I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.

Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.

After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.

But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :

1. Explain all currently and previously observed facts in the category of interest in terms of natural laws.
2. Describe what facts, if discovered, would prove it false.
3. Make predictions about future (as yet undiscovered) measurements or discoveries, and suggest how these might be found.

As near as I can tell the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design misses on all three counts. (more…)

The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland said that fuel policies pursued by the U.S. and the EU were one of the main causes of the current worldwide food crisis.

The Special Rapporteur warned of worsening food riots and a “horrifying” increase in deaths by starvation before reforms could take effect.

For the full article, visit Common Dreams.

I’m constantly learning valuable new lessons, but I generally find it difficult to recall any particular good lessons at any particular moment. I got the same problem with jokes. I’ve heard a lot of good jokes in my life, but if I’m put on the spot, I’m at a loss to remember more than one or two.

I thought it might be a good time to dig deep to try extra hard to remember a few of those lessons that have taken deep root with me. One shortcut would be to cite some of the books I have read which have provided some good lessons. For me, one of those books has been Inner Peace for Busy People, by psychologist Joan Borysenko (2001). She divided her book into 52 chapters, each of them offering a strategy for holding things together and finding peace in one’s life.

In chapter 1 Borysenko recommends that we pay attention to the Yerkes-Dodson law, which holds that increased stress makes us more productive only to a point, while further increases decrease productivity. Borysenko argues that many highly productive people operate “on the descending limb of the stress/productivity curve.” In short, they could be more productive if they could only push themselves a bit less, which would reduce the toll they are putting on their overstressed bodies.

In chapter 2 (of her 52 chapter book), Borysenko draws on the Buddhist saying that “Peace is like a sun that’s always shining in your heart. It’s just hidden behind clouds of fear, doubt, worry and desire that continually orient you toward the past or the future. The sun comes out only when you are in the present moment. Step one when you feel crazy busy is to take a breath to help let go of whatever it is on your mind. Think, here I am. Let your body relax, and feel your connection to the larger whole.” Breathing is so incredibly important that Borysenko devotes her entire third chapter to teaching her readers how to breathe.

Many of the worthwhile lessons I have learned have come in the form of written quotes. For instance, you can see that many of the posts at this site have been categorized as “quotes.” Those “lessons” arrive in a constant stream. Here are three recent quotes that constitute good “lessons” for me:

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
Thomas Paine

We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.
Thomas Edison

I do not follow any form of organized religion, but some of the figureheads of some of the most popular religions teach some excellent lessons. One of those impressive religious leaders would be the Buddha, who taught that A) suffering is an inherent part of existence; B) that the origin of suffering is ignorance and the main symptoms of that ignorance are attachment and craving and C) that attachment and craving can be ceased. I find these lessons to be incredibly important in my life, even though I struggle to employ these lessons in my daily existence.

Speaking of religious leaders, some critically important lessons have been attributed to Jesus. Again, I do not follow any organized religion; I certainly don’t believe in any of the supernatural claims that many Christians proclaim.  In fact, here is a post that presents some of the many reasons I disbelieve claims of supernatural occurrences and indicating my doubts that the “Jesus” of the Gospels ever actually existed. On the other hand, the lesson that one should love one’s enemy is both elegant and powerful, no matter who taught this lesson. (more…)

In about 300 B.C., Epicurus eloquently summed up the problem of the existence of evil. It has come to be known as the Riddle of Epicurus or the Epicurean paradox. It was translated by David Hume in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion:

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to
Then He is not omnipotent.

If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.

If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?

If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?

In “The Death of Conscience (Part One),” (Free Inquiry, April/May 2008 –not available online) Shadia B. Drury makes it clear that not all religion is bad.  She recognizes the religious backdrop to the successful efforts to repeal slavery, to promote civil rights and to create the Red Cross. “As these examples show, religion cannot simply be dismissed as pure evil or the ally of all the evils in the world.  Life is not that simple.”

Where is it, then, that religion goes bad?  “The human inability to accept a flawed and imperfect world and the longing for a world of perfection and Justice (either here on Earth or in the beyond) are at the heart of the problem.”  She argues that it is the dream of “escaping” to some perfect world that invites religious madness.  And she doesn’t mince her words on this: “Religiously inspired crime is unsurpassed in malignity and moral blindness.”

I disagree with Drury when she attributes all the worst human rights abuses to religion.  It is my belief that wickedness comes in many flavors.  Many horrid acts are clearly based on religion.  Others, however, are based upon a pretend religiousness and some of them are not based upon any form of religion at all.  To me, religion is one way (among many) that people can be inspired to do good things and one way (among many) that people can be inspired to do bad things.

Even though I disagree with Drury on the above point, she does present some interesting reasons for how and why things go wrong when they go very wrong in the name of religion.  I think that she is right about these factors where great evils are, indeed, perpetrated in the name of religion:

Religion is akin to a mind altering or hallucinogenic drug-in small doses it may be harmless (or even beneficial) but in large doses lethal.  There are several reasons for this.  First, the otherworldly sensibility that religion makes it seem as if death, suffering and construction in this world are of no consequence. This is particularly true of Islam and Christianity.  Second, the belief in the gratuitous wickedness of humanity makes it seem as if no amount of horror inflicted on human beings is undeserved. This is particular true of Christianity.  Third, and most significantly, religion (and lethal doses) undermines the rational faculty and it leads, for all practical purposes, to the death of conscience.  Ghastly deeds can then be carried out in good conscience.  In the absence of any pangs of conscience, wickedness reaches new heights.

[Emphasis added to the above quote.]

Note:  in this same issue of Free Inquiry (April/May 2008), articles by entomologist E.O. Wilson (”Denial and Its Risks”) and Preacher P. Andrew Sandlin (”Global Ecology and Godly Stewardship”) are evidence that Believers and non-Believers can collaborate on accomplish important tasks (preserving biodiversity), albeit with distinct motivations.

Imagine that a neighbor walks up today and tells you that he really cares about you.   In fact, he loves you like a daughter/son and he wants to show his love.  You might be delighted to hear such an expression of affection. 

Then imagine that he tells you that he wants to prove to you that he cares for you.  He wants to prove it in a way that you will never doubt the depth of his caring.  

You would probably be thinking that he’s going to do something nice.  Maybe he will give a big donation to charity in your name.  Or maybe he will go buy you something nice, or take you to dinner at a good restaurant.  But then he surprises you.

He reminds you that he has an adult son named Bill (which you knew, because you know Bill).  He then tells you that he is going to let a mob of goons torture and murder Bill in a bloody spectacle, for you!

You are aghast, but he continues on.

He tells you that he is going to let that mob drive large nails through Bill’s hands and feet, for you, to prove that he cares about you.   For a grand finale, he is going to allow this sadistic crowd to jab a spear through Bill’s side, to make sure that every drop of blood has been drained from Bill’s body.

It would be patently obvious to you that decent people don’t “show their love” by allowing their loved ones to be murdered.   At this point you are thinking that your neighbor is nuts and probably highly dangerous, because your neighbor’s logic points to an eternal regress.  If he lets Bill (his beloved son) get killed to show his love for you, then someday he might allow you to be killed to “show his love” to someone else. Where might this ever stop? 

The much bigger problem, of course, is that being complicit in murder is not a healthy way to show love to anyone.   Decent human cultures prohibit gratuitous murder.  We deplore those who allow mergers to happen when they could intervene and stop them.  Facilitating murder is a warped and disturbing attempt to demonstrate love.  

Similarly, the claim that God sacrificed his Son to show his love for us appears to be a blatant non sequitur.  It shouldn’t make sense for anyone, anywhere.  Except that it does make sense to Christians. Christians make a jarring and nonsensical exception for God, who is supposedly the most intelligent and loving Being in the universe.  (more…)

In an earlier post, I argued that people need to better appreciate that dollars are fungible (see here  and here).  Why is it important to understand that dollars are fungible?  A case in point is the new American enthusiasm for turning food into fuel. Consider this report from Fortune Magazine:

The growing myth that corn is a cure-all for our energy woes is leading us toward a potentially dangerous global fight for food. While crop-based ethanol -the latest craze in alternative energy - promises a guilt-free way to keep our gas tanks full, the reality is that overuse of our agricultural resources could have consequences even more drastic than, say, being deprived of our SUVs. It could leave much of the world hungry.

We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.
 
This year cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption. The problem is simple: It takes a whole lot of agricultural produce to create a modest amount of automotive fuel.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.

And consider this additional bad news from Earth Policy Institute: 

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.

As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.

Here’s are a few rhetorical questions to consider:  Can Americans justify filling up any more of those big SUV fuel tanks now that there is solid evidence that doing so will cause families on the other side of the world to suffer and die?  Can we justify cranking up the heat in the winter to stay toasty warm?  Should we merrily take long trips without considering the effects of burning this extra fuel on food prices (and thus food availability) to those people who are living on the margin?  Can we justify building more houses in the exburbs? 

We are now witnessing a collision between A) our desire to have fun and feel prestige through the discretionary buring of fuel, versus B) our ability to honestly look in the mirror to see ourselves as kind, decent and caring people.

It seems to me that Darwinism is to this election cycle as Family Values and Abortion have been to previous ones. There has been a recent rash of books and now a movie all pointing out how a conspiracy of elites are following the Darwin manifesto to create a facist atheist state.

Am I overstating it? Read this criticism (including their own release blurb) of Ben Stein’s new movie, “Expelled”. This movie about how bully tactics are what keeps the theory of evolution uncontested is scheduled for a mid-April release. But is already playing to mega-churches and closed-door sessions of school boards and state legislatures. Mainstream press has not yet officially had access to it.

Legislatures? According to NowPress.com in this short article:

The invitation to “Expelled” is just for legislators and their spouses, along with legislative aides. The press and public is excluded.

House Minority Leader Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, asked House general counsel Jeremiah Hawkes if that’s legal — since Florida law requires open meetings whenever two or more lawmakers meet to discuss pending business. Hawkes replied that, as long as they just watch the film and don’t discuss the issue or arrange any future votes, it’s technically legal.

Why? Because Florida just modified its education policy to require the Evolution to be mentioned in biology classes as a Scientific Theory. Two representatives have now introduced bills that would allow teachers to present discussion of “Intelligent Design” in science classes. The Florida Family Policy Council (one of the many branches of Focus on the Family) is the group sponsoring the showing.

(more…)

Would you like to listen to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens discussing religion for two hours?  My initial impulse was that I wasn’t especially interested, even though I admire these thinkers/writers and I agree with many of their ideas.  My hesitation was that I was already quite familiar with their works.

I jumped in, though, and watched the video (it’s hosted at Richard Dawkins’ site).  I was delighted with this material.  This video is well worth watching,  whether or not you’ve read any of the participants’ books.  Each of these four participants is well known for writing a book that challenges religious beliefs.  In this video, they often move beyond the eloquent arguments they have made in writing and, instead, they address many aspects of the psychology of belief, the psychology of argument and where we should go from here.  The session is filled with memorable anecdotes and personal reflections. 

It is true that Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have much in common.   But there are also a surprising number of points where they diverge in their thinking.  When they diverge, they do it with mutual respect, and the discussion moves well all the way through. 

Some of my favorite topics:

What preachers think in private (whether they “know better” than to preach the way they do).

Whether it’s ever possible for a rational argument to succeed regarding a devout believer.

The type of faith we have in scientists and other types of experts.

The arrogance of those who claim to speak for God.

Those who are noumenous (those who experience a secular sense of mystery) versus those who claim religious beliefs.

That each of the participants enjoys having a Christmas Tree during the holiday season.

Sophisticated theology characterized as “stamp collecting.”

That well-educated believers somehow succeed in keeping “two sets of books.”

Are there some absolutely true things that responsible people shouldn’t investigate and shouldn’t promulgate?

What are atheists missing when they coldly dismiss religious beliefs, out of hand?

The problem with those who live lives of perpetual distraction.

Whether the participants would prefer a world in which churches were always empty.

The connection between religion and art.

Whether one can lose one’s self in religious stories without actually believing them to be true.

The discussions of these topics will often surprise you.  Don’t make my mistake and presume that you could have written the script. 

Is anyone else struck by the irony that Homeland Security so often erodes First Amendment rights? Homeland Security has become obsessed about listening to personal phone calls and seizing people’s cell phones and laptops when they travel.  Ironically, there is no security for the victims of gunmen who shoot up college campuses and city council meetings.

At 48 years old, I can remember attending high school and college without any fear that someone would walk in and begin blasting away. The recent stories on the news, starting with last year’s Virginia Tech shooting, followed by a local killing rampage at a Kirkwood City Council meeting (5 dead, 2 critically injured, one of whom was the city’s mayor), and yesterday’s deaths on the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, has me wondering what has changed? Is it my level of awareness or is it a change in the basic behavior and beliefs of Americans?

Initially outraged by the extremely cavalier treatment of US citizens with Muslim backgrounds who attempt to travel out of the United States, I now find myself feeling deeply saddened and frustrated that innocent folks are uselessly harassed while others, intent on venting their rage, are so easily able to take many lives in a few short minutes. Is there a connection here? I think there is.
 
For eight years now we’ve lived in an atmosphere of fear, created by and fed by an embedded media that supports a President and a government that speaks of terrorism and “The Enemy” as something out there, waiting to get us all.

Whatever we might think about the media’s ability to affect how we think and behave, I personally believe it is impossible to escape its effect altogether. Even if we refuse to turn on the TV or the radio, there is the Internet.  And even if we do not indulge in surfing the Internet, our neighbors, friends and family members are certainly not on a low- or no-media diet. The atmosphere of fear pervades the very air we breathe.
 
Unfortunately, there is no respite and there are no sure-fire solutions offered by the government or the media. Homeland Security?  It’s not effective.  It’s a “war” we cannot win. Just as computer viruses and system break-ins continue to be engineered by those with the fever to destroy, terrorists bent on passing through security lines will think of new and creative ways to detonate their bombs and kill people.

The result is that we feel completely out of control. Guess what? It’s true. We are. Despite increased security (That woman’s a Muslim! Take her cell phone!), shooting rampages continue, children continue to be raped and kidnapped, and the fear builds.

We can run but we can’t hide from fear. We can keep our children indoors and we can give them cell phones with instructions to call us from wherever they go, but we still can’t quell the fear. Fear has the capacity to build on itself and, without a means to face it, we become driven by it.  The Fearful people themselves become dangerous. People who are basically motivated by fear can become so angry and frustrated that they act out. They sometimes kill. (more…)

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since.  Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.

What did I think of the movie?  It was entertaining.  It moved well.  One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones.  The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction.  Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.

I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through.  The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation.  It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least.  I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.

No, it is beyond that.  It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women.  Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.

It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for.  Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.

(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy.  If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)

The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness.  Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.

The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus.  I seriously doubt it was.  I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic.  He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals.  Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!

Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device.  The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests.  If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.

Did they do this consciously?  Some probably knew very well what they were doing.  Most just followed orders.  They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust.  After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating.  It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it.  Nonsense.  Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.

But was it based on Jesus’s teachings?  Likely not.  He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal.  The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.

The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it.  All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving.  To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences.  All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.

I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others.  It’s a lengthy topic.  Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.

What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church.  People are gullible, but stubborn.  It would do no such thing.  People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes.  I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise.  Never happens.  Never will.

At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.

Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other.  The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point.  They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir.  But more importantly, they would have lost their icon.  Their center.  They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.

I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper.  Absurd in many ways, though.  While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture.  The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.  It did not fare well.  Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’  It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci.  The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting.  The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork.  It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive).  If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time.  But who can say?  It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.

I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue.  The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people.  The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness.  Capable of wholeness.  Capable, finally, of love.

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.

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.

I’m pondering an idea which is certainly not original, though it is an idea powerful enough to make a mockery of any moral system that looks to the consequences of actions to characterize the moral quality of those actions. 

Here’s the thought:  Every so often something really bad happens to me.  I’m in an auto accident.  I lose my job.  My marriage fails.  My children ignore me.   Something expensive breaks.  Someone I care about dies. My attempts to impress someone important go completely unnoticed.  I spend endless hours on a project and it does not turn out the way I had hoped.

Each of these things are the types of things we would easily categorized as “bad.”  They are so obviously bad that we can predict that our friends, upon hearing of these things, will console us.  But are “bad” things really bad?

After all, while I’m healing from that auto accident, an incredibly important thought occurs to me and I change my life for the “better.”  Even though I’ve lost a job I cherished, I then find another job which I like even better.  After my marriage fails, I make some changes in my life and I encounter a new love.  When my children ignore me, I learned to pay more attention to them and then I benefit from an improved parent-child relationship.  That thing that broke is something I didn’t need in my life anyway.  The death of my close friend inspires me to be a better person.  When that person I was trying to impress ignores me, I realize that I should have been spending my time doing other sorts of things anyway.

On countless occasions, a “disaster” turns out to be a great excuse to do something we should have done anyway. When one door closes shut, three other doors open wide.  And I’m not talking only about tiny disappointments.  I’m talking about major disasters.  The sorts of things that you are absolutely certain are horrible. But in the long run, they often aren’t. Fifteen years later (far enough removed that you don’t feel the intense mental or physical pain that you felt in the past), you realize that that “bad” thing was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to you, even though you hated it at the time and you were certain that it was ruining your life.  You did something really stupid, for instance, but you learned a big lesson and never again screwed up in that way again.

Someone might object that natural disasters, all genocides and at least some wars are absolutely bad, given the horror, the permanency of death and the lasting pain. That is certainly true from the perspective of many individuals. Such events, however, are often catalysts for widespread change that prevents future events of even greater magnitude. Perhaps a hurricane provokes officials to implement a new warning and rescue system. Perhaps the horror of a genocide causes society to reevaluate bigotted attitudes and helps stave off future genocides of even greater magnitude. Wars always provoke episodes of heroism within the insanity of the violence and they do sometimes cause the defeat of a malignant regime (e.g., the defeat of Hitler in WWII). There is the possibility that even a senseless war will teach long term lessons that might avoid future senseless wars (though this often doesn’t happen). 

The other side of the coin consists of acts which seem “good,” that result in widespread horror.  I would put rampant consumerism in that category.  (more…)

While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.

The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood of the animal is drained from its body in the belief that,

…the energy contained in blood of an animal sacrifice opens a channel of direct communication with the Orishas.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/santeri1.htm

(Orishas are the multitude of gods that represent various aspects of life, much as in the Hindu pantheon or the Christian saints.)

The question that first occurred to me when I read this was “Who figured this out?”

I mean, there is no Santeria “bible”, it’s an oral tradition. Someone somewhere in Africa got it in her head that the blood of animals somehow “speaks” to her God and she was persuasive enough to convince others that it was true. So persuasive in fact, that people are still doing it to this day just because a teacher tells them to, even though there is no “written word of God” to back her up.

The original priestess of Santeria must have been wishing really hard for something big and when she killed a goat her wish came true. She deduced that it was the killing that caused the good thing to happen and I can only assume she followed that up with more killing and more good luck.

The second thought that occurred to me was, “How do they know it still works?”

For that matter, how does anyone who prays know that their message is reaching God and that God will act on their request? In a recent scientific study it was proven that prayer is usless from a medical standpoint.

Distant prayer and the bedside use of music, imagery and touch (MIT therapy) did not have a significant effect upon the primary clinical outcome observed in patients undergoing certain heart procedures, researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and seven other leading academic medical institutions across the U.S. have found.

“Prayers for the sick and healing-touch are among the most widely practiced healing traditions around the world,” said Mitchell Krucoff, MD, interventional cardiologist at Duke and lead author of the study. “As widespread as these practices are, few rigorous studies exist to explain any mechanism of action or reliable measures of safety or effectiveness. While many of us are fascinated culturally or philosophically with the mystery of healing and prayer, for the practice of medicine we need to understand these phenomena with data-driven insight.”

I’m sure this is old news for regular readers of DI, but I decided to conduct a personal (i.e. anecdotal, unscientific) experiment of my own. So that I couldn’t be accused of persecuting anyone’s religion, I decided to put my own family’s faith in the spotlight. (I was raised Roman Catholic.)

I thought back over the years to the many times that members of my family were in major medical distress and we prayed for help. Did it work? Let’s see…

Great Aunt Mary: Cancer.

Her sisters, my grandmother included, were avid churchgoers all their lives. They prayed for Mary for many months as she suffered with her disease.

Result: Aunt Mary died.

Cousin Jeremy: Because he was born with a heart defect Josh needed periodic surgeries to expand his chest cavity to accommodate the growing organ. At 12 years of age during one such operation his body became wracked with infection. Our family prayed for him.

Result: Jeremy died.

Baby Jake: My sister’s son became feverish and was diagnosed with meningitis. We were all asked to pray for him.

Result: Jake got better.

Lynne: My cousin’s wife was 37 years old with three small children when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We prayed like we’d never prayed before.

Result: Lynne died.

Rose: The 38 year old sister of a close friend discovered a tumor on her spine. She was a single mother of a small daughter. His family and my family both prayed for her.

Result: Rose died.

That’s 1 out of 5. Pretty lousy track record if you ask me.

What did we do wrong? Are we a bad family whose members deserve to die painful tragic deaths? As far as I can tell we are no better or worse than anyone else.

I wonder if the practitioners of Santeria fare better statistically than Catholics. Even the proverbial flip of the coin, 50/50, would be a big improvement! I’d like to know because if draining the blood from a screaming animal can increase my odds of getting what I want and save my family from untimely death…I’m joining!

Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?

Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our civilization but our coins) know that we were a Christian nation. It was thus briefly seen on the U.S. 2-cent piece at the end of the civil war. And then retired, not to be seen again for over a generation.

Then came the morality movement backlash from “The Gay 90’s”. Picture a disco era for your great-great-grandparents. This post-Victorian backlash eventually led to the 18^th and 21^st amendments (prohibition and its repeal). Meanwhile, this slogan started appearing on coins in 1908. There is nothing like the fear of pleasure to get politicians who need to appear churchy to move on a moral issue.

I just read an article “IN GOD WE TRUST” — STAMPING OUT RELIGION ON NATIONAL CURRENCY that suggests protest in the form of marking out the offending theist sentiment on any folding money that passes through our hands. Although it is petty vandalism, it is not a federal offense. As long as an alteration you make to money does not change its value in any way, it isn’t illegal.

(more…)

Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace.  When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter.  This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.  

I never once thought it was her fault.

How could you?  She’d been deceived.  Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.

History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality.  Especially among adolescents.  We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain.  The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development.  It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults.  Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity.  (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)

Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.

And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.

It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.

Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people.  Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.”  It was somehow her fault.

When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad.  In fact immoral.  Evil.  That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.

This is pathetic.  But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from.  This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape.  “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.”  We’ve heard all this.  After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female.  It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.

Blaming the victim.

This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways.  (more…)

According to this post at Alternet, there are many forms of rampant self-indulgence.  The GOP specializes in the most pernicious forms:

While the culture at large was adjusting to the idea that families don’t all look the same and that private sexual morality was not the business of the state, the decadent economic elite and right wing ideologues had systematically defined deviancy down to the point where Moynihan’s deviant “altruism” can be illustrated as giving bonuses to workers who denied cancer patients their medicine; his deviant “opportunism” is seen as giving hundreds of millions of dollars to failed business leaders who lost their companies billions; and his deviant “normalizing” can be observed as society tossing aside its taboo against government-sanctioned torture.

Senator Bernie Sanders writes that the American Middle Class is being decimated.  He cites some interesting numbers.  Here’s a couple shockers:

Robert Frank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has detailed the lives of the rich and famous in the book Richistan. He writes that households with a net worth of between $100 million and $1 billion last year spent an average of $182,000 on watches. Meanwhile, in the real world, 400,000 qualified students were unable to go to college because they lacked the funds.

Frank also details how during this one-year period the economically elite households spent $311,000 on cars, $397,000 on jewelry and $169,000 on spa services. At the same time, President Bush presented a budget in which he proposed cuts that would deny child care to 300,000 families and food stamps for 280,000 families.