The skeptic's prayer

Dear Hannah,

I don't remember whether it was Chesterton or Macaulay, but somebody's responsible for telling me about the hilarious English skeptic who was about to go into battle and was overheard praying

Dear God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.

Nothing more accurately sums up skepticism than this -- not even our modern skeptics.  Our modern skeptics are actually fundamentalists in disguise.  They have very real beliefs about controversial things, and they call themselves skeptics because it gives everyone the impression that they're still thinking hard about them.  In reality they've mostly made their minds up, and so have joined the ranks of the conservatives who want to change everything, the liberals who don't like liberty, the socialists who who prefer a mixed economy, and the Christians who ignore everything Jesus commanded.  The skeptic's name means something, exactly like everyone else's.  It means something it isn't supposed to mean.  It most usually is code for atheist.

Never bring a Christian leftist to the zoo

Dear Hannah,

A small circle of my friends and I agree we'll never take a Christian leftist to the zoo.  We all know Christians have a tendency to get thrown to lions, but beyond this there have been a few cases in which Christians threw themselves into the lion's den.  But these grisly reasons aside, the reason we never take a Christian leftist to the zoo is out of self-preservation.  The old Christian was likely to get himself killed.  The new Christian will throw you to the lions and then praise the Lord for making him a hero.

Why we love our guns

Dear Hannah,

Black people are almost the only people in the United States with any history of being enslaved, and almost all of them belong to the party working desperately to rush us back into slavery.  It's a masterstroke of irony fit only for fiction.  The one thing every free man's got to have is the one thing they openly wish they hadn't got.

Concerning nude photos of Amy Schumer

Dear Hannah,


The important fact to begin with is that I'd never heard of the Pirelli calendar until it became too terrible to ignore.  Now all of a sudden Pirelli is the only calendar -- because until now I've never known anybody who was interested in talking about calendars.  Yesterday calendars were for little kids and the elderly; today they're the talk of the town, like every other thing we took for granted that's suddenly gone horribly wrong (I refer especially to our bathrooms). What Pirelli is -- who Pirelli is -- why Pirelli is, is not the question.  What's wrong with Pirelli is the question.  Feminism is the answer.

Mad Men: musings on character and capitalism

Dear Hannah,

I've heard many people say that with great power comes great responsibility; but I've never heard anyone say that with great responsibility comes great power.  If you want the most obvious example of the former, I recommend watching Spider Man and paying attention to Peter Parker.  If you want an example of the latter, I recommend watching Mad Men and paying attention to Donald Draper.

How to horrify your children

Dear Hannah,

Time Magazine asked Americans which of our practices would horrify our children, but I don't think Cindy Crawford (or even Time Magazine) understood the question.  Her answer was that our children would be horrified by our "otherness" -- the so-called inability to recognize our sameness.  Our children's answer will much more likely be that we failed to recognize which parts of us are too different to reconcile.

"All life is precious" and other idiotic ideas

Dear Hannah,

There are only a couple of people I know who have taken a stand against the slogan all life is precious, and one of them is me.  The good news for me is that the other one appears to be God.

On the greatness of Rome: a review of a review

Dear Hannah,

Anyone with any brains knows that in order for you to be successful in any endeavor, you have to have two things.  The first are circumstances good enough to make your endeavor possible; and the second is a personal ability to take advantage of said circumstances.

In defense of nativism

Dear Hannah,

In the world of demographics, there are very few kinds of people who can fairly be excused of nativism, and one of them is a person who's about to move somewhere else.

Sounders 'til I die

Dear Hannah,

Political bumperstickers may be more annoying than bumperstickers about sports, but in terms of insanity they lag very far behind them.  I've never understood what it is that could lead anyone to place a bumpersticker for or against gay marriage on the back of his car, because it implies it was the only opinion he thought worth me knowing.  You would think that maybe it might be better to shout religious slogans if anything at all.  You'd think that if you had only a single chance to deliver a message to the person behind you, it might be preferable to choose something aimed at the realization of mortality -- or maybe about the possibility of entering into eternal damnation (which many people claim to believe, but are too polite to consider warning us about).

Concerning the use of human shields

Dear Hannah,

Nearly every conflict in the world is morally complex -- nearly every conflict except the one between the Israelis and the PLO.  With many conflicts you're forced to dig through decades (and if you're unwise, centuries) of sins and blunders, trying to see who's responsible for starting it.  The PLO makes our decision easy, because they almost remove history from the equation entirely.  They provoke Israelis with violence, and then shield themselves from damage with children.

Jesus is Lord -- but only of the rich

Dear Hannah,

We've all heard the passages about the meek inheriting the earth and camels going through the eye of the needle, but my personal theory is that God is only the God of the rich; and barring this extremely restrictive outlook, maybe the God of the middle classes too.  The poor have almost nothing to do with Him.  They get all the fun.  The well-to-do get all His rules, which means they get a God.  Nay, they get worse than his rules -- they bear His cross.

Two terrible parents

 Dear Hannah,

Marcus Aurelius is known for being one of the wisest and justest emperors of imperial Rome.  The other thing he's known for is being one of the worst parents.

Why women love fall

Dear Hannah,

I keep talking about Solomon in these essays and it's starting to feel like he's the only person I talk about.  In fact I've mentioned several times that Ben Franklin is my hero and that Solomon is a screwup.  Mentions of Ben Franklin?  Not sure of the number, but it's a lot less than mentions of Solomon, and this makes me worried.  We all say we have our ideals.  But what are we actual meditating on?  This is what makes us.

Obama the Christian radical

Dear Hannah,

Jesus Christ is frustrating because we're never really sure whether to take Him literally.  It might be argued that He was never meant to be taken practically, and that a good portion of His sermons were meant to make us be humble.  It could be that after all the talk about poking your own eyes out what He was really trying to prove is that being perfect is beyond us -- and maybe even suicidal.  If you look at it this way, the Sermon on the Mount may not be about behavior.  It may be an attempt to get us to cry "uncle."

Yesterday

Dear Hannah,

I wouldn't call myself a fan of Sarah Silverman's, but I'm definitely a fan of some of her sayings.  And when she said a short while ago that comedians have to change with the times and accept political correctness, I think I agreed with her most.  In fact I woke up this morning to check my Facebook and asked myself what day it was, and when I figured it out it was the twenty-first of September, I told myself I would have what everyone else was having.

Why Republicans deserve Obamacare

Dear Hannah,

I was delighted to find in the New York Times this week that our hospitals are beginning to consider their expenses.  It's nice to finally have some company.  I've been wondering what my expenses are ever since I moved out of my parents' house, and I've been keeping records of it in red and black ink because I don't want to live in the streets.

You can't both be a Christian and be a Christian

Dear Hannah,

Spend any significant time reading the Bible, and you're sure to have encountered a certain saying -- that not many wise were called to be Christians.

We have reason to believe that Paul was being serious when he said it.  Not only because the majority of the epistles were written to people who misunderstood everything about Christianity (I refer the reader to the Book of 1 Corinthians), but because even after two-thousand years of reading the epistles, many Christians -- idiots, I insist -- have difficulty understanding that Christianity and killing children are mutually incompatible.

Miley Cyrus and the post-gender generation

Dear Hannah,

Solomon was never meant to be taken literally, but generally.  And when he says there is nothing new under the sun, we are almost led to believe him entirely -- if it hadn't been for automobiles and the internet and America.  About the rest of it he was right.  You can always expect the best and worst out of humanity, because the loves and hates of human nature have always remained the same, which leads us to do the same kinds of things we've always been doing.  And if he was right about anything in particular, it was about the recurring existence of Miley Cyrus.

A retraction concerning the Mexican work ethic

Dear Hannah,

St. Augustine used to publish a series of yearly retractions, and I think it would be wise for me to do the same.  If anyone's going to be a man of learning, he must also be a man of unlearning; or to put it another way, if he's going to learn better ways to think of things, he has to get rid of the worse.  And if he's got any humility at all, he has to admit it when he was wrong.

A home for Black Lives Matter activists

Dear Hannah,

If I had to pick a single moment out of the Black Lives Matter campaign as a testament to their stupidity, I'd pick the moment they stormed Bernie Sanders' stage and told the audience they were standing on stolen Duwamish land.

"Black lives matter" and other horrible slogans

Dear Hannah,

A short while ago President Obama made a deal with Iran -- a deal in which they got nearly everything they wanted out of us, and we got almost nothing we wanted out of them.  But what was most interesting about the agreement was that after they'd won and relations should have been smoothed, the supreme leader of the Iranian people was caught shouting "death to America" and everyone in the crowd was shouting it along with him.

Don't tell me to smile

Dear Hannah,

I've never really had trouble smiling, but I imagine that if the genders swapped places and women went around asking men to smile, that men would think of something much funnier to say than they were being forced to because of the matriarchy.  I imagine, being a man, that many of us might answer that we would already be smiling -- if only the woman who was asking was prettier.

How to ruin your homeschooled child

Dear Hannah,

Something that's given me an almost endless source of amusement is the public's response to an essay I wrote about homeschoolers, mostly because they said I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Of course, anyone who knows me knows I do know what I'm talking about, and I know what I'm talking about because I was schooled at home -- all the way through tenth grade, when my parents realized that homeschooling wasn't good for me anymore.

On putting Pat Robertson to death

Dear Hannah,

We hear a lot of talk about God judging the nations, but isn't it strange the Evangelicals know the way He's going to do it?  The truth is that they don't; and I know this because I've tried to get God's judgment down to a science, and the only thing I've ever been able to figure out is that if we're going by Biblical standards, God would have already drowned all the Evangelicals.

"If necessary, use words" and other nonsense

Dear Hannah,

You may have heard people say by this point "preach the Gospel.  If necessary, use words."  It may be safely translated, stop preaching.  I've never heard it used in any other context than to get people to stop preaching, and it is used because people believe preaching is less important than doing things.  But if you've been paying any attention, you'll notice that the person who quotes this happens to be speaking, and he happens to be speaking a Christian lesson for the purpose of influencing your thoughts and behavior.  In other words, what you're hearing is a sermon.  I believe it may be fairly asked, at this point, why the person who's speaking instead of keeping his mouth shut isn't keeping his own advice.  It may be because speaking is a better vehicle for ideas than silence.

The most difficult thing about being a Catholic

Dear Hannah,

Throughout my life I've heard many people say I don't know what it feels like to be black in America.  Aside from the fact that nobody has ever proposed the opposite, that black people have no idea how it feels to be white in America, what I have never heard anyone say is that I don't know how it feels to be Catholic.  I admit I don't know how it feels to be Catholic because I am not a Catholic; but I imagine that if I was, right now would be a difficult time to be one.  And this is because you never really can be too sure what Papa Francesco is going to say next.

Speak now, or forever hold your peace

Dear Hannah,

Although I've seen several bad marriages in my life, there's really only one time I felt forced to attend a wedding, and it involved a woman I love marrying a man I never trusted.  I spoke at the wedding, and did a damn good job at it.  I even bought a gift for this couple despite the fact that I knew he'd ruin everything and I'd be out a good chunk of money.   The wedding cost me my dignity and my money.   It caused the bride a broken heart and a divorce.  And shy of shoving her fiancée off a cliff there was nothing any of us could do to stop it.

If God is dead then God's Not Dead killed Him: a very late film review

Dear Hannah,

Imagine for a moment that a society of Elvis fans pooled together a bunch of money and decided to prove that Elvis was alive; and so they got a lot of marketers and hired Kevin Sorbo and compiled all their arguments for Elvis's current existence and put them all together for a film brilliantly titled Elvis is not Dead.

Thoughts on Gay Pride Month

Dear Hannah,

This morning I was told it's gay pride month, which led me to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions -- about the sanity of the American public.  I asked, for instance, why gays get a whole month when Memorial Day is only a day, and whether men having sex with men is more important than my great uncle Bob*, who was killed fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.  The answer, so far as I can tell, is that my great uncle Bob only died trying to protect us from invasion.   Or in other words, he was only in the Army.  He didn't sing In The Navy.

How to fake the presence of God

Dear Hannah,

I'm not one of those people who says that all religions are saying the same thing.  I'm also not one of those people who says that all religions have nothing in common.  To say that Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Buddhism all teach similar messages is fair; almost as fair as saying that their messages are just different enough to cause serious problems between them.  A Catholic might say the Devil isn't only in the details, but that he's purposely muddled them.  A Calvinist might say God willed the Devil to muddle them.  A Muslim might feel comfortable agreeing with the Calvinist (which is why he says things like en'shallah). Culturally, many of them might feel more comfortable blaming a Jew (which is why Jews don't want Arabs to get nukes).

To love being American (classic essay)

Dear Hannah,

Being an American is a messy business.  Nobody watches the mediocre or the boring; the whole world has better things to do than sing about Scotland, and none of the African states are very interesting unless they're on fire.  It seems that the more power and prestige a nation has, the more attention it gets, and even the worst of nations at least is forgotten from time to time unless you're living in it, or it happens to be disrupting the price of oil.  The greater something is, the more it inspires our admiration and invites our censure; and if we may be certain about two things, it is that great power produces great corruptions, and that men have always been envious of power.  And therefore, whether one lives within or without a great nation, we are frequently more likely to hear complaints rather than praise.

Should women be allowed to drink?

Dear Hannah,

In an age of social liberalism you can expect to see many stupid things become legal. One thing that hasn't become legal and that almost nobody has considered legalizing is childhood drinking.  And the reason nobody has really suggested it is obvious: because each and every one of us knows that children are idiots.

Summoning the Prince of Darkness

Dear Hannah,

When I was young my mom always advised me, if I ever thought Satan was nearby, to never attempt to summon him.  She was worried he might show up.  And so, naturally, I did what any young boy would do when asked to not do something stupid, and I asked him to show himself anyway.  I sometimes asked timidly, and other times with a manly defiance -- but I always asked.  I never really felt like there was anything to lose.  If Satan is in your room, you might as well know he's there for sure; just as it's much better to know if he isn't.  It's the sitting around and wondering that ruins a child's sleep.

In defense of an openly-racist magazine

Dear Hannah,

One nearly universal fact of human nature is that if you tell people not to read something, they'll begin to want to read it.  Another fact of human nature is that if a man begins to feel like something's been hidden from him by the "good guys," he'll begin to want to listen to what the bad guys have to say.  The unfortunate but expectable result of these is that if you have a kid spend his childhood watching movies with anti-racist themes (the ones where whites are racists, naturally), and send him to a leftist college, and he hears little-to-nothing in the media about any atrocities committed by anyone but white people, and then suddenly encounters a horrible website like American Renaissance, he might find it extremely interesting.

Two tips to avoid being used by men

Dear Hannah,

So far as I can remember, there are really two kinds of advice: how you should do something you want to do, and whether or not you should do it.  The unfortunate thing about the latter kind is that it's almost completely useless.   I can't even remember the last time I listened to good advice about whether I should do something, and so it makes me a little bit uncomfortable expecting you to do the same -- especially when the advice concerns men.  I even have a difficult time following my own advice: my essay On Happiness was a very good idea with lots of practical suggestions.  That is, I thought it was practical until these last few months, when I've found myself wanting something outside what it suggested.  It turns out that happiness can be doing the right thing; but it is equally getting the right thing -- the thing that we want.  For those of us who are barred from getting what we want, it's misery.

So you say you hate the Puritans

Dear Hannah,

Despite the fact that Oliver Cromwell was vastly superior to Charles I, I have yet to hear anyone praise Cromwell for deposing and killing him.  There have been many reasonable objections to his killing of Charles, chief among them being that Charles's death immediately led to the instant popularity and eventual kingship of Charles II -- historically one of the most profligate and useless kings that England ever saw.  But people are more likely to complain about Cromwell and the Puritans and unfairly loathe them, despite the fact that Cromwell ruled more honestly and rightly than both his predecessor and his successor; King Charles I is almost forgotten in America, despite his unhappy tendency to mangle and murder his subjects.  And the reason we hate the better man and forget the worse is simple.  Charles I offended the constitutional liberties of Englishmen; the Puritans tried to get rid of dancing on Sundays.

Homeschoolers and gay lovers

Dear Hannah,

I heard someone express one time that a good number of Disney/Pixar films were aimed at getting children to come out of the closet.  I'm not so certain, after considering not only the number of gay people employed by Pixar, but the overwhelming theme of their films, that this person was being completely paranoid.

Insanity in Indiana

Dear Hannah,

Due to a recent law protecting the rights of Indiana's business-owners, in what has got to be the bravest political move in Seattle history, our mayor has finally decided to stop funding the extremely large number of city employee trips to Indiana.  This has left us wondering what he's going to do next.  If he's going to equal the heroism of this current measure, will he stop all our city-funded flights to Pakistan, in support of women's rights?  Or maybe to Egypt, in support of the Coptic Christians suffering there?  Like the size of our mayor's heart and cajones, the limits are endless. 

A trip to hell and back

Dear Hannah,

Last night I dreamed I ate a poisonous flower with a hundred soft white petals.  Everyone was doing it, so it seemed reasonable to go along with them.  And our reasoning for eating it was simple: we were all going to die anyway -- everyone dies, you know -- and this was the easiest way to get it over with.  And so I did it.

How to celebrate International Women's Day

Dear Hannah,

Of all the classes I took in college, English 201 and Health stand out the most; and the reason they stand out the most is because in English we spent nearly all our time reading "minorities," and in health class we spent nearly all our time learning about venereal diseases.

Tyler Durden

Dear Hannah,

Right after Fight Club came out on DVD, my friends and I used to get high on all kinds of things and throw punches on the streets of Italy.  We had rules, because we were too sensible to get hurt too badly: no punches to the face, and nothing below the belt.  If someone wanted out, we let him.  I don't remember anyone fighting any girls, which would have been embarrassing for both parties whether the man won or lost.  But the point of the matter was that however ridiculous Fight Club looks now, it had an impact on nearly every young man who saw it.  I saw it with nerds who ranted and raved about it in between matches of Starcraft. I pretended it with punks and stoners who acted it under the influence of ecstasy and cocaine.  Nobody who admired the film, from the jocks to the preps to the band kids, was anything remotely like Tyler Durden.  Everyone, on some level, wanted to be like him.

Some thoughts on The Black Eyed Peas

Dear Hannah,

Ever since the 1970's at the very earliest, popular culture has run in 20-year cycles.  I'm now old enough to have consciously experienced three of them. Nobody in the 1960's was interested in the 1940's, but in the 1980's everyone was excited about the 60's.  In in the 2000's, which is the cultural revival I experienced the most personally, everyone went wild for the 80's.  A period of twenty years gives a fad exactly enough time to be unpopular: just enough unpopularity to mean none of the kids will have heard it, and exactly enough time to remind 30 year-olds about the times they used to be interesting -- a perfect recipe for a band to go on an embarrassing reunion tour.  In ten years everyone will go wild for the 2000's, which means I should probably try to start explaining The Black Eyed Peas.  I can't do anything to explain emo.  Aside from a few isolated hits, the whole of it was garbage. 

All romance is tragic

Dear Hannah,

In my last letter I told you that I was born with a certain set of inclinations.  What I didn't tell you is that not all of them have changed.  I stopped dreaming about war when I was about sixteen years old.  My dreams about romance have only gotten more complex.  Truth be told I would have preferred it the other way around. 

Concerning war and women

Dear Hannah,

When I was a young boy, there were really two things that occupied my mind for the majority of the day.  The first was war, and the second was women.  Depending on the day, their priority might have been reversed.

How to tell if you're in a relationship

Dear Hannah,

Since it might seem suspicious if you keep hearing about the good things I dream but none of the bad things I do, I've decided to throw in a confession every now and then so you can know you're dealing with a real person.  So here is my confession.

Why papa is vain

Dear Hannah,

One of the great difficulties of publishing my thoughts has been that some people have called me arrogant.  I actually had two people say I was full of myself within the same week -- for which I consider it a horrible week.  It's always good to hear someone call you out on your faults, especially when there might be an inkling of truth to it.  It's better than going your whole life being an ass and everyone thinking it except yourself.  We can oftentimes learn more from our enemies than our friends.  They'll sometimes tell us things our friends won't, because an enemy's happiness doesn't usually rely on ours.  Even if an insult is undeserved, sometimes it allows us some good reflection, which may result in our improvement of a virtue we already had.  I advise most everyone to listen to their enemies.  They may do you more good than you realize.

A toast to Bill Clinton

Dear Hannah,

I know it sounds strange to say -- and maybe we should keep this a secret from my dad -- but one of the presidents I'm happy to think about is Bill Clinton.  To be completely honest, I don't know much about anything he did as president, because I was too young to be paying attention.  What does make me happy is that he proves to me, on some level, that we have evolved significantly in our ideas about women.

God's orphan

Dear Hannah,

In the world of compliments, I've found you can screw things up in one of two ways.  The first is by giving a compliment that's not good enough; and the second is to give a compliment that's so good it embarrasses the recipient to get it.

A hasty and general review of Game of Thrones

Dear Hannah,

Since I'm about done with the fourth season, I suppose I owe someone an explanation for having begun to watch Game of Thrones in the first place.  I'd sworn it off for years now, only to prove that I'm not the kind of man who should be swearing anything.  If it wasn't for marriage and business, I wouldn't believe in vows at all.  They work out fine for men like David and Jonathan, who pledged each other their mutual devotion, because their souls were knit together.  But then there's Jepthah, who vowed to sacrifice the first thing that left his front door if he won a war, and then ended up sacrificing his daughter.  Some people think it's sexist that Mosaic Law prohibits women from making vows without their husband's consent, and it may very well be -- perhaps toward men.  The idea that women can express their ecstasies and sorrows in ridiculous vows and not find themselves bound to something which, being made in the heat of the moment, has every ability to ruin their lives later, you would think a greater benefit than an insult (although I can conceive of its being an insult to the intelligence of women).  Both sexes, after all, are capable of being rash.  But enough on Biblical vows and feminism.