I’m still relatively new at administering a blog, but it has now become clear that we need to give our readers notice as to what will and won’t fly regarding comments.  

The starting point is that we love comments.  Without them, our posts lack life.  Therefore, if you are tempted to comment, please do send it to us.  You can do so anonymously (readers won’t see who you are).   I rarely use the email address you provide in order to comment, though I occasionally write a note to a potential commenter asking for a clarification or thanking him or her for an especially good comment).

As of late, a few commenters have used their comments to pull the conversation way off-topic. I fear that allowing this to happen is annoying those who want to stay on-topic. There have been a few other problems, as well.  Rather than rejecting these problems on an ad hoc basis, I thought it would be more fair to publish some guidelines as to what “works” as a comment.   I added a few other housekeeping items in this list as well.

To reiterate the bottom line, please do send us comments.  We really enjoy hearing for you.  We want to know what posts “work” and where we need to improve.  We get more than 1,000 unique visitors each day now, and we’d enjoy knowing who you are and what you are thinking.

Without further ado, here is our new Comments (etc) Policy (I’ve also posted this file also in our “About Page”):

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I’ve seen a couple of those independantly produced DVD “exposes” about the 9/11 disaster–you know, the ones attributing sinsister intent to the United States government, that, in fact, we “knew” and did nothing in order to promote subsequent insanity.  I’ve been taking these things with large grains of salt for decades.  It’s not that they aren’t persuasive.  It’s that people are too willing to be persuaded.

You can find conspiracy theories about nearly everything.  The CIA murdered Jimi Hendrix.  And Jimmy Hoffa  (or was that the FBI?)  and the FBI assassinated JFK.

The thing is, during an episode wherein the stakes are so high, emotions are running on adrenalized atomic interaction, and absolutely everything takes on more significance than it can possibly support, the human desire to Make Sense Of Everything moves into overdrive and like the occultists dabbling in Alchemy and ancient wisdom, nothing is as it seems to be.

What I have found is that there is a far higher degree of overattention to unrelated details than anything tangibly connected.  The trouble is, of course, that sometimes some things are connected.  How is the question, and to what end are or were they connected once the connection is established.

There is a phrase I like to use in these discussions:  conspiracy of effect.  I heard it from an historian studying the course of the civil rights movement.  Looking at all the elements that fed into the checkered and often tragic history, it would be easy to assign blame to a single entity for all the bad that happened.  But instead, the reality is that the road blocks on the path to political equity in this country were all of individualized and separate origins.  Their confluence at given moments in history give the appearance of coordination, but there is no way such a complex of actions and intents could have been so coordinated.  It’s not that people aren’t that smart (or malign) but that not everyone can be that smart at the same time.  All you need, really, is a lot of people driven by a single impulse, acting separately, at more or less the same period of time…

Let’s step back and take a big example.  In his excellent book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII  John Cornwell traces the history of one of the biggest bug-bears the Catholic Church has had to contend with since WWII–was there a plot between Eugenio Pacelli and Adolph Hitler to betray the Jews?  His conclusion is, no.  Although the Concordat signed by the Church and Hitler basically gave Hitler carte blanche in Germany by effectively destroying the only other legitimate political party in opposition to the Nazis, this was done for different reasons on both sides.  The Church was fulfilling a plan to gather absolute control of all its farflung branches, something commenced back in 1870.  Under the Church program, the formerly independent bishoprics would no longer have the autonomy they had exercised for centuries.  All authority was to reside in the Vatican.  They’d been working on this for decades.  It just so happened that in Germany they got it at the very moment Naziism was ascendent.  If Pacelli can be accused of anything, it would be the blindness of singlemindedness, which allowed Hitler to “play” him.  No conspiracy is required.

Pearl Harbor is another.  People have been trying for decades to prove that Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor and that he “let it happen.”  Detailed history shows that it was a confluence of dumb decisions on the part of many people all converging on one day. (There were some smart decisions, too.  Halsey’s “engine trouble” which kept his carrier group out of Pearl till after the attack.  You can question that all you want, but there is no causal link to Roosevelt…) 

Other factors, like the unfortunate confluence of Vietnam with Johnson’s Great Society programs that ultimately destroyed the Democratic Party and opened the way for the neocon revolution of the Eighties.  Conspiracy?  No one suggests it, but you could spin it if you like and come up with one.  One group taking advantage of the tragedy of colliding moments in history.

What about 9/11?  Well, Bush and Company had other things they wanted to do with their administration.  He’s tried to do them anyway and it appears they may all be discredited because of his mishandling of the aftermath of 9/11.  The fumblefingered manner in which all subsequent decisions have been made belies the idea that the intelligence and cooperation existed to mount such a conspiracy. 

No, it was just bad timing all around.  Unfortunately, conspiracy theory is so much more attractive.  A correspondent in Pakestan recently reported the belief among the educated sector in that country that the United States knocked it own buildings down so it could go forth and wreak hegemonistic chaos on the world.  It must be asked, however, that if that were true, why didn’t Bush do a better job of it?  They actually launched the Iraq invasion as if expecting to be out of there in six months.  Hardly the plan of a world conqueror.

In some ways, conspiracy would be a comfort.  You could deal with it, then, find the culprits, expose it, put them in jail, and enact safeguards against it.  It’s much harder to do that with incompetence.  Impossible to do it in the case of plain bad timing.

But the theorizing continues.  It’s a national pasttime.  When 9/11 gets old, you see, there are still the alien bodies in the freezer at Area 51 and the United Nations’ black helicopters kidnapping people for having opinions.

So when are they going to begin those courses in critical thinking for  grade schoolers?

Silence implies acquiescence.

We live in a culture that is rife with moral controversy, but public education is largely silent with regard to many of these controversies.

In a Free Inquiry article titled “Wanted: Moral Education for Secular Children” (December 2006), Paul Kurtz asks why we aren’t doing a better job of stepping into the moral void to give our children a secular moral education:  “Secularists, humanists, and naturalists face a pivotal and deeply practical challenge: how to develop educational curricula and institutions that can provide moral guidelines for our children.”

Kurtz crowns pop culture as a prime contributor to the problem:

“banal and demeaning values often permeate the mass media: popular television, movies, music, radio, the Internet, and literature read by children. These values can herald violence, greed, vindictiveness, and immorality.”

Teaching children to be moral without reference to religion is easier said than done, of course.  Secular versions of morality conflict with many authoritarian versions of morality:

[The authoritarian tradition] holds that “deference to authority” is essential and stresses moral commandments that children simply need to accept and obey. The primary emphasis is on obedience to ancient creeds and codes. Second is the liberal tradition, which encourages young people to be responsible and to think for themselves. This approach stresses personal autonomy and freedom of thought. It is part of a new morality that has become influential since the Enlightenment: an effort to improve the lives of individuals in the current world.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to teach critical thinking and cultivate moral growth in schools. Parents committed to the authoritarian model may feel threatened by any questioning of their revered values and fearful that free inquiry in ethics will undermine the religious outlook they seek to impose on their children. Yet we cannot allow the misgivings of frightened authoritarians to limit what our children can learn about morality. So high are the stakes, in my view, that we should take nothing for granted; and we should be prepared to take matters into our own hands in such areas as moral education.

One prerequisite to teaching secular morality is exploding the myth that there is no such thing as a secular version of morality:

Encouraging children and adults to think for themselves need not necessarily lead to moral permissiveness or anarchy. Liberal humanists need not be subjective relativists, nonjudgmental in the face of all outrages. Indeed . . . liberal humanist schools and curricula need to “warn . . . pupils of the perils of extreme moral skepticism.”

A secular moral education begins by teaching critical thinking:

In particular, we should cultivate the habit of thinking critically about one’s own beliefs and attitudes. By encouraging independent thought, we can help children to grow in intellectual maturity. The morally educated child is not simply responding to external commandments but attempting to internalize empathy and conscience. This is especially important in democratic societies, where students of every cultural background, secular or religious, must master the values of citizenship together.

What are secular moral values?  Here are some examples:

“honesty, courage, “peaceability,” self-reliance, self-discipline, moderation, fidelity, loyalty, dependability, respect, love, unselfishness, sensitivity, kindness, friendliness, justice, equality, mercy, and forgiveness. I think that we can say that many of these values are humanistic; they are cherished by great numbers of our fellow citizens, whether secular or religious . . . the common moral decencies are widely shared, no matter the ethnic, national, or religious origins of the people who practice them.

(more…)

So, really.  What happened next?

Greetings to the readers of Dangerous Intersection! My name is Adam Lee, though on the internet I usually go by Ebonmuse, and I’m the owner and proprietor of the weblog Daylight Atheism. Erich Vieth has given me the opportunity to write a guest post here, and I couldn’t turn down his generous offer.

As it happens, there is a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. In particular, I was inspired by Michael Moore’s wonderful op-ed, A Liberal’s Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives, which I came across from a recent post on this very site. Say what you will about Michael Moore - many people have - but his essay, to me, stands out for its compassionate and gracious tone. It contains no gloating over the Republicans’ defeat, no mocking them for their loss. On the contrary, it empathizes with them and assures them that they have nothing to fear.

Especially noteworthy, I thought, was this point:

We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you “unpatriotic” simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us.

Now, the question: Does anyone believe for even a moment that, if the Republican party had won these elections, we would be hearing the same tune from their pundits and spokespeople? The answer, which I hope should be obvious to everyone, is: Of course not.

Had the Republicans won, they would be gloating to high heaven, mocking and ridiculing their opponents, and casting sneering personal aspersions on them at every opportunity. I know that this would be the case because this is exactly what we have been hearing from them nonstop for the past six years: an endless stream of vicious, mean-spirited attacks on the courage, patriotism and personal character of anyone who dared disagree with them in any way.

I could cite many examples from the last few years, the most recent of which was Rush Limbaugh’s infamous suggestion that Michael J. Fox had purposely exaggerated the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease. But there are many others: Max Cleland, a decorated war hero who lost three limbs defending his country, was compared to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Ann Coulter accused the widows of men who died on September 11 of “enjoying” their husbands’ deaths. Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, was vilified in some of the most disgusting ways imaginable by right-wing pundits given a national platform by the media. John Kerry, a decorated veteran who volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was wounded in combat, had his service mocked by attendees of the 2004 Republican national convention. John Murtha, another decorated veteran and a former Marine, was called a coward on the very floor of the House by Republican Jean Schmidt. In the 2006 elections, Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran who lost both her legs in the line of duty, was accused of wanting to “cut and run” by her congressional opponent. Republican Barbara Cubin, running for the U.S. House in Wyoming, walked over to the Libertarian candidate Thomas Rankin after a debate - Rankin is disabled by multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair - and said to him, “If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.” And all these are just the best-known examples of a vast pool of right-wing sewage from which countless more equally repugnant statements could be produced.

The pattern that all these separate incidents reflect and exemplify is the scorched-earth strategy of politics adopted by today’s conservative right. (more…)

…is my favorite line from the movie, “Face Off”. I’m just saying.
I had one too many cappuccinos, and this little ditty did materialize in my insane brizain. It may not mean anything, but seems rife with possibilities for deconstruction.

Piper’s Prize

Pete Piper Packed an Uzi,
Squeezed the trigger, wasn’t woozy

Spun around within a crowd
causing noises, oh, so loud.

Clip ran empty, bullets spent,
to the Pen Red Peter went

Fed’ral Judge did think it fair
that Piper’s feet should dance on air

Now under daisies Piper Lies
his Uzi a prime eBay prize.

I blame my apparent fondness for this simple sort of rhyme on Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who used them to spout such silliness as

How many boards would the Mongols hoard
If the Mongol hordes got bored?

Published here, you can read the ongoing lively debate between Sam Harris and Dennis Prager, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show. 

Here’s how Harris responded to the common claim that atheists are arrogant believers that everything “just happened”:

Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…

An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

Prager argues here that God’s existence is proved by the alleged lack of moral fiber found in secular societies.

My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and stand for nothing (they were largely morally worthless in the Cold War against Communism and are worthless or worse in helping to keep Israel alive against Muslims who vow to exterminate the Jewish state.) When people realize this, they may conclude that something that is necessary for society to survive—belief in the God of Israel—may in fact exist.Judeo-Christian Values?

Although Prager’s examples are clouded by numerous confounding variables, I find this to be an interesting issue. Atheists certainly aren’t as willing as Believers to pick up guns to impose their philosophical viewpoint on others.  For example, there haven’t been any atheist Inquisitions.  On the other hand, doesn’t a strong shared religious belief system provide an advantage to a community that is forced to defend itself against an external enemy?   Consider, for instance, the melding of religious and political outlook in post 9/11 America.  It brings to mind David Sloan Wilson’s suggestion (in Darwin’s Cathedral) that religion can serve to coordinate numerous individuals into a socially cohesive super-entity, similar to the way in which human cells cohere into human bodies.  (more…)

It doesn’t get any simpler than this.  Almost as satisfying as the real thing.   And no . . . I don’t know the phone number of the “Fresh Sheet” woman.

While going through some family memorabilia that I inherited, I discovered an address book that my grandfather had dated 1923.  In it, he had typed several creative compositions, which I suppose he had read someplace and wanted to preserve for future reference.  They are reproduced below, to provide a glimpse of American bachelorhood from 80 years ago.

—

Don’t use big words.

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or in articulating superficial sentimentalities and philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.  Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compact comprehensiveness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency.  Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations.  Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibilty and veracious vivacity without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast.  Sedulously avoid all polysyllable profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent rapidity.  Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant and apparent.  In other words, talk plainly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully and purely.

(more…)

When we were teenagers, my sister and I used to discuss how the people around you affect how you look. She was very short, and a little ‘plump’ and seemed to have girlfriends that were tall and skinny.  I pointed out (just being argumentative, I was the older sister by a couple of years), that instead of wearing 6 inch platforms, she should get shorter and fatter friends, so she’d look taller and thinner. 

Looks like Dubyah (I love Molly Ivins) never grew out of that belief.  

It is a very common adage that we better ourselves by surrounding ourselves with smart people.  Take for example a recent graduation address at Whitman College, a very small college near Spokane.  The address by Dr. Balof, included a quote variously attributed to many.  The quote is:

If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people.  If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.

Dubyah hasn’t done that.  He didn’t hire the best and brightest he could find to help him govern.  Instead he surrounded himself with buddies, regardless of their ability or experience.

I can’t write it any better than the report done by Frontline, so I won’t even try.  Here’s what that report said: 

What happened was that the hiring was done by the White House liaison to the Pentagon, an office of the Pentagon political appointee. This office served as the gatekeeper. Instead of casting out widely for people with knowledge of Arabic, knowledge of the Middle East, knowledge of post-conflict reconstruction, they went after the political loyalists and canvassed the offices of Republic congressmen, conservative think tanks and other places where they knew they would find people who would be unfailingly loyal to the president and to the president’s mission in Iraq. …

The hiring process involved questions that would have landed a private-sector employer in jail. They asked people what their views on Roe v. Wade were, whether they believed in capital punishment. A man of Middle Eastern descent was asked whether he was Muslim or Christian. People were asked who they voted for for president. …

So you wind up getting people like John Agresto to go run Iraq’s higher education system instead of getting somebody who had, let’s say, run a very large public university system. He was a former president of a small college in Santa Fe, N.M., with 500 students. But he had connections. He served on the National Endowment for the Humanities with Lynne Cheney; Joyce Rumsfeld sat on his board of directors at St. John’s College.

For [Iraq's] primary and secondary education, [they] brought in a guy from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a very conservative think tank, who had written extensively on the need for school vouchers. This is not a guy who has any experience in rebuilding school systems in the Middle East.

We’ve talked about Jim Haveman, the guy from Michigan who had very little experience in public health, being brought over to rebuild Iraq’s health care system. And the list goes on — a bunch of political appointees with very little practical experience.

Grumpypilgrim just asked when Dubyah was planning to create stability. That wasn’t going to be an easy job, and surrounding himself with yes men and old cronies made it impossible.

There is no fix now.  We can’t undo the damage we’ve done.  We can’t bring thousands upon thousands of Iraqis back to life.  We can only hope to stem the tide of problems we instigated, and if Dubyah doesn’t change his method of choosing advisors, it isn’t going to happen in the next two years.

I’m not holding my breath.

According to this article, Jordan’s King Abdullah believes the Middle East might be on the verge of three civil wars:  in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.  If true, then George Bush’s latest justification for invading Iraq — to bring peace, stability and democracy to the Middle East — looks like the latest in his long series of failures (capturing the 9/11 terrorists, finding WMDs in Iraq, reducing terrorist attacks, bringing peace to Iraq, etc.).

You’ll never find anyone who writes more clearly about mathematics than John Paulos.  Exhibit A is Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1990). 

Paulos doesn’t limit his inquiries and writings to pure mathematics, however.  Mathematics permeates numerous social issues, and Paulos is happy to jump into the fray whereever that is the case.  In this article, he points out how odd it is:  

that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution - for example, many fundamentalist Christians - are among the most ardent supporters of the free market.

I’ve certainly seen fundamentalists repeatedly and proudly announced that all aspects of an economy “just happen,” without an omniscient and omnipotent Planner.  I’ve heard this so often, that I’ve sardonically termed the free market as “The Fourth Person in God.”  Paulos has heard these claims too:

[Those who reject biological evolution] would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges which are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.

Paulos thus raises the question of why those who reject evolution don’t require an “all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver” to make certain that the vast and complex economies of cities and nations continue to run with the apparent precision with which they appear to run. 

Good question.

Check out the many other offerings on the web site of John Paulos. 

Could this headline ever run in a major newspaper?   

Of course not!  Never is the alleged wall between the news department and the sales department of newspapers so low as during the holy season of senseless spending. 

Yes, I changed this headline to make a point.  The real headline disturbed me and I was struggling to effectively explain why.  I even considered an alternative make-believe headline: “In the name of Jesus, newspapers promote the buying of useless things, through purported news articles, to make their advertisers happy.” Both of my false headlines reflect the deep and disturbing reality of what drives modern day American Christmas better than the headline that actually ran.  Here’s the actual front page headline reporting the earth-shaking news that Thanksgiving Friday retail sales were brisk:

The actual headline works hard to convince us that we the shoppers are heroes trying to conquer the challenge of shopping on a deadline or, perhaps, victims of the long lines.  I seriously question both of those characterizations.  I would say that many of us have been hoodwinked by fake news.

For the next thirty days or so, newspaper ”articles” and television “news” reports will work hard to convince us to buy expensive and unnecessary consumer goods, allegedly to honor Jesus Christ.  The message is absurd.  Absurd, but powerfully seductive.  (more…)

I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.

Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.

We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill for the same money.

(more…)

Science Network, an educational organization based in California, recently sponsored a La Jolla, California conference entitled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival.”  According to this article, the conference rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all.” 

You can watch videos of the sessions here. The speakers were numerous well-credentialed scientists and philosophers, including each of the following:

Steven Weinberg
LawrenceKrauss
Sam Harris
Michael Shermer
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Joan Roughgarden
Richard Dawkins
Francisco Ayala
Carolyn Porco
Stuart Hameroff
V.S. Ramachandran
Paul Davies
Steven Nadler
Patricia Churchland
Susan Neiman
Loyal Rue
Elizabeth Loftus
Mahzarin Banaji
Scott Atran
Sir Harold Kroto
Charles Harper
Ann Druyan
Jim Woodward
Paul Churchland
Richard Sloan
Terry Sejnowski

What was the bottom line of the conference?  Watch the sessions and see! I haven’t yet watched most of the conference yet, though I do plan to watch them all.  If you click in, you’ll immediately notice the consistently high quality discussion throughout the conference. 

In her talk, Patricia Churchland argued that “What we care about sets the framework for what we value.  Evolution see to it that we care about food, water, oxygen, sex, surviving.  Social animals also care about offspring, mates, parents and kin.”  Consequently, the traditional philosophical claim that you cannot derive an ought from an is, is “wrong.” We don’t need an overriding value system in order to know how to behave well.  Morality is in us, configured by robust biological triggers.  Her bottom line: you “don’t have to scare the crap out of people” to get them to get along with each other.

Neil Tyson’s talk was terrific, in that it was both entertaining and provocative (see the video from the second day of the conference). Wonderful comments by the panel and the audience. Notice his photos of horribly mal-formed babies (many stillborn, one with a heart outside of its body), used to illustrate the falsity of Intelligent Design. He makes the point that “The universe is not here for us.”  Further, “God is not responsible for what we don’t understand.”

The conversation then leads to this: what can science do about leading the charge against superstitution? What kind of PR campaign can be effective? Stephen Weinberg was cautious about the limits of science in providing the basis for morality. He asked, “If not religion, what?” His own answer: The answer won’t be science.

Tyson’s session included especially insightful comments by Patricia Churchland, Scott Atran, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris and others.

Here’s another quote from the NYT article, regarding the manner in which Tyson’s session wrapped up:

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt. “She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won’t miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

For more articles on the conference, as well as a separate link to the videos, check the Edge’s site.

While Americans were enjoying the companionship of family and friends on Thanksgiving day, secular violence continued in Iraq, with more than 230 people either killed or found dead.  One attack alone claimed 161 lives.  America might have taken away Iraq’s dictator, but we appear to have exchanged tyranny for genocide, which raises the question:  what do Iraqis have to be thankful for?

It also raises other questions.  How many Iraqi families were affected by all those murders?  How many will remember America’s day of “Thanksgiving” as the day that America’s unjustified invasion forever robbed them of a beloved relative or friend?  With the death toll skyrocketing every day, how long before every family in Iraq will have experienced the murder of a relative or friend because of America’s unjustified invasion?  How many will march in parades, chanting “death to America,” for years to come?  How many future enemies has America created?  How many future terrorists?

For more information about the counter-productive nature of misguided government policies, see here, and here, and here, and here, and my comments to this post.

Here is a link to a 2006 documentary called “The Root of All Evil? - Part I,” narrated by Richard Dawkins. 

In this elegantly written and presented documentary, Dawkins does not mince words.   He explores the seductive beauty of religion, as well as the damage that religion, especially fundamentalist religion, does to society.   The problem with all religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with “answers that are not really answers.”  According to Dawkins, religion foists evident falsehoods on the flock to support “bronze age myths.”

According to Dawkins, religious thought:  A) discourages independent thought, B) is divisive and C) is dangerous.

In the scenes that I found the most memorable, Dawkins attended a service at the 12,000 member New Life Church in Colorado, then interviewed Ted Haggard, then the head of that mega-church church. That church service certainly reminded me of the times I attended evangelical services.  The same brain-washing techniques were used.

It was truly surreal to see Haggard speaking aggressively and condescendingly to Dawkins during that interview.  Haggard sternly instructed Dawkins that Dawkins was “intellectual arrogant” for daring to confidently declare that the earth was “billions” of years old.  It was apparent that Dawkins spoke with Haggard in a way few people ever spoke with Haggard (prior to Haggard’s sexual predatory “fall from grace,” anyway).  The interview ended, but Haggard wasn’t finished attacking.  Haggard drove up to the parking lot where Dawkins and his crew were packing up.  He yelled, “Get off my land or I’ll call the police!”  Dawkins noted that Haggard was especially upset that Dawkins had referred to Haggard’s flock as “animals,” an apparent reference to Dawkins’ reference to evolution during the interview.  But as Dawkins noted, humans are “animals.”

This outburst of Haggard served as a demonstration of what Dawkins (later in the documentary) termed “Christian fascism.”

Dawkins asserts that fundamentalist Christianity offers a mirror image of Islamic extremism.   Therefore, the “war between good an evil is really a war between two evils.”

Here is a link to Part II of this documentary, entitled “The Virus of Faith.”

In this section of the documentary, Dawkins argues that religion warps morality.  He is concerned whenever ancient morality is taught as truth in schools.  In fact, Dawkins argues that it constitutes child abuse to frighten children with stories of hell.

The Christian theory of the death of Jesus confuses Dawkins:  If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them?  “Who’s he trying to impress?”  Dawkins concludes: what do you have to be to believe the theory of the New Testament?  “Barking mad.”

Dawkins then interviews, Michael Bray, pastor and defender of Paul Hill, a man who was eventually executed for murdering an abortion doctor in Florida (32:00).  Bray explained that Hill had the right to protect thoughtless embryos–that embryos were sanctified human life, even though thoughtless.  Walking from that interview, Dawkins cited Steven Weinberg’s “For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

I certainly agree with Dawkins when it comes to the tendency of Christians to cherry pick the Bible.  “Why bother with the Bible at all if we have the ability to pick and choose from it what is right and what is wrong for today’s society.”

Part II ends (41:00) with a look at chimpanzee proto-morality.  Because they are mammals, humans have inherited this ancient capacity for getting along with conspececifics.  As a result, there is no need for us to refer to any ancient holy books to know that rape, murder and stealing are wrong, despite the baseless and insistent claims of fundamentalists.  

What about the fear of death?  How should we deal with it?   “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.  Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”  That is how we should look at death.  “We are grotesquely lucky to be here . . . and we should make the most of our time on this world.”

For more on this documentary, see this article in Wikipedia.

Here’s a short video of Richard Dawkins recently answering this question. 

According to this article, some airlines are starting to enforce policies that children shouldn’t be seated next to unrelated men, because you never know what might happen . . .

Frances Kemp booked an aisle seat on a recent British Airways (BA) flight because she had a bad leg that required extra space. Her 76-year-old husband Michael occupied the middle seat. A nine-year-old girl took the window position.

When a stewardess asked Frances to switch seats with her husband, she declined. The stewardess explained that the seating arrangement breached the airline’s child-welfare regulations and moved the child.

Michael is a retired journalist with no criminal record; he made no contact physical or verbal with the girl; no complaint or request to move was received; the child’s mother was elsewhere on the plane. The girl’s welfare was deemed to be in peril solely because Michael was male.

Last evening, I wasted about 1½ hours working in the basement on some uninteresting but useful titanium accessories that I call Fat Wires on MrTitanium.com. I had a dyslexic moment, and made them slightly wrong. Just wrong enough that I can’t in good conscience sell them. I found this very frustrating. A big waste of time.

This morning I started over. This sort of fine craft allows my mind to wander as I cut, hammer, punch, drill, grind, band-aid, polish, bend, re-polish, and assemble. I reflected on Erich’s post on Fungible time: The principle that time, like money, is commutative in an accounting sense. In brief, time is spent whatever you do, so you should make the best of it.

So I wondered (in between thinking about the imminent Buy Nothing Day and listening to FM blather) why I was so upset at having wasted 1½ hours on honing my craft but getting no product, yet a comparable time wasted playing Doom2 or watching YouTube doesn’t bother me. I quit TV several weeks ago.
(more…)

No, sorry.  He’s not cartooning.   According to this article from USA Today, though, Larson has has recently released a calendar (of previously released cartoons), all of the profits going to help Conservation International

for the organization’s work to help end the illegal trade in Asian elephants, Indochinese tigers, Asiatic black bears, pangolins, freshwater turtles, and Siamese crocodiles in Cambodia. The profits will also fund an awareness campaign in China aimed at reducing acquisition of of threatened species for exotic dishes, traditional medicine and for pets. There are also projects in Indonesia and other southeast Asian countries as well.

According to the United Nation’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released last year, in the last 50 years

humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

The USA Today article presents a nice bio of Gary Larson, reminding us of his amazing accomplishments as a cartoonist (his daily cartoon appeared in newspapers from 1980 - 1995).  The reason Larson has re-emerged in public, however, is because of the desperate plight of numerous animal species:

Everything is getting filled in, dug up, overrun and generally made uninhabitable for everything but humans. Places where animals can live in peace, or at least live, are being destroyed at an increasing rate.

“Our species is rife with greed, war and destruction. But this is new. It’s all happening on our watch. It creeps me out, the rate at which we’re pushing species to extinction,” he says bleakly.

Larson clearly feels an affinity with animals, be they the “charismatic megafauna” that make us all want to race out and save the rainforest (there’s a reason the World Wildlife Fund uses the panda for its logo) or lesser newts.

So protecting wildlife is “at the top of my list,” he says. Some days he finds himself staring at the walls, wondering how things could have gone so terribly wrong for our planet. Donating the money from the calendar is one attempt at helping to fix it, and stop fixating on it.

“I’m trying to get it off my conscience,” he says.

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

–

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog. 

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want to know what this site is all about, here are some good places to start.

It is so very hard to choose.  It’s like asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child.  Without further ado, here are my selections:
Reflections on Hotel Rwanda  

Why Do They Hate Us?  

Why Does a Recently Created World Seem So Old? 

My limited vision. 

Banking laws for sale  

semantics, schemantics

A new age of immaturity 

The greatest sin–and virtue–of human memory 

God’s attractive nuisance: the Tree of Knowledge 

Playing to the terrorists’ strength 

SEX 

Alien Rapture

Wither Thou Goest…

Consumptious Conspicuosity  

Sticks, Stones, and Prayer Mats (more…)

I have a friend that is sometimes frustrating to converse with, because he always wants me to define the terms I use.  Our conversation is filled with his requests to explain just what I mean.  He says, with justification, that people may use the same word but often have different meanings for it and he just wants to be sure that he understands what I MEAN to say, not just what I do say.  Take for example, my recent bragging about my 3 year old grandson.

I told this friend that the boy had learned to read, and used for illustration the fact that he could read and write a number of random words and when presented with a new book, could pick out those words and ‘read’ them (it doesn’t work to try him on books he’s familiar with, he’s got those memorized).  I pointed out that reading is not sounding out every word, and that we must be able to recognize a word immediately on sight.  Many are familiar with the little test that has gone around the internet for some years, proving we aren’t quickly sounding out every word, but rather recognizing it on sight, and even then, with mostly only a few letters of the word.  For example:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

I pointed out the child knows all his alphabet, can make the sounds associated with all letters, and recognizes on sight some 50 words, and can write at least 30 of them (the others he doesn’t always know how to spell).  Voila- a reading genius.  But he had me stumped when he asked if my grandson could sound out and then recognize a word he didn’t already know.  After thinking about it overnight, I came to the conclusion that my definition of reading must include both:  the ability to recognize certain words immediately on sight, and the ability to read new ones when they arise (and no, he can’t do that yet, so he’s not yet reading).

Even the simpliest words leave room for lots of misunderstanding.   It’s all about semantics. Semantics is not a little problem.  Not only can confusing the semantics frustrate understanding between individuals, between corporations, between governments, but for those people who like to have insight into themselves, it frustrates our understanding of ourselves.   Take for example, my most recent difficulty with the simple word “Happy.”

I read with interest Erich’s post: Are you happy?  I read this post at the end of a very frustrating day (week/month/year) when I was particularly stressed about my failure to reach a certain goal and the outside influences that prevented me reaching it.  I was so frustrated at what parts felt to be completely outside my control, and guilty about the parts I might have controlled better, that I had cried, and was in a darn lousy mood.  Everyone was lucky I live alone!  But then I got into a discussion with another friend about what being happy meant.  I didn’t feel UNhappy at the time, although to hear me whining and complaining and trying hard not to cry, one would think I was miserably unhappy.   I wasn’t pleased with things, but I still had my place in the sun, so to speak.  Still had a decent apartment, good transportation to get there, a job I loved, family I love and that loves me and the list goes on and on.

I decided I wanted a word to describe how I felt underneath, even with all the frustrations of life.  I wanted a word that would include my dark visions- what I consider to be realistic negative outlooks (i.e. politicians will always be corrupt as long as we have the current campaign finance rules, children in this country are getting poorer and sicker while the rich get even richer, etc.) but still acknowledge that I am a very fortunate woman indeed. 

 I looked up the definition of the word ‘joy.’  Wikipedia defines it as: “an emotion of great happiness.”  I wasn’t very happy (pun intended) with the circular definition.  I wanted a word that described a state of inner serenity that one can possess despite the cares of the world, despite occasional unresolved conflicts with family, friends or professional associates, despite some unmet physical need (i.e. trying to pay my car insurance!).  I haven’t found it, but for now I’m going to use the word Joy.  “Joy” is especially meaningful to me because that is what I named my daughter many years ago.

So when I say “Joy,” I’m going to mean that despite the fact that I may be frustrated, that I may be angry, I may be sad, at some situation, even situations I can never change, like the deaths of people close to me, I have a deep inner satisfaction with my life, what I’ve done with it (mistakes and all), and wouldn’t trade it for another without the pain (like that really exists).

If anyone has another word that expresses this inner condition, I would love to hear it.  In the meantime, I wish you all great joy.

Watching the furor generated over Erich’s post about Bart Erhman’s book has been awesome.  I mean that in the strict meaning of the word.  It is awe-illiciting.  After watching the average responses to our posts rise and fall around five to ten each, with a few fetching somewhere in the twenties, here we have a thread running well into the four hundreds with no sign of ebbing to a halt.

I’ve been dipping in from time to time to see where the argument is, and some patterns have emerged which are both frustrating and heartening.  By any objective criteria, the folks of a generally pragmatic, secular viewpoint have held to a bit higher standard of argument than those of the religious/romantic side.  The silliness of watching people over and over again assert that, basically, the evidence doesn’t matter, the universe is the way I  believe it is because, well, I believe it’s that way (the bible says so, after all, even when it doesn’t) reminds me strongly of a kindred, albeit much more modest and almost invisible debate which is related to my own profession.

Jason Rayl is a pseudonym.  There are a variety of reasons for using one, but the chief one for me is that it keeps two sides of my writing life separate.  I write fiction–get paid for it–and while doing so I use a voice somewhat different than what I use as Jason.  Jason allows me a certain freedom I might not allow myself under my “real” name.  It also removes the possibility of people taking the view that my words here are somehow to be taken differently because I’m “that writer guy there” and I have a persona.  People think they know who you are by reading your writing.  Only when you write autobiography or memoir should that actually be taken to be true (and as we’ve learned in the last few years, not even then is it entirely to be trusted).  People should not judge a writer of fiction by the work produced.  It’s fiction.  We make it up.

Still, certain proclivities can be gleaned in a broad sense about the artist. 

I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, scads of short stories, essays, reviews.  I’ve even been shortlisted for a few awards, so apparently I do my craft at a reasonably high level, which leads me to assume I know something about that which I write.

I do not write fantasy, as a rule.  (I have  committed fantasy from time to time, as experiment, but my preference is overwhelmingly for SF.)

There’s a good reason I eschew fantasy, most of which I do not read, either.  And it relates to this ongoing secular vs religious argument–in many ways. 

This has been a debate in the field for a few decades now.  Most people are getting bored with it, and so it wanes from time to time, only to be reborn when some young turk comes on the scene and makes A Pronouncement, which usually runs something like this:  “Science fiction is really a subset of Fantasy, which has a much older pedigree.  Therefore, science fiction can lay no special claim to being any more plausible or realistic or believable than fantasy.”

Originally, this argument was made by fantasy writers who had a much smaller market share than science fiction.  They were jealous.  That situation has now reversed and SF is a smaller part of the single SF/F genre designation.  Fantasy writers are getting more money, selling more books, and, of course, have more readers than science fiction.  So now the argument is rather condescending when it comes up, a kind of “I told you so” rant on the part of fantasy authors.  Pathetic, really.

It is a matter of concern for those of us practicing SF.  We don’t quite understand why the Adventures of Dronan Thunderthighs and His Elf Courtesan are outselling us by such margins.  We don’t quite understand, you see, why the former audience for SF has abandoned what we consider a better read (more intellectually stimulating, at least) for pure escapism.

Now, here’s where the two different debates, in my mind, have some similarity.  There is, despite the well-deployed critical arguments of certain fantasy writers, a major difference between SF and Fantasy and it has to do with world views.

This is one of those instances of slippery definitions.  It is more often a matter of “I know it when I see it” rather than a hard and fast rule that can be applied to determine the difference.  I’ve been intuitively convinced that the two genres are utterly different for a good thirty years, but only when I was confronted by a rabid, evangelizing fantasy fan did I begin trying to really concretize my impression.  What I have come up with it, as briefly as possible, is that science fiction is Epistemological fiction, while fantasy is Religious fiction. 

By that I mean SF is, underneath all the slick effects, spaceships, aliens, physics, and rayguns, thematically concerned with knowledge and how it works and how the universe is structured.

Fantasy could care less about how anything works.  It is concerned with symbol, fate, and moral reification.

These distinctions work in the subtext, as starting points from which the point of view of the work springs.

Roughly, SF is based on a universe as understood by science, fantasy is based on a universe as understood by myth.

Despite the fact that certain works have over the eighty-odd year history of the genres tried to blend the two, for the most part they don’t blend.  Science fantasy is a mongrel creation that is neither fish nor fowl.  It can be very enjoyable, but it is never a true hybrid because, depending on what the author is concerned with, the work tips over into one or the other.

The first three Star Wars movies (nunbers 4, 5, and 6, that is) are pure fantasy, despite the science fiction trimmings.  Lucas tried to turn the whole thing into SF in the first three (numbers 1, 2, and 3, that is) only to create a hobbled, stumbling mess, because he lost the thread created in the first first three.

How is this like the debate between secularists and religionists? 

Well, for the most part SF writers grumble about the popularity of Fantasy but don’t try to turn it into something it’s not.  We don’t tell fantasy writers that what they’re doing is really SF, it’s just that they don’t know it (or do it well).  But fantasy writers do try to tell us that we’re just writing fantasy.

Science gets regularly accused of being a religion.  I don’t think any scientist ever accused religon of being something other than religion.

But also in the discourse between the two groups, there comes a point when reason breaks down and the fantasy devotee (I’m speaking now of the reader, the fan, not the writers, who know better) starts making accusations about how this or that just doesn’t work in SF, which makes it less than claimed, and really fantasy.  The SF side continues to point out problems with the comparison, never resorts to name-calling, just sticks to, well, epistemology.  Eventually, the SF devotee just walks away, having at some point “won” the argument (which is to say, made the point, proved the point, offered examples in support of the point, and finished making the case), while the other side keeps frothing.

What bothers me these days is how many young people turn away from SF–it’s hard, harder than fantasy, which offers sagas of validation for characters who have little more than their birthright, their family name, their so-called destiny, and win the day usually by killing someone.  SF–good SF–prompts thought, you need to know a little something to comprehend it, it elevates the idea of learning, and that problem-solving is not a trait “owned” by a bloodline…

Anyway, I wanted to lighten this up a little bit and make an observation from the smaller to the larger.  I can’t help seeing people stuck in a religious tautology as fantasy fans who don’t and won’t understand Einstein or quantum mechanics or the fact that all you really have is a brain that needs filling.  Maybe this sounds a little harsh, but to me religion and fantasy do roughly the same thing–let one escape, for a short while, the idea that magic (miracle) doesn’t happen and that, really, it’s not necessary–just a little learning, which seems frightening to people who want to feel special because they belong to a certain club, not because they’ve worked hard to be someone worth while.

One more similarity between the two debates.  In SF, there is no single, seminal work that defines the field.  You could pick maybe ten books that sort of do that, but it’s impossible to reduce what science fiction is  to one work.  Fantasy, on the other hand, does have a single work that pretty much contains all that fantasy is–The Lord of the Rings.  The genre can be reduced to a single work with a single idea.  Interesting all the more since ever since Tolkein published his book work, most of the fantasy field has been engaged in copying it in theme and trope, endlessly–and almost all the imitators have missed the point Tolkein was making.

Thanks for your indulgence.  Back to our regularly scheduled current event etc.

And have a happy Thanksgiving.

I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing.  Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to be solved rather than an experience to be enjoyed.  Though it is likely true that I am not a prototypical “happy” person, it would be horribly inaccurate to assume that I am unhappy.  I hope that the “not unhappy” side of me also occasionally shows through in my posts.

I truly appreciate the many opportunities and challenges life has thrown my way.  I am lucky to have found so many people who have influenced me in so many good and important ways, not the least of which are my wonderful wife and daughters. I am also extremely lucky that I have met so many people who have taken the time to challenge my ideas and thereby teach me important lessons.  Many of these people who have made me a better thinker and writer are those of you who have taken the time to contribute comments to this blog or send me notes via e-mail.  Truly, thank you.

About a year ago, “Grumpypilgrim” and I had a well-established routine: we traded ideas and book recommendations by email on almost a daily basis.   I suggested to Grumpy that we should start a blog to see if anybody else might show some interest in the sorts of topics that interested us.  Grumpy was a wee bit tentative.  With the incredibly generous help of Nick Smith (of www.nicksmithdesign.com), however, this blog made its first appearance on the Internet back in February 2006.  We didn’t begin posting with any regularity until March, 2006.  In those early days, someone we didn’t know personally sometimes actually posted a comment.  Grumpy and I celebrated many of those early comments with commemorative phone calls (grumpy lives in Madison and I live in St. Louis).

One by one, we invited other people to join us as authors, people who shared our passion for writing and who shared our interest in the sorts of topics and ideas we feature on this blog.  Currently, fourteen different authors have appeared on the blog.  What they bring to this blog (as you can see from the “About” page) is a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds that are manifested in their writings.  The