PANGEA PROGRESS

Ernest Becker - Escape from Evil

2012-02-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed -- a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.

Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all the he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist -- continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost . . . . this absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth.

Man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. [Herein we have the origins of civilization] As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature . . . . [but] the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression. What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity . . . . men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live . . . a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.

In seeking to avoid evil [(death)], man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

Ernest Becker from his book Escape from Evil

Newt Gingrich & American Christianity

2012-01-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich is proving that American christianity is a form of neo-victorianism. In that it finds it more distasteful to talk about adultery than it does to committ adultery. This redemption is a form of relativism. "We are all fallen. We all sin." This sickly relativism is American christianity's flexibility...as long as you speak the language of the tribe. If you are outside the tribe you are judged for your sins. If you are within the tribe you are given a pass.

This provinical and tribal theology allows for corrupt double standards and outright hypocrisy.

What is paramount is that one swears fidelity only to the spoken ideology. Your life and integrity is secondary.

The Story of Science vs. the Story of Religion

2012-01-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

The narrative of the natural sciences is not only more likely than the supernatural narratives it also possesses greater explanatory power.

The advantage that religious narratives have is their cultural & emotional identity connection usually developed in childhood and in family units. The religious narrative also has the advantage that it directly consoles the existential anxiety due to human consciousness and its propensity to metaphysical meaning and security.

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson (NSFW)

2012-01-15T15:25:00.000-08:00

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson (NSFW)

Rick Santorum's Political Christianity

2012-01-10T12:16:00.000-08:00

Why Rick Santorum Can't Just Say: God Doesn't Want You To Be Gay | Politics | Religion Dispatches

It’s not as though Santorum dispassionately selected Catholicism from a menu of religious ideologies. He believes because he feels. Even before his wife’s miscarriage (in 1996), before his political career, some concatenation of circumstances installed what some have called religious “software” in his brain. Things are good when religion is dominant, bad when it is not. This is the truth of his experience.

I’m reminded of a story told by Tim LaHaye, notorious author of the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series. LaHaye was ten years old when his father died, and obviously devastated by the loss. As LaHaye tells it, it was during a pastor’s eulogy for his father that he truly came to believe. The pastor explained how his father was now in heaven with Jesus, and the young LaHaye knew this to be true, felt it to be true. Indeed, he must have wished it to be true as well. Of course he did; what ten-year-old boy wouldn’t?

That, not evolution or homosexuality or any other point of dogma, is the real issue for people like LaHaye, Santorum, and Chambers: the fundamental comfort that religion provides. If people evolved from apes, according to this logic, Timmy LaHaye’s father is not in heaven with Jesus and Rick Santorum’s son died for no reason.

And this is why we cannot argue with people who subscribe to this framework: there is simply too much at stake for them. They have wedded their fundamental sense of okay-ness to the truthfulness of a set of doctrines. Not only is sociology not at issue for Rick Santorum, Romans isn’t either. What is at stake is his very sense that the world is a good place, that things are basically okay, and that he himself is okay as a result. That may be expressed in a theological framework, but it is a psychological reality. If I marry my partner, therefore, Rick Santorum is not okay.

The rest is window dressing. The fake sociology, the religious doctrines of sin and salvation, all of it. Santorum and Chambers have had powerful religious experiences, and they avail themselves of such doctrines to articulate the inexpressible.

By Jay Michaelson

Thomas Paine Contra the Religious Right in America

2012-01-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

Glenn Beck's use of Thomas Paine is quite ironic considering Paine's view of the Judeo-Christian tradition and his distaste for Church and State connection. Either Glenn Beck is woefully ignorant or he is a charlatan who takes advantage of the ignorance of those he fleeces.

The adulterous connection between church and state...

[Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

Glenn Beck (and many others on the religious right) have been pushing this Judeo-Christian identity as the inspiration of the American Experiment and Founders. But again his history is very selective.
If we are saying that the majority of Americans were and are Christian then that would be fair. But the inspiration and knowledge that framed the American experiment was not the Judeo Kings of the Old Testament or the Kings of Christian Europe but rather it was the example of Ancient Greece (Democracy) and the Roman Republic. It was Pagan Europe not Christian Europe that was the inspiration. The American Founders had a classical education and they were inspired by Ancient Greece and the Republic of Rome. Political Christianity from Europe was not what the American Experiment was about. The Enlightenment and the Classical world were very influential in the philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Glenn Beck and David Barton say the separation of Church and State was to keep Government out of Church but not Church out of Government...that is like saying that Jelly should stay out of peanut butter but peanut butter can mix with jelly. If the mix is the problem what party crosses the line is not the fundamental issue. They want Church to run government but not government to run church? Take power from the Government and give it to the Church? Sounds like a theocratic dream. Freedom of Religion requires Freedom from Religion when it comes to the State. Otherwise the confusion of which God and which holy book is problematic. Even Christians who agree somewhat on the same God fight among themselves over the correct interpretation of that God. That is why the founders(important Deists among them) would only acknowledge a vague Creator or Providence. Something the classical pagans would have no problem with. Something as broad as Nature was used as a source of rights as well. When Thomas Paine argued for the rights of man he did not invoke Christian-Judeo heritage but the Age of Reason and the values of the Enlightenment.

What Athens was in miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present.

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

From the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, the Founding Fathers looked to classical history as a reliable guide to their successful experiment in building a lasting republic.

Dr. Joe Wolverton II

I too am an epicurean.I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

Thomas Jefferson,Monticello, October 31, 1819

TheraminTrees on Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-29T09:48:00.001-08:00

Responding to SE Cupp's Blind Spot

2011-12-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

Fox News Atheist SE Cupp wrote,

"Back in college, while I was busy pretending that a blottoed discussion of Nietzsche over $1 beers made me an intellectual giant, my fiftysomething father, who'd worked so hard to send me there, was quietly being saved. Having long eschewed any ties to his Southern Baptist upbringing, he suddenly found himself born again and on a quest to know God better...
Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of "The End of Faith" and "God Is Not Great," respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today's militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don't seem to want to do too much thinking at all."

Article

To start the fact that Cupp thought that a discussion about Nietzsche over beers made you an intellectual giant is troublesome... as troublesome as thinking that bashing Sam Harris and the New Atheists makes you beyond reproach and an enlightened person.

I can appreciate that there are ambiguities but Cupp's delivery can be just as smug as any new atheist she dislikes.

Personally I defend skepticism not atheism. In a world of secular and religious frailty it is good to be a skeptic.

The problem I have with progressives who view the late Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris with disdain and with words like "arrogant and angry" is their huge blind spot that comes from their own experience or lack of experience. There is some truth to their point of view that religion can be more sophisticated and in some areas beneficial to people. But they ignore the fact that many people do take religion as dogmatically true and to claim that religion is simply benign would be intellectually dishonest to history and the present. The blind spot for people like SE Cupp is that she has received a rich education herself but she forgets there are many students who have not been given the opportunity to learn or be inspired by the scientific narrative because of religion dominating their community. It is easy to be benevolent to something that has never bloodied your particular lip. If you use your imagination you will see that others have been harmed by the sting of religion and stunted by its dogma.

For SE Cupp religion did not complicate her education but for many others it does impact their ability to grow in learning. We know that the two things that inspire children when it comes to Science are Dinosaurs and Astronomy. Both of these subjects can be a problem in many religious homes and school districts in America. That is something to be acknowledged.
Now there are other circumstances where a religious community helped in giving a child a better education. For instance let us say a gang member grew up thinking books were boring and for nerds but he became religious and got interested in biblical literature and that led him to learn to read and to even go to a higher learning institution. That happens but so does the fact that some religious influence gets in the way of the advance of knowledge and education. So let us not pretend that there are simple answers to the ills of society either way. With or without religion the opportunity for a rich education is going to be something of a struggle in a culture that prizes identity politics and cheap fame over wisdom. The arrogance of atheists can be bad taste but the arrogance of believers can have a real impact in the quality of education children are getting in this country. The worst arrogance is from solipsism that creates a blind spot and you forget that others do not walk your same path. The world is a spectrum of realities and sometimes what is benevolent to you is an obstacle to others.

Hitchens last Essay

2011-12-17T04:06:00.000-08:00

"I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing."

Christopher Hitchens (Trial of the Will)

Hitch RIP

2011-12-16T05:31:00.000-08:00

Tim Tebow and Divine intervention?

2011-12-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

If God is involved in football for Tim Tebow and not helping children with cancer then that God is insane or bored.

Human superstition and solipsism are hard to combat in a species that believes it is the center of the Cosmic Drama.

Nietzsche said "God is Dead" but if the Christian narrative is correct it would be better to say God is a little crazy and bored. I think the Gnostic Christians could agree to some extent.

Earth from Above

2011-11-15T10:30:00.001-08:00

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Nature and Grace

2011-11-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

From Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish:

A reader writes:

Thank you for continuing to engage Terrence Malicks's criminally under-attended The Tree of Life. Even as an atheist, I believe the film to be a masterpiece and an extraordinary source of beauty. I'd like to correct, however, Fr. Barron's otherwise lovely meditation on the film. He characterizes the encounter of the two dinosaurs as an example of "nature," and describes one dinosaur as "dominating" the other. In fact, the scene depicts both "nature" and "grace" - or, rather, the development of one following the other. The dominant dinosaur is shown pushing the injured dinosaur's face into the ground. This is "nature," as Fr. Barron describes. But the scene does not stop there. The dominant dinosaur then appears to effect something akin to mercy and backs away from the injured dinosaur, leaving him in peace. It would apear that Malick has shown us the birth of "grace."

Another writes:

While I'm personally a Christian - and I was knocked out by Malick's film every bit as much as you were - I left the theater feeling it was a devastating, almost unanswerable challenge to the Christian message. If the film is asking whether the universe tilts toward nature or grace, I would say Malick puts his thumb on the scales every-so-slightly in favor of grace. But I had a powerful feeling in my gut that it's all just nature.

In one cut-away in the film, you see a wounded dinosaur approached by another hunter-dinosaur. When it looks like the hunter is about to finish off the wounded prey, it inexplicably walks away. Grace? Maybe. But I had the sinking feeling that the human experience of grace isn't any different in kind or meaning than a dinosaur deciding for some unknowable reason to walk away from its wounded prey.

Measured against the staggering scope of cosmic time, even the most meaningful personal events - or traumas - really are insignificant, even meaningless. That's the overall impression I carried from the film.

I believe that is one core mystery that Christianity asserts: that despite all the power of nature, grace triumphs. It's as unlikely as a Resurrection. Another:

The two biblical stories Barron references have long bothered me. They both contain some thorny issues that most clergy, including Fr. Barron, sidestep. Why does God put the forbidden tree in the garden to begin with? The snake and the woman get the blame, but it seems like God is just taunting humans, daring them to break the rules. Before eating from this tree of knowledge, do Adam and Eve have no understanding of good and evil? Don't they actually gain from eating the fruit?

The Job story actually gives us an answer for God's perplexing actions, because we know more than Job does. He has gone through all of this crap because God and Satan have made a bet. How fair is that? When Job, justifiably, wants to know why such bad stuff has happened to such a good person, God just blows him off. "I'm God, and you're not. Mind your own business."

Both of these stories, it seems to me, tell us to remain ignorant. Don't ask questions, don't ponder too deeply. Life is hard, but even though God's reasons may be unjust, he's God, and you just have to suck it up.

I think Malick's film actually puts God in a much more favorable light than either of these Bible stories do. Jack accuses God just like Job: you let anything happen; you don't seem to care. But at least in Malick's version it's fair. Everybody suffers, everybody dies, and that's just the way of nature. That dinosaur gets a momentary reprieve, but the meteor is on its way. This is everyone's fate. At least there is a comfort in knowing that I have been a part of it, that all of life shares my personal grief, and that it's all so beautiful.

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." I can't know what Jobs meant by that, but the ambiguity is fitting here.

Universe - Cosmic Evolution

2011-10-31T10:14:00.001-07:00

The Cosmic Heights - Alan Watts, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Jay Gould

2011-10-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. The first that we associate with Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo that taught us that we weren't living on the central body of a limited universe. And that Darwin's was the second that taught us that we were not separately created in the image of a benevolent deity, but were part of a history of genealogical connectivity of all living things. Now, in an odd sense, we know how contentious the first revolution was; we know the story of Galileo.
But the way I like to put it, I don't think that revolution was as important as Darwin's, because it's about real estate. The Darwinian revolution is about essence; it's deeper. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. "

Stephen Jay Gould

"Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming."

John Burden Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) English geneticist. Possible Worlds and other Essays (1927) "Possible Worlds".

"The importance of the Scientific Revolution for philosophy is beyond question. Modern philosophy the work of both rationalists and empiricists would have been impossible without great advances in physics. Analogously, therefore, we could anticipate that the Darwinian Revolution will have important implications for philosophy. Indeed, I would go further and say that we might expect Darwin's work to have even greater implications for philosophy than those of physics. The theory of evolution through natural selection impinges so directly on our own species. It is not just that we are on a speck of dust whirling around in the void but that we ourselves are no more than transformed apes. If such a realization is not to affect our views of epistemology and ethics, I do not know what is. As I said in the Preface, I find it inconceivable that it is irrelevant to the foundations of philosophy whether we are the end result of a slow natural evolutionary process, or made miraculously in Gods own image on a Friday, some 6,000 years ago. "

Dr. Michael Ruse

Christian Apologetics = Natural Politics & Posturing

2011-10-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

"Man is by nature a political animal."

Aristotle

Christian Apologists despite their claim they represent the divine all powerful supernatural God act and argue like the natural beings they are. Christian Apologists are Political Animals. With ad hominems and machismo like declarations "atheists are scared", "atheists owned", "atheists destroyed", "atheists stupid". What you see here is a very political reactionary response to a tribes natural opposition. I see no divine humility or wisdom with the New Christian Apologists and their smug dismissive attitude and posturing.

There is alot of cynical talk of youtube atheism but the average Christian apologist on youtube engages in ego shining and identity politics. Ad hominems are not a good argument but they do make the Christian tribe feel better and help protect the ego from the uncomfortable questions from those with different perspectives. Christianity is a man made religion and its defenders keep underlining that point for us in how they go about defending their God concept.

Where is the humility, kindness, justice and genuine faith in modern Christian Apologetics? It lacks these but it has plenty of pride, sophistry, smugness and indifference.

"Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete." -The Apostle Paul

Christian Apologists are human mortals with all the limitation, baggage and bias that we all carry. Their knowledge is incomplete. Can they even admit what the Apostle Paul stated? Or are they so invested in protecting their pride and their tribe that they fail to see their own weakness and fragility?

The irony of this argument from Christian apologists who say that there needs to be a higher degree of biblical scholarship before commenting is that most of the Christian beliefs they defend are believed by people who have no such scholarship. IF more Christians studied the Bible at a higher level I think there would be more doubt and less fundamentalism. Is this what christian apologists want? More likely they use it to bully people into silence and obfuscation.

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."

Nietzsche

"The Excessive importance attached to 'apologetics' is therefore an undeniable proof of the decline of the religious spirit...such apologists themselves furnish the proof of their complete ignorance of the real character of the doctrine whose more or less authorized representatives they believe themselves to be."

René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)

The Belief Instinct

2011-10-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

"The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology."

E. O. Wilson

"And on the trillionth day, Man created Gods."

T.D. Pate

"I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E.O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruelest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth."

Dr. James Lovelock

Creating Confusion and Eternal Torture for a diluted and unnecessary "free will"

2011-10-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

The Christian narrative is that in the beginning was God and he created this whole universe and existence. If this is true then this all powerful God is responsible for the great horror,suffering, and evil in the world. The reply is that God wanted creatures to have free will but this is questionable because at best existence for humans is a mix of deterministic factors as well as their will. So that is not a very fair system. And is there really a clear choice? There are other claims about this God and the Christian narrative must be taken on faith. So the choice is really more like chance.

Also who is responsible for Satan if not God? And this God apparently gave Satan free will so it is not just for humans. Also do humans have free will in heaven? And if they do then it is possible to create a world where humans can live in perfect peace and have free will. So why all the prelude of death, disease, confusion and hell from a perfect Creator? The horrible truth is that for the Christian narrative to be consistent then there is no security in heaven either! In fact one verse in the Book of Revelation talks about a rebellion a thousand years after the return of Jesus. This is the best of all possible worlds? Some new angel may rebel like Lucifer or another Adam and Eve will rebel with their "free will" and we can start the whole confusing mess all over again. Even as a Christian one cannot be secure in future justice and peace because Satan and Sin according to the narrative started from divine perfection and creation!
If God is all good and all powerful it could have created a world where it started and ended with eternal bliss. Boredom not compassion would be the reason for creating a world such as ours. Does not God have free will? Is not God responsible for all things including evil and the suffering in it?

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Thomas Jefferson

The tragic history of human civilization and its many competing narratives of meaning...

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold Poem 1867

Pastor Robert Jeffress Sectarian Politics - Christianity as tribal identity

2011-10-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pastor Jeffress wallows in logical fallacies. *In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it.

Christianity is not the oldest religion Pastor Jeffress and was considered a cult to the Pagans and Jews who came before Christianity.

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites."
Thomas Jefferson

Article Six of the Constitution states that

"no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

The adulterous connection between church and state... [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

The Emotional Problem of the Christian Narrative (Why Theodicy Matters)

2011-10-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

"As to gods, I have no way of knowing either that they exist or do not exist, or what they are like."
Protagoras ( 5th C. BCE)

The Problem of Evil (Theodicy) carries within it some degree of emotion because it is responding to the rather explicit theological and emotional claims of Christianity.

Christian Apologists like William Lane Craig will assert that those who bring up the problem of evil or other such problems with this Cosmic Drama are engaging in emotion and therefor it is not relevant to his Theology or God concept. But that would only be the case if his God concept was rather abstract and without any specific claims of its own. The moment you move from the Unknown God to the Known God then these claims of the known God can be looked at with a critical eye.

A quick reminder of the revealed God of the Bible:

Matthew 10:29-31New International Version (NIV)
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

This verse alone carries within it specific claims and claims that have an emotional weight with human beings. God is called Father. This Father cares for even birds. This Father knows the very hairs on your head. Be comforted for human beings are worth more than birds.
What specific claims with so much emotional appeal! God as Father is in itself an emotional and theological claim with huge implications to human psychology.

John3:16, 35
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son...The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.

Again the Father loves the world! What we know of human history and natural history is this love? And everything has been placed in the Son's hands. These are huge specific theological claims that are inherently emotional and are problematic when it comes to how human history and natural history have played out. Loving the world and having the world in your hands cannot be ignored if a person really wants to know whether this God makes sense in this world and Universe.

If God is to be understood through nature it is hard to see the Christian God as being conducive with that God construct. Charles Darwin used one family of parasitic wasps as evidence for natural selection, writing to a colleague:

"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."

"That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection."
Charles Darwin

When these specific attributes of the Creator are brought up then a person should question whether the knowledge of the natural world works well the description of this being. You can call that emotional but it is a rational response to emotional theological claims. It is intellectually dishonest to assert that those who reject these Christian claims are simply being emotional when those who accept these claims are also frail human beings with all the same emotional make up.

Many people are Christians not for Vulcan like logic but because of provincial social reasons that have much to do with psychological and emotional sources. Family bonds, parents, spouses, children, and the community have a great deal of influence on a persons emotional attachment to certain ideologies including Christianity.
Religion takes advantage of our emotions: our guilt, our fear, our solipsism, our shame, and our need for purpose and meaning in this life. The pillars of a human social life are covered with the vines of religious justification: Marriage, birth of a child, and the death of a loved one are infused with religious ceremony...how is this not an emotional advantage for the religious meme.

What could be more comforting to a highly evolved conscious decaying human than security in sex, children, and death? Religion has the emotional advantage par excellence.

In fact the God of the Bible is quite emotional as well. God is loving, merciful, angry, jealous, and gets emotional with the people of Israel many times in the Old Testament. If William Lane Craig is to be critical of all this perceived emotional reaction perhaps he should start with the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is from the imagination of emotional human beings and it shows.

The God of the Bible engages in criminal behavior and that is why it needs Defense Attorney's like William Lane Craig. Excuse it for genocide, creating Satan, sin, death, disease, and rewarding credulity and punishing people with eternal torture for using the brains they had been given. Lawyers for God defend such behavior on theological technicalities.

A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality

2011-10-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

By CHARLES McGRATH (The New York Times)
October 9, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, probably the country’s most famous unbeliever, received the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Atheist Alliance of America here on Saturday. Mr. Hitchens was flattered by the honor, he said a few days beforehand, but also a little abashed. “I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do,” he explained, adding: “I’m not sure we need to be honored. We don’t need positive reinforcement. On the other hand, we do need to stick up for ourselves, especially in a place like Texas, where they have laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff.”

Mr. Hitchens, a prolific essayist and the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” discovered in June 2010 that he had Stage 4 esophageal cancer. He has lately curtailed his once busy schedule of public appearances, but he made an exception for the Atheist Alliance — or “the Triple A,” as he called it — partly because the occasion coincided almost to the day with his move 30 years ago from his native England to the United States. He was already in Houston, as it happened, because he had come here for treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he has turned his 12th-floor room into a temporary library and headquarters.

Mr. Hitchens is gaunt these days, no longer barrel-chested. His voice is softer than it used to be, and for the second time since he began treatment, he has lost most of his hair. Once such an enthusiastic smoker that he would light up in the shower, he gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago. Even more inconceivable to many of his friends, Mr. Hitchens, who used to thrive on whiskey the way a bee thrives on nectar, hasn’t had a drink since July, when a feeding tube was installed in his stomach. “That’s the most depressing aspect,” he said. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can get used to.”

But in most other respects Mr. Hitchens is undiminished, preferring to see himself as living with cancer, not dying from it. He still holds forth in dazzlingly clever and erudite paragraphs, pausing only to catch a breath or let a punch line resonate, and though he says his legendary productivity has fallen off a little since his illness, he still writes faster than most people talk. Last week he stayed up until 1 in the morning to finish an article for Vanity Fair, working on a laptop on his bedside table.

Writing seems to come almost as naturally as speech does to Mr. Hitchens, and he consciously associates the two. “If you can talk, you can write,” he said. “You have to be careful to keep your speech as immaculate as possible. That’s what I’m most afraid of. I’m terrified of losing my voice.” He added: “Writing is something I do for a living, all right — it’s my livelihood. But it’s also my life. I couldn’t live without it.”

Mr. Hitchens’s newest book, published last month, is “Arguably,” a paving-stone-sized volume consisting mostly of essays finished since his last big collection, “Love, Poverty and War,” which came out in 2004. The range of subjects is typically Hitchensian. There are essays — miniature pamphlets, almost — on political subjects and especially on the danger posed to the West by Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism, a subject that has preoccupied Mr. Hitchens since 2001. But there are just as many on literary figures; there’s a paean to oral sex, and there are little rants about unruly wine waiters, clichés and the misuse of “fuel” as a verb. The book’s epigraph is from Henry James’s novel “The Ambassadors”: “Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” And in an introduction Mr. Hitchens writes: “Some of these articles were written with the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.”

In his hospital room he suggested that an awareness of mortality was useful for a writer but ideally it should remain latent. “I try not to dwell on it,” he said, “except that once in a while I say, O.K., I’m not going to make that joke, I’m not going to go for that chortle. Or if I have to choose between two subjects, I won’t choose the boring one.”

He added, talking about an essay on Philip Larkin that made it into “Arguably”: “I knew the collection was going to come out even if I did not, and I was very pleased when I finished that one, because of the way it ends: ‘Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.’ I remember thinking, if that’s the last piece I write, that will do me.” After a moment he went on: “The influence of Larkin is much greater than I thought. He’s perfect for people who are thinking about death. You’ve got that old-line Calvinist pessimism and modern, acid cynicism — a very good combo. He’s not liking what he sees, and not pretending to.”

His main regret at the moment, Mr. Hitchens said, was that while he was keeping up with his many deadlines — for Slate, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair — he didn’t have the energy to also work on a book. He had recently come up with some new ideas about his hero, George Orwell, for example — among them that Orwell might have had Asperger’s — and he said he ought to include them in a revised edition of his 2002 book, “Why Orwell Matters.” He had also thought of writing a book about dying. “It could be called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting,’ ” he said, laughing.

Turning serious, he said, “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.” He added: “I don’t know why I got so sick. Maybe it was the smokes, or maybe it’s genes. My father died of the same thing. It’s pointless getting into remorse.”

On balance, he reflected, the past year has been a pretty good one. He won a National Magazine Award, published “Arguably,” debated Tony Blair in front of a huge audience and added two states to the list of those he has visited. “I lack only the Dakotas and Nebraska,” he said, “though I may not get there unless someone comes up with some ethanol-based cancer treatment in Omaha.”

Mr. Hitchens has an extensive support network that includes his wife, Carol Blue, and his great friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Mr. Amis is known for being cool and acerbic, but as he kissed and embraced Mr. Hitchens last week, visiting on the way to a literary festival in Mexico, his affection for his friend was unmistakable. “Hitch’s buoyancy is amazing,” he said later. “He has this great love of life, which I rather envy, because I think I may be deficient in that respect. It’s an odd thing to say, but he’s almost like a Tibetan monk. It’s as if he’d become religious.” ***

Geoff Berg:
Though he was asked a variety of questions from the audience, none appeared to elicit more interest than the one asked by eight-year-old Mason Crumpacker, who wanted to know what books she should read. In response, Hitchens first asked where her mother was and the girl indicated that she was siting beside her. He then asked to see them once the presentation was over so that he could give her a list.

As the event drew to a close, Mason and her mom, Anne Crumpacker of Dallas, followed him out. Surrounded by attendees wanting a glance of the famed author, Hitchens sat on a table just outside of the ballroom and spent about 15 minutes recommending books to Mason.

"Christopher Hitchens to 8yearold who asked, "What should I read?" "All the old myths and fairy tales." -- Suzie Harmon on Twitter.

Hitchens’ list of books and authors: Dawkins’ Magic of Reality, Greek and Roman myths, particularly those compiled by Robert Graves, anything satirical by Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, PG Wodehouse (“for fun”), David Hume, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

The Laughing Lions - Skepticism & Stoicism

2011-10-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Great is he, who conquers the frightful. Sublime is he, who, while succumbing to it, fears it not."

Philosopher Schiller

"The art of living well and the art of dying well are one."

Epicurus

The Courage to Be and the Courage not to Be.

"To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be -- Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them."

Bertrand Russell

A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me; "Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!" Thus it cried out of me — my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.

The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him; he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake — and he jumped up. No longer shepherd. no longer human — one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!

Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"The Vision and the Riddle" ends with a shocking scene where Zarathustra comes upon a shepherd with a snake in his throat. The snake--"the heaviest and the blackest"--could symbolize the choking effects of the slave morality, and, as my students have suggested, the snake's head, which Zarathustra exhorts the shepherd to bite off, could represent the Christian God himself. At the passionate urging of Zarathustra, the shepherd does decapitate the snake and is immediately transformed: "No longer shepherd, no longer human--one changed, radiant, laughing . . . a laughter that was no human laughter."95 After the death of God, there is only eternal recurrence, and this "cosmic" laughter of Hesse's immortals is the only proper emotional response to such a meaningless existence. As Graham Parkes says: "laughter [is] an often necessary concomitant of insight into the way things are."

Cosmic laughter is different from the laughter of the child who is the only being capable of loving herself and embracing every moment without any awareness of the terror of the inevitable return of many similar moments. Cosmic laughter is instead the "Olympian laughter" of the "deeply wounded,"97 those, like Nietzsche, who have suffered greatly, who know eternal recurrence as an "abysmal thought," but who still realize that they must embrace it with a child's acceptance. It is the laughter of the lion, who has come home to Zarathustra's mountain retreat resigned to the futility of all his Nay-saying and protesting-- in short, a reformed Titan.98 It is also the laughter of the Daoist sage or Zen master who says "Yes" to anything and everything in the universe, even though at its core it is a faceless hundun.
Excerpted from N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives

Religion has been a positive force in culture?

2011-10-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Barry Brummett (Chair, Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin) on the resolution "Religion has been a positive force in culture," June 4, 2011.

The Shield of Skepticism (The Danger is Fanaticism, Servility, Credulity)

2011-10-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

"In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the lack of it."

Benjamin Franklin

It has been said as a rule that those selling the advice often profit more than those buying the advice. This can be applied to some financial advisers but all you have to do is go to the televangelist church parking lots and see the preachers expensive cars versus the flocks vehicles. The poor giving to the rich for misleading advice is part of society. When it comes to prosperity tv preachers, get rich schemes and books, or those in positions of self proclaimed authority this is often the case and it is why the shield of skepticism and doubt combined with the sword of reason and free inquiry are the weapons to fight off this lazy numb servitude to the superfluous and sophomoric pushers of false status. Who benefits? The saying goes, “it all depends on whose ox is being gored.”

The advice of authority or those who claim authority usually benefits those in authority. Obey my law, pay me, give me, trust me, and somehow all this servitude will benefit you. The divine right of kings, the pope is infallible, the teacher never makes mistakes and other platitudes based on titles are empty without the respect of reason and common sense. The shield of skepticism is of more value than the shield of faith because one gives you the protection against charlatans, con artists, demagogues and authoritarians of all stripes and the other makes you more likely to become a victim of the former and succumb to these vultures who feast on the naive and the gullible. In a world such as ours skepticism is a virtue and faith is a vice.

The Pope's comments:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a "reductive vision of the person and his destiny"... Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms; and may that patrimony, which has always served the nation well

The Nazi regime also hated academics and intellectuals...Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Voltaire, Einstein...are these Skeptics of Christianity Nazis in waiting? Was Socrates, Epicurus, Lucretius,Democritus and Democratic Athens blessed by the Church?
There is a problem with generalizations and ignoring the ambiguities and complexities of history as the Pope does here. It was not Nazi Atheism that was the problem it was the Nazi thirst for power and those willing to worship power. That impulse is universal in humans and is also in the history of the Church.

It's what the Philosopher Bertrand Russell called "The cruel thirst for worship."

The Church is made of humans of course...humans that carry the same weaknesses of any other group. It is not atheism that is the problem but the lack of vigilant skepticism of human power whatever the form. The Nazis were not all Atheists by any extent some of the Nazis were Catholic and when one studies the rise of Fascism in Catholic Italy in the 20's with Mussolini the Authoritarianism and anti-communism of the Church helped out Fascism. Hitler was inspired by Fascist Italy. If you want to connect atheism and Nazism you would also have to connect the Church to Fascism. Is that the kind of generalization the Pope wants?
Who supported Franco and Fascist Spain? Franco was raised a devote Catholic. There is much literature on Anti-Semitism and some of its roots can be traced to Christian reactionaries towards Jews. Shall one blame Christianity for the Holocaust on that variable alone?
Shall one generalize all priests as pedophiles? The horrors of World War II cannot be laid at atheists in general. Humans and their will to power and lack of skepticism is the problem and that includes the Church as well.
It reminds one of the Tea Party types and their distrust of Big Government only. As if government is the only form of abuse. History has a warning for Big Church and Big Business as well.
On Christianity and the English people again it is a more complex history. It is not always a good influence considering the religious wars and corruption that is part of the history. To be steeped in history is to go beyond Christianity and to study the philosophy and democracy of Greece. As well as the Republic of Pagan Rome. Democracy came from Ancient Pagan Greece.

"What Athens was in miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present."

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

The Pagan Roman Republic was an inspiration for the American Experiment. George Washington was the Roman leader Cincinnatus not the King of a theocratic State.The Renaissance was inspired by Pagan Greek and Roman ideas. Christianity cannot claim it was the only influence in the Western world. There are deeper roots that are in Ancient Greece and Rome that the Church had nothing to do with. The Catholic Church would appreciate that people do not generalize the Church and is seen with complexity and not demonized as pedophiles and crusaders. But the Church should have some reciprocity and not be simplistic and ignore history's complexity with its criticisms of atheism. Skepticism of human power whatever the claim whether divine or secular is important in keeping a vigilant guard of human liberty.

"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."

James Madison, American President & a Constitutional Founding Father

"In fact it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles."

Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison, December 16, 1786

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind"

- March 17, 1814

"As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, Oct. 31, 1819

Water, Life, Change

2011-10-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

"everything is in flux and nothing abides;
everything flows and nothing stays fixed;
everything is constantly changing and nothing stays the same"

Heraclitus

Infinity Water - Case Study from KORB on Vimeo.

A mandala is a sacred geometric figure that represents the universe. The traditional Tibetan sand mandala, when completed, is deliberately destroyed. The sand is poured into a nearby stream or river to distribute the positive energies it contains. This ritual reminds those who painstakingly constructed the mandala of the central Buddhist teaching of the impermanence of all things.

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
― Siddhartha Gautama

What does it feel like to fly over Planet Earth

2011-10-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite (55sec) and the stars of our galaxy.

Think Different

2011-10-06T13:48:00.001-07:00

The Spirit Ends When The Brain Dies

2011-10-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Graziano
Professor of Neuroscience and Novelist, Princeton University:

In my last post I commented about the link between the brain and the mind. That post received so much interest and so many comments from all perspectives that I thought it would be useful to explore the topic more systematically. Nobody should be mistaken about the cultural importance of the topic. The link between the mind and the brain is not merely a medical story. Its implications reach into almost all aspects of religion and spirituality including the belief in God, ghosts, angels, devils, and life after death.

When most of us think about the key conflicts between science and religion, we tend to think about Darwin's theory of evolution published in 1859, or Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the 17th century. These famous clashes between science and religion are resolvable. Every sensible modern religion accepts the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. Liberal religions are gradually accepting the scientific fact of biological evolution.

One disconnect between religion and science, however, is much older, much more profound, and may be much harder to bridge. It dates back at least to Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. At that time there was no formal science as it is recognized today. Hippocrates was nonetheless an acute medical observer and noticed that people with brain damage tended to lose some of their mental abilities. A passage attributed to him summarizes his view elegantly:

"Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant..."

Hippocrates evidently understood the central conflict between observation and most spiritual beliefs. The belief in a spirit world, a world of consciousness that exists independently of physical substance, that survives the death of the body, that comprises ghosts and angels and deities, is incompatible with the observation that damage to the physical brain systematically takes away chunks of the mind. The medical facts suggest that mind, though it definitely exists, is something created by the brain and that it dies piece-by-piece as the brain dies.

About a century later Aristotle famously disagreed with Hippocrates, placing the mind in the human heart. Aristotle listed his reasons, many of which sound vaguely plausible given the analogical and somewhat mystical thinking of the time. How did Aristotle go so wrong in his medical analysis? He was a theoretician. Hippocrates, who worked in a hospital, saw the effects of brain damage every day and grounded his theory in observation. Nobody who spends appreciable time with brain-damaged patients can avoid the obvious conclusion. The brain is the source of the mind.

Another famous view of the brain/mind problem was outlined by Descartes two thousand years later, in the 17th century. In Descartes' view the mind was an ethereal substance, a fluid, that was stored in a receptacle in the brain. When he dissected the human brain he noticed that almost every structure came in pairs, one on each side. The human soul was obviously a single entity and therefore it could not be stored in a double structure. In the end he found a small single object at the center of the brain, the pineal body, and deduced that it was the house of the soul. The pineal body is now known to be a gland that produces melatonin and has nothing whatever to do with a soul.

Descartes' idea, aside from being wrong in the particulars, has a deeper problem. There is no part of the brain that, when damaged, takes away the Cartesian soul. Instead damage to different structures takes away different chunks of the mind. The ability to formulate a sentence? Lost in damage to Broca's area. The ability to understand language? Lost in damage to Wernicke's area. The ability to see, imagine, or comprehend color? Lost in damage to specific regions of the visual system. The ability to think about the space around the body? Lost in damage to another set of brain areas. The ability to intuit the feelings and intentions of others? Impaired after a stroke to a specific network of brain regions. And so on. The mind is a collective and bits of it die when parts of the machinery are mucked up. Even awareness itself, as I wrote about last time, can be splintered apart and compromised by brain damage.

The effect of brain damage is certainly not the only pertinent evidence. Some of the more interesting evidence comes from the direct electrical stimulation of the brain. A little more than a century ago scientists tried applying minute sparks of electricity to surface of the brain, stimulating the circuitry. The technique was improved and elaborated and is now one of the main methods for probing the brain's circuitry. For example, before removing a tumor from a person's brain, a surgeon will expose the brain while the person is awake and under local anesthetic. The surgeon will then study the effect of electrical stimulation, mapping out the function of this and that brain area, to avoid surgically removing any area necessary for language. Some of the most colorful and memorable experiments of this type were done by Penfield in the early 20th century. He found, as have many others since, that electrically tickling a specific spot in the circuitry has a specific and predictable effect on the mind. Whether seeing, hearing, feeling hunger, feeling rage, remembering a scene from childhood, making a coordinated gesture, even feeling as though you've intentionally chosen to make the gesture, these many bits and components of mind can be turned on and off by altering the activity of neurons.

The evidence is now overwhelming that every aspect of the mind is produced by the brain.

The realization that the brain produces the mind is similar in some ways to the theory of evolution before Charles Darwin got to it. Prior to Darwin, the theory of evolution was much discussed and the fossil record certainly supported it, but nobody could point to a plausible mechanism. How exactly did one species evolve over time into many new species? Darwin proposed a mechanism that fit the evidence: natural selection. Survival of the fittest. With the discovery of this simple mechanism, the science of biology was revolutionized.

The idea that the mind depends on the action of the brain is amply supported by the scientific evidence. But nobody knows how a brain produces the inner experience -- the feeling of consciousness. What is the mechanism? That is the question of our time. Many theories have been proposed, including one of my own, and only time and data will tell who is right.

I draw two personal lessons from the neuroscience of mind.

First, far from dismissing mind, or spirit, or soul as nonsense, I see these quantities as far more precious precisely because they are vulnerable and finite. In a sense I've become more spiritual as my scientific understanding deepens and I realize that spirit is a passing conjunction of information.

Second, the neuroscience of the mind gives me a wonderful opportunity to work on a scientific problem that is truly meaningful. About 25 years ago Francis Crick, famous for his role in understanding DNA, posed a question. Is it possible for brain science to address consciousness, a topic traditionally studied by philosophers and theologians? The answer is a definite yes. Many neuroscientists including myself have joined that effort.

Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

2011-10-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault in ’71, at the height of the Vietnam War, the American linguist and French historian/social theorist appeared on Dutch TV to debate a fundamental question: Is there such a thing as innate human nature? Or are we shaped by experiences and the power of cultural and social institutions around us?

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm

Regarding ContraPoints modest enlightenment

2011-10-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Voltaire

“History could not come into its own until theology gave way.”

"Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous."

Some thoughts on ContraPoint's video. I was very interested in what particular shift he was making in his perspective. I think Wittgenstein used an analogy of using a ladder to get to a position and then looking back and realizing the ladder that got you there is no longer there. For me I see the enlightenment in a similar fashion. It is a beginning not an end. And for some it is a necessary start creating the space and ability to dare to question and think freely.
It sometimes takes the blunt force of freethought (activism, pathos, blasphemy, playful ideas) to break free from the dogmatic ice. The enlightenment is something to pivot off of not to remain static or to burn in place but to keep flowing. Knowledge is like water its great vitality is when it keeps moving and fills the spaces before it. It can become poison if it stagnates in one area or it can drown the person in despair if the weight of a lost paradise is too much...as the statement goes "it was like trying to drink from a fire hose"... one must flow with the water of ideas and strive to see the world in its fullness by being aware of ones limitations as well as the possibilities in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge.

I have no consternation with ContraPoint's shift only I hope he still appreciates the ladder that got him suspended in mid air. The ladder is no longer there but it was a necessary tool in breaking from the box of dogma. And his previous atheist activism may have helped someone else become more free and brave in their thinking. And there are others who still need the blunt force of active playful skepticism to give them the chance to think freely as a human possibly can. At times it takes great wrestling and activism to escape dogma and in doing so the person who breaks from that still feels the need to wrestle with broken chains no longer there. Getting to a point where those previous chains of the mind no longer haunt the individual can be a longer process than we think.

This is why I continue to look kindly on the so called new atheists because they were instrumental in helping me break free from the dogmatic ice. It took some blunt hammers to start the cracking and the rest was the heat of curiosity and the desire to know. To use a biblical analogy I see the Capital "E" Enlightenment as well as ones smaller personal "e" enlightenment as the Moses that freed one from the tyranny of the Pharaoh and like Moses it can only take one into the desert of freedom and responsibility of thought. The desert is not always a positive experience and can lead to many other problems. Personally I see Existentialism as a fine partner in this existential desert. Whether there is a Joshua of the enlightenment that leads one to the promise land of progress is not something that I can state with certainty. One reason I doubt the gods is because I doubt the humans who created them. Faith in men can be just as problematic as faith in the gods.

The Philosopher John Gray directly challenges the value and purpose of the Enlightenment in "Straw Dogs":

"I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife." In Schopenhauer's fable the wife masquerading as an unknown beauty was Christianity. Today it is humanism.What Schopenhauer wrote of Kant is no less true today. As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.
Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error – the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals. Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves.
We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.
But what if we give up the empty hopes of Christianity and humanism? Once we switch off the soundtrack – the babble of God and immortality, progress and humanity – what sense can we make of our lives?

And another philosopher counter the enlightenment, Isaiah Berlin:

“We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.”

It is true in a purely utilitarian approach that there are many variables to a good life and breaking free from dogma may not always lead to a good life in a strict emotional and physical sense. And I nod in agreement that it is easy to escape one ditch only to end up in another ditch. I believe it was Nietzsche who compared Kant to a fox that escaped a cage only to be ensnared into a trap.

But this should not lead one to being paralyzed in pursuing and sharing new ideas. There are many paths to a more vital and full thought life. And some of those paths must go through the enlightenment. Whether this leads to progress will depend on ones definition of progress. The enlightenment should be a mother that openly offers her death to those she gave life to. To question the Enlightenment could be progress whether in capital P or not.

In conclusion I hope ContraPoints keeps sharing because he seems to have a healthy dose of skepticism, irony, and an itch for discussing ideas.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

Heraclitus

"There is nothing to prevent a man from changing his mind. Consistency is not a virtue in itself."
"Nobody human is ever consistent."

Christopher Hitchens

In the Image of Primates

2011-10-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

Creationist Christians assert that Man was created in the image of God. But have they asked about this:
Why are apes, monkeys, and other primates made in the image of man? Not only in basic physiology but in the DNA itself. Which is why Christian Francis Collins believes the DNA evidence is enough to convince him of evolution as a working scientific theory. Humans are primates. Humans are apes.

And how does biology work with Eternal life organisms like the supposed characters of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden?
Life seems inherently to work with decay and death. Another words from stars dying, universal decay, viruses and bacteria, the predators on earth, and death all around... I do not see how there was a pre-death biology which is what Genesis asserts. Life feeds on Death and Death feeds on Life. Everything works with and because of inherent decomposition. The problem of death and suffering is solved from the outset...Nature has its system and it does not care.

The explanations of an intervening God, Adam & Eve, and Sin are superfluous and hubristic and these explanations create many more problematic questions.

American Christianity - A Kingdom of this World

2011-10-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

John 18:36 - Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

Christianity as it stands now in the West and especially in America is about identity politics not a movement of the heart. It is about protecting ones status and keeping Christianity as the dominant identity. Unlike the Jesus of the gospels it seeks a kingdom of this world and fights for political space and power. It does not seek to reach the hearts of people it seeks to reach the public halls of power. This is not good for the health of spiritual Christianity. Political Christianity corrupts spiritual Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth did not seek to overthrow the Romans by political power. The Roman rule was a foreign pagan occupation and yet Jesus in the gospels said to pay your taxes to Caesar. Would American Christians accept such a message today? Jesus did not busy himself judging Roman pagan rule, taxes, prostitution and the like but rather his only source of real anger was against the corruption and hypocrisy in his own religious institution.

"What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?"

The Apostle Paul 1 Corinthians 5:12
Can you imagine the Religious Right in America taking this position?

"'Ah, Constantine, how much misfortune you caused. Not by becoming Christian, but by the dowry which the first rich Pope accepted from you."

Dante

Theologian Garry Wills suggests it was the freedom of religion in America that allowed Christianity to flourish in the free market of ideas versus the European history of Church institution and State. The greatest danger is from within not from without. It is not the secularism from without but the theology from within that is the threat to the original faith. The problems that I have come across seem to be not from unbelief but from bad belief. It's not trying to be good without God it's being bad with God that is a big problem in American Christianity. It's constructing a Jesus that orbits around personal wishes and not around the Jesus of the New Testament. To put it like this the people who are straying in church are not reading Thomas Paine and Voltaire but they are listening to bad theology from the pulpit that enables and encourages a selfish market friendly Christianity where God is your servant.

To reference the Fall of Genesis - Adam and Eve were not secularists they were believers who listened to a bad theology coming from the serpent. The serpent was a believer too...as James put it whats so great about broad faith by itself when even the demons believe - so specific theology matters immensely... A misconstrued faith in an American Jesus that is not even based on the synoptic gospels is a type of faith but is it the original Christian faith?
When one considers the evolution from the radical Nazarene who was a threat to the Ecclesiastical order and to the order of the ruling class and through the process of historical washing of the Greco-Roman culture and then European culture to American culture it becomes an institution that supports the status quo.

The Jesus of Mark's Gospel(70?) had already been transformed by John's Gospel(100?which is very Greek in theology-logos-word-truth-life) into a transcendent and in control Divinity. When Christianity rose to official power in the empire it had been through an evolutionary change.
The radical misunderstood-messiah and tragic outcast of Mark's Gospel gets diluted over time...and then when the Catholic Church arose to dominance and was blessed by the State Christianity became a very institutional enterprise indeed. The Metaphorical Pilate and the Ecclesiastical Order now consumed the radical Nazarene into their system.

In this way I see it was the rise of institutional political Christianity that strayed from the original challenge of Jesus. Suddenly Jesus became official and a protector of the status quo instead of the challenge he was before.

American Christianity is seeking materialism (prosperity gospel) and political power (the religious right). This wealth and power gospel does not resemble the Jesus of the scriptures much less the Jesus of history.

When you listen to modern Christian Apologists they are not trying to convince unbelievers of this gospel instead they are working to keep Christianity's dominant status in the West. They are not defending the faith they are defending their own ego identity and their place in this world not some world to come.

Where is the humility, compassion, love, and faith in William Lane Craig's apologetics? Instead there is smugness, sarcasm, sophistry, and arrogance. For William Lane Craig there is little room for faith in God when one has so much faith in ones theological credentials.

Andrew Marantz reports on Dinesh D'Souza's new role as president of King's College, a small evangelical school located in the Empire State Building:

"We are living, for perhaps the first time in history, in a society whose basic assumptions are secular," D'Souza told the 36 members of the King's class of 2011. "Some Christians hope to change this through bottom-up, grassroots techniques. But I'm skeptical about that approach. Consider minority groups like Jews and gays, groups whose influence far outweighs their relatively small numbers. How do they do it?
By focusing on strategic institutions—finance, media, law. At the King's College, our mission is to prepare you to go into that world. It's, frankly, an elitist mission, which says that culture is formed from the top down. I can only hope we have given you the tools to complete that mission, the tools to be dangerous Christians."

You see the mission of modern Christian Apologists is to build and defend a kingdom of this world where there is real power to be gained in the political and cultural battles. The Kingdom of God can wait they have a kingdom of this world to defend today.

Waking from Dogmatic Slumber

2011-09-14T17:00:00.001-07:00

Universe: Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos

2011-08-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
Douglas Adams

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Albert Einstein

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming. John Burden Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) English geneticist. Possible Worlds and other Essays (1927) "Possible Worlds".

Extreme Places in the Solar System

2011-08-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

The universe is a mighty big place, but there is no shortage of amazement right here in our celestial neighborhood. From Venus's searing surface temperatures, hot enough to melt lead, to Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a storm that has been raging for hundreds of years, to the cryovolcanoes of the Saturnian moon Enceladus, the solar system boasts plenty of extreme locales.

That is the thrust of a new book, The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System (Harvard University Press), which serves as a kind of photo-illustrated guidebook for the planets—along with their accompanying moons and rings—that surround the sun. The book's authors, David Baker of Austin College and Todd Ratcliff of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, acknowledge that they use the term "places" loosely: Some of the 50 entries are specific events, such as the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs on Earth, and some are long-term phenomena, such as plate tectonics.

"What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind [through the universe]? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day."

Death By Black Hole, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Paintings that breathe

2011-08-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Alexa Meade takes three-dimensional objects—mostly people—and paints over them in such a way that they look like two-dimensional paintings. Then she photographs them. When you examine the resulting artworks, it’s hard to know what’s really going on.

In some of her photographs, Meade leaves remnants of unpainted reality—placing her subject against blades of grass, for example, or among astonished onlookers. In others, she paints over everything—not just the model, but also the background and the props. If you look at these latter, entirely masked images without being familiar with Meade’s work, you might not suspect that there are living, breathing, humans under the brushstrokes. (Source: Slate.com)

Her work is currently on display at the Irvine Contemporary gallery in Washington, D.C.

Cosmic Perspective

2011-08-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. "

Feynman, 1959 Interview (From Genius by James Gleick)

Religious apologists who put humans at the center of this Universe and the Cosmic Drama are like little children throwing ice cubes at the Sun. The arrogance, impotence, and absurdity. It looks like something to us but it is insignificant to the Sun. Language is a source of our unique ingenuity but it is also a source of our ridiculous and absurd self-aggrandizement.

"I fear that we will never rid ourselves of God so long as we still believe in grammar."

Nietzsche

Human language is the justification of the gods. What can be stated orally or written down can obfuscate reason and reality. The Religions that dominate most of the world have a book. It is written down and thus it must be true! IF it can be spoken it is so. This is the power of human language...it can override reality by just a sound and a symbol. No matter the tyranny of the actual the sound and the symbol drive deep in human psyche. No matter how much suffering, death, natural explanations, diversity of opinion, scientific progress and critical thought the religious apologist can say "God is..." who can resist the sound and the symbol? The problem of evil is solved with a simple sound and symbol. "God has his reasons...it is the best of all possible worlds." Ah what justification! Without human language the gods would not exist. The gods are mortal. When the human species goes extinct what symbol or sound will justify the gods? Who shall defend the faith with no human voice? Humans that justify Gods do so because the Gods justify them. I hear and see the sound and symbol "God created man" and in that Man created God. The creation of the Gods is the hubris of humanity.

Bad Superstitious Explanations for Natural Events

2011-08-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

At its core the religious impulse is a bad superstitious explanation for natural events.

Even after the enlightenment and the progress of modern science large portions of society still wallow in this primitive superstition of bad explanations on natural events. Superstitious pattern seeking mammals indeed.
Why did the volcano erupt? God was angry. Why did the earth shake? God did it for some reason or another. It is a combination of human solipsism, ignorance, and human impotence in the face of overwhelming natural events.

I would hope human beings could respond to solipsism with greater perspective, to ignorance with knowledge, and to impotence with stoicism and human solidarity.

Glenn Beck called Hurricane Irene a "blessing" on his Friday radio show, saying it would teach people to be prepared for disasters.
"If you've waited [until now], this hurricane is a blessing," he said. "It is God reminding you, as was the earthquake last week...you're not in control." (Source:HuffingtonPost)

Televangelist Pat Robertson suggested Wednesday that cracks in the Washington Monument caused by the August 23 earthquake could be a sign from God, and the natural disaster “means that we’re closer to the coming of the Lord.”

To explain the rare east coast quake, Robertson pointed to the Biblical prophecy of the end of the world, which claims there could be potential devastation from natural disasters leading up to Jesus' return to Earth.

On his television show, "The 700 Club," Robertson said:

"I don't want to get weird on this, so please take it for what it's worth, but it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America's power. It has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and we say this is one nation under God. Now there's a crack in it."

"Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance, or is it just the result of an earthquake?" Robertson asked his viewers. (Source:Huffingtonpost)

I Am the Satellite - Bryan Steeksma

2011-08-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

"If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust."
(Alain de Botton)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming

2011-08-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

Richard Feynman-"The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries - certainly a grand adventure! "

Carl Sagan-"Everybody starts out as a scientist." Every child has the scientist's sense of wonder and awe. Too often we discourage this curiosity and wonder.

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

Albert Einstein

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-Sir Isaac Newton

Crashing the Tea Party: Would you like some Theocracy with your tea?

2011-08-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

Crashing the Tea Party NY Times
By DAVID E. CAMPBELL and ROBERT D. PUTNAM

GIVEN how much sway the Tea Party has among Republicans in Congress and those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, one might think the Tea Party is redefining mainstream American politics.

But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

The strange thing is that over the last five years, Americans have moved in an economically conservative direction: they are more likely to favor smaller government, to oppose redistribution of income and to favor private charities over government to aid the poor. While none of these opinions are held by a majority of Americans, the trends would seem to favor the Tea Party. So why are its negatives so high? To find out, we need to examine what kinds of people actually support it.

Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.

Pictured above,Richard Lee, Ralph Reed, Glenn Beck, John Hagee, David Barton, Jim Garlow, Tom Mullins, and Professor Robert George.

On everything but the size of government, Tea Party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans. Indeed, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, today’s Tea Party parallels the anti-Vietnam War movement which rallied behind George S. McGovern in 1972. The McGovernite activists brought energy, but also stridency, to the Democratic Party — repelling moderate voters and damaging the Democratic brand for a generation. By embracing the Tea Party, Republicans risk repeating history.

David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, are the authors of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.”

AronRa: Oklahoma Freethought Convention 2011

2011-08-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

Fly through a survey of the universe

2011-08-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

6df Galaxy Survey fly through from ICRAR on Vimeo.

First life: The search for the first replicator - life - 15 August 2011 - New Scientist

2011-08-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

First life: The search for the first replicator - life - 15 August 2011 - New Scientist

4 BILLION years before present: the surface of a newly formed planet around a medium-sized star is beginning to cool down. It's a violent place, bombarded by meteorites and riven by volcanic eruptions, with an atmosphere full of toxic gases. But almost as soon as water begins to form pools and oceans on its surface, something extraordinary happens. A molecule, or perhaps a set of molecules, capable of replicating itself arises.

This was the dawn of evolution. Once the first self-replicating entities appeared, natural selection kicked in, favouring any offspring with variations that made them better at replicating themselves. Soon the first simple cells appeared. The rest is prehistory.

Billions of years later, some of the descendants of those first cells evolved into organisms intelligent enough to wonder what their very earliest ancestor was like. What molecule started it all?

As far back as the 1960s, a few of those intelligent organisms began to suspect that the first self-replicating molecules were made of RNA, a close cousin of DNA. This idea has always had a huge problem, though - there was no known way by which RNA molecules could have formed on the primordial Earth. And if RNA molecules couldn't form spontaneously, how could self-replicating RNA molecules arise? Did some other replicator come first? If so, what was it? The answer is finally beginning to emerge.

When biologists first started to ponder how life arose, the question seemed baffling. In all organisms alive today, the hard work is done by proteins. Proteins can twist and fold into a wild diversity of shapes, so they can do just about anything, including acting as enzymes, substances that catalyse a huge range of chemical reactions. However, the information needed to make proteins is stored in DNA molecules. You can't make new proteins without DNA, and you can't make new DNA without proteins. So which came first, proteins or DNA?

The discovery in the 1960s that RNA could fold like a protein, albeit not into such complex structures, suggested an answer. If RNA could catalyse reactions as well as storing information, some RNA molecules might be capable of making more RNA molecules. And if that was the case, RNA replicators would have had no need for proteins. They could do everything themselves.

It was an appealing idea, but at the time it was complete speculation. No one had shown that RNA could catalyse reactions like protein enzymes. It was not until 1982, after decades of searching, that an RNA enzyme was finally discovered. Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado in Boulder found it in Tetrahymena thermophila, a bizarre single-celled animal with seven sexes (Science, vol 231, p 4737).

After that the floodgates opened. People discovered ever more RNA enzymes in living organisms and created new ones in their labs. RNA might be not be as good for storing information as DNA, being less stable, nor as versatile as proteins, but it was turning out to be a molecular jack of all trades. This was a huge boost to the idea that the first life consisted of RNA molecules that catalysed the production of more RNA molecules - "the RNA world", as Harvard chemist Walter Gilbert dubbed it 25 years ago (Nature, vol 319, p 618).

These RNA replicators may even have had sex. The RNA enzyme Cech discovered did not just catalyse any old reaction. It was a short section of RNA that could cut itself out of a longer chain. Reversing the reaction would add RNA to chains, meaning RNA replicators might have been able to swap bits with other RNA molecules. This ability would greatly accelerate evolution, because innovations made by separate lineages of replicators could be brought together in one lineage.

Andrew Sullivan DailyBeast: Adam And Eve Did Not Literally Exist. Period.

2011-08-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

Studying the human genome has disproven the possibility that we sprang from two people:

Karl Giberson - who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia - says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.

"When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face," Giberson says. "The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it."

The backlash from the literalists has been intense:

Harlow, who like Schneider has tenure and considers himself a committed Christian, said that the backlash reflects the views of fundamentalists within the Reformed denomination, not what most people think. "I work in the mainstream of Biblical scholarship, and we believe that the early chapters of Genesis are divinely inspired stories which imagine the human condition and creation of the world. Their intent is to make theological statements. They weren't written to provide geological or biological information," Harlow said. "My college freshmen seem to be able to handle this, but fundamentalists get all bent out of shape over this."

But the evangelicals are not the only ones hoisted by, er, truth. John Farrell notes a particularly tough Catholic problem:

The Catholic Church indeed of all the Christian churches faces a particular quandary. The Council of Trent is quite explicit on the topic. Catholics are required to believe not only that Adam is the single father of the human race, but that Original Sin is passed on by physical generation from him to the entire human race. It’s not something symbolic or allegorical (although it is regarded as ultimately mysterious). The First Vatican Council reiterated the doctrine, as did Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Catholic apologists who point to Pope John Paul II’s 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as evidence of the Church’s acceptance of evolution often fail to notice that the late Pope completely passed over the question of monogenism, and indeed never did discuss the problem that genetics poses to the doctrine.

So much innovative and imaginative and faithful responses to modern science's revelations are required by the Church. Now more than ever. And yet the fundamental response by today's reactionary Vatican is mere silence or denial. In my view, that is a fundamental abdication of responsibility.

The Narrative of Science and its potential to inspire

2011-08-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

Society needs Scientific Storytellers who can inspire young minds to greatness in thought and discovery. Science Education suffers in America because there lacks an early and interesting interdisciplinary approach to explain the origins and evolution of the Universe. Science education in public schools is failing to connect the dots and lacks the grand Cosmic story that fuels the flames of genius. We need more classes and more teachers who are able to present the greatest story in the Universe. From the big bang to big brains. Cosmic evolution and Earth life evolution need to be explained in a way that gives young minds a more expansive perspective in this life.

"Telling a story is one of the most persuasive means of communication...How we persuade is how we deliver and tell our story to the jury. Storytelling is the most basic means of communication." -Gerry Spence, renowned Trial Attorney

When a culture teaches its young that religious mythology is truth and that modern science is a conspiracy of lies then that culture will breed a generation of dogmatic stagnation not fluid exploration.

Atheist in a Fox Hole (Political Christianity, Fox News, Atheist Minority)

2011-08-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

From Andrew Sullivan Daily Beast Blogger:

Blair Scott, a spokesman for the American Atheists, Inc., was subjected to over 8,000 death threats and other violent rhetoric after appearing on Fox News. Some examples:

Modern Humans 10, Neandertals 1 - ScienceNOW

2011-07-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

Modern Humans 10, Neandertals 1 - ScienceNOW

"This town ain't big enough for the both of us," says ranch foreman Nick Grindell to lawman Tim Barrett in the 1932 film The Western Code. Biologists know the principle well: Two animal species can rarely occupy the same niche. The same, it seems, goes for human populations. A new study of Neandertal and modern human sites in the south of France concludes that the moderns so greatly outnumbered their evolutionary cousins that Neandertals had little choice but to go extinct.

For more than 100,000 years, Neandertals had Europe all to themselves. Then, beginning roughly 40,000 years ago, modern humans—Homo sapiens—began migrating into the continent from Africa. Although researchers debate how long the Neandertals hung around, these ancient humans probably did not survive much longer than 5000 years. Just why they disappeared is also a matter of contention, but most experts agree that H. sapiens was able to outgun its rival in either direct or indirect competition for food and other resources.

Some genetic studies, based on both modern and ancient DNA sequences, have suggested that modern human population growth quickly outstripped that of Neandertals, but estimating population levels from these kinds of data is very difficult and inexact. So Paul Mellars and Jennifer French, archaeologists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, decided to look directly at the archaeological evidence for the presence of both groups in the region where the most excavations have taken place: southwestern France, including the lush Dordogne region, as well known for its prehistoric sites as for its wine and foie gras.

Mellars and French tapped into a comprehensive database of all Neandertal and H. sapiens sites in a 75,000-square-kilometer region that Pierre-Yves Demars of the University of Bordeaux had previously compiled. They looked at three prehistoric cultures and time periods: the Late Mousterian, from 55,000 to 44,000 years ago, associated with Neandertals; the Châtelperronian, from 44,000 to 40,250 years ago and also associated with Neandertals; and the Aurignacian, from 40,250 to 35,000 years ago and associated with modern humans.

Christian Apologetics: The Kingdom of this World - Defending Christian Cultural Status and Political Space NOT faith

2011-07-28T11:31:00.001-07:00

D'Souza's Christianist Crusade - Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Marantz reports on Dinesh D'Souza's new role as president of King's College, a small evangelical school located in the Empire State Building. Money quote:

"We are living, for perhaps the first time in history, in a society whose basic assumptions are secular," D'Souza told the 36 members of the King's class of 2011. "Some Christians hope to change this through bottom-up, grassroots techniques. But I'm skeptical about that approach. Consider minority groups like Jews and gays, groups whose influence far outweighs their relatively small numbers. How do they do it?

By focusing on strategic institutions—finance, media, law. At the King's College, our mission is to prepare you to go into that world. It's, frankly, an elitist mission, which says that culture is formed from the top down. I can only hope we have given you the tools to complete that mission, the tools to be dangerous Christians."

Sounds like Opus Dei's pitch to me. But there is dissension in the ranks:

[S]igns suggest that the King's community may find D'Souza more divisive than galvanizing. Some King's professors are considering resignation next fall rather than pledging allegiance to their new president. "I mean, I'm a conservative," one tells me. "I didn't vote for Obama. But I don't hate him.”

Rynn Reed, a rising sophomore from Dallas with blonde hair and a nose ring, identifies herself as a progressive. "The students and most of the professors are totally smart and open to argument," she says, but D’Souza can be too strident. "I would hate to see King’s written off as a right-wing breeding ground, but there's definitely potential for that with him."

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God

2011-07-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer on Colbert

2011-07-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

Iceman's Stomach Sampled—Filled With Goat Meat

2011-06-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

Iceman's Stomach Sampled—Filled With Goat Meat

ScienceShot: Crocodile-Snouted Dinosaur Discovered Down Under - ScienceNOW

2011-06-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

ScienceShot: Crocodile-Snouted Dinosaur Discovered Down Under - ScienceNOW

More than 100 million years ago, Australia was home to a unique blend of predatory dinosaurs. The latest to be added to the mix—thanks to a single neck vertebra that was found in Victoria and described today in Biology Letters—is a bizarre class of crocodile-snouted carnivores called spinosaurs. These peculiar dinosaurs have previously been found in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and the Australian fossil closely resembles a spinosaur known as Baryonyx from England. Combined with other fragmentary skeletons attributed to tyrannosaurs, raptors, and allosaurs, this as-yet-unnamed spinosaur may help paleontologists figure out when different dinosaur lineages arrived in Australia and, consequently, when and how the continent split from other land masses 80 million years ago. Prior to that time, all the southern continents were merged in a supercontinent known as Gondwana, and the new find—combined with other dino discoveries that indicate that Australian dinosaurs more closely resemble their counterparts in South America rather than Africa—suggests that Africa may have been the first to split off.

Abandoned Baboon Adopts Bush Baby Orphan In Kenya

2011-06-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- An abandoned bush baby and a yellow baboon have formed an unlikely companionship at an animal orphanage in Nairobi.

The six-month-old female baboon, abandoned by its family in Maralal in Northern Kenya, is taking care of the three-month-old bush baby that was also abandoned by its family in central Kenya.

Charles Musyoki, a senior scientist for species and conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, said Friday it is likely that the animals formed the bond in order to cope in the new environment at the animal orphanage.

"This is a situation where two individuals are basically in need of each other because they need the bond to survive in the absence of their parents and their grouping. Therefore when both find themselves in such a situation they tend to bond and make friendships," Musyoki said.

He said the union between the two species is a rare occurrence that was last recorded in Kenya in 2002, when a lioness adopted and nurtured a young oryx, a large antelope that lions normally hunt.

Musyoki said the two animals would not have had such a relationship in the wild. The yellow baboon is active during the day and sleeps at night, while the bush baby is a nocturnal animal, he said.

"In the natural world they are very separated in terms of time," Musyoki said, adding that there is now a bond "in this captive environment because the two animals which are in distress, need each other for companionship, for friendship and play."

The two animals will have to be separated as they become older, he said.

Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome | Video on TED.com

2011-06-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome | Video on TED.com

Photos: Shape-Shifting Cuttlefish Can Mimic Pictures

2011-06-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

Photos: Shape-Shifting Cuttlefish Can Mimic Pictures

Photograph courtesy Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory

During recent research into how cuttlefish adopt camouflage positions, a common cuttlefish (left) raises two of its eight arms in apparent mimicry of artificial algae placed in its tank. The animal reacted similarly when shown a photo of green algae, said biologist Roger Hanlon.

It's been known that many cuttlefish—and their squid and octopus cousins—adjust their postures and rapidly change color to resemble nearby objects, a strategy to evade predators.

But the recent lab experiments are the first to confirm that cuttlefish use visual information to determine those gestures, according to Hanlon, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates - Newsweek

2011-06-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates - Newsweek

"Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside." He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived—was an artist because "he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

"The rest is silence," says the dying Hamlet—these are his last words to us. But Wallace was no quietist: in his writing, at least, he never stopped wrestling with the "terrible master" in his own skull. Even beyond this life, he seems to have found silence unimaginable.*

An Unquiet Mind:

"I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist."

"We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

The Heroic Stars

2011-06-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

"The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem--
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle--
We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.
-Robinson Jeffers, The Epic Stars

"Beautiful Fatalism" is a phrase from Ernest Hemingway used to describe warriors "who stayed loyal to a doomed cause."

Astronomer Pamela Gay on the Heat Death of the Universe:

Over time the stars will run out of the ability to burn stuff. The planet Earth actually has the same problem at a certain level. Someday, we’re going to run out of fuel. The Universe is someday also going to run out of reasonably accessible fuel.

Stars start burning by having hydrogen fuse in their core; then having helium fuse next. You can’t start off with a lump of carbon and get it burning, at least not easily. Eventually, we will have burned up all the nebulas. We will have burned up all the dust clouds. Everything that could easily be turned into a star and burned up is going to be burned up.

What’s left over is going to be in the form of white dwarfs. Is going to be in the form of if you take a red dwarf star it just sort of burns out and turns into charcoal. It’s going to be left over in the form of neutron stars and black holes. We’re going to have a bunch of stellar embers. In about a hundred trillion years there won’t be any stars that are actively burning the fusion processes things into higher elements.

Then you have a Universe filled with black holes, neutron stars and black dwarfs, right? And planets I guess whatever there was left orbiting all of this dead material.
We’re looking at a Universe where someday in the future, basically everything sits as close to absolute zero as atoms can get. Imagine the entire Universe basically becoming a Bose-Einstein condensate...it's energy death.

Pictures: Gorilla Mother "Mourns" Dead Baby

2011-05-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

Pictures: Gorilla Mother "Mourns" Dead Baby

Young gorillas and adult females gather around Ruzuzi and her dead baby in an act of apparent sympathy or possibly even ceremony in April. Sometimes, the family members made soft, crying noises, ranger Mburanumwe said.

At times, he said, "it was like they were trying to see if the baby could get up."

Scientists generally resist the temptation to project human emotions on animals.

But watching the gorillas care for the dead baby, Mburanumwe said, he felt it was impossible to not draw similarities with people. "They were like human beings."

The death of a baby may hit gorillas particularly hard, ranger Mburanumwe said. Female With a long gestation period and a high infant mortality rate, mountain gorillas successfully rear an infant only about every six to eight years.

Tim Flannery: Here on Earth

2011-05-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

Australian biologist Tim Flannery is the renowned author of The Weather Makers, The Future Eaters, and a great ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier. His current book is Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet.

Freedom of expression must include the license to offend

2011-05-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION MUST INCLUDE THE LICENSE TO OFFEND from Intelligence Squared US on Vimeo.

Freedom of expression must include the license to offend:

For The Motion

Philip Gourevitch
Christopher Hitchens
Signe Wilkinson

Against The Motion

David Cesarani
Daisy Khan
Mari Matsuda

Astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way.

2011-05-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

Astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Space Pictures This Week: Vibrant Lagoon, Mock Mars

2011-05-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

Space Pictures This Week: Vibrant Lagoon, Mock Mars

Seen through binoculars or small telescopes, the Lagoon nebula is a ghostly blur tinged with pink tucked inside the constellation Sagittarius. But with the powerful gaze of the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have created a dramatic new view of this stellar nursery.

Released this week, the false-color picture shows the nebula in vibrant hues thanks to a combination of data from several light filters. The dense cloud of dust and gas is a birthplace for medium- and low-mass stars, most of which are embedded in thick cocoons of material. The bluish points of light in the frame are young stars in the background.

It's a galaxy fit for a slasher flick: NGC 2442, aka the Meathook galaxy, glitters with stars in a newly released picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

NGC 2442 sits in the constellation Volans, the Flying Fish. Seen in its entirety, the galaxy's asymmetric spiral arms give it a double hook shape, inspiring the nickname. This image is a closeup of the galaxy's central region and the more compact of its two arms.

ScienceShot: Why Is This Galaxy Lopsided? - ScienceNOW

2011-05-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

ScienceShot: Why Is This Galaxy Lopsided? - ScienceNOW

A new image of the distant Meathook Galaxy, which gets its name from its dramatically warped profile, reveals widespread patches of glowing gas that betray bursts of star formation. The pinkish and reddish clumps of glowing hydrogen, ionized by the powerful radiation of newborn stars nearby, can be seen across most of the galaxy but are particularly prominent in the longer of the galaxy's two spiral arms, researchers report online today. Astronomers previously have suggested that the asymmetrical shape of the Meathook Galaxy, dubbed NGC 2442 and located about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Volans (also known as the Flying Fish), stems from gravitational interactions with another, as-yet-unidentified galaxy that passed nearby. The same tidal forces that deformed the mass of stars probably disrupted clouds of gas in the galaxy, causing them to collapse and triggering the spate of star birth, the researchers say.

CNN: Behind the scenes of Bin Laden's Killing

2011-05-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

The hunt for Osama bin Laden that went on for almost a decade led to a final mission that was completed in a matter of minutes. But how? The mission utilized specialized troops, heavy government coordination and extreme precision.

William Lane Craig - Apologetics that strain out a gnat but swallow a camel

2011-05-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

"You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."

- Jesus according to Matthew 23:24

A Christian Apologist like William Lane Craig does not study Science or philosophy because he wants to understand and know more for the sake of curiosity but instead he uses knowledge as a will to ideological power. A means of intimidation and manipulation. Craig is the Christian Orientalist and Colonialist in the manner of the critique of Edward Said. Edward Said noted that Western Colonial powers studied a culture not to genuinely understand it but rather to dominate and control it. Craig uses science and philosophy when it is convenient to his ideology. Craig uses knowledge instead of truly seeking knowledge. William Lane Craig for that reason is a corrupt philosopher. Knowledge as a will to power not as a will to truth. He seeks to win not to be wise.

There is a high degree of smugness with William Lane Craig. Ernest Becker noted that dogma gives the human the ability to be smug about death and terror. Voltaire stated that doubt is uncomfortable but certainty ridiculous. The Apologist strains at the Scientific theory of evolution but swallows extraordinary Biblical claims.
Craig's ability to be smug when he believes in Biblical miracles is surely a sign the Enlightenment never really took to American Society. William Lane Craig's apologetic presentations may be organized and disciplined in his delivery but it lacks the meat and weight of the burden of the philosopher. Craig is a suppressed philosopher who has never wrestled with despair and never allowed for the release of the Titans in his mind.

Michel de Montaigne said that "Philosophy is Doubt" but for WLC it is his faith. Faith in his credentials even more than his God.
He attacked Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for being philosophical lightweights compared to his credentials and yet most of the Christian community he swims in are full of people much less educated than Christopher Hitchens or Dawkins. And what about his own weaknesses including his lack of credentials in Biology or Astronomy? Dr. Craig speaks of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists lack of command of philosophy and theology and yet I wonder if his lack of scientific specialization ever gives him any pause? WLC lacks the education Dawkins has in Biology. Should WLC get a doctorate in Biology before he discusses anything to do with Science?

WLC does not chastise the lack of scholarly knowledge in the faith community that he swims in as long as they agree to his vision of God. For William Lane Craig it is not the pursuit of knowledge that matters but instead that you submit to his ideology. Craig does not want people to study more he wants an Amen from the credulous crowd. For Craig there is no pressing need for Christians to study more just trust in his scholarship and pay him to go up against those troublesome skeptics. If there was a true scholarly revolution in the American Church there would be less faith and more doubts in the fundamentalism that Craig champions. If more Christians were sophisticated Bible Scholars there would be more Crossans, Borgs and Ehrmans and less fundamentalism like Craigs brand. Craig does not give good reasons for faith in Jesus but he gives good reasons for faith in himself! Craig gives believers less educated than Hitchens reasons to feel good about themselves being credulous. If an educated man like Craig is a believer than I am ok. Craig shows contempt for the layman and yet he expects the layman to follow him without question. Again this points to his desire for the layman to submit more to his scholarship not to study more for themselves.

WLC lacks humility and imagination. Wisdom requires some humility. Knowledge requires curiosity and compassionate people need imagination to be empathetic. Craig lacks on all three fronts except in knowledge as a will to power. In his debate with Victor Stenger the topic of Christianity coming late in evolution and human history was brought up. Craig actually got into the numbers game of how many humans suffered and died before Jesus showed up in human history. Something Adolf Eichmann would surely appreciate. Millions are just statistics to the theological technician. The lack of empathy and imagination is there to see-(it was only millions of Jews who perished in the holocaust not billions?) what empathy! -if this is where Christian Apologists want to make their stand there is no amount of shame possible to get them to be people of compassion.

Mary Jo Sharp has a blog called “Confident Christianity” with the type of followers of William Lane Craig it should be called “Arrogant Christianity.” WLC followers are so enamored with his presentation, organization and discipline that they forget what really matters is if he is speaking for the truth or not. What matters to them is that he gets his God concept off on a theological technicality instead of caring for the reality of whether God does exist or whether Jesus is God. What matters to them is that he wins a point or two in debate tactic comparisons versus the unadulterated truth. This insecure juvenile reaction of cocky Christianity lacks the humility of the Nazarene and the faith of the early Christians. It is American Christianity with an emphasis on winning a game instead of sincere faith in the man of sorrow in early Christianity. Christian apologetics as entertainment value not a way to wrestle with knowledge and God. No matter how many philosophical cliffs WLC takes you to he still has no bridge to build to his Christian God. In the end it takes a leap of faith. But the prideful Craig has a hard time admitting that leap.

The Christian message from the Gospel of John is God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish...after listening to WLC you would think it is God so logically and reasonably gave his son to the world that whoever becomes a theological expert shall not perish.

Mark 10:15 (New King James Version)

" Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it."

For William Lane Craig it takes a scholar and a scholar who agrees with him completely! Where does reason end and faith begin for Craig? Reasonable Faith is more like faith in Craig's twisted sophistry. If it is not faith is it Christianity? Is it faith in himself? What is the genuine anchor for Craig? What would the New Testament look like if you tear the word faith out of it?

1 Corinthians 1:20-

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

Jeremiah 9: 23
This is what the LORD says:

"Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches,but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight," declares the LORD.

Where is the humility, kindness, justice and genuine faith in William Lane Craig's Christian Apologetics? It lacks these but it has plenty of pride, sophistry, smugness and indifference.

"Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete." -The Apostle Paul

William Lane Craig is a human mortal with all the limitation, baggage and bias that we all carry. His knowledge is incomplete. He needs faith to get to the Christian God. Can he even admit what the Apostle Paul stated? Or is he so invested in protecting his pride and his tribe that he fails to see his own weakness and fragility?

The irony of this argument from Christian apologists who say that there needs to be a higher degree of biblical scholarship before commenting is that most of the Christian beliefs they defend are believed by people who have no such scholarship. IF more Christians studied the Bible at a higher level I think there would be more doubt and less fundamentalism. Is this what christian apologists want? More likely they use it to bully people into silence and obfuscation.

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."

-Nietzsche

Greta Christina on the bankruptcy of William Lane Craig's Apologetics

2011-05-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

By Greta Christina

In a recent post on his Reasonable Faith site, famed Christian apologist and debater William Lane Craig published an explanation for why the genocide and infanticide ordered by God against the Canaanites in the Old Testament was morally defensible. For God, at any rate -- and for people following God's orders. Short version: When guilty people got killed, they deserved it because they were guilty and bad... and when innocent people got killed, even when innocent babies were killed, they went to Heaven, and it was all hunky dory in the end.

No, really.

Here are some choice excerpts:

God had morally sufficient reasons for His judgement upon Canaan, and Israel was merely the instrument of His justice, just as centuries later God would use the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon to judge Israel.

and:

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven's incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

and:

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.

I want to make something very clear before I go on: William Lane Craig is not some drooling wingnut. He's not some extremist Fred Phelps type, ranting about how God's hateful vengeance is upon us for tolerating homosexuality. He's not some itinerant street preacher, railing on college campuses about premarital holding hands. He's an extensively educated, widely published, widely read theological scholar and debater. When believers accuse atheists of ignoring sophisticated modern theology, Craig is one of the people they're talking about.

And he said that as long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to kill pretty much anybody. It's okay to kill bad people, because they're bad and they deserve it... and it's okay to kill good people, because they wind up in Heaven. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to systematically wipe out entire races. As long as God gives the thumbs-up, it's okay to slaughter babies and children. Craig said -- not essentially, not as a paraphrase, but literally, in quotable words -- "the death of these children was actually their salvation."

So why did this story not make headlines? Why was there not an appalled outcry from the Christian world? Why didn't Christian leaders from all sects take to the pulpits to disavow Craig, and to express their utter repugnance with his views, and to explain in no uncertain terms that their religion does not, and will not, defend the extermination of races or the slaughter of children?

Because the things he said are not that unusual.

Because lots of people share his views.

Because these kinds of contortions are far too common in religious morality. Because all too often, religion twists even the most fundamental human morality into positions that, in any other circumstance, most people would see as repulsive, monstrous, and entirely indefensible.

Step One: Admit Your Mistakes

See, here's the thing. When faced with horrors in our past -- our personal history, or our human history -- non-believers don't have any need to defend them. When non-believers look at a human history full of genocide, infanticide, slavery, forced marriage, etc. etc. etc., we're entirely free to say, "Damn. That was terrible. That was some seriously screwed-up shit we did. We were wrong to do that. Let's not ever do that again."

But for people who believe in a holy book, it's not that simple. When faced with horrors in their religion's history -- horrors that their holy book defends, and even praises -- believers have to do one of two things. They have to either a) cherry-pick the bits they like and ignore the bits they don't; or b) come up with contorted rationalizations for why the most blatant, grotesque, black-and-white evil really isn't all that bad.

Now, progressive and moderate believers usually go the cherry-picking route. But that requires its own contortions. Once you acknowledge that your holy books really aren't that holy, once you admit that they have moral as well as factual errors, then you have to start asking why any of it is special, why any of it should be treated any differently from any other flawed books of history or philosophy. You have to start asking why -- since your religion's holy books are just as screwed-up as every other religion's -- your religion is still somehow the right one, and all other religions are mistaken. You have to start asking how you know which parts of your holy book are right and which parts are wrong -- and how you know that people who disagree with you, who've picked the exact opposite cherries from the ones you've picked, who feel their faith in their hearts exactly as much as you do, have somehow gotten it terribly wrong. You have to start asking how you know the things you know. And to do that, and still maintain religious faith, requires its own contorted thinking, its own denial of reality, its own sticking of one's fingers in one's ears and chanting, "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"

And when you don't go the cherry-picking route? When you insist -- as Craig apparently does -- that your holy book is special and perfect, that the events and motivations in the text all took place exactly as described, and that the actions of God described in it are right and good by their very definition?

You put yourself in the position of defending the indefensible.

When your holy book says that God ordered his chosen people to slaughter an entire race, down to the babies and children -- and you insist that this book is special and perfect -- you put yourself in the position of defending genocide. You put yourself in the position of defending infanticide. You put yourself in the position of defending slavery, rape, forced marriage, ethnic hatred, the systematic subjugation of women, human sacrifice, and any number of moral grotesqueries that your holy book not only defends, but praises to the skies and offers as models of exemplary behavior.

And you can't cut the Gordian knot. You can't simply say, "This is wrong. This is vile and indefensible. This kind of behavior comes from a tribal morality that humanity has evolved beyond, and we should repudiate it without reservation."

Not without relinquishing your faith.

And if you refuse to relinquish your faith? If you cling to the assumption that your faith, by definition, is the highest good there is, and that by definition it trumps all other moral considerations?

Then you cut yourself off from your own moral compass.

I've made this point before, and I'm sure I'll make it again: Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

As just one example among so very many: Look at the Lafferty brothers, Mormon fundamentalists who murdered an innocent woman and her 15-month-old daughter because they thought God had commanded them to do it. At many points in their journey across the continent on their way to the killings, they questioned whether brutally slaughtering their brother's wife and her infant child was really the right thing to do. But they always came to the same answer: Yes. It was right. They thought God had commanded it -- and that settled the question. It ended the conversation. It stopped their moral query dead in its tracks.

But don't just look at sociopathic murderers from a bonkers religious cult. That's too easy. Look at Mr. Theological Scholar himself, William Lane Craig. In this piece, Craig says that the Canaanites were evil, and deserving of genocide, because (among other things) they practiced infanticide. The very crime that God ordered the Israelites to commit. I shit you not. Quote: "By the time of their destruction, Canaanite culture was, in fact, debauched and cruel, embracing such practices as ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice." (Emphasis -- and dumbstruck bafflement -- mine.) And he says the infanticide of the Canaanite children was defensible and necessary because the Israelites needed to keep their tribal identity pure, and keep their God-given morality untainted by the Canaanite wickedness. Again, I shit you not. Again, quote: "By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable." As if an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god couldn't come up with a better way to teach a lesson about assimilation to pagan idolatry than murdering children.

I could sit here all day and pick apart everything that's intellectually wrong with Craig's arguments. But it seems that a far more appropriate response would be, "Are you fucking kidding me? Do you hear what you're saying? Can you really not hear how grotesque, repulsive, flatly evil, totally batshit insane that sounds? Yeah, sure, if you start with your assumptions, then genocide and infanticide are morally defensible. Doesn't that tell you that there is something monstrously, ludicrously wrong with your assumptions?"

If I were trying to make up a more blatant example of ethical contortionism, of morality so twisted by its need to defend the indefensible that it has blinded itself to its own contradictions and grotesqueries, I couldn't have done a better job. Craig, like so many believers before him, has made my best arguments for me.

What's Sauce for the Creation Is Sauce for the Creator

Now. Some people might argue that the rules of morality aren't the same for God as they are for people. They might argue that, while it would certainly be wrong for people to kill babies and eradicate entire races on their own initiative, it's not wrong for God to do it. Craig himself makes that argument in this piece. Quote:

According to the version of divine command ethics which I've defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn't issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. (emphasis mine) He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as "playing God." Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that's His prerogative.

Yeah. See, here's the problem with that. If the moral rules for God are different from the moral rules for people? If the very definitions of good and evil are different for God than they are for us?

Then what does it even mean to say that God is good?

If you say that what "good" means for God is totally different from what "good" means for people -- if you say that murdering infants and systematically eradicating entire races is evil for people but good for God -- then you're pretty much saying that what it means for God to be "good," and what it means for us to be "good," are such radically different concepts that the one has virtually nothing to do with the other. You have rendered the entire concept of "good and evil" meaningless.

And I, for one, don't want the entire concept of good and evil to be rendered meaningless.

Of course, if you're a progressive/ moderate/ non-literalist believer, you're not stuck with defending every tenet of your holy book. You can say, "No, no, God didn't command these horrors. He couldn't have. The Bible is an inspired but flawed document, and it must be mistaken here when it says this command came from God. The Israelites wanted to slaughter the Canaanites, so they went ahead with it and told themselves the order came from God. But my God is good, and my God would never tell anyone to do any such a thing."

But then we're back to the cherry-picking problem: How do you know? How do you know which parts of your holy book are the ones that God meant? The Bible, and indeed most other religious texts, is loaded with instances of God commanding his followers to commit murder or worse. How do you know that God really wasn't giving those orders... but he really was giving the orders to love our neighbors and give to the poor? No two Christian sects agree on which bits of the Bible are God's true word and which bits are the "Just kidding" bits. And every sect has just as much "feeling in their heart" about their interpretation as you do.

So in order to pick those cherries, you have to twist yourself into just as many contortions as the fundies do.

Irony Meter Goes Off the Scale

It's funny. One of the most common pieces of bigotry aimed at atheism is that it doesn't provide any basis for morality. It's widely assumed that without religion -- without moral teachings from religious traditions, and without fear of eternal punishment and desire for eternal reward -- people would behave entirely selfishly, with no concern for others. And atheists are commonly accused of moral relativism: of thinking that there are no fundamental moral principles, and that all morality can be adapted to suit the needs of the moment.

But it isn't atheists who are saying, "Well, sure, genocide seems wrong... but under some circumstances, it actually makes a certain amount of sense." It isn't atheists who are saying, "Well, sure, infanticide seems wrong... but looked at in a certain light, it really isn't all that bad." It isn't atheists who are prioritizing an attachment to an ancient ideology over the clearest moral principles one can imagine: the principle that entire races ought not to be systematically exterminated, and the principle that children ought not to be slaughtered.

Human beings have intrinsic compassion. We have a sense of justice. We have feelings of revulsion and rage when we see others harmed. We have a desire to help create a livable world. We have a willingness to make personal sacrifices -- sometimes great sacrifices -- to help others in need. And contrary to what Craig and many other Christians think, these moral emotions don't derive from the Bible, and don't require belief in God. They're taught by virtually every religion and every society, and atheists feel them every bit as much as believers. Humans are a social species, and these emotions and principles evolved because they help members of a social species survive and reproduce. (Other social species seem to have some or all of these moral emotions as well.)

But our compassion and justice, our altruism and moral revulsion, can be twisted. They can be stunted. They can be denied, ignored, shoved to the back burner, rationalized away. They can be contorted to the point where we're saying that black is white, war is peace, and the most blatant evil is actually goodness if you squint your eyes just right. They can be contorted to the point where we're saying that genocide is okay because everyone gets what they deserve in the afterlife, and that infanticide is morally necessary to teach a lesson about the evils of murdering children.

And religion is Exhibit A in how this can happen.

Crocodile Blood Could Help People who are HIV Positive by Everything Dinosaur

2011-04-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

Crocodile Blood could Hold Key to Improving Human Immune System

Crocodiles, those ancient predators may have a reputation as being man-eaters but new research suggests that their remarkable physiognomy may prove beneficial to humans when it comes to combating AIDS and other diseases.

Researchers at Kasertsart University (Thailand) have discovered a new medicine to help HIV positive children using crocodile’s blood, which has been successfully tested on rats and is now ready for wider research on people suffering from a number of diseases including those with the HIV positive condition.

Win Cheichomsri, Chief of Crocodile Blood Research, Faculty of Zoology, has conducted an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of crocodile’s blood in unhealthy rats. For the university, the third oldest in Thailand, these tests mark the beginning of an extensive crocodile blood testing programme. For years, scientists have been aware of the remarkable properties of crocodile blood. These animals live in dirty, stagnant water stuffed full of bacteria but even though they may have open wounds their blood and it's anti-bodies prevent infections.

The researchers experiment involved two rats groups – one fed with supplement capsules made of crocodile’s blood and the other fed without the pills, a control group, as the scientists state.

Win Cheichomsri stated that the results indicate that the controlled group (fed without capsules) have bigger spleens than those in the experimental group.

The experimental rats (fed the crocodile supplements) became healthier and more fertile, reproducing many pups later on, the chief concludes. The Food and Drug Administration committee has certified the crocodile-blood tablets as clean and safe supplements for consumption.

Mr. Cheichomsri believes that the crocodile-blood pills could improve the immune systems and general health of HIV positive children. In fact, the capsules have been offered to twenty-four HIV infected children at Lorenzo Orphanage House in Panusnikom, Chonburi.

These children show remarkable physical changes after the consumption of the pills. They show less fatigue and have more energy to play. Their pustules are also gradually disappearing, Mr. Chiechomsri says.

He adds that those children who have suffered from hepatomegaly and splenomegaly, are presented with decreasing liver and spleen sizes. In particular during cold weather these children do not fall ill, indicating an improvement in their immune systems, according to Mr. Chiechomsri.

Based on the results, Mitri Temsiripong (Manager of Sriracha Tiger Zoo) and Wisachini Rungtaweekchair (Wanithai Part, Ltd) donate the crocodile blood supplements to the children at the orphanage, as accepted by Sister Wichuda Kusub. At the moment, the blood can be taken from the crocodiles without harming them and the crocodiles soon recover.

Perhaps these animals with a reputation for being man-eaters, may soon have gained a reputation for being man-savers as scientists search for new ways of combating disease and bacterial infections.

A Dangerous Design

2011-04-28T16:45:00.001-07:00

Earth Day Pictures: 20 Stunning Shots of Earth From Space

2011-04-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

Earth Day Pictures: 20 Stunning Shots of Earth From Space

Amis on Hitchens: 'He's one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen'

2011-04-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Christopher's personal devil is God, or rather organised religion, or rather the human "desire to worship and obey". He comprehensively understands that the desire to worship, and all the rest of it, is a direct reaction to the unmanageability of the idea of death. "Religion," wrote Larkin: "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die …"

And there are other, unaffiliated intimations that the secular mind has now outgrown. "Life is a great surprise," observed Nabokov (b. 1899). "I don't see why death should not be an even greater one." Or Bellow (b. 1915), in the words of Artur Sammler: "Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more … But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge."

Such thoughts still haunt us; but they no longer have the power to dilute the black ink of oblivion.

Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.

Sam Harris

2011-04-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris

On Academic Blogging

2011-04-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

How Public Like a Frog: On Academic Blogging
By Natalia Cecire 04.20.2011

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

An Arcadian who shall remain nameless asked me a few weeks ago, "Wait, how come you don't blog on Arcade?" My first thought was, "Because I'm the Transactions editor, dummy,"* but because I'm socially well adjusted and have an appropriateness filter, what I said was, "Dude, I have my own blog."

Upon reflection, that statement warrants some unpacking. I've given a fair amount of thought to why I blog as an academic. Many of the reasons are outlined in Dan Cohen's now-classic post "Professors, Start Your Blogs," published in 2006, which is a million internet-years ago. (I would Instapaper it--those margins are brutal.) In blogging, I've come around to the idea that academics need to do a lot more thinking in public if we want said public to have a clue as to what it is that we actually do. It really only seems fair.

Thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into, though, because public is the place where we're supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one's intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache. This is particularly a problem for academics, who are, after all, professional thinkers; we have a culture of making it look easy, and of concealing as much as possible "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness."

Two things cause me to recur to the difference between blogging on my own blog and blogging on Arcade. First, there's been a posting lull on the Arcade blogs recently, a natural effect, I suspect, of the spring semester hurtling toward its crisis of grade-submission deadlines. (Stanfordians, Davisians, and others on the quarter system, I don't know what the hell your excuse is.) And second, there's our Conversations editor Meredith's reflection back in February on the gender dynamics of Arcade and of other online collaborative spaces.

In response to Meredith's post, Cécile Alduy quoted Virginia Woolf's expression of unwillingness to expose the messiness of thinking: "When will come the day when I will be able to read my own writing printed on the page without blushing with shame?" This is a fear that afflicts all writers, but is nonetheless gendered as well; those of us trained in literary studies are familiar with the trope of the publication substituting for the author's body, making the circulation of the text into a highly immodest act for a woman in particular.

So when I say, "Dude, I have my own blog," I am in part acknowledging that having A Blog of One's Own (as it were) is a more comfortable proposition than thinking in public on Arcade, a sort of private room in contrast with Arcade's more public, well, arcade, where traffic is orders of magnitude higher and passers-by peer into your glass windows.

One Arcade feature that has incited debate in the past is our username policy--real, full names only.Passage des Panoramas, Paris, 1910; source: Wikimedia This policy puts into practice the theory that academics should be able to think in public and stand behind their ideas, even the ones they formulate on the fly. Here's how Dan Cohen puts it in the above-mentioned post:

Another factor that has distanced professors from blogs was anonymity. Most early blogs, and especially the ones the media liked to cover, were anonymous or pseudonymous. But I would say that the vast majority of new blogs are clearly attributed (even if they have odd monikers, unlike the boring dancohen.org). Attribution and its associated goods, such as responsibility and credit, should make academics feel better about the genre.

Responsibility and credit sound great, and reassuringly academic. I've certainly come out in favor of responsibility and credit in the past. Yet as Marilee Lindemann points out in the Journal of Women's History, eschewing anonymity is gendered (among other things), not neutral. Moreover, Lindemann observes, less authoritative genres like blogging are often the scene of anonymity precisely because they are the places where the disempowered--those who need to be anonymous, for one reason or another--have access to authorship. For these reasons, she celebrates the construction of pseudonymous online identities:

There is a lot of Emily Dickinson in this postmodern Madwoman, playing fast and loose with identity, reveling in the space opened up by declaring oneself a delighted "Nobody" rather than a dreary "Somebody." Dickinson offers the Madwoman more than lessons in the ironies of non-identity, however. With her homemade books and the hundreds of poems circulated to an audience of intimates, she also provides an enabling example of self-publication. Dickinson's careful insistence to Thomas Higginson on the distinction between "print" and "publish" ("I had told you I did not print," she writes, when she wants to explain to him that "A narrow fellow in the grass" appeared in a Boston newspaper without her knowledge or consent) has new resonance in the postprint era that brought today's academic feminist bloggers into being. (210-2)

Indeed, the post-Web 2.0 tendency toward real names has serious privacy implications, and what seemed like an innocuous enough comment from Cohen in 2006 looks a little more troubling juxtaposed with later pronouncements against anonymity by Mark Zuckerberg and others, which my colleague Aaron Bady has ably demonstrated very frequently amounts to good old-fashioned privilege. Certainly a graduate student is less free to post under her or his real name than is a professor with tenure; ignoring power differentials does not make them go away. In requiring real names, Arcade enforces a particular kind of publicness that is in some ways riskier than print publishing.

How dreary to be somebody!

And yet, it's often as somebodies that we reveal ourselves as scholars and teachers. One of the bees recently in my proverbial bonnet is the notion that students have been misguided into thinking that academic thought is neither applicable to nor motivated by "the real world." It's in blogging that I've found this notion most profoundly refuted, as trivial posts on the minutiae of everyday life eventually link up with larger theoretical concerns, casually strung together by the idiosyncratic tagging taxonomy in my head. The humanities in particular are aimed at developing theoretically supple ways to answer questions that we seriously want answered. I'm not going to lie: when I heard I was going to be an aunt, I went and read Eve Sedgwick's essay "Tales of the Avunculate." (Recommended, by the way.) To me, revealing those connections is part of the point of thinking in public.

Sometimes a glass arcade is more of an "admiring bog"--but that's okay, I think.

Beethoven...

2011-04-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Beethoven at the end of his life:
"Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est"
("Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over")

Quotable Hitchens

2011-04-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

HITCHENS:

Now, all of this massive Big Bang cosmological churning and destruction and annihiliation—which is paralleled, by the way on our own earth where 99% of all species that have already been on the planet have ever gone extinct, leaving no descendants. All of this could be part of a plan. There’s no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn’t it, with mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time and all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off. This is stupid.

HITCHENS:

I think despair is quite a good starting point myself. I mean I think it’s very good to know that we’re born into a losing struggle. I think that the stoicism that comes from that and the reflection that comes from that is very useful. I’m not very impressed by people who say, “Well, I wish it wasn’t true so I’ll try and act as if it isn’t.” It is true. Everything is governed by entropy and decline and annihilation and disaster and you’re born into a losing struggle and because you’re a mammal primate, a primate mammal, you know you are and you know you’re going to die and there’ll be a lot of struggle and pain along the way.

Big Universe. Small Religion.

2011-04-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. "

Feynman, 1959 Interview (From Genius by James Gleick)

"A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe."

-Carl Sagan

Mass Killings of Gazelles Marked Rise of Human Civilization - ScienceNOW

2011-04-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

Mass Killings of Gazelles Marked Rise of Human Civilization - ScienceNOW

The mass killing of wildlife by humans is not a modern phenomenon. A new study concludes that around the time the first cities were founded in the Near East, people herded hundreds of gazelles into long stone passageways that ended in circular pits, where they would slaughter every animal. These massive hunts may have been rich with symbolism at the time, yet the authors argue that they have left the gazelles of the Near East a highly endangered species today.

Gazelles were the favorite prey of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Near East—an area that includes modern-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—before farming began about 11,000 years ago. But there is little evidence that their numbers declined at that time. And when early farmers began domesticating cattle, sheep, and goats, the gazelle's importance as food declined rapidly.

Yet the three gazelle species still found today in the Near East—mountain gazelle, dorcas gazelle, and Persian gazelle—are all endangered. Historical records, based on eyewitness accounts, attest that Bedouin tribes used the long stone walls, known as desert kites and which ranged for up to tens of kilometers, to wantonly slaughter migrating gazelle herds in the 19th and early 20th centuries, much as settlers of the American West massacred buffalo and the antelope-like pronghorn around the same time.

But some researchers have suspected that such practices began thousands of years ago. They think that the hundreds of mysterious desert kites found in the Near East were used to corral and kill wild gazelle and other animals. Scientists have had a hard time figuring out when the kites were used, however, because they contain few traces of organic materials such as bone and charcoal that can be radiocarbon dated.

Now a team led by zooarchaeologist Guy Bar-Oz at the University of Haifa in Israel has found what it thinks is strong evidence that gazelles were massacred at the kites. The researchers analyzed a cache of 2631 pieces of gazelle bone, found during excavations in the early 1990s at the site of Tell Kuran in northeastern Syria, a settlement or hunting camp dated to between 5500 and 5100 years ago—shortly before early cities rose in the Near East. The bone fragments represent at least 93 individual Persian gazelle and bear butchery marks from stone tools. They include all ages of gazelle—juveniles, young adults, and older adults—suggesting that an entire herd had been wiped out.

Earlier archaeological surveys have identified several desert kites within 10 kilometers of Tell Kuran and nearly 50 kites in the Khabur River basin in which the site is located. Rock art near the kites depicts what appears to be the outlines of stone traps used to hunt animals that can be clearly identified as Persian gazelles. Some of this rock art also depicts humans holding clubs that are tethered to lions and bulls, which archaeologists have interpreted as symbolic of the deities worshipped in the cities of Mesopotamia some 5000 years ago. All this adds up to a strong circumstantial case for the ancient mass killings, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This paper presents the first compelling archaeological evidence that gazelles were mass hunted," says Natalie Munro, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Munro adds that this practice might have had economic as well as symbolic importance, despite the ready availability of domesticated animals, because being able to kill a large number of animals at one time would have been worth the large communal effort it required.

Historical records of gazelle hunting in desert kites suggest that the team is probably correct, adds zooarchaeologist Simon Davis of the Portuguese Institute of Archaeology in Lisbon. Nevertheless, Davis says, he has some "minor quibbles" with the paper, noting that the age distribution of the butchered gazelles could also have come about if the killing had taken place randomly over a long period of time and the bones deposited in one central place. Davis says he would also like to see "more solid evidence for the dates of these kites" before accepting that they were used to hunt the 5000-year-old gazelles found at Tell Kuran.

Aronra: What we can honestly say we know

2011-04-15T12:45:00.001-07:00

Egyptian Princess Mummy Had Oldest Known Heart Disease

2011-04-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Egyptian Princess Mummy Had Oldest Known Heart Disease

Footage of Japan's devastating tsunami

2011-03-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Blue Planet of Beauty & Agony: Beyond the dogma

2011-03-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

Human Origins - Professor Marean

2011-03-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Hypnotized by Charisma

2011-03-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Hypnotized by Charisma

Now to the new study, which has possibly identified another state in which our critical thinking and executive function is inhibited, much like hypnotic induction. The study looked at individuals identified as Christian and very religious (confirmed with a questionnaire) and non-religious controls. They were then exposed to speeches by a non-Christian, a Christian, and a Christian faith healer, while being examined by fMRI (functional MRI scanning looks at brain function by measuring blood flow to the various brain regions). One caveat – this is a smallish study with a low signal to noise ratio inherent in fMRI research. The results are interesting primarily because they conform to prior psychological research.

The authors conclude:

The contrast estimates reveal a significant increase of activity in response to the non-Christian speaker (compared to baseline) and a massive deactivation in response to the Christian speaker known for his healing powers. These results support recent observations that social categories can modulate the frontal executive network in opposite directions corresponding to the cognitive load they impose on the executive system.

So two things appear to be happening here. The first is an increase in activity among the secular group when exposed to the speech of a Christian faith healer – this can perhaps be interpreted as a negative reaction, putting their critical thinking on alert. Further, Christians who believed in faith healing had the opposite reaction – they turned off their critical thinking. They were literally hypnotized by the faith healer. The authors write:

Insights from hypnosis research may further explain how such effects become established in interpersonal interactions suggesting that frontal deactivation indicates a ‘handing-over’ of the executive function to the perceived charismatic speaker similar to a patient’s ‘handing-over’ of executive function to the hypnotist.

It is probably not a coincidence that in the vernacular we talk about a charismatic figure “hypnotizing” his audience. This research suggests that this is no mere metaphor and may be literally true.

The take home from all of this is that our brain function is complex, and has many inherent weaknesses. We may fall victim to simple resource limitations, and when we tax our brain function our performance – including critical thinking – diminishes.

But there is also another layer here – it is interesting how easy it is to turn off our critical thinking. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that our ancestors may have been selected for the ability to hand over their executive function to a charismatic leader. This allows for group cohesion, and it allows for the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the group. If the group is comprised largely of our genetic relatives, this self-sacrifice can make Darwinian sense.

This level of handing over may be necessary to do otherwise unthinkable acts, such as following your commander into a deadly (even suicidal) situation.

But there is a dark side to the monkey brains we inherited. Cults are the ultimate expression of this – turning over complete control to a charismatic leader. Cults then indoctrinate their members into a belief system that enhances this effect. They further cultivate an us vs them attitude, which makes them more pliable to their leaders and resistant to outsiders. Cults even manipulate their recruits with sleep and protein deprivation, to further stress their neurological resources.

But we all encounter this phenomenon in day-to-day life. Charismatic leaders of all types may exploit this neurological effect. As will con men. Free energy guru Dennis Lee comes to mind – he crowds people into a conference room and then wears them down for hours with multiple presentations. As the night drags on, those more predisposed to suggestion remain. He heavily doses them with appeals to God and country – manipulating their faith and patriotism. He does all the things this research shows inhibits critical thinking. Then he hits them up for an investment scheme.

In the morning many of them may ask themselves – “What was I thinking?”

Published by Steven Novella

Huge Impact Crater Found in Remote Congo

2011-03-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

Huge Impact Crater Found in Remote Congo

A circular depression deep in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been confirmed as the first known impact crater in central Africa, a new study says. The find brings the number of known meteor craters on Earth to 182.

The so-called Luizi structure was first described in a German geological report from 1919. But without further fieldwork, it was impossible to say for sure that the 10.5-mile-wide (17-kilometer-wide) feature had been made by a meteor impact.

On other planets, such as Mercury and Mars, it's easier to identify impact craters based only on their shapes, since these worlds no longer have geologic forces making major changes to their surfaces.

But on Earth, many older craters have likely been erased by tectonic activity or erosion, while others are so covered with dense vegetation or sediments, like Luizi, that they're almost impossible to spot without satellites.

What's more, the crater-like structures we do see may have been made by volcanoes, collapsed underground chambers, and other forces that have nothing to do with impacts, said study leader Ludovic Ferrière, curator of the rock collection at the Natural History Museum of Vienna in Austria.

"On Earth, to confirm it's an impact, you have to go in the field because you need evidence of high pressures and temperatures," Ferrière said.

Crater Expedition Had Brushes With Snakes, Poachers

The researcher first became interested in the Luizi structure after seeing satellite pictures published in the 1990s.

By studying the available satellite data, Ferrière and colleagues estimated that the structure has an elevated rim about 1,148 feet (350 meters) high, as well as an interior ring and a central depression.

But to truly confirm Luizi as an impact crater, the researchers had to mount an expedition to the politically tumultuous DRC. (Related: "Rare Gorillas at Risk as Rebels Seize Congo Park.")

"I was working for a year just to find a contact there, because you need a local person to help you find your way around," Ferrière said.

With funding from the National Geographic Society/Waitt Foundation program, Ferrière—then a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario in Canada—visited the crater site in June 2010 with colleagues from the University of Lubumbashi.

"I flew direct to Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the DRC. From there we had to drive from the city to the crater," he said.

"I had looked at maps and planned a route before I left. But when I got there, my contact told me there is no bridge across part of my intended path. We had to take some crazy gravel roads with big potholes inside. These are not good roads to drive on, even with a four-wheel-drive car."

The team set up camp in a small village about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from the crater rim, recruiting two local guides/porters and a soldier to help them safely navigate the wild terrain.

"The crater is in a national park, and I thought it would be like the jungles of South America," Ferrière said. "Instead it was a tree savanna—a big plataeu with dry grass. The grass was sometimes more than a meter [3.2 feet] high."

Standing on the rim of the Luizi structure, Ferrière could see skinny trees that seemed to fill the depression, with the crater's distant edge rising like small hills.

Despite the remote, wooded terrain, "we saw no large animals, only snakes. But we did see a lot of remnants of poachers. Sometimes we'd come to a site and the doused fires were still hot."

Ferrière's team spent about a week at the crater collecting samples, which were sent back to the lab in Canada for analysis.

"I found so-called shatter cones, which are features in the rock only found in impact structures," he said. The nested, conical shapes in such features are evidence that the bedrock has been exposed to extreme pressure from a shock wave.

The crater rocks also contained an abundance of shocked quartz, a version of the mineral known to form only from impacts or nuclear blasts, Ferrière said.

"Everybody will believe me now, I think, that this is an impact site."

(Related: "Meteorite Impact Reformulated Earth's Crust, Study Shows.")

The scientists think the Luizi crater was made by a meteor more than 0.6 mile (a kilometer) wide that slammed into what is now the DRC at about 45,000 miles (72,000 kilometers) an hour.

For now it's unclear how old the crater is—the scientists can say only that the affected rocks are about 575 million years old, "but we know it's younger than that, because the rocks have been excavated," Ferrière said.

"It would be nice to do more fieldwork, because the shape of the structure with this inner ring can tell us about the exact formation process involved," he added. In the meantime, the researcher will continue to study the rock samples, now housed at the Vienna museum.

"There is still a lot to discover" about Luizi, he said.

Map Of The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2011-03-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

Map Of The Day - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions in Carl Sagan's "Earth the Pale Blue Dot"

2011-03-08T05:33:00.000-08:00

Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe - life - 06 March 2011 - New Scientist

2011-03-06T07:01:00.000-08:00

Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe - life - 06 March 2011 - New Scientist

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties - the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

Like the objects depicted in the mural, P. hispanica has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus - a ring around the stalk. "Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as they do in the mural"

This isn't the oldest prehistoric painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural that may show the species Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.

Maybe Christians Should Read The Bible - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2011-03-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

Maybe Christians Should Read The Bible - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Adam Kirsch reviews Timothy Beal's The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book:

While there is no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he notes simultaneously that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments.

The Bible isn’t really “a book” at all, but a library of books—the Greek word biblia, Beal points out, is a plural—written over a span of centuries, in a wide range of genres—myth, history, law codes, poems, proverbs.

In asking “What Would Jesus Read?”, Beal also ends up explaining what is still apparently unknown to many Christians—that Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity initially a Jewish movement. The episode in Luke 4 where Jesus preaches in a synagogue leads Beal to discuss Torah reading and Shabbat services. Later he examines the Hebrew text of the Bible to demonstrate how every English translation is inevitably an interpretation—sometimes, a Christian apologetic interpretation, as when the Hebrew word almah in the Book of Isaiah is translated as “virgin” rather than “young woman,” in order to produce a Christological reading: “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son …”

(Richard Dawkins & Francis Collins) Time.com

2011-03-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

God vs. Science

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

Does God Exist? William Lane Craig vs Austin Dacey 4/14

2011-03-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

IR M63. What RU?

2011-03-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

IR M63. What RU?

The various spiral arm segments of the Sunflower galaxy, also known as Messier 63, show up vividly in this image taken in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared light is sensitive to the dust lanes in spiral galaxies, which appear dark in visible-light images. Spitzer's view reveals complex structures that trace the galaxy's spiral arm pattern.

Messier 63 lies 37 million-light years away -- not far from the well-known Whirlpool galaxy and the associated Messier 51 group of galaxies.

The dust, glowing red in this image, can be traced all the way down into the galaxy's nucleus, forming a ring around the densest region of stars at its center.

The short, diagonal line seen on the lower right side of the galaxy's disk is actually a much more distant galaxy, oriented with its edge facing toward us.

Blue shows infrared light with wavelengths of 3.6 microns, green represents 4.5-micron light, and red, 8.0-micron light. The contribution from starlight measured at 3.6 microns has been subtracted from the 8.0-micron image to enhance the visibility of the dust features.

14 billion years-TEDxYouth@Castilleja - RISA WECHSLER

2011-03-05T04:46:00.000-08:00

Psychology Today: Despair & Psychotherapy

2011-03-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

A Forensic Psychologist on Anger, Madness and Destructive Behavior
by Dr. Stephen Diamond

Existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, whose concentration camp experience during the second World War made him somewhat of an expert on the subject, defined despair as meaningless suffering in the simplistic but powerful formula D=S-M: despair equals suffering minus meaning. The clinical implication here is that despair can be treated by helping the patient attribute to or discover some meaning in his or her personal suffering, misery and symptoms. Indeed, when a psychiatrist diagnoses the patient's despair as stemming from clinical depression or bipolar disorder, he or she has provided some meaning to their suffering, and also some hope for psychopharmacological salvation. Unfortunately, this too often turns out to be a disappointing, false or fleeting hope, which then tends to exacerbate and reinforce the patient's already devastating clinical despair. The same may be said of psychotherapies, both brief and longer-term, that offer patients the perhaps overly optimistic hope of relieving their clinical despair and then do not deliver.

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, in his Sickness Unto Death (1849), suggested that despair could be understood as comprising three stages: Spiritlessness, which applies to those who outwardly seem well-adjusted and successful yet inwardly live in a state of deep and perilous despair; despair in weakness and despair about weakness, which has to do with a refusal to become authentically and fully one's self and the existential guilt (what Sartre called mauvaise foi or "bad faith") of this cowardly refusal to move forward and frustrating inability to retreat back to their former identity; and, thirdly, the despair of defiance, which pertains to the capacity of despair to turn, sometimes quite suddenly, to elation, excitement, optimism, enthusiasm, hypomania or mania and frenetic creative activity as so often seen in extremis during the manic phase of bipolar disorder. For Kierkegaard, the cure or antidote to despair is religious faith, in his case, Christianity or what he called Christian existence. (For this brief section on Kierkegaard, I am mainly indebted to Dr. Robert L. Moore's paper titled "Theory Matters: Analytical Psychology and the Human Experience of Despair")

Commonly, clinical despair results from the chronic repression of what existential psychologist Rollo May called the daimonic: the ultimate source of our vitality, will, power and creativity. When, for example, we habitually deny or repress our anger, sexuality, passion, spirituality, sadness, anxiety, creativity-and even our existential despair--we are cutting ourselves off from the daimonic and our true selves, and drifting toward clinical despair, apathy and depression. Clinical despair, which often contains a kind of embitterment, typically stems from chronically repressed anger or rage about how unfairly life has treated us, and how powerless and helpless we are to do anything constructive about it. This is why it can be vitally important for the patient to get in touch with this daimonic anger and harness its power and motivating energy to courageously change themselves and their lives for the better. Otherwise, clinical despair festers, sometimes expressing itself in self-destructive and even violent behavior.

As Sartre suggests,

"Human life begins on the far side of despair."

Instilling some hope in the patient suffering from clinical despair seems an obvious and simple therapeutic ploy, but in practice proves much easier said than done. Counterintuitively, confronting clinical despair can be closer to taking Dante's sojourn through Hell in The Inferno, where he anxiously reads the daunting inscription on the gate:

" Abandon all hope all ye who enter here."

Clinging desperately to false hope, whether in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, can paradoxically be a neurotic defense against despair, a defense which, while serving the valuable purpose of survival in some cases, ultimately prevents one from facing and moving past the despair of abandonment, abuse, neglect, loss and other traumas. This is what Jung may have meant when he noted that

"neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."

Sometimes clinical despair, it seems, must simply be patiently accepted, tolerated and suffered through with the stabilizing and supportive presence and accompaniment of the compassionate psychotherapist until it eventually turns into something else: courage, hope, joy, love, rage, passion, spirituality, faith or creativity. (This subtle shift is something fundamentally different in intensity from the radical, dramatic, transitory, destabilizing and dangerously exaggerated mood swings seen in bipolar disorder.) Moving through this excruciating process can be likened to both a terrifying death of one's old self, and a birth of the new self, with despair being the prolonged pregnancy and painful labor. But when clinical despair is totally avoided or prematurely aborted during treatment by pharmacological and/or psychological means, there can be no true transformation. Tragically, the patient remains stuck in the destructive vicious cycle and potentially deadly snare of clinical despair.

Christopher Hitchens on 60 minutes

2011-03-05T04:29:00.000-08:00

How Do Blue Whales Avoid Cancer? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2011-03-03T13:55:00.000-08:00

How Do Blue Whales Avoid Cancer? - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Carl Zimmer raises a fascinating question:

Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That’s a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there’s a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do...

Yet there seems to be no correlation between body size and cancer rates among animal species. We run a thirty percent risk of getting cancer over our life time. So do mice, despite the fact that they’re 1000 times smaller than we are. All animals studied so far have cancer rates in that ballpark. (And yes, sharks do get cancer.)

Caulin and Maley argue that when animals evolve to larger sizes, they must evolve a better way to fight against cancer.

Bolivia Landslide Photos: Neighborhoods, Cemetery Fall

2011-03-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

Bolivia Landslide Photos: Neighborhoods, Cemetery Fall

Visions of the Universe: Stars to Microbes

2011-03-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

Poverty's Cancer

2011-03-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Poverty's Cancer

Cancer is an enormous, and growing, global public-health problem. A disease formerly considered more pervasive in affluent countries now places its heaviest burden on poor and disadvantaged populations. Of the 7.6 million cancer deaths every year, 4.8 million occur in the developing world.

If no action is taken, the number of cancer deaths in the developing world is forecast to grow to 5.9 million in 2015 and 9.1 million in 2030. While cancer deaths in wealthy countries are expected to increase less dramatically, they are nonetheless predicted to rise by a harrowing 40 percent over the next 20 years.

How To Be A Writer « Thought Catalog

2011-03-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

How To Be A Writer « Thought Catalog

1) Don’t listen to advice from writers. I realize that me saying this will invalidate this entire column, but I’m cool with that. Writers like to talk about writing because talking about writing is easier than actually sitting down and — y’know — writing something. (Like a novel, or a play, or a poem, or such.) Don’t listen to writers. And are you sure that writers even have your best interests at heart? Most writers that I know are petty, insecure, self-absorbed dicks. And writers don’t like competition. Therefore, take any advice that they give you with a grain of salt.

2) Chill out. Most people are a thousand times more interesting when they’re talking than when they’re writing. Why is this? Because people panic when they start writing. People instantly revert to memories of 10th grade English class, and memories of No. 2 pencils, and lined notebooks. And then they freak out and tense up. Don’t tense up. Just relax. Seriously.

3) Just relax. …Um, seriously. Chill. When are you funniest and most interesting in life? When you’re hanging with your friends, maybe having a few beers, and telling a funny story. So when you write, do that. Just be normal. Act like you’re telling a story to your friends. Write the way that you talk. This will be much more interesting, I promise you.

4) You’re gonna have to write all the time. I wrote for about six hours a day, every day, for 15 years before I could quit my boring job and become an actual paid full-time writer.

Which reminds me of a funny story. In his excellent autobiography, animator Chuck Jones talks about his first day at art school. And on his first day, the “mean” professor said this to the class: “You have 200,000 bad drawings inside of you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.” Startled gasp! The class was horrified. And Chuck Jones, genius and creator of Bugs Bunny, etc., was horrified for a second too. Until he realized this: “Wait. I’ve already done at least 300,000 drawings.”

The same thing happened to me on my first day of school. Our professor said, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write for six hours a day. No exceptions.” And I was appalled, until I remembered that I did that already.

You’re gonna have to write all the time in order to get better. No one can make you do this. You’re going to have to make yourself do it.

Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny | Video on TED.com

2011-03-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny | Video on TED.com

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning