Of Values And Victims

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 …

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What does evolution really have to do with religion? David Sloan Wilson argues that it’s time to find out.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller.  Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew.  He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.

But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor?  When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements.  When people are good, they are not really good because of religion.  To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”  (Page 167).  Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:

It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”

When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.

Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident.  They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves.  We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under

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Tolerance

A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over…

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Incompetence as the Basis of Civilization

I was reading about Gallium metal, and got sidetracked by a debate about math software. The point that got my attention is the contention that civilization is based on an institutionalized principle that we all are incompetent in many important fields. The item being debated was the necessity of children…

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Change in Self – Change in World

Erich just uploaded a short post noting that Americans feel sourly about nearly everything. With no sign of optimism, and marked lack of trust in virtually all institutions, does it come as a surprise that people often sigh hopelessly over the “good old days”? Many people cling to an image of past glory and happiness, even when their fantasy “good old days” never existed. Several writers on the blog, Jason Rayl and me among them, have pointed out the inaccuracies of such perfect, imagined pasts.

So when we look back to a “good old day”, hold it up to the light of present times and see a glaring gap, has the world changed, or have our perceptions simply matured, become more jaded with time?

Some psychological research has delved into this tendency of human cognition to misperceive the past, and of our additional tendency to ignore the role that perception plays in how the world looks. A recent Cornell University study entitled “When Change in Self is Mistaken for Change in the World” (Eibach, Libby & Gilovich, 2003) finds that:

“Personal changes in respondents (e.g., parenthood, financial change) were positively correlated with their assessments of various social changes (e.g., crime rates, freedom).”

Thus, if your world has improved in recent years, you may think that crime rates have lowered, drug abuse and dependency has shrunk, and that the country’s economy has brightened and bettered recently as well. But if things have gotten worse for you, perhaps you clamor …

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