From browsing the Youtube comments on this video, it’s interesting how many people jump to conclusions about the filmmaker’s intent. They believe he’s attempting to prove “God doesn’t exist.”

This is not true. I believe he’s attempting to show why it’s logically incorrect to coerce others into believing God when there’s no real presentation of evidence. God may be true for you, but that doesn’t mean someone else needs to believe for the same reasons.

Community Connection

Need some more philosophy? Don’t miss F. Daniel Harbecke’s classic The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide To Informal Fallacies and The Kung Fu Warrior’s Guide To Arguing With Logic.

Photo: viaj24h / Feature photo: wandering angel

You’re sitting in a dirty alleyway, perched on a bright blue plastic stool eating the best bowl of noodles you’ve ever had.

A group of fanny-pack toting tourists shuffles by, following their guide’s umbrella and craning their necks to hear her narration. You let out a chuckle, happy to be on your own, free of the constraints of an organized tour and content in the knowledge that they have no idea what they’re missing.

You return to your hole-in-the-wall guesthouse, only to find that the tourists and their umbrella are staying on your floor.

The tour group mentality has always been an easy target for anyone who travels, making us feel better about our own adventures and providing a convenient Other to poke fun at.

It’s getting harder and harder though, with companies like Urbane Nomads billing themselves as “travel mixologists” and blurring the line between hardcore travel and hand-holding tours.

According to them, they’ve:

“turned the typical tourist itinerary on its head- taking the tourist through a city’s back alleys, revealing its seamier (and/or more interesting) side , continually testing the limits of accessibility in travel or using a local folkloric legend as a premise for an itinerary revealing current social and political problems.”

The Back Door Philosophy

Up until recently, almost all tour companies have presented their services with an image of ease and relaxation – you can’t open an issue of Conde Nast Traveller without seeing the words “style” or “luxury” – but what they’re selling is ultimately far more about leisure than travel.

Going it alone and spending as little money as possible provides a far richer experience, something everyone’s idol Rick Steves has always espoused with his “back door” philosophy.

It’s true that a lot of backpackers do it on the cheap purely because they’re broke, but most at least pay lip service to this idea of staying close to the ground.

Rightly or wrongly, travelers often feel like their journeys are constantly under siege by everyone else’s.

Think of the backpacker who laughs at you for paying 140 Baht for a guesthouse when he only paid 115 – we’ve all met that guy and a lot of us have been him. Examples like that come off as a little insane, but that sentiment is a common thread even among veteran travelers.

Much as we’d like to play the part of the hardened vagabond, we’re all afraid of everyone else cheapening our “authentic experience.”

From what I can tell, Urbane Nomads actually does threaten to do that.

Urbane Nomads is offering tours that guarantee life-changing experiences without having to exert yourself to get there. It’s presenting hardcore adventure – placing yourself in unfamiliar and unexpected situations for the purpose of discovery and personal development – as something that can be done free of worry and hardship.

This is totally antithetical to the things I’ve come to believe through traveling. Adventure isn’t just about the highlights; it’s the everyday misery and difficulty that produces the best stories and clearest insights.

Departure From The Urbane

If, in twenty years, this sort of thing becomes the norm, will anybody really value travel as a holistic experience anymore? If it’s acceptable to watch a Mongolian polo match on the steppes and go home to a perfect cosmo in your five-star hotel bar, have you learned anything about yourself, Mongolia or travel?

Camels in Mongolia / Photo: mooney47

Sure, no one will stop you from riding a bicycle down the Karakoram Highway, but as writers, artists and photographers we all know that it’s never just about us. If the image of adventurous travel as a series of dizzying highs and backbreaking lows is watered down to a flattened, five-star package tour, where will you and I fit?

Of course, there are two sides to everything. As dire as I’ve made it sound, there seem to be some great things about Urbane Nomads.

It’s run by one person, not a huge corporation, which makes me believe that their commitment to sustainable, ethical and personally enriching tourism is sincere. Their owner says that, “Under her guidance, the itineraries and destinations offered by Urbane Nomads reflect a concern for the social, cultural and historical nuances of the destinations visited.”

It’s also probable that, before this company existed, their clients would have spent ten thousand dollars on a luxury tour of Western Europe instead of hot air ballooning in Burma.

As a concept, I think Urbane Nomads is the sort of tour company we’d all like to run. It’s the “urbane” part that bothers me.

Adventure has always been a departure from the urbane, and if we begin to blur the lines between everyday comfort and eye-opening experiences we stand to lose the most important aspect of travel: to transform ourselves.

Community Connection

Check out F. Daniel Harbecke’s classic The Last Article On the Tourist/Traveler Distinction You’ll Ever Read. Also don’t miss From Tourist To Travel In 5 Easy Steps.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on companies like Urbane Nomads? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: annnna.

We previously talked at BNT about what it might mean when white people take on heritages other than their own.

But I found dialogue on Reddit that delves into an area where we just scratched the surface. Someone posed the question, “What is white culture?”

The purpose and responses of that post happens to be about Glenn Beck’s comment that Obama has “hatred for white people or the white culture.”

Some of the readers believe Beck’s statement essentially implies that white culture is American, Christian and conservative. Other people say that there is no such thing as white culture, that culture in fact comes from:

Where you live, how you were raised, and the collective traditions, beliefs, and prejudices of the people around you.

What is Culture?

While making fun of white people can be well, funny, it got me thinking, is the term “white culture” even valid in the world? I’m taking this question beyond the borders of the US and even other white-majority countries.

Does being born white in Africa mean that a person is culturally linked to someone in Canada? Probably not, unless their family came from there.

But what if you paired the UK and the US, who share a language (minus accents), cultural heritage, and at least on a world stage, have remained political allies? Does the rest of the world think there exists, to some extent, a culture of shared whiteness between the two?

I can think of a lot of people from both the UK and the US who would not concur, though I can see how people in other parts of the world very much connect the two.

But I’m not sure if at this point in history, we can say that culture is at all based on race. While for some cultures, such as the Aboriginal people and South Asians, a large percentage of the people are still not of mixed races, on the whole, our world has intermeshed in a big way.

And place is also key – where you settle often ends up being the “culture” you take on.

This is not to say that culturally-based racism isn’t alive and thriving, or that keeping cultural history alive is not important; far from it. It is only to say that I’m not sure definitive lines can be placed according to race any longer.

And I’m not sure that we should ever listen to anything Glenn Beck has to say. But really, that’s another point entirely.

Do you think there is such a thing as “white” culture? Share your thoughts below.

Community Connection

Check out Matador Night’s Editor Kate Sedgewick’s piece White Privilege – Can You See it? to test your view of whiteness throughout the world. Don’t forget to read Buster’s illuminating piece (and the comments that came with it) about racism in Russia: Should People of Color Go To Russia?

Photo: lavalen

Cambodians love the lightest of Lite Rock pop music.

Celine Dion is huge here, and one morning my neighbor across the alley was blasting her from rattling speakers while washing his car in the white-blue of dawn. I happened to be up early and reading on my front porch a book of Joan Didion’s essays from the Sixties.

She referenced Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch master of ghastly medieval humanity, twice in sixty pages, and this gave me a new lens through which to understand Khmer musical tastes.

My neighbor, like any Khmer over the age of thirty, almost certainly lived through the Boschian horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the terror that has made Cambodia what it is today.

As Celine gave way to the Carpenters singing every sha-la-la-la; every whoa-oh-oh-oh, I thought of how words, which many in the West fear are losing ground to the pulsing image, remain powerful enough in Cambodia to build a bridge to ruin.

And they’re frequently as banal as those Western nonsense syllables.

Lies and Defamation

Photo: Jason Leahey

If you travel around Cambodia, you’ll pass many, many signs over schools, homes, the red-dirt roads, advertising for the Cambodian People’s Party. Every once in a while you’ll come across a similar ad for the opposing Sam Rainsy Party. These signs are inevitably battered by age, their lettering faded to outlines and the color of soured milk.

The SRP is the only party other than the CPP to have any significant representation in parliament, though its 26 seats are dwarfed by the CPP’s 90. Prime Minister Hun Sen and his CPP are waging a war on the SRP. They’ve marginalized it, now they’re going to eradicate it, la-di-da, the same old song and dance.

A few months ago the editor of a pro-SRP paper printed a speech by Rainsy in which he accused the CPP Foreign Minister of being a former Khmer Rouge cadre.

The editor, Dam Sith, was slapped with a two year prison sentence for the spreading of “disinformation” and “defamation.” A lawyer for two SRP Members of Parliament was given a prison sentence as well because he “made a mistake” in defending the MPs, who were also accused of insulting the CPP.

What makes these cases particularly interesting is their vocabulary.

On Sen’s demand, and as the only possibility of avoiding jail time, Editor Dam wrote a groveling apology. “I am asking for the highest permission of [the party] to forgive me,” he wrote. “I promise to discontinue the publication of my paper. I promise to support the ingenious CPP policy in the building of the country’s progress.”

Dam even joined the CPP because disowning one’s dissent, apparently, is not enough.

Meaning Of Words

This stuff isn’t limited to political enemies. The head of the Khmer Civilization Foundation, an organization charged with protecting and promoting Cambodian culture, worried that the heat from a light show staged nightly in Angkor Wat might damage the temple.

He was slapped with a two-year jail sentence for “disinformation.” The sentence was rescinded when he wrote a formal apology.

When the World Wildlife Federation issued a report citing pollution in the Mekong as a major threat to endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins, the government decried the findings as “all lies” and threatened to kick the organization out of the country.

Sitting on my porch while the neighbor boomed his music, songs that I find childish and goofy, I reflected: letters of apology hardly seems worthy of any tyrant worth his salt. An editor or lawyer notes offenses committed, is sentenced to jail, and then is freed, so long as he says sorry? It’s like keeping someone in a headlock and nuggy-ing his scalp until he calls himself gay.

And yet Hun is a seasoned despot; he would not insist on apologies and then let it go unless the security of his position obviated the need for the physical purges of his enemies and unless he had something real to gain by the public shaming of them.

The groveling of that editor, the way he was forced to use his own words to embarrass and attack himself, that was language turned to power. Hun could have let the prison sentences stand and doom his critics to a slow purgatory.

Instead, he chose to impose self-incrimination, to force his adversaries to denounce themselves and then claim the denouncing as honorable. The technique is a classic, but what interests me is the potency it grants to words in an era where many of us fear the loss of that potency.

Control Without Violence

Words like apologize and sorry so often feel benign.

How many times have you used or experienced I’m sorry as a verbal place holder in a fight, a meaningless errrrgh that allows you to catch breath before battling on?

Photo: Jason Leahey

The average American takes it for granted that the words publicly uttered by our leaders are just wisps of cloud; we have steadily divested our vocabulary of meaning. But in Cambodia, words like “corruption” and Khmer Rouge cadre are still potent enough to require official distortion and abuse, and rely on the degradation of words like “honor” and “generosity.”

And that brings me back to Hieronymus Bosch and my Celine Dion-loving neighbor. He surely knows that the Foreign Minister and Hun Sen were both Khmer Rouge. This is something everyone knows.

But there is no ripping out of toenails, no systematic rape, no skewering of babies on bayonets these days. Making a newspaper editor beg for forgiveness is not the same as taking him into the jungle and beating his head in, right?

So in the world of relative experience, living under a tyrant is not so bad, eating one’s own words not so abusive. This is the post-Boschian Cambodia, the post-Khmer Rouge world. Things are more civilized than that now.

And that, I suppose, is worth celebrating with the comfort of a soft rock cheese-puff.

What do you think of the political power of words? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo: kudumomo

This headline might make some of you worry:

Pro-Life Activism Adapting And Thriving.

What made me choke on my tea was the first line of the article: “The number one cause of death in the United States is abortion.” And here I thought it was heart disease.

Ok, I’ll give them that the purported number of abortions a year is higher than people who die of heart attacks (whether everyone would concur that abortion is a cause of death is another matter). I can’t say I agree with their statement that “radically pro-abortion politicians now control the executive and legislative branches of the [US] federal government.”

Last time I checked, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Plan in 2008 that President Bush had signed into law in 2003. But while the Bulletin article begins with a decidedly political tone, this “adapting and thriving” of pro-life activists has less to do with politics and standing outside of abortion clinics, screaming at doctors, and more to do with nonviolence.

It seems the group 40 Days for Life is bringing the issue back to what they consider, at its root, a spiritual question. And using spiritual, non-violent action is how they are getting their message across.

Using “prayerful, non-confrontational witness,” the group asks people to pray and fast for an end to abortion where they live, to keep vigil outside a local abortion clinic, and to get the message out to a wider community for 40-days, which many Christians can relate back to Jesus’ time in the desert.

Pro-Choice Vs. Open Conversations

As probably most of you who have read other articles I have written might imagine, I am pro-choice. But I have to say, with the exception of the fact that this group employs the tactic of going door-to-door, I’m actually impressed with their approach.

I’m certainly more willing to listen to what they have to say as compared to when they shout, craft derogatory signs, or use violence to promote a supposed nonviolent purpose.

Using prayer and vigils are actual nonviolent approaches, and allows everyone to take part in the conversation, unlike the comparable religious billboards that imply atheists are murderers and t-shirts that say Muslims are devil-like. And isn’t that what we’ve been hoping for?

Maybe this approach even means there is the possibility of people listening on both sides of the debate.

Or maybe I’m completely deluded.

What do you think about 40 Days for Life’s approach to spreading their message? Share your thoughts below.

Why does everyone have to have the same cupboard? This seemingly simple question sparks the journey of one kid who grew up under the influence of intolerant and fearful parents.

For another amazing short film, check out Sweet Dreams: An Epic Story About A Traveling Cupcake.

Ninth grade partying / Photo: Ashley Sebrell

I spent this past weekend surrounded by old high school friends. One was getting married (the one sitting in the chair in the photo to the right), and his wedding brought quite a few of our old “group” together.

There is something special about seeing people that knew you way back when. Probably the more time that passes, and the older a person gets, the more special it seems.

You tend to look back on the good times more than the challenging ones. At the rehearsal dinner, I began to think about those days of field parties in the country, fast food lunches, and…bouts of drastic depression. Ok, some of the bad stuff crept back in.

I’ve changed in innumerable ways since then (Frosty’s are no longer a part of my vocabulary, and bawling for hours on end is thankfully an occurrence of the past), yet, unlike the usual dwelling followed by patting myself on the back for how much I’ve “evolved,” this thought process stopped abruptly. I realized I no longer needed to think about how much I’ve changed.

Why was this the case? For the last 10 years, I’ve been trying to prove (to myself more than anyone else) how far I’ve come, how much more worthy I am. So what really is so different?

My spirit.

The Importance of Belief

I now believe that connecting to our spirit is the key to really and truly falling in love with ourselves.

It’s often hard to see that many of us look outside of ourselves for that blessing of self worth. We’re pretty much taught from day one that what counts is what other people think and feel about us, so who is really to blame here? Plus, for the most part, we can’t even see that this is our approach.

A long conversation with one friend about his own struggle with finding himself, and his worries over what we remembered and thought about his antics in high school, forced that click of recognition.

l now feel in my bones something that has been said to me time and time again over those last 10 years: to have others look at you with appreciation, you must first appreciate yourself. And the way to attain that appreciation for the self and connect to spirit is to gain some understanding of all those other people out there roaming the earth.

Traveling Spirit

Three months after I graduated from college, I left North Carolina for California. I didn’t know why or what I was going to do; I just knew I had to get out of there.

A much more refined (and less blurry) group / Photo: Jim Ernst

I can now understand what I thought was a drive in me to explore the “unknown” was simply a gentle, intuitive knowing of a process to find my spirit.

The same is not necessarily true for everyone, though I think the generation I find myself a part of seems to have this drive – or gentle knowing – in droves (just take a quick look around Matador).

We often discuss both inner and outer travel here at BNT. This can mean different things to different people, and really can be found in any direction you look. But how exactly did outer travel help me connect to my spirit?

For me, trekking to new places has been about normalizing myself, in a way. As my friend John put it last weekend, I was “always searching for something.” What was cloaked in self-esteem issues was actually my spirit’s ‘gentle approach’ to essentially making me move my ass.

I was propelled to find out how to feel normal, and even possibly – gasp! – truly appreciated. At the same time, I learned to not worry so much about what others thought (or what I think they thought) about me.

Sharing the Desire for Contentment

Whether glancing around at the expats doting the Globe cafe in Prague, or being the only white woman dancing to old school Michael Jackson at a club in Lusaka, Zambia, I began sensing a pattern of purpose.

The more I travel, the more people I meet, the more I feel at my stomach’s base that we are all just trying to eek out some happiness, contentment, and peace in this life.

I admit, it is still sometimes hard to feel connected in a strong political climate where I don’t agree with what the majority (or vocal minority) want. But if you get to the root, even the “enemy” is just searching for a little happiness, contentment and peace in their life, working toward it in the way they know best.

All the places and people I have seen and met, a mere dent in the globe as compared to many of you reading this, led me to return to that place in which I never felt “normal”: home. Only this time, I found myself in full appreciation of those people, my teenage years, and any abnormality I ever felt.

And that, my friends, comes from the power of spirit.

How have you felt returning home after a long journey? Share your thoughts below.

Feature photo: tipiro

Photo: smoothmasterflex

The quest for happiness, like that for love, is one of the most common shared human experiences. When we travel, we often consider potential destinations based on historical sites, culture, sightseeing, activities and location.

But what about happiness? Can we learn something from people who live longer and more satisfying lives? Or can our own happiness be increased simply by being around them?

An organization called The Happy Planet Index recently released the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the length and contentment of life in world countries.

The index doesn’t claim that all citizens of its top-rated countries are happier than everyone else, but it does show how nations can produce high well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources.

The Happy Planet Index combines life expectancy, satisfaction, and ecological footprint to process its ratings – when all three components are good, the country’s overall well-being and happiness is rated high.

Nine of the top ten countries are in Latin America – a finding that might be surprising, until you consider the mindset of Latin American culture and what values are given importance. “Latin Americans report being much less concerned with material issues than, for example, they are with their friends and family,” states the HPI data. “Civil society is very active, from religious groups to workers’ groups to environmental groups.”

The takeaway? Having a close network of family and friends, forming intimate bonds, being social and involved in your community may lead to longer and happier lives that almost any other factor.

Countless research has told us for years that being married and having close friendships – even pets – increases longevity and lowers stress. The Happy Planet findings seem to be one more corroboration of this.

According to the HPI, here’s more insight we can learn by examining the Top 5 countries:

Photo: wagnert.cassimiro

#1 – Costa Rica (Score: 76.1 out of 100)

Costa Ricans report the highest life satisfaction in the world, and enjoy the second-highest average life expectancy of the West (only behind Canada). Costa Ricans live slightly longer than Americans while reporting much higher levels of contentment – all with an environmental footprint less than a quarter the size.

A haven of democracy and peace in turbulent Central America, Costa Rica has taken deliberate steps to reduce its environmental impact; with a footprint of 2.3 global hectares, it just narrowly fails to achieve the goal of “one-planet living”: consuming a fair share of natural resources.

It also has the fifth-lowest human poverty index in the developing world, with clean water and adult literacy almost universal. But Costa Rica’s biggest secret may be found in the country’s motto, pura vida. Literally meaning “pure life,” citizens base their fulfillment on spending time with loved ones, doing what they most enjoy in life, and protecting their beautiful natural resources.

Photo: Ulises Jorge

#2 – Dominican Republic (Score: 71.5)

The Dominican Republic’s condition is similar to many other countries in the region – a medium Human Development Index score, high levels of inequality and dependence on the USA for trade – yet it manages to achieve a life expectancy of over 70 years with a very small footprint.

The country has led the way in environmental conservation in Latin America since the 1970s; 32% of its land is covered by national parks and reserves, the highest proportion in the Americas.

As politics in the Dominican Republic have become more democratic, local NGOs have begun to flourish. Whereas most environmental NGOs in many developing countries tend to be imports from the rich world, here local groups dominate – again demonstrating the idea that when citizens engage in their communities together, they tend to live happier and longer lives.

Photo: Bruno Henrique

#3 – Jamaica (Score: 70.1)

Jamaica’s appearance in the top three of the HPI table comes somewhat as a surprise. It is fair to say that the country has been in some economic trouble for over 30 years, resulting in high levels of inequality and unemployment, and some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Yet despite these problems, the island is able to maintain some of the best levels of health in the developing world, as indicated by its high average life expectancy. 97% of babies are born with the assistance of skilled health professionals, with only 4% underweight – a figure comparable to richer nations such as Argentina.

Most Jamaicans have access to clean water, unusual in a county with a GDP per capita one-tenth that of the USA. Together with its extremely family-oriented populace and small ecological footprint – approximately 5% of its energy is renewable – is what puts Jamaica towards the top of the HPI table.

Photo: themikeless

#4 – Guatemala (Score: 68.4)

Life expectancy is where Guatemala ranks lowest, with an estimate between 60–75 years. This falls in the middling range, and is what brings the country’s score below Costa Rica.

When it comes to life satisfaction, however, Guatemalans are right there at the top, reporting 7.4 on a scale of 1-10 for being “satisfied with their life.” The nation also comes in under the minimums for one-planet living, consuming resources at a rate of less than one planet’s worth.

Photo: etrendard

#5 – Vietnam (Score: 66.5)

The only Eastern nation to crack the top ten, Vietnam racked up 8.5 in the satisfaction index and has an average life-span of 73.7 years. The country’s ecological footprint only narrowly misses the one-planet goal. Sociologist Andrea Fonseca says that Vietnam’s high happiness rating “has a lot to do with social imagination.”

The bottom ten HPI scores were all suffered by sub-Saharan African countries, with Zimbabwe bottom of the table with an HPI score of 16.6. And how does the United States fare? Below the middle, with a score of 30.7 at 114th place and consuming resources as if we had four planets to live from.

The highest-placed Western nation is the Netherlands at 43rd, and the UK ranks midway down the table at 74th, behind Germany, Italy and France.

Perhaps the European and North American focus on consumerism is actually making us less happy. In fact, while most countries’ scores increased between 1990 and 2005, the three largest countries in the world (China, India and the USA) have all seen their scores drop during that time, suggesting they are indeed less happy now than twenty years ago.

The Happy Planet Index begs us to ask how many resources are we wasting – both as individuals and as a culture – on things that don’t even improve our lives?

If we made a rule of targeting resources only at things that delivered quality of life, we would end up automatically saving the planet – and at least according to the Happy Planet Index, living happier lives as well.

What do you think – any other lessons we can learn from these happy countries? Share in the comments!

Community Connection

Check out Carlo’s 5 Key Ingredients in the Search For Happiness. And for a laugh, read The Hunt For Happiness comic.