Proper Prayer Position for Practicing Postulants

Do not be deceived that the science of prayer underutilizes the modern tools of charts and graphs and pursues the metrics of metaphysics in less than thorough regard for the contemporary demand for logical breakdown of the very physics of divine petition. One need only look here to begin to glimpse the dedication to the Popular Mechanics model of spiritual presentation. In many ways, this reminds me of The Third Eye, with its fake Tibetan flowcharts and associational metaphysics. At the turn of the 20th Century there were many groups organized around the notion that spirituality was merely a forgotten science and that if the methodology of enlightenment could be found (in tradition Victorian faith-in-science manner) then we could all stop buzzing about churches and indulging fuzzyheaded scattershot traditional religions as a means of elevating ourselves to higher planes. The Victorians loved diagrams. Rather like patent applications, really, and that wedded them to invention and progress. So it only made sense to tackle this whole question of the afterlife and souls and such by the same sort of techniques---if one could reduce a question to a blueprint, as it were, one could get quickly to the center of the matter. Now we have the phsyiology of proper prayer. If nothing else, this could be good for one's posture---except for the constant bending forward, which could exacerbate a stooped shoulder aspect and aggravate osteoporosis... Well, I suppose there are drawbacks to everything. Enlightenment at the cost of a straight spine. Better, I suppose, than a renewed interest in self flagellation and scourging.

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P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots

P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots. Myers' post springs from this passage from a new book by Pierce, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

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That strange relationship between power and truth

I have a question for readers and a request for guidance. My gut feeling is that political power has nothing to do with truth. It doesn’t matter that someone is encouraging me or threatening me to believe that 2 + 2 =5. The truth is that 2 +2 is always 4. Even if someone enacts tax incentives for me to say otherwise. Even if police officers put guns to my head. Even if every other person in my country ostracizes me and calls me immoral. It seems, though, that there are what seem to be (to many people) strange but unrelenting version of truth that are guided by the exercise of power. This occurs most often in closed systems. For instance, one would be scolded if one stood up and announced that Mary wasn’t a virgin while in a Christian church. If you take a megaphone at a Fourth of July picnic in middle-America, you’d better damn well say that the United States is the world’s greatest democracy, even though our voting rates are pathetically law and even though our political system is thoroughly corrupted thanks to legalized bribes termed “campaign contributions” (see this telling comment, which SHOULD shock us into starting a massive revolution). Within a closed social system, then, it seems as though political or social power can be used to make many people mouth many blatant untruths. After mouthing them for long periods, many of these people start believing these untruths. For instance, did we invade Iraq to confiscate known weapons of mass destruction? That idea served as truth to many people during the run up to the invasion (some people still cling to that falsehood). Now, with a new power order in place in Washington DC, the prevailing truth is that the Bush Administration intentionally conjured up fake evidence regarding WMD. This inter-relationship between truth and power reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion that scientific fields undergo periodic revolutions ("paradigm shifts"), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. I’m also somewhat acquainted with various “post-modernist” writings that seem to address this general issue. For instance, consider this definition of postmodernism by Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler, which I pulled from Wikipedia:

A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.”… Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.

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Elephant’s Wings

PZ Myers has produced a parable; an updating of the ancient saga of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The gist of every version of this tale is that several blind explorers each encounter one point on an elephant, and decide from that point what the whole must be. PZ presents a version with an intractable dissenting opinion among those considered as experts. After their consternation at their initial dissimilar conclusions about the true nature of an elephant,

The first three, being of a scientifical bent, quickly collaborated and changed places, and confirmed each other's observations; they agreed that each had been correct in the results of their investigations, except that there wasn't a hint of feathers anywhere about, but clearly their interpretations required correction and more data. So they explored further, reporting to each other what they were finding, in order to establish a more complete picture of the obstacle in the path.

"Feathers?" you ask. The fourth had suggested that it simply must have iridescent, transcendent wings. So as the others checked their evidence, he:

yawns and stretches in the shade of a tree. "It has wings, large wings, that it may ascend into the heavens and inspire humanity. There could be no purpose to such an animal without an ability to loft a metaphor and give us something to which we might aspire."

The disagreements between those who explore and those who are sure, escalate. A worthy short read.

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Banks and Republicans are blocking short-sales of homes

A middle-aged couple who bought a home in my neighborhood are in a terrible situation. They paid too much for their new house, which needed a lot of repairs, and they failed to aggressively work to sell their existing home. Therefore, they now have two houses. They continue to live in their original home while their new house (two houses away from where I live) has been vacant for three years and it is falling apart. I’m not talking about chipped paint. There are huge holes in the roof that are causing the house to rot out. Check out the garage roof too: Image by Erich Vieth[/caption] People who know a lot about rehabbing houses tell me that if this house and garage don’t get immediate attention, they will need to be completely torn down.

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