As all the New Year’s hoopla tries to direct folks to see a shiny New Year ripe with possibilities, the cynic in me can’t help but note that each year produces more of the same. I am generally predisposed to see coming opportunities to be missed, crises to bemoan, difficulties to slip past, and other dark musings. My 2008 will begin with Jury Duty. Yep. On January 2^nd I get on a bus at 7:30 to head into town for (at best) 2 days of punctuated boredom. Here in the city, one has to do jury duty every 2 years. More often if you don’t actually get on a jury. They pay $12 to compensate me for losing each day of income, as they have since the 1940’s.

But what of the year past?

After my early report on investment tax problems, I topped my previous record in spectacular losses in the stock market. Yes, I put a large chunk into a sub-prime mortgage lender just before it went belly-up. I finally exceeded my folly of 1999 when I rolled my entire IRA into a booming technology fund. At least mutual funds can eventually recover.

I did have some fun flash-dancing in the Missouri Botanical Gardens and Camping and dancing in the Indiana Woods, and other places.

We took a 3,140 mile drive over 12 October days to explore and photograph sunsets, a Gemini and Apollo astronaut, 100’s of hot air balloons in Albuquerque, Indian pueblos, casinos, Hillerman country, nuclear sites and museums, hot springs, modern ruins, and more. Food poisoning (probably from a mutton burrito in Window Rock) was the unique note for this particular trip. But it was a good trip, in retrospect.

My online jewelry business is still puttering along on the shoulder of the information superhighway. I spend an hour or two on this every day, and earn enough to have to pay taxes. Most of the time is spent in giving out free advice and keeping up the site.

For strokes, I did win one category and get an honorable mention in another in a very minor local photo contest. The local paper needed pix for its website.

Oh, yes. I also joined the blogosphere this year, right here.

Amnesty International is encouraging people to participate in their a holiday card action. I’ve never done this before, it’s my first time, others I know do it more regularly, so don’t hesitate to join, too! I bought some greeting cards like two, three weeks ago, but started procrastinating when I realized that the deadline was 31 January 2008 - I’m writing them now though!

When you decide to participate, please keep in mind the guidelines (they are on the right side; a gentle reminder from me, because if you’re like me you will probably miss them at first).

If it’s an emergency situation where you lost your glasses and you need to read something, all you need is a leaf and a tiny stick, or a piece of paper and a pin.  Robert Krampf explains it at the Science Education Company.

I just tried his simple technique and it works impressively (though it’s not practical as a long-term solution). 

Note to self: always carry around a leaf and a pin in case I lose my glasses.

In an article entitled “When Words Decide,” Barry Schwartz (writing in the August/September 2007 edition of Scientific American Mind [not available online]) gives some good examples demonstrating the great power of default choices.  These examples add more fuel for a long burning fire-that people are not the rational careful-thinking beings (homo economicus) economists have traditionally portrayed them to be.

One example is that 90% of the people in most European countries are organ donors.  Compare that number to the lowly 25% of Americans who agree to donate their organs.  Why the difference?  As reported by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein of the London business school (in 2003), one is deemed to be an organ donor in Europe.  In the United States, to be an organ donor, you have to sign the back of your driver’s license.  In the U.S., if you don’t sign the back of the driver’s license, you cannot be considered to be an organ donor.

Schwartz gives another good example.  When employers switch their 401(k) plans from opt-in (where you have to sign a form to contribute) to opt-out (or you have to sign a form to decline participation) “initial enrollment jumped from 49 to 86%.  This was according to a 2001 study by University of Pennsylvania economist Brigitte Madrian.

No-fault insurance provides yet another example.  No-fault is the default in New Jersey.  In Pennsylvania, however, citizens must opt-in.  As reported in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in 1993, 80% of car owners in the states ended up with the default choice (which cost Pennsylvanians millions of dollars.

Defaults have great power, and Schwartz suggests that it may come from lack of human attention.

Life is busy and complicated and it is not possible to pay attention to everything.  That is why most of us keep our cell phone plan whether or not it is the best one for us.  Researching alternatives is time-consuming and we do not want to be bothered.

I am a big believer in limited human attentional capacities as explanatory causes for much human behavior.  See here, for example.

But there’s more.  University of California psychologist Craig McKenzie conducted a study on which found that most people simply infer that the default choice is the best option.

Given this power of defaults, politicians might well be tempted to nudge people in various directions based upon the use of default choices, a technique that economist Richard Thaler terms “libertarian paternalism.”

I’m wondering the extent to which this principle might apply in the political realm.  Are we so accepting of the our financially corrupted election system, for example, because it is handed to us as the default system (one alternative being the write in ballot and another being revolution)?

In a previous post (here), I described how the god-of-the-Bible can be shown to be entirely the result of self-fulfilling expectations and how such expectations could be applied to any ordinary person to create the appearance that the person is a god; in other words, how you, too, could be a “god.” In this post, I describe how you, too could be a prophet.

Let’s imagine you want to be regarded as a prophet. How might you do it? One easy way would be to write your predictions after they have already happened, so you could be certain your “prophecies” would be accurate. Another way would be to have many people read your predictions and then behave in ways that cause your predictions to come true — the aptly named self-fulfilling prophecy. A third way would be to predict things that are likely to happen anyway, and then claim credit when they do. A fourth way would be to write your predictions in vague language, without any expiration dates, and then simply wait until future events can be creatively interpreted to “fulfill” your vague prophecies. Yet another way would be to selectively interpret past events to support your “predictions,” a process known as revisionist history. (This last method is popular with rebel governments eager to portray their founders as “freedom fighters” instead of as “traitors.”) A sixth, and very powerful, way to be regarded as a “prophet” would be to write a wide range of predictions, and then simply publicize only the ones that come true, while quietly burying the ones that don’t. These are just a few of the many ways in which any ordinary person could make himself appear prophetic.

Now, let’s consider Christianity. Most devout Believers claim that prophecy is what distinguishes the Bible from all other holy texts; i.e., that the Bible is full of all sorts of prophecies that demonstrate the Bible’s validity. But are Bible prophecies trustworthy, or do they bear the marks of potential fraud like those mentioned above?

Well, we know, for example, that the four Gospels (and probably the rest of the New Testament books) were not written until many decades after the death of Jesus — plenty of time for “prophecies” to be revised to fit historical events and for any inaccurate “prophecies” to be expunged. Bible “prophecies” also have no expiration dates and are written in exceedingly vague language — so vague, for example, that the Second Coming of Christ has been predicted dozens of times, always without result. Many Bible “prophecies” also relate to likely events — for example, that wars will eventually occur between hostile nations; that powerful nations will eventually decline; that oppressed nations will eventually rise up; that droughts will eventually occur in desert regions; that plagues, fires, floods, etc., will eventually ravage communities and kill many people; etc. One of my favorite Bible “prophecies” is the “prediction” that believers in Jesus will be persecuted, as if this were somehow not self-evident. Indeed, I continue to be amazed at how often evangelical preachers successfully innoculate their followers by warning them to not allow their faith to be weakened by the ridicule of non-Believers — because, after all, the Bible “predicts” that Believers will be persecuted. Gosh, what an amazing “prediction”!

Likewise, many Bible prophecies could easily have been self-fulfilled — for example, the many Old Testament prophecies that Jesus supposedly satisfied. Obviously, Jesus and his followers were well-versed in OT prophecies (as were most other Jews of the time), so we should not be too surprised that some of their behaviors conformed to those prophecies. If the OT predicted that the messiah would ride into town on an ass, and Jesus (like a lot of other people) rode into town on an ass, was this a fulfillment of scripture, or was it merely a case of Jesus doing what the well-known OT prophecy said the messiah must do?

And what about Christian revisionist history? Well, we know that the Bible is the end result of careful editing by the early Catholic Church many centuries after Jesus’ death, and that the Church excluded many gospels it considered “blasphemous,” thus effectively burying many books that did not support their desired doctrine. If we consider who changed the Bible and why, we find ample opportunities for revisionist history.

In sum, when we examine the Bible “prophecies” that Believers point to as the foundation of their faith, we are hard-pressed to find any that are trustworthy. And if they all could have been easily faked — such as by enthusiasts in the early church eager to gain supporters, or by well-meaning but gullible Believers eager to defend their faith against a world of doubters — then what credence should we give to arguments based on these “prophecies?” This is not to say the Bible is completely untrustworthy (some of its descriptions of earthly historical events might well be accurate), just that assertions of the Bible’s supernatural validity cannot legitimately rest on recitations of its “prophecies.” The “prophecies” described in the Bible were simply too easy to fake.

Moreover, why doesn’t the Bible contain any verifiable scientific prophesies; i.e., scientific facts that was unknown when the Bible was written but that could have been conclusively confirmed later? For example: the distance to the nearest star; the mass of the electron; the formula for converting mass to energy in an atomic reaction; the formula for orbital rotation; the atomic number for a carbon atom; the universal gravitational constant; the fact that the brain, not the heart, is the organ of emotion; the fact that there was an undiscovered continent in the far western Atlantic Ocean; etc.? Or, what about information that would have been hugely beneficial to public health, such as: the germ theory of disease; the fact that water could be made safe by boiling; the fact that scurvy could be prevented by eating citrus fruit; etc.? God might have avoided an awful lot of human suffering if His “Word” had disclosed the formula for quinine, or penicilin, or anesthesia, or aspirin; instead, we had to wait two millenia for humans to discover these cures ourselves. Indeed, for more than a thousand years after the time of Jesus, Christian doctrine taught that our planet was the center of the universe, that our Moon was an unblemished sphere, and that the other planets in our solar system revolved in perfect circles around the Earth. With so many teachings that were utter nonsense, why do so many Believers rest so much of their faith on the Bible’s alleged “prophecies?”

Well, if we turn back the calendar two thousand years to a time when science as we know it did not exist, we find people who relied, instead, on myth and superstition…dreams and visions…miracles and “prophecies”…to understand the world around them. Christianity, and virtually all other major religions on our planet today, germinated in such a world. It was a world in which people were apparently easy to fool — a world in which you, too, could have been a prophet.

If you’re tired of hearing heated yet worn-out arguments regarding religion and science, check out this intellectually nimble and energized exchange published by Edge.org: Responses by David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, P. Z. Myers and Mark D.  Hauser to Jonathon Haidt’s “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.”  Here’s a link to Haidt’s original article (”Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.”).

David Sloan Wilson sets the tone by challenging “the new atheists” to answer all four of the following questions:

1. Is there any empirically verifiable evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?
2.  If not, how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?
3.  What are the impacts of religion, good or bad, on human welfare?  and
4.  How can we use our understanding of religion to advance the goals of a stable and peaceful society?

Wilson argues that the new atheists sometimes neglect questions 2, 3 and 4.  “This is like a debater leaving the debate after the opening round.”

For his part, Sam Harris reaches even deeper than usual in two his arsenal of weapons to present the many stupidities exhibited by many religions.  In the process, Harris suggests that Haidt had incorrectly argued that all religious ways of life contains some wisdom and insights.  In his response, Haidt makes it clear that he is suggesting no such thing.  I won’t review the challenges and criticisms issued by the other reviewers point by point, but I’ll skip to Haidt’s response. 

Those who have followed my readings on Haidt already know that I think that he (energized by the ideas of David Sloan Wilson) is especially interesting on the topics of religion and morality in that he makes a more serious effort than most writers to explore whether evolutionary functions can be gleaned from the ubiquitous displays of religion.  Here is an excerpt from Haidt:

I used to dislike all religions, back when I thought of them as systems of belief that help individuals understand the world and cope with the unknown.  After reading Durkheim and D.S. Wilson, I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimes terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups.

Haidt agrees with David Sloan Wilson that scientists and evolutionary theorists need to reconsider groups as “emergent entities that have unique properties and regulatory mechanisms.”  The dispute over group selection is a long and hotly contested one and evolutionary circles.  The issue is one of whether “tribes really do compete.”  Haidt argues that there is now a thriving field of behavioral economics and that scientists are now starting to look in the right places for group level effects (e.g., mechanisms that bind people together and suppress free riders).

There is much evidence to consider on the issue of whether religion truly benefit society, as described by Michael Shermer.  On the “good side,” a study by Arthur Brooks shows that “religious conservatives donate 30% more money than liberals and nonreligious people, they get more blood and logged more volunteer hours.  By a wide margin they report that they are much happier than nonbelievers.  On the “evil side,” Gregory Paul’s 2005 data from the Journal of religion in society demonstrates “an inverse correlation between religiosity and societal health (measured by rates of homicide, suicide, childhood mortality, a life expectancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, and teen pregnancy). (more…)

I ran across a site I’m really enjoying, No Impact Man.  Who is “No Impact Man”?  He is a fellow who got tired of only talking about living an ecologically responsible lifestyle:

I am no eco-expert. I am just a liberal schlub who got sick of not putting my money where my mouth was. In a way, the whole project is a protest against my highly-principled, lowly-actioned former self. I’m fumbling through, trying to do my best and doing the research as I go along. This blog is my attempt to tell you how it’s going.

Ok.  It’s time to walk the walk.  But what is the plan? 

Stage one was figuring out how to live without making garbage: no disposable products, no packaging, etc. Stage two was figuring out how to cause the least environmental impact with our food choices. Stage three is figuring out how to reduce our consumption to only what is necessary and how to do that sustainably. The whole thing gets harder and harder as we add each stage.

The site is a bubbling ferment of practical tips on living an ecologically responsible lifestyle.  Here are a ton of tips, in a post called “Cure the Planet’s Fever.”  And why vacation far from home?  After all, there are “Opportunities in the Crisis.”  And here are a bunch of tips for not making trash. 

But can you take this living responsibly stuff too far?  No Impact Man says “yes”:

This point, “the goal,” is really just the place where you are really conscious of what you use. You don’t take things for granted. You understand that your actions have consequences for other people and the planet. It is the point between asceticism and waste, between self-denial and self-indulgence. It is the place of balance.

I can already see many people scoffing at this site, the same people who are going to be doing many of these things in ten years.  That is the way the (warm) wind is blowing.  We’re all going to have to live smarter and lighter if we’re going to thrive.  

About a month ago, I wrote an e-mail to one of my heroes, the great jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson.

I have been listening closely to Oscar, mesmerized, ever since I started appreciating and playing jazz (when I was 17 years old, back in the mid-1970s). I saw Oscar perform in Champaign, Illinois about 25 years ago. About 20 years ago, I attended an outdoor concert Oscar gave in Boston. I owned about a dozen Oscar Peterson record albums and I studied these relentlessly, until I could anticipate much of his improvisation. It’s one thing to anticipate the music, but it is another to carefully hear it, much less play anything resembling it. I will never come close to playing music like that, no matter how hard I work at it. It’s just a fact of life and it is not a cause for any sadness that I will never come close to playing music at that level. In that regard, I am a member of a huge club.

For those of us who play jazz, it is difficult to decide what to like best about Oscar Peterson. Was it his beautifully arpeggios that spilled like rapids or was it his multi-textured chords, or was it that ebullient left hand that was never content to assume a subservient role to that explosive right-hand? Or was it Oscar’s equanimity, or his unrelenting effort to reinvent and expand his musical scope, or was it the care he took to never musically stomp on those with whom he played, or was his deep-rooted never-ceasing musicality that was never overwhelmed by his surreal technical abilities?

When I wrote my e-mail to Oscar (I found his e-mail address on Oscar’s website), I felt a bit conspicuous. After all, I’m a 51-year-old man who was writing a fan letter to a musician who probably received buckets of fan mail every month. Nonetheless, I wrote an e-mail to Oscar Peterson. In that e-mail, I attempted to express to Oscar how much his playing inspired me over the years. I told him that my favorite album was Tristeza (although it was difficult to decide on a “favorite”). I tried to explain to Oscar that his music was more than just music.

I knew that Oscar had had a stroke in 1990s, losing the use of his left hand for two years. though he worked his way back to playing concerts. I had read, however, that his health was not good in 2007, so I ended my email to Oscar by wishing him well and expressing hope that he was in good health.

Three days ago, on Christmas Eve, Oscar Peterson died of kidney failure. Like most people who truly love jazz, I felt I knew Oscar more than I knew most of my friends. That’s how it is when you listen to someone with such musical intelligence so carefully for so long. What kind of musician was Oscar Peterson? It’s time to show, rather than tell. The following video is a performance of “You Look Good to Me,” performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1977. It’s an unusual combination of musicians, as you’ll see–it includes Oscar playing along with Ray Brown and Niels Pedersen, both playing the upright bass. Notice how Oscar takes a very simple tune and develops it-—this was not the only time Oscar took a quiet simple song and injected it with an overflowing musicality; this was one of his trademarks. Notice the intense collaboration among the musicians. You simply won’t find better jazz musicians anywhere or anytime (the bass solos of Brown and Pederson are also exquisite). With regard to Oscar, you’ll never see a keyboard player with a better command of the keyboard, a consequence of Oscar’s intense study of classical music along with jazz.

Here’s what MSNBC had to say about Oscar on Christmas Eve:

Oscar Peterson, whose early talent, speedy fingers and musical genius made him one of the world’s best known jazz pianists, has died. He was 82. (more…)

Bob Cesca raises the issue of Bush’s inappropriate smirking and provides the images to substantiate the problem.

I went to Catholic grade school and high school and I’ve seen nuns beat the holy crap out of you for smirking at something innocuous. So here’s the alleged leader of the free world repeatedly smirking at matters of death and destruction.  I’ve noticed it repeatedly.  Now Bob Cesca puts several images of Bush’s most bizarre expressions in one article:

I don’t know who he thinks he is or what he thinks he’s grinning about, but for the Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces to smile and giggle while discussing warfare of any form or magnitude is an insult — not just to the soldiers who followed his orders into battle, but also to basic decency and human morality. From his zany “those WMDs have to be around here somewhere” sketch to his shit-eating grin whilst comparing warfare to wacky-yet-delicious breakfast foods, this extends far beyond the necessary objective distance of a military leader and into the realms of madness.

Bhutto is dead.

One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue.  Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.

We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides.  Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable.  We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.

But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions.  The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational.  Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.

Which in the end will be everyone.  Under such a program, no one may be in charge.

And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror.  All progress must cease by this program.  Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.

These people are insane.  Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying.  They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made.  Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.

There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear.  One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.

The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home.  We do not riot.  We do not overturn the Constitution.  We do not have coups.  (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.)  How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion?  We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.

Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself.  But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.

And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.

 by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

by Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

Tab, The Calgary Sun

–

Dangerous Intersection proudly supports the creators of these cartoons, which are printed by permission, pursuant to an arrangement with Cagle Cartoons.

Nor should there be such a word.  For adults, at least, it’s normal to not believe in the existence of Santa Claus.  Nor do we have labels to describe people who don’t believe in

Elves
Levitation
Squared-circles
Talking apple trees, or
The claim that Elvis is still alive.

What if those who were not convinced that Santa exists (because there’s no evidence that Santa exists) had to go around labeling themselves as “aclausists.” 

In a society where most people professed that they believed in Santa (despite the lack of evidence), the aclausists would be conspicuous by having to refer to themselves as something different every time someone mentioned that “Santa was coming to town.”

This need to repeatedly make this distinction would be a subtle yet powerful signal that the aclausists were different, not fully accepted in the group.  Over time, this difference from the statistical norm would take on connotations of “lack of morality.”  Aclausists would thus be excluded from political office, teaching positions and other important roles, thus isolating them further.  Santa-ism would be a wedge-issue.

Or, perhaps, a fair and rational society could just have no word at all for those who don’t believe in Santa, because people shouldn’t believe in something for which there is no evidence.

I’m a newcomer to an extremely popular website called Lifehack.  The site specializes in “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.” 

There is obviously a lot to consider at Lifehack.org.  One might wonder, though, how much time one should spend on productivity lest one’s productivity sags.  Despite this self-limiting concern, Lifehacks marches on relentlessly, reporting on hundreds of ideas, big and small, that claim to enhance productivity. 

I really enjoyed a post called:  “Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus.”  Mingus was a highly respected bass player, composer and band leader. 

I’ve played a fair share of jazz guitar over the years (I’ve long been inspired by the music of Wes Montgomery).  that experience often has me wondering how much of those jazz techniques transferred over to other activities.  In particular, is jazz playing merely good subliminal therapy, mental chiropractic, or do some of those jazz skills have clear relevance to other domains?

The author of this Mingus post, Dustin Wax, was inspired by Mingus’ autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, arguing that some jazz techniques do indeed transfer to other walks of life.  To me, Wax’s arguments make intuitive sense.  His article is succinct and well-crafted.  Here’s a sample:

You don’t play alone: Too many people think about the great Jazz geniuses as exemplars of individualism: free minds striving for greatness. Here’s what Mingus would do when a soloist thought too highly of his own genius — he’d direct the band to stop playing, leaving the soloist hanging without any backup, looking like a fool. Improvisation is as much about the relationships between people as it is about our own self-expression; work with the input of those around you instead of trying to stand out against it.

Here are some of Mingus’ jazz rules Dustin Wax found to be useful beyond jazz playing.  I found myself nodding agreement to each of these:

Go with the flow

Learn the rules so you can break them

Play by ear

Embrace limits (Infinite choice is paralyzing)

When you make a mistake, keep playing

I struggle to see through the rampant commercialism, the over-consumption and the glazed-eyed happiness of the holiday season.  But maybe I’ve had a break-through.  It keeps recurring to me this month that kind and thoughtful atheists/agnostics have an immense amount in common with millions of kind and thoughtful people who believe in God. 

Too many of us have too much in common, in fact, for me to stand by silently while the “new atheists” (led by Richard Dawkins) repeatedly belittle Believers.  Most of these new atheists claim that religious moderates, by their silence, are enabling the social destruction wrought by fundamentalists.  I think that is often true.  By the same token, moderate atheists/agnostics are adding unnecessary fuel to the belief/non-belief wars when they fail to speak up during the new atheist hyper-scoldings of believers. 

I suspect that many of the new atheist criticisms of religion underestimate the function served by the type of religion practiced by most religious moderates (I think that David Sloan Wilson has it right on this point) and that they over-estimate the ability of science to provide substitutes for whatever it is that religious moderates get out of their practice of religion (on this point, see this Salon.com interview of theologian John Haught).

In fact, many of the new atheist scoldings smell of schadenfreude and vengeance.  I agree that much of criticism is warranted on an intellectual level, but it seems like we really need to sit down and figure out how to get along with each other, for the common good.  Is that possible?  Absolutely.  We’ve got a country to turn around and we need the help of the many smart and good-hearted believers who line up with us well on so many issues.  It always has been possible for us to work with each other and it always will be, as long as we limit membership in our “club” to people who are kind and thoughtful. 

Before I continue, I need to define who I’m not including by use of the phrase “kind and thoughtful.”  I’m leaving out fundamentalists.   Yes, the fundies often show common courtesies—they hold doors open for others and they say “please and thank you.”  The social, political and intellectual damage that they have brought, however, means that they don’t qualify as either kind or thoughtful.   Who are these people I’m scolding?  I’ll refer to Jimmy Carter’s definition of “fundamentalist”:

A fundamentalist believes, say, in religious circles, that I am close to God. Everything that I believe is absolutely right. Anyone who disagrees with me, in any case, is inherently wrong and therefore, inferior. And it violates my basic principles if I negotiate with anyone else or listen to their point of view or modify my own positions at all. So that is what has permeated this administration. 

One more explanatory note before moving on:  There are religious organizations that are entirely fundamentalist and there are other organizations that are not, but that include sub-groups of fundamentalists.  To really get it right, each person should be judged individually.  My quick test is whether a person is strongly motivated to impose his or her own image and likeness upon the rest of us.  If so, we’ve got ourselves a fundamentalist (of one flavor or another).

Setting aside those fundamentalists, then, what do the rest of us have in common?  What do kind and thoughtful believers have in common with kind and thoughtful atheists and agnostics?  The list is almost endless.  Every day is a good day for all kind and thoughtful people to remember this. (more…)

I have a box before me, the determination of the disposition of which is at hand.

“Huh?” you may well ask.

I need room, and gotta choose stuff to throw away. This box is from my first job out of school, when I was as an industrial robotics designer. I designed and built electronic panels, composed communications protocols, programmed device controllers and their supervising computers, and pulled some all-nighters in rural factories. When the consulting company for whom I worked folded, I kept an archive of all the development I’d done. It came in handy a couple of times, when I had to go back and fix something.

However it is now decades later. The machines I designed and built have not only been retired, but the factory itself has been closed. I recently found this box containing detailed math derivations, design drawings, user and maintenance instructions, and the complete programs written for computers and other devices that you can’t get any more. The code is both stored on disks for which you’d have a hard time finding a drive, and as hard copy on a roll of thermal paper that is darkening on the ends. Antique? The code required line numbers!

This is a piece of my life I hold in my hands. But nothing in the box has either practical value or aesthetic appeal. None of the interesting stories that I could tell about those days are captured by the contents of this box. So why am I loathe to dispose of this obvious waste of my ever-waning free space? Might it be a reflection of my own mortality?

Then I remember that people hold on dearly to ideas that are long superseded, a topic oft covered on this site. Having now publicly posted the idea of this box, I may now have an easier time discarding the physical box itself. I probably won’t go the way of the box as long as I keep learning.

There are almost 300 of them in this comprehensive list. Dozens of these scandals would seem to constitute impeachable offenses, in my opinion.

Think Progress gives you the line-up of all the major players and tells you where they are now.

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Benjamin Barber, a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City. Barber’s most recent book is Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007). What’s the focus of this book?

[T]he global economy produces too many goods we don’t need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, he says, “seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain.”

Barber argues that we now have “push capitalism”:

They’ve got to sell all this stuff, and they have to figure out how to get us to want it. So they take adults and they infantilize them. They dumb them down. They get us to want things. And then they start targeting children. Because it’s not enough just to sell to the adults.

One prominent example is bottled water, which is often actually bottled tap water. Was there ever really a demand for expensive bottled tap water?  Yet so many of us demand it and claim to need it. Barber argues that American adults are, indeed, infantilized.

What I mean is that grownups, part of being grown up is getting a hold of yourself and saying, “I don’t need this. I’ve got to be a gatekeeper for my kid. I want to live in a pluralistic world where, yes, I shop, but I also pray and play and do art and make love and make artwork and do lots of different things. And shopping’s one part of that.” As an adult, we know that. But if you live in a capitalist– society that needs to sell us all the time, they’ve got to turn that prudent, thoughtful adult back into a child who says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want, I want, I want.” Just like the kid in the candy store. And is grasping and reaching.

Barber argues that push capitalism is threatening democracy.  It seduces us into thinking that being a consumer is being a citizen.

That a citizen is nothing more than a consumer. That voting means spending your dollars spreading around your private prejudices, your private preferences. Not reaching public judgments. Not finding common ground. Not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but just making the private judgments. And letting it fall where it will.

How do we combat this threat of the hyper-consumption of un-needed goods and services that is driving us deeply into debt?  Barber makes three suggestions.

First of all we, as consumers, have to be tougher. We are the gatekeepers for our kids and our families. We have to be tougher. I mean, I ask anyone out there who needs to go out at 2:00 AM to go shopping? For God sakes, wait ’til Monday afternoon.

Second thing is capitalism has to begin to earn the profits to which it has a right, when it takes real risks. Inventing something that is needed. Folks working in alternative energy, some of them are going to make real money.

Barber’s third approach is a slap at those who disparage government and naively tell us that we should look to the “free market” to solve our problems.

We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship. We can’t buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say the market can do everything and government can do any– nothing. [But] Government is us. Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together. We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship.

I’ve been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil.  Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, “The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism.”   (you’ll need to scroll down to the z’s).  Zimbardo’s article appears as one of a series of articles responding to the question: “What is your dangerous idea?”  [Here's a more elaborate version of Zimbardo's article; a careful reading will be richly rewarded.]

Those people who become perpetrators of evil deeds and those who become perpetrators of heroic deeds are basically alike in being just ordinary, average people.

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism. Both are not the consequence of dispositional tendencies, not special inner attributes of pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving individuals across the decisional line from inaction to action.

This view implies that any of us could as easily become heroes as perpetrators of evil depending on how we are impacted by situational forces.

Zimbardo makes a good point, but why stop there? Why assume that only great moments of good or evil are banal?  Isn’t banality of conduct another instance of “universal acid” (Daniel Dennett’s term for a concept that seems to have widespread application in untold domains of experience–natural selection was Dennett’s favorite example)?  Couldn’t we actually expand Zimbardo’s idea and talk about the “banality of everything,” and wouldn’t that actually be a backdoor way of challenging that most hallowed of human constructs: free will?

After all, there are an infinite number of constellations of environmental triggers out there and it might thus be impossible to run a controlled study to isolate “our” influence in any action we take, to the exclusion of the complex panaply of environmental triggers surrounding us.  We love to think that we are in control of our actions, but what if the our surroundings play us with environmental triggers like a jazz player brings out lush chords by striking complex patterns of keys on a piano?  When the music sounds good, we inevitably get greedy and claim the “good” result as our own.

When we notice our own good behavior, we do convince ourselves that our decision and or behaviour was totally our own.  Most of us can’t deal with any other possibility when we are proud of ourselves.  Same thing with the greatness of our heroes.  We can’t bear to think that our heroes are puppets with millions of strings stretching out in all directions out into the environment and down into their biology, and that our heroes’ admirable conduct was not meaningfully their own.

Zimbardo’s point is a good one because it points out how inconsistent we are when it comes to attributing responsibilty for human conduct.  It’s funny how readily we explain those moments when we act foolishly by blaming numerous factors external to ourselves (bad luck, bad education, bad peers, bad circumstances).  When we do well, though (or when our heroes do well), it’s all about internal character.  We love to take (and give) the credit but not the blame. 

Zimbardo doesn’t merely identify the phenomenon of the banality of heroism.  He advocates the need to study the psychology of heroism.  He argues that we ought to be studying ways to design social environments in such a way as to encourage heroic actions–encouraging ordinary peole to act in heroic ways.  Here’s his basic plan to study the banality of heroism:

My research reveals how easy it is to create environments that will bring out the worst in people. Now the time has come examine the other side of the coin and discover how we create environments that bring out the best in human nature, that truly enable ordinary people to go beyond resisting temptation to challenging its domain.

The media can’t deal with candidates that buck the system.  Glenn Greenwald discusses three dramatic cases, John Edwards, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee.  On Edwards, Greenwald writes:

It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt at its core — “rigged” in favor of large corporate interests and their lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress. Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this critique.

Yet because that argument indicts the same Beltway culture of which our political journalists are an integral part, and further attacks the system’s power brokers who are the friends, sources, and peers of those journalists, they instinctively react with confusion, scorn and hostility towards Edwards’ campaign. They condescendingly dismiss it as manipulative populist swill, or cynically assume that it’s just a ploy to distinguish himself by “moving left.” In the eyes of our Beltawy press, the idea that our political system is “rigged” or corrupt must be anything other than true or sincerely held.

You can read Vidal’s article at Truthdig:

I don’t know how many of you were as appalled as I was at the way that the presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was totally erased from the last Democratic debate held in Iowa.  This was a decision that was made, I can tell, jointly by the one-time voice of AIPAC, Mr. Wolf Blitzer, and, at the same time, The Des Moines Register—or whatever it is called—a paper of no consequence for the United States of America.

Kucinich’s exclusion is infuriating, for the reasons discussed by Vidal. 

The “Unicef Photo of the Year 2007” is this picture by American photographer Stephanie Sinclair of an 11-year old Afghan girl sitting next to her 40-year old soon-to-be-husband.

Photo caption:

Portrait of soon to be wed Faiz Mohammed, 40, and Ghulam Haider, 11, at her home in a rural village of Damarda in Ghor province. Ghulam said she is sad to be getting engaged as she wanted to be a teacher. Her favorite class was Dari, the local language, before she was made to drop out of school. Married girls are seldom found in school, limiting their economic and social opportunities. Parents sometimes remove their daughters from school to protect them from the possibility of sexual activity outside of wedlock. It is hard to say exactly how many young marriages take place, but according to the Afghan women’s ministry and women’s NGOs, approximately 57 percent of Afghan girls get married before the legal age of 16. In addition, once the girl’s father has agreed to the engagement, she is pulled out of school immediately. Early pregnancies also result in an increase in complications during child birth.

From the Unicef website:

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

To download a zipfile with the images of the award winning photographers from the UNICEF website click here. The other entries are also worth taking a look at.

In such marriages, the man is likely to view the age difference as a fair bargain, his years of experience in exchange for her years of fecundity. At the same time, the girl’s wishes are customarily disregarded. Her marriage will end her opportunities for schooling and independent work.

On the day she witnessed the engagement party of 11-year-old Ghulam Haider to 40-year-old Faiz Mohammed, Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. “What are you feeling today?” the photographer asked. “Nothing,” the bewildered girl answered. “I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09BRI.html

This is a beautiful picture, it’s good photography, but the girl in the picture is a kid and she’s going to marry this man who will rape her and make her have babies although her body is not ready, although she hardly understands what is going on, although she is hoping for something else in her life. Something is wrong here.

Whenever I hear people talk “politically correct” and claim to respect cultural differences even in the face of barbaric traditions like these I don’t think they are liberals, I think they are stupid and cowards. I remember a case here where a Turkish man poured gasoline over his wife and set her on fire. The judge’s opinion was that this was a cultural thing and an extenuating cause. I don’t know what would have happened in a Turkish court, but marital rape is a crime in Turkey (it took a while, but still):

Also praiseworthy was the enactment of new legislation, including the law on the protection of the family, by which domestic violence had been legally defined for the first time, and the anticipated entry into force this year of the new Penal Code, which, for the first time, criminalized marital rape and sexual harassment in the workplace.

http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2005/wom1480.html

I wonder where people get the notion that “different culture” (or maybe I should say, “Islamic culture”) means living like animals and that people have no sense of wrong doing.

I often heard men complain about feminism (especially American men, by the way), even women make statements like “I’m not a feminist by nature” (meaning: unlike you I’m so supersuccessful with men - *yawn*) or “I’m not a feminist. I’m supersexual and feminine, I’m self-confident and well-educated with a college degree” (then take a good look at countries like Afghanistan and see where you might be without feminism), but when you see a picture like this you know they should shut up and that feminism is still a worthy cause.

This list comes from “Church Hopping,” and it’s a good list.  I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone basing a sermon on any of these.  Here’s an example:

Deuteronomy 23:1: No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.

When the U.S. was busy invading Iraq, the toy aisles started bursting with new soldier, tank and fighter jet toys.  Tonight, I toured the toy aisles of several stores to see whether I could find military toys corresponding to the current state of the Iraq occupation.

First of all, I looked for “Bogged Down in Iraq” action figures, but no luck.  I was looking for U.S. soldier action figures who looked disillusioned because they couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.   I assumed that I might also find some especially frustrated National Guards soldier toys, frustrated because they thought they were signing up for flood duty and a free education, but they are now on their third tour of duty in Bagdad.  I had hoped to find such action figures, complete with tiny photos of their infant children that they would receive at the plastic replica of a PX.

The President says that we’re making great progress in Iraq, so you’d think toy-makers would help celebrate that progress with commemorative Endless Occupation Sets.  Such a disappointment to learn that there weren’t any such toys.  I was also disappointed that I couldn’t find any corporate military action figures, including collections of dolls of the officers and directors of Halliburton or Blackwater, complete with replicas of their opulent corporate boardrooms.

Given that religion is such a big deal in America these days, I also scoured the toy aisles to see whether I could find religion action figures, such as the Virgin Mary, Joseph or Baby Jesus. No such luck in the toy aisles in the heartland of this highly Christian Nation.  Nor could I find any Creation-in-Seven-Days toys, including 6,500 year old Adam and Eve, complete with their pet dinosaurs.  This absence of religous toys left me dumbfounded that there won’t be any Creator of the Universe dolls for children this Christmas.  It couldn’t possibly be that the children aren’t asking for such toys . . .

I also looked, without success, for crucifixion reenactment sets, complete with a little plastic spear to insert into Jesus’ side.  No such luck.  Same result when I looked for Bible stoning sets, to include action figures of several people to be stoned, a mob to do the stoning and lots of realistic stones.  I also looked, without success, for God’s genocidal attacks on major cities, including his murder of babies.  Again, no luck in finding any such games or toys.  Without these sorts of toys, how are our children supposed to learn to love the Bible?

I couldn’t find any Virgin Mary impregnation-at-a-distance dolls.  Nor could I find Gay People Burning in Hell diorama kits.  In a final act of frustration, I asked the store manager if the store stocked any talking God dolls.  No such luck.  I was looking for one that repeatedly said “Worship me or go to hell,” just like the real God.  I also looked for pharmacy store toy sets, where the pharmacist dolls call out the word “whore” to any female customer dolls who ask the pharmacist dolls to fill their prescriptions for birth control pills.  No such toys are being sold this year.

It’s hard to explain the absence of such religious toys unless, perhaps, children are of the opinion that one day of religion per week is quite enough.  Or perhaps young minds find the above-described activities to be too disturbing or pointless.