I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C. S. Lewis

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

Bertrand Russell

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

Oscar Wilde

"Remember Richard Reid, the guy who tried to light up his shoe on the airplane? After that we had to take off our shoes. Imagine what would have happened if he had hid that bomb in his pants," Boyd said.

-- Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an aviation consulting firm in Evergreen, Colorado.

The problem, as some people in this article point out, is that security restrictions that focus on potentially harmful objects can never be 100 percent. So, nobody can take toothpaste onto an airplane. So you have thousands, millions, of people dumping their toothpaste at the checkpoint. Everybody knows they can't take toothpaste on board. Normal law-abiding people diligently attempt to remember to not have toothpaste in their carry-on luggage. And then one of those law-abiding people simply forgets about the toothpaste in his back pocket, nobody notices it at the checkpoint, and he gets onto the airplane with it.

So what was the point, really, of making all those other people dump their toothpaste?

I understand the immediate restrictions -- they were a panicked reaction, based on, "we don't know the full ramifications of this plot, so we're erring on the side of caution." That makes sense, in the short term.

But there is talk of making the no liquids restriction permanent. Talk of banning cell phones, laptop computers, MP3 players. Can you imagine trusting your laptop to the ravages of checked baggage? Me neither. Although, on the plus side, a de-emphasis on carry-on might reverse a twenty-year trend of people hogging the overhead bin space.

Flights from England reportedly banned books and can you imagine the horrors if that ban became permanent? A ten hour flight without a book? And what could you do with a book, anyway? Chuck it at the back of somebody's head?

Let's face it, anybody sufficiently motivated will find a way around any security measures you can possibly devise. Ban guns? They use box cutters. Ban box cutters? They hide explosives in their shoes. Ban shoes? They hide explosives in their drinks. Ban drinks? They can hide explosives in their digestive tracts. We could make it so you can't get on a plane with anything but your body and your passport, and they will find a way to hide explosives under their nails and the trigger inside the passport. (Jeez, don't these security people watch James Bond films?)

Things that can be used as part of a terrorist plot -- once you're talking suicide bombers, anyway -- are ubiquitous and fundamentally un-bannable. The rare thing is the person who is actually planning to become a suicide bomber. And how do you prevent those people from getting on the airplane? Well, British officials already did this time, so I guess they should keep doing whatever they did.

But, as this Alternet article have suggested, the point of airport screening is not to prevent would-be terrorists from getting would-be objects of terror on board an airplane -- it is to make passengers feel that they are being protected from would-be terrorists. (Or perhaps, as MikeK suggested, it is to make sure that certain people in the TSA never have to testify before a Senate sub-committee as to why they didn't ban carry-on liquids.) Either way, they are a psychological measure only, and make no material difference in our safety.

These two pages are unusually autobiographical -- they are based on my own experiences and don't differ from them too much, except that I don't believe I ever had a fruity 70s unicorn on a birthday cake. But I might have, if it had occurred to me. Or I might have had a cheesy, vaguely Gandalf-esque wizard.

Because I am a big nerd.

The "another reason you should obey your parents" line, and the "great place to meet ministers" line are both direct quotes from Sunday School classes I remember from the Church of the Poison Mind. They came along well after I had disconnected from the proceedings and was just amusing myself by taking mental notes for future satire -- otherwise, that's the point where I would have disconnected.

As much as I had been a Christian since I could remember, I had also been a feminist since I could remember. Until this point in my life (early adolescence) I had never thought for even a moment that there might be a conflict between those two ideologies, that is, the teachings of Jesus and sexual equality. So now, suddenly, I had these people telling me that there was a conflict. You had to pick one. Jesus or feminism. Jesus or science. Jesus or rock music. Jesus or rational thought.

Under those terms, Jesus couldn't win.

One thing I regret from this time: that I did not keep any copies of these weird anti-rock handouts that our Sunday School class got... circa 82-83? (I sent them all to my punk-rock pen-pal.) They were crazy gold, more paranoid and creepy than Chick Tracts. Some things I remember: the KISS logo, with the lightning bolt esses, was evil because the lightning bolts represented "Lucifer falling like a lightning bolt from Heaven" and not because of the very obvious resemblance to the Nazi SS logo. The same handout identified images of light as symbolic of both Jesus (light of the world) and Satan (Because Lucifer is the morning star). The song "Hotel California" was evil because it was about being trapped in hell (well, duh) and also because it was full of secret references to the Church of Satan. (Never mind working out how a song that is clearly about being trapped in a kind of hell can also be interpreted as somehow being all "hell, yay!") And "Stairway to Heaven" was chock-full-o "backmasking."

Ah, remember backmasking? Those were the days. It was the 1980s, and you could sometimes rig up turntables to play backwards -- you had to disengage the motor and turn them by hand, and it probably ruined the records, and the needle, and maybe the motor too, but it did allow you to judge for yourself whether "Number Nine, Number Nine" played backward sounds like "turn me on dead man."

(It doesn't. It sounds like "neon rebman" and it only sounds like that because the announcer is from the BBC and turns "nine" into two syllables, "Ny-un," and because the schwa-e problem in English means that we hear "mun" and "man" as the same word.)

(Oh, and for you youngsters, a "turntable" is a device that uses a "needle" for replaying a vinyl "record." These records were a primitive but effective method for physically recording sound waves. Sound was translated into vibrations of the needle and recorded as impressions into a medium, such as wax, which then became a master for mass-producing the sound recording.The needle on the replay turntable fit into the groove copied from the movement of the original needle, and reproduced the vibrations of the original sounds.)

Anyway, being concerned about backmasking required swallowing some rather large, rotten, whoppers.

Whopper 1: Believing that your typical unsuspecting teenage Led Zeppelin fan could, somehow, without special equipment or attention, discern what a bunch of sounds would sound like if you played them backwards.This suggests that the average human has some kind of constantly operating subconscious backward sound reel, which has interesting quantum time-travel implications if true. But if it were true, you'd think it would affect our species in other ways. Also, you'd think this ability would be verified in laboratory tests. Which it is not.

Whopper 2: Believing that, once these backward messages are perceived (subconsciously), they affect behavior. This is tied into the controversial idea of subliminal advertising, which sounds more plausible than the subconscious backward sound reel thing, but again, has not been verified in laboratory tests. Even if subliminal advertising has an effect, it's difficult to imagine that it would have more of an effect than all the liminal and superliminal advertising that we are all subjected to.

Whopper 3: Believing that rock musicians are carefully constructing normal forward music that just happens to have these secret messages when played backward. One of the peculiar things about the backmasking controversy is that it never seemed to involve obvious backward recordings -- the final verse of "Rain" by the Beatles, for example. And why was that?

Because the whole thing was nonsense, beginning to end.

Anyway, now that most music is played electronically, you never hear about backmasking anymore. Is that because people realized it was stupid? Probably not. People currently believe in things that are just as stupid. But you can't play a CD or an MP3 file backward, so nobody is ever going to try it and notice that when you play Britney Spears backward she is urging young girls to put on turtlenecks and go into law school.