Medical experts tell me I have only 468 months to live.

Next month, it will be 467.

How do I know?  I consulted one of the many life expectancy calculators available on the Internet.  The MSN calculator I used takes into account personal behavior, family and personal health, lifestyles (including alcohol and cigarette use), diet and exercise and driving habits. Based on my lifestyle habits, I have just determined that I’m scheduled to die at age 89, 39 years from now.

I have no grounds to complain about the small-seeming number of months I have yet to live. I’m certainly not looking for pity.  Compared to many other people, I’m doing well. People in the Stone Age (ca. 8000 BC) lived only about 20 years.    At the beginning of the 20th century, the average person lived only until my current age, 50.  In African countries hit hard by AIDS, the average person lives a total of only 30 years, significantly less than my remaining life expectancy at age 50. This is a phenomenal and disturbing statistic: at age 50, I am expected to live longer than a child born today in Zambia.

The reason I wrote this post, though, is that calculating my remaining life expectancy is much more than mathematics.  I’ll try to explain.  Perhaps this experiment won’t have the same effect on you, but it might.

First of all, why calculate my remaining time in months rather than the years?  Because as an adult, the month turns out to be the most basic unit of time.  Years …

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What does the New Testament actually say about morality?

In a short article called “The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos,” Sam Harris asks this simple question: What does the New Testament actually say about morality?  As a warm-up, he describes Old Testament morality (sometimes cited and approved in the new testament):

Human sacrifice, genocide, slaveholding, and misogyny are consistently celebrated. Of course, God’s counsel to parents is refreshingly straightforward: whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13–14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshiping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.

When I told a fundamentalist relative that such writings disturbed me and that they did not inspire me, she said: “You shouldn’t read so much of the Old Testament and focus on those things that trouble you. Instead, you need to read more of the New Testament.” Although she claimed that the Bible was “perfect and without any contradictions,” apparently (for her), the New Testament was more perfect than the Old Testament. Harris has also heard this claim, from Christians, that Jesus is kinder and gentler than the Old Testament God.  Harris therefore checked the New Testament:

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The importance of false and oxymoronic religious claims

Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed.  For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question.  We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us.  We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.

What is language for?  Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas.  In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”  

Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.”  Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action.  For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks. 

Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways.  According to Clark, we …

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The many faces of Christianity

When I was a kid, I was always curious about why there were so many different kinds of Christian churches in America: Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, Congregational, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, United Church of Christ, Reformed Church of Christ, Mormon, Quaker, Shaker, Greek Othodox, Russian Orthodox, Christian Science…the list seemed endless. It seemed like there were more different versions of Christianity in America than there were non-Christian religions around the rest of the world (Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Bahai, Shinto, Confucianism, etc.). Later, I learned that those other religions also had many different versions (Orthodox Judiasm, Ultra-orthodox Judiasm, Hasidic Judiasm, Reformed Judiasm, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, etc.), so Christianity is not unique in that respect.

Meanwhile, Christians were fond of telling me that the Bible was written by God and, thus, was both perfect and complete. Naturally, this made no sense to me given the cornucopia of churches. If the Bible was perfect and complete, then why didn’t all Christians understand it the same way? Didn’t God know how to write clearly? More importantly, why were there so many different kinds of churches and what were their actual differences? To my immense frustration, churches of different denominations didn’t have signs out front explaining how they differed from the other churches down the street.

Only recently have I learned some answers to these questions. First, it turns out that the number of different versions of Christianity and other religions that I can name are only the tip of …

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Social conservatives become “pro-choice” to oppose life-saving vaccine for cervical cancer

You might think that social conservatives, especially those in the so-called "pro-life" crowd, would welcome the use of a new vaccine that is virtually 100% effective against two deadly strains of cervical cancer that account for 70% of such cancer deaths and that kill over 3,700 women each year.  Unfortunately,…

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