Minnesota had a coagulation of reactionary Republicans at our capitol last week. Their goals were clearly stated, and were thoroughly repugnant, but at least they also had a small turnout.
So…is Benny Hinn like a Kiai Master? This video is disturbingly nuts, with ol’ Hinn waving his hands at the True Believers and knocking them over. We need to smuggle some godless people in to one of his shows to just stand there and give him a quizzical look.
90% of teenage girls believe they are overweight, according to a recent survey. That’s something to worry about — there’s the reality, that a lot of us are overweight, but there’s also the perception problem, that many girls are convinced that they must lose weight when they really don’t. There’s an article that speculates on the cause of this problem, whether it is an obsession with celebrity, peer pressure, or pressure from the diet industry, but it comes up with a strange explanation:
Read Ophelia’s take on the Israeli ‘modesty buses’. Would you believe certain buses in Jerusalem are set aside to make special accommodation for orthodox Jews?
Women are compelled to sit in the back of the bus.
In the back of the bus. I think they need a Jewish Rosa Parks.
The most disingenuous argument in favor of this discriminatory policy is the excuse that not all the buses are ‘modesty buses’ — that all you have to do is wait a little longer at the bus stop and take a different bus that doesn’t enforce the idea that women must be segregated. As a former commuter on an overcrowded bus and subway system, I know how ridiculous that suggestion is. “Separate but equal” is a policy that always emphasizes “separate”, not equality.
This interview with a Rabbi Sacks is rather hard for me to wrap my brain around. The first part is about something Sacks is very concerned about: Jewish continuity. He seems strangely concerned about Jewish young people marrying outside their group, and has run ad campaigns to convince young Jews to raise their children in their faith. It’s all very weird; I know my grandmother was concerned that her grandchildren marry good Scandinavians, and I even got admonished about what ethnic groups I could date when I went off to college. I’m afraid that when my Norwegian/Swedish grandmother did that sort of thing, we just called it bigotry and ignored her.
Even now, I can’t quite imagine telling my kids who they are allowed to marry, or being concerned with maintaining an ethnic bloodline. Be different and unique, I say — no one should try to be who their parents and grandparents are, but should follow their own path, and we parents and grandparents should reconcile ourselves to our progeny’s independence.
There is one odd moment in the interview. I don’t sympathize at all with the ethnic purity angle, but this part I actually liked:
In the question and answer session that followed Rabbi Sacks was asked how he would convince someone like scientist and atheist, Richard Dawkins of the benefits of religious identity.
Mr Sacks responded: “We need atheists to remind us things are not God’s will, God does not want hunger, injustice or violence. I am quite happy Richard Dawkins stops us having too much faith. There’s a lot more religion in the world than there was 25 years ago and there’s a lot more violence in the world than there was 25 years ago.”
I suspect that while I enthusiastically agree qualitatively with Rabbi Sacks, we might disagree on how much religion is too much — I’d say anything above zero.
David Barash tries to review 11 recent books on the religion/science conflict, all in one essay of middling length. It’s not entirely satisfying, nor could it be with that excess of books in so little space, but it does have a convenient short list of what’s been published lately.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)
Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)
Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)
I’ve read most of these, and I roughly agree with most of Barash’s assessments except that he’s much milder in his criticisms than I would be. I was also disappointed in Wolpert’s book, which was a bit too scattered.
Next on my list: Boyer. It’s going to have to wait a little longer, though, until this term ends.
You’re bored with it? I’m bored with it. All bored now. But since the discussion is still going on everywhere, and I’m frothing rabid (as everyone knows) and always ready to snarl and bite even when (especially when?) I’m beset with ennui, I’ll call your attention to Greg Laden again. He’s pointing out that Nesbit/Mooney have poorly framed — I swear, I never want to use that word ever again — their argument for the evolution-creation conflict, which might explain why they are being so poorly received by some of us who are focused on that ugly mess. That, and the fact that parts of their report read like a pious Discovery Institute press release, which sets our jangled immune systems on fire like a bee sting triggering anaphylactic shock, and no one’s slinging any epinephrine our way.
It looks like they talking about approaches more like we find in Kennith Miller’s “Finding Darwin’s God: A scientist’s search for common ground between god and evolution.” This needs to be clarified, and if this is in fact what they are talking about, then there is something very important that they don’t get, and they need to be flogged, then ignored. If, on the other hand, they are just kind of talking vaguely about this issue and are not explicitly arguing for a god/science chimeric view, then they should be very eager to be educated on this and then to move on with framing but using a very different approach.
We can’t use an approach that brings god into the evolution picture. This is not because of atheism (though that position would make this same argument). It is because it is a) bad science; b) a wedge for bringing various forms of creationism into the classroom and c) illegal.
OK, Greg has put up some very specific issues and questions that fans of the f-word should deal with it. Please do.
Now, since I’ve bored myself again, but since I did mention “rabid” and “flogging”, I’ll recommend that everyone read this article. It’s much more entertaining, even if the thought of 103 literally rabid Christian fanatics gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s alright if you’d rather talk about that than the f-word, too.
Crud. Laden has added a link to an interview with Nisbet. How would you f-word the idea that the earth goes around the sun for Copernicus? He gives an answer I guess I should have expected.
You recall that nice scarlet letter “A” for atheism t-shirt? I like it so much that I’ve decided to get it tattooed on my forehead. And this is so important to me that I’m also dragging my kids into the tattoo parlor to have it done to them. After all, my beliefs are important and this minor procedure will make my children more attractive, so they shouldn’t object — it’ll also make it easier to find partners with a similar cultural background. This is a win all around; I really don’t understand why Skatje is hiring a lawyer to oppose me.
Once upon a time, some people on a road were stopped by a wall.
We didn’t mind. It was a good place to stop for a while, and as more people coming down the road stopped at the wall, a community grew at its foot. Most people enjoyed gathering together, so the wall seemed like a fortuitous event, a good reason to rest and celebrate and work together for a while.
The wall wasn’t impassable, of course. Some could still clamber over the pile and continue on their journey, but the wall was a little daunting, and the happy community was so tempting, and few bothered.
Now I’m just going to have to give up — I can’t top Ophelia, who just got a Jesus and Mo comic that references her. Maybe if I talked about epistemology more…
