California Missions

Skipping past the history lesson, I'll just say that the California missions are some of the most significant historical/archaeological/architectural sites in California. In some ways, the history of the mission is the history of California, and the four largest cities in the state grew up around four of the 21 missions. They're also responsible for there being a wine industry in California and, therefore, the United States. They're responsible for a lot of other things, too, not all of them good.

My wife and I have plans to visit all of the mission sites; so far, we've visited five of the 21, three of them back around the beginning of August. Here are some pictures from those visits. Without labels or anything. Sorry. No, I'm not. If you're really curious, you can look up the missions and see if you can match my pictures to the appropriate one. Sounds like fun, right!

Why There Is No Hope For Your "Christian" Friends

One of the most constant and consistent frustrations of those opposing Trump is with his supporters, especially with -- and this is most of them -- "Christians." The disbelief that non-Christians have with "Christians" who support Trump is completely justified, but discussions about the lack of compassion from "Christians" is for some other time. This time let's deal with the dismissal of facts and reality by "Christians" in their rabid defense of Trump and the things he's doing.

So let's deal with a hard truth:

There is no hope for your "Christian" friends, and it is a waste of your time trying to talk to them or convince them of anything fact-based or anything having to do with actual reality, even when it comes to things that might be directly affecting them (like the ACA) in the very near future.

Well, that's kind of doom and gloom, isn't it?

Maybe, but it's the truth, and here's why:

From childhood, "Christians" grow up being taught to ignore science, history, and archaeology for the greater truth that the Bible contains. See, sometimes what's in the Bible comes into direct conflict with the reality of the world. In those situations, "Christians" are taught that the Bible is always right and science is always wrong. Always. The Bible is infallible after all, so any fact that goes against something in the Bible is always suspect. It is only a "fact," meaning it is some piece of some liberal conspiracy to undermine the Church.

Let me give you a couple of real world examples that I dealt with over and over again as I was growing up.

See, dinosaurs were my first love. I spent a good 10 years of my life planning to be a paleontologist when I grew up (which is a story for another time). By the time I was four (yes, I said four), I was already neck deep in textbooks about dinosaurs (not little kid books but actual science books about dinosaurs and paleontology). To put it another way: Science was my thing. However, dinosaurs don't fit well within the "Christian" mythos. I mean, where are they even mentioned in the Bible? And how do they fit into that whole seven-day creation myth? "Christians" will go through all sorts of mental contortions to explain all of those very real bones sitting in museums.

Explanation one:

When God created the Earth, he created it with the fossils already in the ground. There were no actual dinosaurs, God just made giant bones and stuck them in the ground.

What the fuck?

Yeah, even as a kid, that was kind of my mental response even though I had no clue about the word "fuck."

I mean, why? Why would God, any god, do something like that? Just to fuck with us? I actually had to have a discussion with my mom about this when I was... oh, I don't know, maybe 12 or 14. Her question to me was, Is it possible? Is it possible that God could have just put the bones in the ground?

How do you answer something like that? Of course, it's possible. But why? I told her it didn't make any sense logically that God would do something like that.

And she said something like, Maybe God did it as a puzzle for us to figure out.

What the fuck?

Look, this wasn't my mom talking. She didn't come up with these ideas on her own. It was some unit or something they were doing in Sunday school and, since it was about dinosaurs, she wanted to talk to me about it. And it wasn't just from my mom I head this theory. But, you know, when it came from the Church, she wasn't ever much for questioning it. This was about as close as she ever got to doing that.

So, yeah, if it was a puzzle, how do you even figure that out? What, then, is the puzzle? If you come up with answers that the "puzzle" would lead you to -- that dinosaurs ruled the world for millions of years then died suddenly -- you are completely wrong. That doesn't make any sense, that God would deliberately mislead us like that, not to mention that there are no clues at all that God had just stuck bones in the ground, so you could never come to that knowledge from the "puzzle."

So she said, "It could be a test?" Like a test of our faith. To see if we would believe that they had been real when what we should be doing was immediately grasping that God had stuck bones in the ground even more proving that He is God.

A trick, then, I said. You're saying that God is trying to trick us. That's mean.

The conversation ended when I said I didn't believe in a God who would make bones and stick them in the ground for no logical reason. It was either stupid or mean. Then I walked away.

We never talked about it again, but that was how I dealt with that particular scenario any other time I heard it mentioned.

Explanation two:
Man and the dinosaurs lived simultaneously upon the Earth. Yes, despite any archaeological evidence, man and dinosaurs coexisted. Some people even believe that Noah had dinosaurs on the ark and that he saved them from the flood... just so that they could all go extinct some time just after that.

One of my youth pastors when I was in high school believed this, that Noah loaded the ark with dinosaurs. Baby dinosaurs where the really big ones were involved. We had... disagreements... about this frequently. So much so, in fact, that he did two separate units about Creationism (in the same year!) with the whole dinosaur/human coexistence as the central point. For one of them, he brought in some outside "expert" on the issue who had a film and various "proofs" that dinosaurs lived with men. The most famous of these being this fossil of a dinosaur footprint with a man's footprint within it. That was the proof.
[If you're interested, this is known as the Paluxy dinosaur/man track controversy and has been debunked by science, though there are still plenty of young-Earth Creationists who believe in the coexistence of man and dinosaur.]

Mostly, "Christians" tend to ignore the dinosaur question or take up the more liberal view that maybe the word "day" where it's used in the creation myth didn't mean a literal 24-hour day.

The point, though, is that "Christians" are taught from a young age to ignore empirical evidence when it contradicts the Bible and that they will fabricate all sorts of stories to get around conflicts.

AND they think they are smarter than you while doing it, because, in the end, they believe that their "foolishness" is greater than your "wisdom":

I Corinthians 1:27 -- But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise...

I Corinthians 1:19-20 -- For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

I Corinthians 3:18-20 -- If any of you thinks he is wise in this age, he should become a fool, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written, "He catches the wise in their craftiness." And again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile."

These are not the only examples of this kind of philosophy from the Bible, so you might be able to understand why some of these people espouse the view that you don't need to have "any learning but what's in the Bible," something I've been told numerous times by numerous people all the way into my 20s when I was going to college. There's a reason why they pride themselves on their ignorance; it's because they've been raised to believe it's a virtue.

Their ignorance makes them "smarter" than you, and you're just not going to talk those people out of that. You can't argue with stupid, especially when it believes it's pulling the wool over your eyes.

How To Be... an Archaeologist

Today is the FREE! release of "Part Eighteen: The Angel"

But, first, it's time for the letter "A"!

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone say something to the effect of, "Well, I saw Indiana Jones, and I wanted to be an archaeologist just like him!" And, you know, I get that. Who wouldn't want to be Indiana Jones? The only problem is that Indiana Jones was more of a treasure hunter than an archaeologist. Sure, he was a professor of archaeology, but that was as Dr. Jones. When he was Indy, he was after treasure!

"I doubt any archaeologist who spent part of their youth in the 1980's didn't have Indy as a huge influence in deciding his career. How could you not?" -- an archaeologist (no, really, it's a real quote!)
"No matter how hard they deny it, every archaeologist is a fan of Indiana Jones. Without him, our field wouldn't seem nearly as romantic as it does." -- another archaeologist

Archaeology, although it can contain a measure of treasure finding, is much more complex than that. First of all, in the United States, at least, archaeology is a branch of anthropology, specializing in the recovery and analysis of material culture and environmental data. Generally speaking, a degree in anthropology is suggested. However, none of the founders of the discipline had that degree as anthropology, in many ways, developed out of archaeology, although what it really was was tomb raiding. So how did they do it?

Well, one archaeologist says, "If you were that kid that always came home with dirt on your jeans and a bullfrog in your pocket, this might be the right job for you." I'm taking that to mean that the first thing you need to be an archaeologist is a love of getting dirty. Or, at least, a willingness. I have to take the bullfrog out of the picture, because, if the goal was just to catch bullfrogs, I'd have to say that path would more likely lead to herpetology (and, no, that has nothing to do with a disease).

So, once you're willing to get down in the dirt, what do you need? You need to like being outdoors, because, unless you just want to be a professor and teach, "you are going to spend a majority of your time outdoors, walking for miles on field surveys, digging for hours in the earth, and generally getting completely filthy every day."

Now, you need to know how to dig. I hear you saying, "But I know how to dig. Just get a shovel and go to it." That would be wrong. Unless you want to destroy the stuff you're digging up. The best way to learn how to dig is to attend a field school, a course that puts you out in the field, teaches you the tools of the trade, and gives you experience in digging with a spoon instead of a shovel. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's not much of one. On a dig, the goal is to remove 5-10 cm of dirt at a time so that the soil and artifacts can reveal history, not just yield treasures. It is the responsibility of the archaeologist to convey that story to the world.

That's a good place to start, but you might remember that Indy had a pretty good grasp of the languages and cultures of the places he went, so, if you really want to excel, especially if you're going to be looking for buried treasure, you better start brushing up on those language skills! And, you know, acclimate yourself to the local cuisine. Oh, and have a good background in history and geography. And, well, there's actually too many things to list.

I suppose the real question is whether you want to be a real archaeologist or just a treasure hunter. A lot of the obvious places to just go dig things up have already been dug up or are in the process of being dug up, so that go-out-and-find-it-yourself archaeology is becoming harder and harder to do. All sorts of new technology help today's archaeologists find interesting places to dig for new stuff, including satellites! I don't think you actually have to know how to navigate a satellite, though, to be an archaeologist.

So there you go... where to start to be an archaeologist. Now, where did I put that shovel...?

Now that you know how to be an archaeologist, it's time to go dig up some FREE! books. Or, at least, parts of a book. Look at it like finding bits and pieces of an ancient manuscript! Here are today's FREE! Shadow Spinner offerings:
"Part Eighteen: The Angel" (NEW!!!)
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Ten: The Broken Window"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
"Part Five: The Police Car"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part One: The Tunnel"
"The Evil That Men Do"

That's 14 of 18 parts plus the part 0, "The Evil That Men Do"!
And, as an added bonus, I'll throw in Charter Shorts for FREE! today, too.

Make sure you pick up your copies today!