I can’t believe a church would have such an outrageous sign. 

At least the message is refreshingly honest.  But I just can’t believe that a church would really put this sort of message on its sign. 

Sometimes I see signs in front of churches and wish I could change the message.  Here’s a location where you can make your own sign.  The site includes many actual signs, at least that is the claim, because some are just too ironic (or honest) to be real signs.  For example:

Is it any wonder, with credos like this, that people refuse to use logic when thinking about their religious beliefs?

Or how about this, which makes it very clear that IF the ‘word of God’ was indeed infallible when it was given, humans have certainly screwed it up?  

I’m not addicted to web videos . . . Really.  I don’t think I am.  Am I?   Oh, come on!   Watch this skate-boarding doggie and tell me it didn’t make you smile.  

This video really makes me want to know how to train a dog to do these tricks. 

I hadn’t heard of the “Blasphemy Challenge” until today. The Rational Response Squad is giving away 1001 DVDs of the movie “The God Who Wasn’t There.”  To be eligible, one must record a short message damning oneself to Hell (using the phrase “I deny the Holy Spirit”), then upload it to YouTube.  For more on the sin against the Holy Spirit, see here.

The Rational Response Squad has sponsored this challenge, inviting visitors to “declare your independence from the stone age.” 

The home page of the RRS contains a score card of people killed by God versus people killed by Satan, according to the Bible.  Chapter, verse and number of fatalities cited here.  The official tally?

God:  in excess of 2,270,365

Satan: 10

If the risk of hell associated with the ”Blasphemy Challenge” seems all too dreadful and final, just remember that you get that free DVD . . .

Some of us who sincerely treasure the scientific fact and scientific theory of evolution have brought on some of our own problems with our choice of nomenclature.  For instance, sometimes “random mutations” gets uncoupled from natural selection, leading some to believe that it is the randomness of the process that is the be-all and end-all of evolution. Consider also Francis Crick’s description of the associations of amino acids with their three base codons as a “frozen accident.”

Creationists, ignoring these (legitimate) scientific and scientific/poetic usages, have jumped all over the terms such as “random” and “accident” to characterize scientific evolutionary theory in the following warped way: “All life forms just suddenly spring into existence as accidents.”  Though I am aware that sophisticated creationists would embellish this attack, this characterization is certainly the straw man put forth by most of the people out there who tremble at the thought that human beings are (gad!) animals.

It recently occurred to me that, perhaps, creationists’ willingness to assume that evolutionists are claiming that complex life forms “just happen” might be another symptom of “innumeracy.”  It might be that they don’t understand how incredibly rare it is that biological “accidents” survive and reproduce.  In his bestseller, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1988), John Paulos introduced the term “innumeracy” to refer to “an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance.”  Paulos bemoaned that innumeracy “plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens.”

How is Innumeracy related to Creationism?  It seems to me that creationists believe that evolutionary theory holds that after a relatively few accidents, complex life forms spring into existence.  This just couldn’t be, creationists argue.  That characterization doesn’t work for me either.  That is why I have termed it a straw man argument.

Perhaps skeptical creationists (they are selectively skeptical) would even refer to an illustration used by Daniel Dennett in his 1995 work, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Dennett stated that “the DNA in your body, unsnarled and linked would stretched to the sun and back several-10 or 100-times.”  A work of such immense complexity just couldn’t spring into existence by any simple accident, right?

But what if creationists better understood the enormous number of mutations that amounted to nothing compared to those that amounted to something?  What if they understood that we’re not talking about mere accidents.  We’re talking about unimaginably unlikely accidents that are equally rare and precious.  This idea reminded me of another illustration used by Daniel Dennett, also presented in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Borrowing on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Dennett (on page 108) asks us to imagine a huge library full of all possible 500-page long books, each page with 2000 characters.  Each space on each page is either blank or has a character, each character being one of 100 standard upper and lowercase English/European characters.  Dennett does the finite math for us, calculating that such a library would contain 100^1,000,000 books.  In comparison, there are only 100⁴⁰ particles in the observable universe.  Therefore, Dennett’s “Library of Babel “is not remotely a physically possible object.”  He asked us to keep in mind that this is not a library of all possible books, since his library will not contain Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, characters, to name a few. Dennett uses this Library of Babel illustration as “an anchoring vision for helping to answer very difficult questions about the scope of biological possibility.” 

Consider, now, the “library of Mendel” which is composed of descriptions of genomes is “just a proper part of the Library of Babel.”  Each of the 500-page permutations of the four letters (the nucleotides that composed the letters of the DNA alphabet) are already in the Library of Babel.  Dennett warns that genomes are much longer than ordinary books, however.  Dennett writes that the information of the human genome would take up approximately 3000 of the 500-page volumes of Dennett’s library.

How big is Dennett’s Library of Babel?  Dennett warns that all of our metaphors for bigness (e.g., a drop in the ocean) fall comically short.  Not even an actual astronomical quantity (such as the number of elementary particles in the universe) “is even visible against the backdrop of these huge but finite numbers.” 

Somewhere in this vast library you can find a perfect copy of Moby Dick (and lots of imperfect copies—most of those so imperfect as to be unreadable).  As Dennett plainly points out, though, most of books in this Library would consist of complete “typographical gibberish.  “No rules of spelling or grammar, to say nothing of sense, prohibit the inclusion of a volume.”  When you compare the universe of meaningful books to the size of Dennett’s library you can see that almost everything out there is gibberish.  Almost everything in Dennett’s library is a non-useful accident.  The useful accidents are almost impossible to find. (more…)

There are simple reasons to reject Biblical authority. Very simple. One above all others–the Bible assigns people to roles from which, by virtue of divine mandate, they cannot abandon. It accords thinking beings no grant to be other than what the Bible says they should be.

Now, a lot of people treat this in one of two ways. The benign way is to simply ignore these restrictions until such a point where the deviations cannot be ignored. For instance, in the case of gay marriage. There has been a sliding metric of tolerance leading up to the point past which those professing a christian character simply cannot go. They sort of make these restrictions cases of, well, in an ideal, christian world these laws would hold, but we don’t live in that world, and since we all have to get along, well, we’ll just pretend they aren’t there for the most point. Because, you see, if they took them seriously, there would be a lot of public executions.

Which leads to me to the malign way of dealing with them–extremist posturing. These rules are god’s rules and we ignore them at out peril. Such people condemn people who are different, rail against the establishment, and actually work toward putting these rules into practice, either through mainstream legal institutions or by joining cults who leave mainstream society and set up little compounds here and there. The leaders of such groups become right vicious little tyrants and a peak inside their precincts shows what would be in store for all of us were they to get their way nationally. Some go so far as to commit murders (god spoke to me and said kill the woman!), blow up private property, and generally harass anyone who disagrees with them.

Both kinds of folks feed into the periodic resurgence of religiosity that muddies our political waters and gets us all in a froth over individual rights, civil rights, and various other community issues which we ought really to have figured out and solved by now.

The question is asked how I can have the chutzpa to claim the Bible should be ignored. Good question. And I don’t say it should be ignored. There’s history there–some of it bad, some of it apocryphal, some of it outright fable–but history nevertheless. There are examples of law making, of civic institution building, of all manner of human endeavor we would do well to study, if only as counterexample. But as a moral guidebook?

Some of what Jesus said is pretty good. But it is when he is speaking about the nature of community and the worth of individuals that he’s at his best. Some of his life lessons are fascinating. As I’ve noted before, whoever Yeshua bar Joseph was, he was a pretty fair philosopher, and a lot of what he had to say was radical.

Iterestingly enough, when he made his claim about bringing a sword and pitting son against father and so on, he was right. Look around. Families often dissolve over differing interpretations of his words. His philosophy has been divisive. He wasn’t doing individuals of conscience any favors by giving them a program that would set them at odds with the society in which they lived. But to me, these were not the words of a deity telling us what he wanted, but of a savvy political thinker who knew the consequences of his philosophy. It was a warning–follow my teaching at your peril.

So most people claiming to be his followers don’t actually follow his words. They substitute belief (faith) for change. They get to go on living peaceably within their communities while feeling they have a good bead on how to get to heaven. That’s how many of them can support Bush and still claim to be good christians–because they believe, not because they’re doing anything Jesus told them to do.

My problem with the rest of the Bible, though, is twofold. One, it is based largely on the national epic of a nation that, in spite of the fact there is today a country by that name, no longer exists. Israel is not run the way it was under Saul and David, Solomon or the Macabees. The essence of that nation is long dead. At best, modern Israel is an homage. So the question I have is, what does the national epic of a country two millennia gone have to do with me? The answer is, about as much as Rome under Caesar does, or Babylon, or Thebes under the Seven, or the Mogul Empire. What we are today is part of the long, twisted road of history, but I am not a Roman, a Mogul, a Hittite, a Celt…or an eighth century B.C.E. Hebrew.

The other reason is that the human program advocated throughout most of the Bible is, to my mind, unethical and immoral. (more…)

I’m getting so incredibly tired of hearing from the cherry-picking fundamentalists (yes, I admit.  I shouldn’t have listened to fundamentalist talk radio on the way home from work tonight).

Here’s a challenge for each of them:  If the entire Bible is inerrant, then read each of its passages closely.  Don’t skip these parts.   If the Bible is truly inerrant, give each passage equal opportunity.  Every time you quote a part that suits your immediate needs, quote one of these passages.  Quote them each slowly and let the words soak in, if you dare.  Focus entire church services around each one of these passages, if you dare.

Put each of these principles into practice, if you dare.  You’d better hope that the police don’t catch you in the act.

When I finished reading Grumpypilgrim’s recent post on the Bush administration’s abject denial of reality and its incompetence, it made me mad. It got me in a bad mood. Perhaps his post had the same effect on you.

Don’t worry. We’re not going to let you leave this site in a bad mood. Here’s the antidote:

I just cannot believe how dishonest some Republican leaders are being about the situation in Iraq.  Bush is still bloviating about how America is “safer” today than before the invasion, even though he has offered not one shred of data to support his claim.  In fact, more than 1.5 *million* Iraqis have fled into neighboring countries to escape the carnage Bush has unleashed in their country, while, inside Iraq, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Iraqis (many of them children) have been physically or psychologically maimed by the violence.  Of the latter group, and perhaps even among the former, some will almost certainly seek revenge someday against America, by volunteering to be a suicide bomber.  Can anyone seriously believe that the nightmare in Iraq has not done this?  I don’t see how, nor has anyone in the Bush Administration offered either an explanation or evidence to the contrary.  Instead, all we get is Bush’s mindless rhetoric, echoed through other Administration drones.

What astonishes me even more are people like Colin Powell.  He realizes the Iraq fiasco has made America less safe, but he ignores the refugee and casualty problem and, instead, talks about America being less safe because its military is over-extended.  Earth to Powell:  unless America has a foreign *army* landing on its shores, America’s military is not a significant source of national security.  When the threat is *terrorism*, the threat is not a military one, so why would America’s troop deployment matter?  What matters is whether America’s foreign policy creates more or fewer angry people who are willing to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans.  On that measure, how can America possibly be safer than it was before the Iraq invasion?

There is one…maybe only one…answer:  Iraqi oil.  Thanks, in part, to Bush’s pandering to Big Oil, American national security heavily depends on having reliable access to oil.  Under Saddam, access to Iraq’s vast oil reserves was unreliable, even under the so-called “oil for food” program.  Thus, to say, as Bush does, that America is “safer” today than before the invasion, this statement can be seen as true if we add an unstated premise:  American “safety” depends on unfettered access to Iraqi oil.

Does it make sense to add this premise, given that Bush never mentions it?  Of course it does, because we would not expect Bush to mention it.  Sending American troops to die in Iraq “to protect America from global terrorists” is one thing; sending them to die in Iraq to secure raw materials for Bush’s Big Oil pals is another.  He mentions the former in every speech; mentioning the latter would be political suicide.

This would explain why Laura Bush last week complained that the American media is not reporting enough “good news” out of Iraq.  To the Bushies, Iraqi oil is all that matters; Iraqi lives don’t.  Thus, as long as the oil is protected, Iraq is a source of “good news,” no matter what happens to its citizens.

Likewise, George Bush’s “stay the course” policy appears to be virtually oblivious to the toll it takes on the lives of American troops and Iraqi civilians.  Why?  Perhaps because safeguarding American troops and Iraqi civilians is not Bush’s objective.  Maybe safeguarding the oil is.

I’ve been fighting two consecutive colds over the past ten days, so I’ve pulled back a bit on my writing. 

Yesterday I spent some time looking for some interesting videos with my six-year old daughter.  We both enjoy setting up strings of dominos and letting them fall.  I didn’t realize, though, that the orchestrating of domino strings has been raised to such a high art form.  This year, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is you, as in Youtube.com.  Thanks to you, we were able to find these entertaining videos.

Without further ado:

Here’s an amazing domino-pool table combo.

And why mess with dominoes at all?  Note the clever transitions  between rooms of this house.  It’s a great show.  I loved the toast (you’ll see what I mean).

Here’s a beer commercial involving human dominos. 

Or you can just stick with coins. 

And here’s the most dramatic “kinetic art” display of all.   Check out the demos too.  

Recent reports are that South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is recovering from a life-threatening episode of bleeding in the brain.  That is good news, indeed.  It remains to be seen, however, how well he will function cognitively in the coming months. 

Johnson suffered a brain hemorrhage last Wednesday caused by bleeding in his brain. Doctors at the George Washington University hospital in D.C. caution that it’s too early for a long term prognosis, but they are calling Senator Tim Johnson’s surgery a success.

The Senator’s staff is saying that his doctors are happy with his progress because he’s responding to voices and reaching for and holding his wife’s hand.

I initially read the above report with extremely cautious optimism.  Republicans everywhere also have Senator Johnson’s health on their mind.  They are no doubt getting ready to argue that Johnson won’t be able to carry out his duties, thus requiring the Republican South Dakota Governor to appoint a new Senator.

But, when determining whether Senator Johnson is well enough to continue on as a Senator, Republicans need to keep in mind the Terri Schiavo rule.  Here’s the rule:  as long as a human body is breathing it is alive and worthy of full respect as a human being.  This is true, even if 70 percent of cortical cells—critical to the functioning of the cortex— are completely destroyed.  It is true even if high-tech machines pump and oxygenate his blood.

Republicans also need to keep in mind the plight of South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, a Republican, who

suffered a stroke while in office. Mundt continued to serve until the end of his term in January 1973, although he was unable to attend Senate sessions and was stripped of his committee assignments by the Senate Republican Conference in 1972.

Truly, I hope that Senator Johnson continues his recovery and that he regains his cognitive function.

In the meantime, I hope we don’t hear anything from Republicans about how much cognitive function Johnson needs in order to continue serving as Senator.  We also need to keep in mind the palpable lack of mental functioning of the many neocons who instigated a needless war, a per se diagnosis of mental incapacity, in my opinion.  Yet they continue to serve.

The Schiavo rule, as I interpret it, says that if he’s breathing, even if totally dependent on complicated machines, and even if he has no intellectual functioning, he’s fully human.  The Schiavo Rule is grounded in the principle that functionality has no relevance to whether a body built on human DNA is entitled to society’s resources (in the case of Terri Schiavo, those resources were expensive medical resources that could have saved the lives of others who might have been brought back to human functionality).  The Schiavo Rule is that you are either minimally alive and thus fully entitled to be recogized as a human being or you are completely dead.  If you’re not the latter, you’re the former.

If there’s any doubt, of course, we could have Democrat-leaning doctor diagnose Senator Johnson by simply viewing a videotape of him. 

All my life I’ve been suspicious of the alleged power of syllogisms.  Here is an often-cited syllogism:

• All men are mortal
• Socrates is a man
• Therefore Socrates is mortal

Syllogisms can be expressed in this logical form:

• All B’s are C
• A is a B
• Therefore, A is C

The above example is a perfect syllogism: the conclusion naturally follows from the premises.  Syllogisms constitute deductive reasoning (from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow).

Many excellent thinkers and writers have stressed the need to present one’s arguments in terms of syllogisms.   For example, in his excellent book on legal writing, The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner advises lawyers to frame every legal issue as a syllogism (see p. 88).

But what is really behind the power of syllogisms?   It turns out that they are actually based on a metaphor—the metaphor of objects in a box.  Consider this diagram in tandem with the classic syllogism (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal”)

As Judge Posner points out (in “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism,” 86 Mich L. Rev 827, 830 (1988)), the first premise presents a box labeled “all men,” in which each of the contents are each labeled “mortal” and one of those objects is labeled “Socrates.”  Posner notes,

“The second premise tells us that everything in the box is tagged with a name and that one of the tags says “Socrates.”  When we pluck Socrates out of the box we know that he is mortal because the only things in the box labeled “all men” are mortals.  Notice that we find the syllogism compelling by virtue of a metaphor, the metaphor of the box. (odd that one should “prove” the truth of logic by a metaphor!)”

Yes, how odd that we should find this device so very persuasive when it is based on such a simple metaphor.  But it works.  Syllogisms constitute popular forms of reasoning because they are so very effective.  They are effective because they are models.  Like all models, they focus our attention toward certain aspects of the thing being considered, (necessarily to the detriment of other aspects).  Syllogisms trigger a feel of logical movement from the general rule to a sometimes surprising conclusion. They take the audience from a starting point and cause an epiphany.  They often give rise to a dramatic “a-HA!” moment. 

That syllogisms work is yet another tribute to the limited attentional abilities of human animals.  They are also a tribute to the power of conceptual metaphors.

Thinking about the power of syllogisms reminded me of the great power of covering law explanations. Also known as the “deductive-nomological” (“D-N”) explanations and “subsumption theory,” covering law theory (developed by Carl Hempel in the 1940’s) holds that an explanation occurs when a description of the empirical phenomenon to be explained is logically deduced from statements of antecedent conditions in combination with general laws (“assumption of general regularities). (more…)

There are some (usually unacknowledged) semantic disconnects (”failures to communicate“) whenever theists and Atheists argue. Neither side responds as though they were aware of the unstated fundamental assumptions of the other side. Here are some of these for your consideration.

For Atheist and Ignostic consideration: Theist’s perceptions of atheism (as far as I’ve been able to discern)

• Atheists say “There Is No God” as a matter of faith. They claim to know this as a fact, but one cannot scientifically absolutely disprove anything. Therefore they are wrong. Therefore God exists.
• God, his acts and his will are terms we use to cover anything that we don’t understand. Atheists therefore are claiming that they know abso-(gerund)-lutely everything. They are therefore wrong.
• God is omnipotent, so he can waive (violate) your man-made “Laws of Nature” any time it suits him. This is not a violation of causality, because causality itself is just a human invention. All ideas not found in {holy book title here} are merely human inventions (as opposed to the divine truths of that particular text).

For the theists, some common faiths among Atheists:

• God is unnecessary. If God exists, who made him? If he/she/it/they have always existed, why not just assume that the physical universe has always existed? Why would either need a creator?
• The universe is consistent and mathematically describable in its entirety. It may change over time, but only in a systematic and describable manner. We don’t yet have the full description, but the bounds of what we know are far beyond human scale, in all directions. We will never have answers to all possible questions, just to all reasonable ones.
• Science, Technology and Math have directly explored many more dimensions, degrees, and scales of magnitude of every subject than were ever even alluded to in any holy book. Static holy books and the wisdom therein are therefore inferior to the living, dynamic, testable world of scientific exploration. When they don’t agree, bet on science.

Evolution (you knew this was coming) neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. It is a fact (repeated, consistent observation) that everything evolves, is evolving, has evolved. The “Theory of Evolution” is an attempt to explain the observation of evolution. If you must have a deity, it is simple enough to consider evolution as a divine progressive act of creation, too complex to try to explain to literate desert nomads three (or more) millenia ago.

Science is a process, not just a list of facts. As more and more minute details of the general theory of evolution are worked out, with the ever growing pile of evidence to study, there is a growing list of failed evolutionary theory details littering the history of the theory. These discarded, discredited, disproved sub-theories don’t prove that the main theory is wrong, just that the particular detail had since been corrected.

I know.  I’m getting a bit too habituated collecting and posting whimsical items these days.  But this one was just too good to turn down.  

It’s almost the end of the semester and this post is dedicated to all of those teachers out there who are busy grading all of those exams.    Here’s a simplified method of getting the job done more quickly.

There are experts who think about these things who have the answer to this question.  Hint:  you don’t quickly puff up like a balloon, which is what I had assumed.

Think Progress contrasts Laura Bush’s recent argument that the media are failing to report all of the good things that are happening to this excerpt from the Iraq Study Group:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

This excerpt is discussed in this separate Think Progress post, which is based on this article from the Washington Post.

According to this article from the Boston Globe, Christianity is fading in Western Europe:

Nearly 99 percent of Christmas cards sold in Great Britain contain no religious message or imagery.

Traditional pictures such as angels blowing trumpets over a stable, Jesus in his manger, the shepherds and three wise men following the star to Bethlehem are dying out,” the Daily Mail reports. A review of some 5,500 Christmas cards turns up fewer than 70 that make any reference to the birth of Jesus. “Hundreds . . . avoided any image linked to Christmas at all” — even those with no spiritual significance, such as Christmas trees or Santa Claus.

Presumably the greeting-card industry is only supplying what the market demands; if Christian belief and practice weren’t vanishing from the British scene, Christian-themed cards wouldn’t be, either.

This makes me wonder why Mr. Bush would have choosen such an atheistic, and therefore per se immoral, group of people to be our primary ally to his so-called “War on Terror.”  Maybe that’s why things went so badly in Iraq.  Next time, he should pick a primary ally that at least puts manger scenes on their Christmas cards.

Up to a few years ago, internet map programs offered map views that were too small to be easily used to plan trips.  That’s all changed not.   Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer full screen maps that you can slide around (your cursor turns into a small hand.   Lots of other features, too, for getting around and finding businesses.  Satellite views are included as well.   Not to say that any of these graphics compares (yet) with Google Earth.

Even Mapquest is now offering a larger map view (though is not full screen).  No more cartological claustrophobia.

OK. You all think you’re such good table drummers . . . But could you do this when you were four years old?

If you like music and animations, you’ll love this music animation.   The linked site doesn’t indicate the creator, but, I learned from the first commenter that this is the work of Animusic.

A lot has happened since Bush uttered those inopportune words: nearly 3,000 American troups are dead for no good reason; more than $300 billion has been wasted, with several times that amount expected to be wasted in the future; Democrats are in; Rumsfeld is out; Bush’s approval rating has slipped to new lows (e.g., his war in Iraq now has less popular support than did the Viet Nam war at its very lowest point); and the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group has issued a damning report about the mess Bush has created in Iraq. Bush no longer boasts about having “political capital” — mostly, he spends his time begging world leaders to pull him out of the mess he has made while they, no doubt, laugh at him. Even George Bush Sr. must know, at some level, that his own do-nothing presidency will be judged a wild success by comparison to his son’s catastrophe.

Said the president last week (12/07), in what must be the understatement of his presidency: “I do understand that progress is not as rapid as I had hoped.” Gee, do you think?

For me, one observation stands out as a glaring example of how out-of-touch Bush is with his country; indeed, even with reality: while virtually everyone in America is searching for a way to get out of Iraq, Bush is desperately searching for a way to stay.  Here’s my solution:  if Bush wants to stay in Iraq, then let’s send him there until he brings our troops home.  Better yet:  send his daughters.  Let him feel the anxiety that America’s military families are feeling every day of his disastrous presidency.  Yeah, send his daughters into Iraq and then let’s hear him say, “Bring ‘em on.”

I would like to take a few lines to introduce people who don’t already know this writer to James Morrow. As it happens, Jim is a friend of mine. I admire and respect him and I find his writing a delight. He is first and foremost a satirist, of the first water, and I must immediately recommend his Godhead Trilogy as one of the finest riffs on the whole idea of Jehovah in the modern world I have ever read. The three books are utterly fearless: Towing Jehovah, Blameless In Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman.

In the first of these, God has died. An angel comes to a disgraced oil tanker captain with a last commission from the Lord, whose immense body is floating in the south Atlantic. The angels have prepared a tomb in the Arctic and they wish this captain to tow the corpse there for internment. Naturally, the trip is fraught with peril.

The second novel details the trial of God (posthumously, of course) in The Hague. The last is about the world coming to grips with life without a god.

Superb writing, superb thinking, marvelous examinations of some cherished nuggets of human qualities.

The occasion for this piece, however, is his latest book, The Last Witchfinder. Up till this, Jim has been mainly a science fiction or fantasy writer, and intends returning to that milieu for his next book. But this one is an historical novel, based on actual events, and is a lucid examination of two completely incompatible modes of thinking during the time of their separation from each other and their subsequent war with each other. Set during the last days of James II reign and the beginning of William of Orange’s reign, this is the fertile period of the Enlightenment. The time when Locke, Newton, Hooke, Boyle, and the Royal Society began the solid first steps away from occult and alchemical suasions and set the West firmly on the road to reason. At least, it ought to have been. No one who has read this blog can think that we’re done with all that nonsense many hoped had been left behind in the Middle Ages, and in this novel Morrow shows us how the fight began (in a modern sense) and how the arguments have both changed and remained essentially the same.

Besides, it’s a very good read.

Recently, Jim gave an interview in the magazine LOCUS wherein he talks about reason, secularism, and the fray in which we find ourselves today. There are excerpts on-line here.

But here is a sampling, and one of my favorite observations on the current situation:

“You really get the sense that the Bushies would be perfectly happy to see a low-level, feel-good, smiley-face theocracy descend upon this republic. The Bushies know that the Christian argument is correct in an absolute sense, so why should anybody have a problem with it? For me, the great irony of our time is that even as Bush is denouncing Darwin, condemning stem-cell research as blasphemy, and encouraging what he calls ‘faith-based initiatives,’ his administration is hoping against hope that something resembling a rational, secular, post-Enlightenment republic will emerge in Iraq. It’s a towering irony.”

Jim and I met at a convention several years ago and sort of intersected during a discussion with another person about the utility of western style materialist thinking, as opposed to other philosophies. It became a heady, profound review of the problems of modern academic reassessment–deconstruction, relativism, the notion that science is “merely a narrative” with as much usefulness as any other “philosophy”–and we left the party after a few hours of this, dazed and a bit drained. We walked down the corridor toward our respective rooms in the hotel and at the elevator, Jim looked at me, a bit bleary-eyed, and asked: “Who are you?”  The way he said that, he meant is as a compliment, and I have been as proud of that particular question asked from that particular man under those particular conditions as almost anything else in my life.

Since then we’ve had opportunity to have other, less intense, but no less fruitful conversations, and I have come to think of him as a kindred spirit. I always thought he was a gifted writer, and his new novel proves the case.

The Last Witchfinder is also the latest of a number of novels dealing with the period of The Enlightenment by science fiction writers, who seem to be returning to the very font of our freedom from superstition to try to divine the source of both our chosen world-views and the beginnings of the battle we continue to wage against those elements of irrationality which plague us today, as if by reviewing the time, the personalities, the thinking of the day, we might find a clue as to where we have gone wrong recently, resulting in the startling statistic that some 40% of Americans are waiting for the Second Coming.

Other forays of note include Neal Stephenson’s immense Baroque Cycle–three volumes, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World–which examine that same period as a set of processes and discoveries which teased the mind of Western Civilization away from the dead-ends of spiritual dictatorship and produced the Modern Era. It is a look at history in a way only a science fiction writer could see it.

I commend these books. They are fiction. They are fun, but they are enlightening.

Check out Jim’s other books, too. Go to his website. www.sff.net/people/Jim.Morrow/ Treat yourself to the special pleasures of a fine writer doing solid work…and learn a few things along the way.This announcement has been brought to you by a concerned aesthete.

In my quest to better understand basic principles of group behavior, I reviewed Intergroup Relations, by Maryland B. Brewer and Norman Miller (1996) [this work appears to be out of print].  The stated focus this book is to better understand “the causes and consequences of the distinctions between ingroups (those groups to which an individual belongs) and outgroups (social groups that do not include the individual as a member).  At the outset, the authors note “the apparently universal propensity to differentiate the social world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’”  (Page xiii).

It was my suspicion that basic principles of social psychology would give me a deeper context for understanding many modern conflicts.   I was not disappointed.  By the way, these same principles appear in all basic social psychology books.  Nothing I mention here is tentative or controversial among social scientists.

According to Sherif (1966) “whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification, we have an instance of Intergroup behavior.”  (Page 2)   Such social categories “tend to be less rational than other categorizations in that the beliefs we hold about social groupings often do not rest on firm evidence of actual Intergroup differences.”  (Page 6)  Once we establish categories, “we are biased toward information that enhances the differences between categories and less attentive to information about similarities between members of different categories.”  (Page 7).

We live in a pluralistic society.  Therefore, individuals are simultaneously members in multiple social categories.  It is not always clear how ingroup-outgroup differentiations are perceived in such situations.  Sometimes there are canceling effects and other times there are additive effects.  (Page 9).

The “fundamental attribution error”: seeing behavior as a product of characteristics or traits of a person, underestimating the influence of situational factors in causing action.  (Page 11).  Good outcomes for our ingroup are explained by stable internal attributions–good things happen to us because we are of good character.   We explain bad outcomes for our ingroup by reference to situational factors (bad luck, bad circumstances).  By contrast, good outcomes for outgroups are explained by situational factors or by unstable internal factors (e.g. effort or luck).  We sanctimoniously explain bad outcomes for outgroups by reference to stable internal factors (bad character).  In short, outgroups get blame, but not credit.  Ingroups get credit but not blame. Pettigrew (1979) termed this pattern of intergroup attributions the “ultimate attribution error.”

What is the advantage of painting an outgroup as “bad” (using the ultimate attribution error)?  “If we attribute a negative action to evil intent or aggression dispositions, we are much more likely to respond with retaliatory violence than if we attribute the same act to a temporary situation.”  (Page 13)  Those fundamentally bad outgroupers have it coming!  Let’s go get our guns! (more…)

A novel in every sentence! 

I’ve been collecting quotes for years.  Here are some of my favorites.  No particular topic.  BTW, “The Quotations Page is a good place to get a quote of the day. 

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (referring to the benefits of openness and transparency).

If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Robert G. Ingersoll, American politician and lecturer

Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.

George Bernard Shaw

“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss in enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill

“The best time to plant a tree… was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.”

Chinese Proverb

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

The besetting sin of political and media types is that about 98 percent of their public conversation is utterly dishonest. The language is inflated, pompous, deceptive. The words are soft, squishy evasions of reality, coated in a layer of Olympian certainty. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the speaker and the listener.

Jeff Greenfield      

“If this is the ‘ultimate game,’” Duane Thomas said, “how come they’re gonna play it again next year?”

As quoted by Jeff Greenfield

“The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”

Thoreau, from “Life Without Principle.”

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.  ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know.’  
‘Then,’ said the cat,’ it doesn’t matter.’

  Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience”, 1967 (more…)

I just can’t help periodically visiting the site of Focus on the Family, at least once in a while.  They address many good topics over there—I often disagree with their conclusions, though not always (I almost always disagree with their attempted intrusions into government).  They offer some solid good advice on parenting, marriage and career, some of it without much religion.  Sometimes it reads like almost entirely like pop psychology.  

For instance, in the current article on Mary Cheney, there is no condemnation, no fire and brim stone, only concern.  Actually, lots of concern.  Most of it about the absence of a father-figure in a child’s life.  This is a legitimate concern, though it seems a bit hollow coming from an organization which is quintessentially homophobic.  But they keep their deeper concerns about gays and inerrant bible passages in check in this particular article.  Certainly, there is no discussion about hell. 

Another current FOTF article features “Worldviews.”    The ostensible concern is that “The Lion King” does not teach biblical Christianity, “despite a handful of good moral lessons.  Again, no rampant condemnation.  Instead, the article warns that

the notion of the “circle of life,” that history is circular and the present is heavily influenced by the spirits of one’s ancestors, is closer to Eastern pantheism or native spiritualism than the linear view of history presented in the Bible.

On a lark, I read a FOTF article on “Marijuana — inhaled intellectual impairment.”  The gist of the article is that marijuana is a “gateway” drug.  A relatively mild starter drug that nevertheless sends one shooting down the slippery slope toward hard drugs that ruin lives.  This point is up for debate, despite the self-assured claims of Focus on the Family.

I noticed something interesting about the argument structure of this FOTF marijuana article.  It occurred to me that some mild forms of feel-good easy-going religion (I’ll call it “liberal” Christianity here) might serve as a gateway religion to hard core mind-destroying fundamentalist religions.  Sam Harris has often made the argument that moderate religions are unwittingly paving the way for the radical fringe, needlessly and dangerously working to make all “religion” respectable because it is “religion.”

To make my argument, I will insert some religion terms into the FOTF drug argument:

Parents who experimented with liberal Christianity during the 1960s may not be terribly concerned about this religion. But the way kids are worshipping today bears little resemblance to the way liberal Christian children were worshipping three decades ago.

In preteens and young adolescents, heavy use of Christianity can also impair growth and development.

Most kids who follow Liberal Christianity experience a sense of euphoria, relaxation, and calm. Some feel it enhances perception. The reality is that it impairs intellectual function, specifically concentration, memory, judgment, and motor skills. Short-term fallout can include injuries and death from motor-vehicle accidents or other trauma as well as sexual misadventures resulting from loss of inhibition and rational thinking.

Long-term liberal Christian worshippers are known for an “amotivational” syndrome in which goals and self-discipline and the activities that require them (especially school performance) literally go up in holy smoke. During the teen years a child should be learning how to think and act more maturely, but frequent prayer use can halt that process. Worse, it introduces kids to the harrowing world of fundamentalism and the fear-mongering criminals who push it.

Now I don’t generally consider liberal versions of Christianity to be “gateway” religions any more than I consider marijuana to be a gateway drug.  In my experience, users of the “lite” types of religions/drugs don’t inevitably slide down the slippery slope.  Then again . . . sometimes Believers/users do advance to fundamentalism/heroin.  I don’t have the statistics on the occurrence rate.  I’d like to know.  (more…)