young lady of my acquaintance used to say: "He that diggeth a pit for others ought to be ashame of himself!"

That sounds like the same approach to Bible quotations as my sister when she was a kid.

My mom: Finish this quotation: 'The wages of sin...'

My sister: '...is trouble.'

Wow, what a great response!

How old was she at the time?

11 or 12, I think.

She made more sense than the Bible, if you ask me

Seeing as death comes to us all - and to some of us even as a relief if we are old and/or weak enough

Of course, to those who believe in eternal life and etarnal death things are a bit more difficult

Oh well, think I'll call it a day. nice talking to you

I think Paul's been misunderstood there - from his writings, it would seem that he took the philosophical position that death in the universe was the result of a fundamental misalignment between consciousness and right action. Or so I read him.

He actually said, 'The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life...'

I think he was trying to say that extraterrestrial forces were working to correct the imbalance. Of course, that's just interpretation on my part.

You have a good evening!

You're making journal postings that aren't part of NaJoPoMo while we're still in November? GAAAAHHHHHH!

I apologise. It's just that the idea of Texas seceding again was too good not to share...

"He actually said, 'The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life...'"

I know. But I'm not sure whether eternal life is really a gift - or a curse...

And anyway I think we all should behave and try to do as good as we can not because we want to earn something (like eternal life or a medal or a coupon for a free meal at the captain's table) but because it is the right thing to do. Does the Bible say anything along that line? If it does I haven't seen it yet. It's always "do this lest you want to end in hell" or "do this and you will be rewarded with this" - isn't it?

Hi folks! I don't want to get into religious debates ... personally I think one should not be too dogmatic about anything; any person should seriously ponder whatever s/he believes in and whether it makes sense AND at the same time be not too certain of whatever conclusions s/he comes to. But anyways I was raised as a very dogmatic Christian of a strict Calvinist church. How we interpreted this:

'The wages of sin is death': this meant that death came into the world as a result of sin. Adam and Eve would have lived forever if they hadn't sinned by disobeying God. Because of their disobedience death came into the world, and all of us, being descended from them, carry their sin with us and so we, too die.

Death WOULD have been our ultimate final end, eternal death, or worse, eternal punishment in Hell, if Christ had not come into the world. Christ is our gift from God that gives us eternal life.

Eternal life in this interpretation means not eternal life in this world but in the next, which would be a literal new Creation, this time without sin ... so, what the world would have been like if Adam and Eve had not sinned and it had remained a paradise, except now with all the saved people living in it. The Bible doesn't give many descriptions of this next world, so us folks had some leeway to imagine it as anything we would have loved and enjoyed for eternity, except we couldn't imagine any sins being in it. The consensus was that a lot if not all of the time would be spent in praising God which might sound boring except that as a true child of God you would love Him as a father - as the best father imaginable - so you would truly find extreme joy in doing things that glorify Him.

And the thing about earning eternal life by works was also completely against our beliefs: we believed that Christ died for us not because of anything we did but from pure love and mercy. Subsequently as well we were free to sin since God had already forgiven us ... EXCEPT that we at this point ought to realise that sinning was bad and wrong in itself, and a horrible way to repay God for the love and mercy he's shown us.

Now I don't believe that any more, but I put that just to clarify certain things. There are many, many other views from people who equally believe the Bible, but at least I can say in our church we really did go into studying the actual texts and trying to construct a coherent belief system from them. And overall that belief system is not so bad ... the problems with it come from a few initial assumptions that as I see it are wrong, and in the execution of it there are some very important values that as I see it are being neglected.

>>all of us, being descended from them, carry their sin with us<<

See, that's the bit I just don't get. Eye colour is genetic, but petty theft? Isn't that more a nature vs. nurture thing?

The idea of original sin is that it's not anything specific: it is a general tendency towards sinfulness, or selfishness - wanting to benefit at the expense of others - that is inherent in every single human being as a matter of course. There is according to this view not a single human alive who hasn't at some point done something wrong. (Excluding very young children or people who have serious mental disabilities that prevent them from even understanding the issue of right or wrong.) Now remember I said I don't believe the underlying religious assumptions of this. But still ... this is what most people today still believe whatever their 'system' of belief might be: human nature means that we will always have wrongdoers with us, and every one of us is constantly tempted to do the wrong thing for the sake of our own interests.

Of course we could debate whether that is true or not *outside* of the assumptions of any system of religious belief.

Of course eternal life in the biblical sense must be a good thing, Willem

And losing that gift is of course a bad thing - although: While you are dead you will not know anything about it and thus will not be able to miss it

I like your first paragraph

Just a few days ago I wrote this in response to another discussion:

Good people on spaceship Earth.
Share what you have wisely and clean up after yourselves.
Believe what you will (nobody will be able to stop you anyway) but do not let yourself be confused by the three most dangerous illusions: racism, religion and nationalism.
According to science there is only one human race - period!
Religions may have their place in that they teach morals and ethics, but they should never interfere with politics.
And nationalism is just plain stupid. We all have relatives in foreign lands. Some were forced to fight and even kill each others in WWI and WWII (and don't get me started on civil wars!)

Yeah, I try to express my thoughts short and simple - because that's how they are

Okay. I write one simple, snarky journal post about idiot US politics, and come back to find out that people are having a deep, thoughtful, and respectful discussion of one another's religious beliefs?

What kind of behaviour is that? You guys are weird.

What I think is interesting about Pierce's point is that he's trying to hold us to a higher standard than any religion ever did - to wit, to be kind, or good, or whatever, for its own sake. That's because he's a very cool person.

Personally, I think it would be sufficient to be kind and good because it benefits both parties - the giver and the receiver of that kindness and goodness.

Now, I'm going to say something crazy, which is my privilege as a bona fide tinfoil-hat-type person.

I know exactly where Willem's coming from, because I came from the same tradition - with denominational differences. We weren't Calvinists. We, er, felt sorry for Calvinists, our mistaken brethren......but that boring heaven? I got that number at 8 years old. I remember this vividly, because I went into existential crisis and had to go and talk to God about it for hours, why would he make heaven boring...?

I believe that not only IS there another world, which works better and is NOT boring, but that everyone is going there.

What Jesus was trying to do was to make sure everybody ENJOYED it.

Think about it: Jeffrey Dahmer dies, goes to Heaven. It is no longer possible for him to be a serial-killing cannibal. He can't hurt anybody. If that's all he wants to do, he can't even *move*.

Is he happy, or miserable? Does he die of shame/misery/boredom?

Just saying.

In that case, you might enjoy this, Dmitri http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ATB6j6eaI (fullscreen for full effect!)

Careful, it's in Forrn. And it was first shown in 1911, when it was still ok to be named Adolf. But that's the reason it has a bunch of people arguing about Neonazis in the comments.

Er, sorry, I mean the story was published in 1911.