Religion in America

Here is Penn Jillette, half of my favourite magician duo, gives an monologue on religion in America...



He says some very interesting things. This is well worth listening to.

Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

This is an excellent speculative historical review of how debt, money, slavery, coinage, and government arose. It is chock-a-block full of obscure but interesting facts. The analysis is fresh and thought-provoking. I'm not in a position to assess the scientific validity of his reconstruction of ancient societies, but it rings true to me.

If you want a new perspective on how economic forces shape us and our societies, this is a "must read" book.

Here is just a tidbit from his chapter on the Axial Age (800 BC to 600 AD):

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance -- as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it -- but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else -- or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl -- it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athen's owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war -- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block -- the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then between the nobile Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal -- all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since -- can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? re they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

I heartily recommend that you read this book.

Anti-Science is Alive and Well

People prefer to "believe". They don't like slow and painful study and rational thinking, calculation, experimentation, theory building aka "science". That requires 20 years of education and only really dedicated and really smart people can access the edges of science these days. That sidelines the masses and they don't like that one bit.

So people believe in magic. They believe in "spirit" and "soul" and the "power of positive thinking". They believe in "holistic medicine". They have their religions.

I worked in a high tech company and was appalled to discover that even people with PhDs in science believed in such madness as "homeopathy". These were smart people, well educated people who had worked hard to understand technology and science and yet they gave in to magical thinking.

Here's what magical thinking will "achieve". From Yahoo! News:

Five share $340,000 in holistic healer case that left woman a quadriplegic

The Canadian Press – Fri, 11 Nov, 2011

RICHMOND, B.C. - Five B.C. residents, including a woman nearly killed by arsenic poisoning and left a quadriplegic, are sharing more than $340,000 as a result of a settlement involving a self-proclaimed holistic healer.

Money from the settlement came from property seized from the defendant and sold under the B.C. government's civil forfeiture legislation.

The government says the defendant, Selena Tsui, was not charged in the case after the Crown concluded there was no substantial likelihood of conviction on any criminal charges.

The government says between 2000 and 2004, Tsui told at least a dozen people she was qualified to diagnose and treat diseases, including mental conditions, when in fact she had no formal training.

One of her clients, identified only as E.L., began taking a concoction she believed contained mushrooms and herbs, but had extreme arsenic levels, and she suffered respiratory and renal failure, cardiac arrest and paralysis.

She was taken to hospital, put on life support and given a five per cent chance of survival, but her life was eventually saved.

The real world is complicated. It isn't a simple morality story. It isn't something that "a good heart" and a "strong will" can conquer. It requires hard work, sophisticated technology, advanced math, and a long education in a specialist area of science. But people love quacks with no training yet who have an "aura" about them, or can "channel spirits", or have a commanding presence and claim a direct line to "God".

Right now, Europe and the United States are in the hands of quacks. Serious economists know that austerity budgets only prolong a depression. A Keynesian approach is needed. But Obama and the European leaders would rather call in the witch doctor to shake bones over the economy and prattle some debt reduction "confidence building" mumbo jumbo rather than rely on the math, the models, and the sophisticated economic theories (the ones prior to the Chicago school and "freshwater" economists turned into lunatics and ran economics off the rails).

It is tragic living in a world where some plague is raging and the scientists and the doctors have the technology to manipulate DNA to create a vaccine to cure it, but the "authorities" (political, religious, civic, etc.) all cry out for "prayer" and "abstinence" and "a submission to God's will" or some "alternative medicine" rather than to science to cure the plague.

We live in a dark time. Carl Sagan wrote a book in 1995 before he died in which he worried about this modern anti-science trend. The book was called The Demon-Haunted World. We live in that magical thinking, irrational, and anti-science world. Millions die every year because of this stupidity. That is what people who want "quick solutions" have created by preferring magical thinking to the difficult path of rationalism and science. Tragic.

An Honest Man

It is rare to find somebody with integrity, somebody who values principle more than status & money. So this story in the UK's Guardian is heart-warming:

St Paul's canon Dr Giles Fraser resigned over plans to forcibly evict Occupy protesters from the outside the cathedral.

This makes very clear his unusual background and approach:

On the face of it, Giles Fraser is an unlikely looking cleric. Bald, jovial, worldly, ferociously bright but genial towards those within the fractious Church of England who disagree with him, his favourite form of garb is jeans and T-shirt.

It is a uniform in keeping with the 47-year-old's support for Chelsea football club and his determinedly demotic persona, though he had to change into a more conventional dog-collar and black suit when translated from his parish in Putney to St Paul's two years ago.

Looks are deceptive though: Fraser is the son of an RAF officer, educated at Uppingham private school and Newcastle University and latterly a lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford. He has been a regular lecturer at military staff colleges and at one stage considered becoming an army chaplain.

His family background is Jewish, and he was a teenage Trotskyite before converting to Anglicanism at university. His doctorate comes from a thesis on the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who famously declared that God – at least in the old-fashioned sense – was dead.

Fraser, served his curacy on a rundown Midlands council housing estate and for 10 years was vicar of Putney parish church in one of the most well-heeled parts of London. He equally valued the church as the scene of the post-civil war debates on the sort of society England should become.

He has never made any secret of his generally, leftwing, progressive views both politically and within the Church of England, where he has been a prominent supporter of the pro-gay Inclusive Church group, launched at a service in his church.

It is classic that a tough issue results in the honest man withdrawing while the social climbers and "yes men" cling to power and creep higher up the echelons of society strengthening their death hold on society. In a nutshell this story explains why society makes so little progress and the evils of the past keep repeating and repeating.

Here is the bureaucratic jujutsu that did him in:

Some critics will undoubtedly say that his resignation was waiting to happen, given that Fraser is not an instinctive committee man or church bureaucrat: in Putney he was in charge, at St Paul's he has had to be part of a team. He had been talking privately about possibly needing to resign when the chapter voted to take action against the protesters, but his hand may have been forced – ironically – by the revelation of that in the media. It is an interesting question who leaked it: there are church conservatives who would be delighted to see him fall.

How many times has the honest man gone down for his principles while the more "supple" social climber has climbed higher? Ever wonder how a Stalin, a Hitler, or a Mao got to the top of the heap?

I look at how the media is trying to undermine the OWS movement by questioning their motives or by trying to put them in a box by demanding that they come up with a short list of "demands". The reality is that this is a movement of social protest deeply rooted in decades of mistreatment by a system that is gamed against the 99%. Those on top my slap themselves on the back with a "job well done" by getting rid of Giles Fraser but they are simply upping the pressure cooker of social unrest and ensuring an ever more devastating explosion because the system simply won't give the bottom 99% a fair break. History is replete with popular uprisings gone amok because the "clever" people on the top manipulated things right to the point of complete breakdown.

American Income Inequality 2011

Here is the data released today by the Congressional Budget Office: the rich get richer and the poor get left in the dust...

Click to Enlarge
The above is as old as the Bible since the rich over time got richer and the poor poorer. That was why there was a jubilee to remit debts, because the rich will constantly grab more, and without pushback from government power or religious power, this leads to the collapse of society. The OWS movement is the modern evidence of this ancient problem and the need, yet again, of a remedy.

Defining the "Self"

I love to puzzle about questions like "what is the purpose of life?", "is a virus alive?", "how do you know when you 'know' something?", etc.

Here is the cartoonist Scott Adams (aka creator of the Dilbert cartoon) taking the puzzle of defining what makes you 'you' and giving an interesting reply:

Have you ever wondered who you are? You're not your body, because living cells come and go and are generally outside of your control. You're not your location, because that can change. You aren't your DNA because that simply defines the boundaries of your playing field. You aren't your upbringing because siblings routinely go in different directions no matter how similar their start. My best answer to my own question is this:

You are what you learn.

If all you know is how to be a gang member, that's what you'll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you'll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you'll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you'll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.

I'm fascinated by the way a person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. People who study economics come out the other side thinking a different way from people who study nursing. And learning becomes a fairly permanent part of a person even as the cells in the body come and go and the circumstances of life change.

You can easily nitpick my definition of self by arguing that you are actually many things, including your DNA, your body, your mind, you environment and more. By that view, you're more of a soup than a single ingredient. I'll grant you the validity of that view. But I'll argue that the most powerful point of view is that you are what you learn.

It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Suppose you don't like your social life. You can learn how to be the sort of person that attracts better friends. Don't like your body? You can learn how to eat right and exercise until you have a new one. You can even learn how to dress better and speak in more interesting ways.

I credit my late mother for my view of learning. She raised me to believe I could become whatever I bothered to learn. No single idea has served me better.

I would put down Scott Adams' "definition" as an 'aspirational' definition of self. Its purpose is to motivate you to learn and grow. In reality, you are something quite different from what you "learn". I had that driven home to me when my mother developed a brain tumour and the operation to remove it was botched by an incompetent (but licensed) surgeon. It left her with left neglect and other cognitive impairments (she couldn't visually distinguish me from my brother but she could tell by listening and by using deduction, e.g. the clothes we wore who was who). She was still "my mother" but a big chunk of her was gone.

What that hammered home is that we are a meat machine. You mess up the brain tissue and you change "you" into something else. The religious nuts can talk about soul and an afterlife and other fantasies, but the reality is that we have one life in this world in this body and if the body is broken we change and if the body dies we are gone. It is a real mystery that matter can be alive. It is an even bigger mystery that matter can be self conscious. Life is a wondrous thing. I find it really disgusting that religious "know it alls" pound on a book and claim they have all the answers. Why they have is a blighted mind and a refusal to experience the mystery of life, this wonderful, brief gift we have, and the chance to interact with others using the mystery of our minds. Our being alive is truly mind-boggling. To demean this by pretending that some religious doctrine "comprehends" the meaning of life and "surpasses" mere mortal knowledge is disgusting. Life is too precious and wonderful to be captured by the scribblings of some religious fanatics.

A History Lesson

Here is an excellent post by Robert Reich on his blog:

The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America

A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.

We are going to battle once again.

Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we’re all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards.

They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s — the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the “rot” is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we’d be back in the late nineteenth century — before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the pure food and drug act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons — railroad, financial, and oil titans — ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America’s wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker’s wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers’ wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they’re conservative jurists. But they’re judicial activists bent on overturning seventy-five years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states’ rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.

Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.

Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.

In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.

Perhaps this is what’s beginning to happen again across America.

Now... if only the great majority of Americans would read the above. And hopefully they have enough common sense and enough historical knowledge to understand the truth of what Reich is saying. Sadly I worry that too many Americans live in a ghetto of like-minded fanatics unwilling to expose themselves to the wider world and new ideas. I worry that too many have been taught so many lies and are so hidebound because of their fanatical religious indoctrination that they are simply not open to the truth. Instead of simple process of putting America back onto the path of progress and improvement, this may require a utterly vicious "culture war" to retrieve minds lost to fanaticism and hate.

Sadly, I don't hold much hope for a "reawakening". I watched in the 1960s as people fought very, very hard to achieve civil rights, to stop a mindless war in Vietnam, to give rights to women and homosexuals. None of those battles was really won. Mostly the fanatics of that time died out. Nobody ever conceded defeat. There was no "enlightenment". In fact, the leaders of the political right in the US today would still fight the old battles of the "culture war". They are completely unreconstructed fanatics. That battle is now 50 years old. So the outlook for the US is pretty grim.

The Brave New World Imposed by the "Moral Majority"

The party of "family values" and Christian pietudes has struck again. Are they attacking the rich who Jesus said were less likely to make it to heaven than a camel make it through the eye of a needle? Nope!

The religious right has decided -- yet again -- to attack the poor. To take food from the mouths of impoverished mothers and children. Yes, the Bible thumpers have notched another victory on their belt.

Here's a bit from a post on Robert Reich's blog:

We dodged another shut-down bullet, but only until November 18. That’s when the next temporary bill to keep the government going runs out. House Republicans want more budget cuts as their price for another stopgap spending bill.

Among other items, Republicans are demanding major cuts in a nutrition program for low-income women and children. The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year.

What kind of country are we living in?

The pious are happy to rush to their churches and push to the front so that God will see them and be pleased with them. These devout souls know that God keeps tally and you show your piety by your bank account. If you give a dollar to the poor like Jesus preached, you lose favour with God, so why listen to the junior partner when the big man, God himself, is telling you to hoard your cash to show your devine favour? So the religious right calls for tax cuts and more tax cuts. This is the manna from heaven that will let them pile up the little green bills that show God's accounting. So what if women and children starve? That's their problem.

The devout are winning hearts and minds in America. Here's Reich's tally:

It gets worse. Most federal programs to help children and lower-income families are in the so-called “non-defense discretionary” category of the federal budget. The congressional super-committee charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion of cuts eight weeks from now will almost certainly take a big whack at this category because it’s the easiest to cut. Unlike entitlements, these programs depend on yearly appropriations.

Even if the super-committee doesn’t agree (or even if they do, and Congress doesn’t approve of their proposal) an automatic trigger will make huge cuts in domestic discretionary spending.

It gets even worse. Drastic cuts are already underway at the state and local levels. Since the fiscal year began in July, states no longer receive about $150 billion in federal stimulus money — money that was used to fill gaps in state budgets over the last two years.

The result is a downward cascade of budget cuts – from the federal government to state governments and then to local governments – that are hurting most Americans but kids and lower-income families in particular.

So far this year, 23 states have reduced education spending. According to a survey of city finance officers released Tuesday by the National League of Cities, half of all American cities face cuts in state aid for education.

I love the hypocrisy of the religious right. Their God is the god of Mammon and they literally love to serve their Master.

The New Trend in American Politics

Mark Thomas has a post on his Economist's View blog discussing the new trend in American politics:

The CBPP notices what may be a new trend:

Yet another state has proposed raising taxes on low-income residents to pay for new corporate tax breaks. Leading lawmakers in Missouri want to eliminate a property tax credit for low- and moderate-income seniors and people with disabilities in order to help finance new tax credits for businesses.

Sadly, swaps like this are increasingly common; both Michigan and Wisconsin have cut low-income programs this year to pay for business tax breaks.

The Missouri proposal, which the legislature will consider in a special session that begins today, would make renters ineligible for the state’s property tax “circuitbreaker” credit. Landlords generally pass along a large share of their property taxes to tenants in the form of higher rents; the circuitbreaker credit helps offset those higher rents for more than 100,000 low-income and disabled Missouri residents. ... Some 29 states offer property tax circuitbreakers or similar programs.

Killing this tax credit would raise taxes on some of Missouri’s most vulnerable residents by up to $750 a year. It would also hurt local retailers and other businesses, since low-income people are among those most likely to spend every dollar they have. That’s not a smart deal for Missouri.

It used to be that policymakers would try to shift income from higher to lower income individuals based upon the idea that the lower savings rate at lower incomes would stimulate demand (i.e. the MPC is higher at lower incomes, so transferring income in this way increases consumption). That is a demand-side argument.

...

The supply-side, trickle down argument from the GOP goes beyond the rich:

...Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told CNN yesterday that he’s visited with a lot of business people lately, and he’s learned they’re “actually afraid to hire people” because they’re “afraid of what the government will do to them.”

That’s awfully dumb — when Republicans find evidence of government punishing employers for hiring workers, they should let everyone know — but it was the next part of the interview that really stood out.

“I have talked to a lot of businesses in South Carolina who can’t get employees to come back to work because they are getting unemployment and they’re getting food stamps and they say, ‘Call me when unemployment runs out.’ […]

“There are a lot of people who desperately need it and we need to make sure that we have that safety net in place, but we also have to realize there are a lot of people gaming the system right now.”

I’m not sure which of DeMint’s talking points were supposed to believe — are employers afraid to hire or are they struggling with lazy people who won’t apply for openings? — but the rhetoric is a reminder that Republicans just don’t seem to like the unemployed.

In DeMint’s mind, the jobless are living it up on meager unemployed benefits, and don’t want to seek gainful employment.

Thus, instead of arguing that giving money to the unemployed helps to stimulate demand, and thereby boost sales and employment, the supply-sider's argument is that it makes the unemployed lazy. So we should take away all of that money and give it to the rich who, of course, deserve and earn every penny they get and will run out and invest it in new business ventures no matter how depressed the economy might be. It has nothing to do with the incentive to do what's best for the rich and powerful, it's what's best for the people whose programs get cut to fund these tax cuts for wealthy indiviuals and businesses.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

Mark Thoma has made the right wing politics of the US utterly clear. No more progressive taxes. No breaks for the guy on the bottom. The guy on the bottom will be taxed and taxed so more tax cuts can be engineering for the fat cats on top. Oh... and the politicians are getting more ridiculous in the "blame the victim" game by claiming that the unemployed are refusing to work because they are addicted to the "easy money" from unemployment. I guess those huge lines of tens of thousands showing up at the Black Caucus jobs fairs around the US weren't serious about finding a job. They went and stood in the hot summer sun for long hours just to get their jollies. That's the story of the right wing politicos.

What a mean-spirited, vicious country the US has become under the right wing. And the amazing thing is that the real heart of the Republican party are those evangelicals, the Bible-thumping Christians who apparently haven't opened their holy books to find what Jesus said about the poor (love them, give to them) and the rich (it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven). It is pretty clear to me that as the role of religion has grown in the right wing politics in the US, the right has gotten more mean-spirited and vicious in their treatment of the poor, the disadvantaged, the sick, etc. What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Getting a Handle on Your Place in the Universe

You are on this very tiny dot w-a-y, w-a-y over here...



The size and numbers are truly mind boggling. From Wikipedia:

The universe is immensely large and possibly infinite in volume. The region visible from Earth (the observable universe) is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, based on where the expansion of space has taken the most distant objects observed. For comparison, the diameter of a typical galaxy is only 30,000 light-years, and the typical distance between two neighboring galaxies is only 3 million light-years. As an example, our Milky Way Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter, and our nearest sister galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is located roughly 2.5 million light years away. There are probably more than 100 billion (10¹¹) galaxies in the observable universe. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million (10⁷) stars up to giants with one trillion (10¹²) stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Thus, a very rough estimate from these numbers would suggest there are around one sextillion (10²¹) stars in the observable universe; though a 2010 study by astronomers resulted in a figure of 300 sextillion (3×10²³).

What I find flabbergasting is that roughly a third the people on earth think that there is a "personal" God who sent his "son" to this one planet of the one-out-of-300-sextillion suns in the universe. Oh, and that this God personally transcribed the true history of the universe and put it into one thousand page book between 2 and 3 thousand years ago and that those trusty human copyists dutifully preserved the true words without error for over two thousand years (despite the historical fact that there are literally thousands of variant texts all claiming to be the "one true" transcription of God's word, and not counting later upstarts like Muhammad, Bahá'u'lláh, Joe Smith, David Koresh, etc. who claimed "additional" revelations). And that this God has contrived to make the universe which was "created" in 7 days look like it is 13.73 billion year old and that he bothered to place fossils in the earth and create geological formations that would deceive humans into seeing the earth as 4.54 billion years old when it is only 6,015 years old according to the very careful calculations of Bishop Ussher. Funny.

Pseudo-Science and the Subversion of Science

Magical thinking is wonderful. It lets me be all powerful, it lets me be the centre of the universe, it lets me find meanings behind the appearances. Unfortunately it isn't science. But it is very popular. Not just religious people but narcissist and the lazy minded enjoy developing their "understanding" of the universe via magical thinking.

Here a bit from a post by Carl Zimmer on his Discover Magazine blog talking about viruses and how magical thinking has gone from simply ignoring the science to trying to control the science:

A few months ago I was asked to give a couple talks to the skeptic community. Since I had just published a book about viruses, I decided to talk about the way myths so often crop up around them, and how a properly skeptical person should think about viruses. Over the centuries, viruses have been encircled by urban legends, superstitions, and conspiracy theories. The name “influenza” dates back to a time when European physicians believed the flu was due to the influence of the stars. More recently, HIV has been subject to all sorts of myths, from stories that it was created by the CIA to claims that it is not the cause of AIDS. The autism-vaccine controversy has been fueled in part by myths about viruses–namely, that the risk from vaccines is far greater than the risk from viruses like measles.

In my talks, I speculated that the very nature of viruses makes it easy for people to grab onto these kinds of explanations, and to reject scientific evidence that might argue against them. Viruses are the smallest living things on Earth, and yet they can have worldwide effects. They may only contain a few genes, yet they can hold their own against all of modern medicine. And the reality of viruses can seem downright unbelievable. Rabbits with horns may sound like yet another myth–but there’s some truth at the core of it. So it may be psychologically easy to endow viruses with extraordinary powers, or to deny them any power at all.

At the end of my talk, I told my audiences that we might be at the beginning of another one of these viral episodes. I described how a virus called XMRV had been recently linked to chronic fatigue, a debilitating condition that may affect 60 million people worldwide. Since the initial report, there had been some attempts to replicate the link, but they had failed. ...

... And today in the Guardian, Robin McKie reports that XMRV proponents are now issuing death threats to scientists who have done this research.

The scientists he talks to have some pretty startling things to say. A protestor shows up at a talk by a scientist, armed with a knife. A scientist backs out of a collaboration for fear of being shot.

I should say I take this article with a grain of salt. McKie writes that “according to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.” But the catalog of harassment he presents made up mainly of obnoxious emails. No one’s bombed a lab. And even if there are some people who are sending XMRV-related death threats, they could well just be a handful of people, rather than any sort of broad movement. In other words, I really hope that my prediction turns out to be wrong.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links and additional text.

Science is a great accomplishment of the modern era of civilization. It is the equivalent of the Egyptians building pyramids and of the Middle Age western Europeans building cathedrals. It is even more important because it provides real beneficial results. But like earlier cultural artifacts, it can disappear. The magical thinking crazies can bring it all to an end like the pyramids and cathedrals.

I worry a lot about the US. They have more religious nuts and extremist per square mile than any other country. I expect if science is to be snuffed out, it will first occur there.

A Change in Religion in the US

Here is a news release from the American Sociological Association highlighting a new trend where the less educated are leaving religion faster than the better educated:

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for those without college degrees compared to those who graduated from college, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping out of the American religious sector, similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market," said lead researcher W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

The study focuses on whites because black and Latino religiosity is less divided by education and income. Most whites who report a religious affiliation are Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Mormons, or Jews.

Relying on nationally representative data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth, the study finds that moderately educated whites—those who have a high school degree but who did not graduate from a 4-year college—attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as the most educated whites—those who at a minimum graduated from a 4-year college—but they attended at much lower frequencies in the 2000s.

The least educated white Americans—those who did not graduate from high school—attended religious services less frequently than both the moderately educated and most educated in the 1970s and that remained the case in the 2000s. "The least educated have been consistently less religiously engaged than even the moderately educated, meaning the gap between the least educated and most educated is even larger than the one between the moderately educated and most educated," Wilcox said.

This is contrary to the impression you get from the media where televangelists are still going strong.

If this trend holds, this should be positive for the society because it is the manipulation of the religious evangelicals by the Republican party which has enabled to get wave of greed, fraud, and crime that has brought the economy down.

I'm upbeat about this direction, but the researcher Wilcox is more negative:

Wilcox views this disengagement among the less educated as troubling because religious institutions typically provide their members with benefits—such as improved physical and psychological health, social networks, and civic skills—that may be particularly important for the less educated, who often lack the degree of access to social networks and civic skills that the college-educated have.

I can see the viewpoint, but I also believe that religion, especially frenzied popular religion like evangelicalism harbours a large number of predatory "preachers" who suck money out of their poor congregations. This withdrawal from religion may be a sign that people have caught on that they have been robbed by the religious leaders. This may be a sign that they are taking more responsibility for their own lives.

But I can see Wilcox's viewpoint:

Because less educated whites are now less likely to be stably employed, to earn a decent income, to be married with children, and to hold familistic views, it makes sense that they also do not as often attend services at religious institutions that continue to uphold conventional norms, Wilcox said.

Time will tell if this is a postive change or a negative one.

Thoughts on God

Here is your chance to find out what some really smart people think about the idea of "God"...


Speakers in order of appearance:

1. Lawrence Krauss, World-Renowned Physicist
2. Robert Coleman Richardson, Nobel Laureate in Physics
3. Richard Feynman, World-Renowned Physicist, Nobel Laureate in Physics
4. Simon Blackburn, Cambridge Professor of Philosophy
5. Colin Blakemore, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Neuroscience
6. Steven Pinker, World-Renowned Harvard Professor of Psychology
7. Alan Guth, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Physics
8. Noam Chomsky, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Linguistics
9. Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel Laureate in Physics
10. Peter Atkins, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Chemistry
11. Oliver Sacks, World-Renowned Neurologist, Columbia University
12. Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
13. Sir John Gurdon, Pioneering Developmental Biologist, Cambridge
14. Sir Bertrand Russell, World-Renowned Philosopher, Nobel Laureate
15. Stephen Hawking, World-Renowned Cambridge Theoretical Physicist
16. Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel Laureate in Physics
17. Ned Block, NYU Professor of Philosophy
18. Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Laureate in Physics
19. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford Professor of Mathematics
20. James Watson, Co-discoverer of DNA, Nobel Laureate
21. Colin McGinn, Professor of Philosophy, Miami University
22. Sir Patrick Bateson, Cambridge Professor of Ethology
23. Sir David Attenborough, World-Renowned Broadcaster and Naturalist
24. Martinus Veltman, Nobel Laureate in Physics
25. Pascal Boyer, Professor of Anthropology
26. Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge Professor of Economics
27. AC Grayling, Birkbeck Professor of Philosophy
28. Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in Physics
29. John Searle, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
30. Brian Cox, Particle Physicist (Large Hadron Collider, CERN)
31. Herbert Kroemer, Nobel Laureate in Physics
32. Rebecca Goldstein, Professor of Philosophy
33. Michael Tooley, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado
34. Sir Harold Kroto, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
35. Leonard Susskind, Stanford Professor of Theoretical Physics
36. Quentin Skinner, Professor of History (Cambridge)
37. Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Laureate in Physics
38. Mark Balaguer, CSU Professor of Philosophy
39. Richard Ernst, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
40. Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge Professor of Anthropology
41. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Princeton Research Scientist
42. Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Laureate in Physics
43. Hubert Dreyfus, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
44. Lord Colin Renfrew, World-Renowned Archaeologist, Cambridge
45. Carl Sagan, World-Renowned Astronomer
46. Peter Singer, World-Renowned Bioethicist, Princeton
47. Rudolph Marcus, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
48. Robert Foley, Cambridge Professor of Human Evolution
49. Daniel Dennett, Tufts Professor of Philosophy
50. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Journalism and Politics

Here is a key bit from a post by the economist Tim Harford on his blog:

If price is not the issue, then what we are really concerned about is that newspaper readers get access to informative news about the key issues of the day – the kind of thing upon which our democracy depends. But it is foolish to expect this from competition alone. Sadly, we do not value information about how to vote nearly as much as information about which car to buy. We probably value shots of celebs in swimwear more than either.

True, competition can encourage certain kinds of quality journalism. For instance, the economists Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow have pointed out that certain stories – of abuses by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, for instance – are promoted by media pluralism. CBS had the story and sat on it at the request of the US government (the story was said to be dangerous to US hostages) before broadcasting after it became clear that the story would emerge in The New Yorker.

But competition also promotes gutter journalism and it probably promotes opinionated journalism, too. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s hugely influential TV news channel, seems to have become popular by staking out ground as the source of right-wing rabble-rousing, and MSNBC has gained ground as it has moved to the left. Competitive markets give people what they want rather than what is good for them.

Gentzkow and Shapiro have studied this question in the US. Using an objective (if imperfect) measure of bias, they found that newspapers closely match the political biases of their potential readers, as measured by votes cast in the 2004 presidential election, and by the source of campaign contributions to each party. No doubt the causation runs both ways, but one striking result is that the proprietor’s identity seems to make no difference to the bias. The media barons tell us what we wish to hear.

The most disturbing aspect of the phone-hacking scandal, it seems to me, is the reluctance of politicians to challenge Murdoch’s empire, and in particular its cosy relationship with the police. If more competition dispels that sense of fear in future, it will be all to the good. But don’t expect every journalist to suddenly start working on the next Watergate.

I worry most about the media acting as a microphone for fanatics. Seems to me the 1920s & 30s were an era where fanatics came to power through their control of the media. That led to WWII and a huge loss of life and a real setback for civilization. Currently we are 20 years into a war of "ideas" from fanatical fundamentalist Muslim terrorists (and on a smaller scale, but still very deadly, from fundamentalist Christian terrorists, witness Norway's mass killings).

I don't have any solutions, but I was thinking this morning of how we now put warning labels on cigarette packages along with graphic pictures to shock people. I'm thinking we probably should require by law that similar signs be put up on religious buildings warning people that the ideas propagated by the religious -- especially the fundamentalists -- can be very hazardous to their health, but even more hazardous to the innocent victims of their cruel "religious" acts.

OK, I know that 99% of religious people are reasonable, gentle, moral people, but there is something crazy at the heart of religion and it needs to be tamed. I don't know how, but we should at least talk about it. Ultimately you can't stop the determined crazy person, but we should find techniques to limit their ability to spew hate-filled speech. The media is a good place to start. I find Fox "News" to be offensive. I can't link any killings to their crazy distortion of reality, but I worry that they are spreading the seeds of fanaticism.

Again, I have no answers. Maybe the only answer is for civilization to stagger on hoping to get to happier times when the fanatics thin out and the wider population can relax and stop worrying about madmen attacking from out of the blue over some crazed idea of "injustice" or "mandate of heaven" or whatever.

Religious Freedom in China, Reaching a New High

Only a state which is run by a secluded gerontocracy with no external constraint on them can come up with this kind of insanity. From an article in the Sunday Times:

Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing’s authority over Tibet’s restive and deeply Buddhist people.

“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid,” according to the order, which comes into effect on September 1.

It is good to know that China's leaders can so elegantly do two things:

1. Show a complete disregard for the laws of nature and the laws of logic by supposing that they can "pass laws" to control reincarnation (something that doesn't happen if you are a non-beliver and which can't be stopped by government decree if you are a believer).


2. Show a complete disregard for human rights and religious freedoms. They are showing that Maoist "thought control" and repression are still preferred governing techniques in China.

Why Humans are Suckers for Doomsday Beliefs

Here's a bit from an essay by Michael Shermer in the New Scientist magazine:

Emotionally, the end of the world is actually a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. In religious narratives, God smites sinners and resurrects the virtuous. For secularists, the sins of humanity are atoned through a change in our political, economic or ideological system. Environmental prognostications of calamity are usually followed with reproaches and recommendations for how we can save the planet. Marxists projected communism as the liberating climax of a multistage process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Proponents of liberal democracy proclaimed the end of history when the cold war was won by democracy and liberty.

Most recently, the US Tea Party's messiah is John Galt, one of the heroes of Ayn Rand's apocalyptic novel Atlas Shrugged (recently adapted into a movie) who leads a strike by the men of the mind, forcing civilisation to collapse into anarchy - only for the heroes to resurrect an "Atlantis" on Earth. As Galt and co-hero Dagny Taggart fly over the shattered ruins of a once-great civilisation now darkened into a charred landscape, Taggart proclaims, "It's the end." No, Galt rejoins, "It's the beginning."

Cognitively, there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains are pattern-seeking belief engines. Consider this evolutionary thought experiment. You are a hominid on the plains of Africa 3 million years ago. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous predator? If you assume it is a predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made what is called a type I error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. You connected A, the rustle in the grass, to B, a dangerous predator, but no harm. On the other hand, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind but it turns out that it is a dangerous predator, you have made a type II error in cognition, also known as a false negative, or believing something is not real when it is. You failed to connect A to B, and in this case you're lunch.

The problem is that assessing the difference between a type I and type II error is highly problematic in the split second that often determined the difference between life and death in our ancestral environments, so the default position is to assume that all patterns are real; in other words, assume that all rustles in the grass are predators. Thus, there was a natural selection for the cognitive process of assuming that all patterns are real.

Apocalypse thinking is a form of pattern-seeking based on our cognitive percepts of time passing.

Go read the whole article.

Here's Shermer's bottom line:

Apocalyptic visions also help us make sense of an often seemingly senseless world. In the face of confusion and annihilation we need restitution and reassurance. We want to feel that no matter how chaotic, oppressive or evil the world is, all will be made right in the end. The apocalypse as history's end is made acceptable with the belief that there will be a new beginning.

I think he has got it right. I never cease to be amazed by easily people are suckered into thinking that some trend heralds "the end", a big crash, doom, annihilation, etc. I guess I'm an oddball. My approach to life is a muddling middle of the road approach. I think the truth is generally in the grey between stark black or white views of things. I expect tomorrow will most likely be like today. I look at the long stretch of history and see that peoples have been some horrendous history, so I'm expecting we will survive the latest calamity. This makes me boring. But it means I'm not subject to joining cults or suddenly selling everything and running for the hills with the latest survivalist fad.

I even remember the late 1960s "back to the earth" movement and thought it ridiculous because two generations in my past were farmers and I knew how hard it was to scratch a living "off the land". But a fair number of hippies decided that the world wasn't going to blossom into the expected "Age of Aquarius" so they packed up and moved into communes for a few years, starving, wretched, until they had enough and snuck back to the towns and cities.

I watch religion being package and sold by a preacher in my family. He was good. He could have been a Hollywood actor, great drama in his voice, ability to let the tears flow. Women loved him. Men admired him. He was a bit of a star and was used by the church to go into areas to build up congregations. But I watched and saw how religion was a "business". I caught on that there are a lot of people who love hell fire and damnation preaching. They loved that "anger of the Lord" stuff. They loved the "end of days" preaching. While I watched that I learned to become cynical.

I think you are better off assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like today with some veering toward better or worse. But don't get sold into doomsday scenarios:

• Zero population growth and "the population bomb" in the 60s telling us we were doomed and there would be mass starvation.


• Modern Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich were selling droughts and the inability to grow more food and predicting great famines by the 1980s.


• The Club of Rome published "Limits to Growth" and showed impressive "models" that clearly predicted we would run out of resources and civilization would collapse before the end of the millennium.


• The rise of oil prices convinced many that oil was a disappearing resource and by the end of the millennium all cars would be banned and our technological fossil fuel based economy would collapse.


• The 1980s were famous for predictions of a nuclear winter because of nuclear weapons. That had a positive benefit in getting arms reduction talks going, but later studies showed that the "winter" was oversold by Carl Sagan because the "models" were wonky.


• The 1970s and 1980s ran hot with fears of emergent diseases. That has caused a number of panics including the "swine flu", SARS, the bird flu, ebola, and other emergent hemorrhagic fevers.


• The year 2000 was notable because the Y2K bug was supposed to cause all computers to fail and civilization to collapse. This was very popular with survivalists.


• With the rise of right wing politics and tragic events like the Waco attack by ATF as well as the Ruby Ridge attack by ATF, crazy "militias" were spawned all over the US convinced there was a left wing conspiracy to invoke UN-domination of the US.


• With Al Qaeda and the 2001 attack the right wing militias were again stirred up and a lot of people were convinced that there were "secret Muslims" in America that were running the government and trying to bring Sharia law to America

That's just an "off the top of my head" list of doomsday craziness. It doesn't even consider the religious doomsday cults like Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, the Heaven's Gate cult, and the recent Harold Camping prediction of "end times".

Belief in Math

This is a wonderful spoof of empty-headed beauty pageant "interviews". But instead of asking what they most wanted ("world peace"), this video speculates on what you would get if you asked "Should math be taught in schools?"



When a beauty queen tells me that she doesn't "believe in math" I sit up and pay attention. And when another tells me that math is "only a theory" and isn't what the Bible tells us therefore it shouldn't be taught in American school, then I know they are onto something big, really big.

I'm guessing America should now be preparing to "reform" its school system and remove all that "belief-based math" and replace it with real, hard facts, Bible-based facts. Oh, and teach more of the sounds, smells, and vibrations stuff. That's just so much more fun than that stodgy old "mathy" stuff.

Glory hallelujah! Religion is going to help free Americans from the cruel domination of "math". God speed the day of our salvation!


By the way... If you want to see the real 2011 Miss USA contestants, try this web page.

If you do want to hear the idiocies of genuine Miss America 2011 contestants ruminating over the tough question of "Should evolution be taught in schools?" watch this...



You can see how the spoof in the first video took some liberties with the idea of "empty-headed beauty queen", but the second video should reassure you, that idea isn't a myth. These women really are only loosely connected to reality. And it is so lovely to see that they clasp religion so closely to their breasts... oh, I mean "bosom".

Brad DeLong Offers a Religious Lesson

Funny. Brad DeLong is a University of California Berkeley economics professor, but here in his blog he is giving a religious lesson. And, he does an excellent job!

It really looks as though originally the God YHWH had a wife: Asherah, Queen of Heaven, She Who Treads the Sea. We see her as late as the time of Jeremiah:

Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven!

Jeremiah does not like this.

He and his theological allies changed Judaism, ripping YHWH's wife out of the religion: no more Queen of Heaven. (Later on the Yeshuan Heresy was to bring the Queen of Heaven back, kinda-sorta, but that is another story...)

Now comes Jeffrey Goldberg continuing his snitfest against Alison Benedikt, this time for daring to alter the Haggadah:

Who is the Wicked Son?: Benedikt linked, in this repellent rebuttal, to an Amazon page featuring all manner of Haggadot, ostensibly to prove that all sorts of people write their own seder service. This, of course, is true, but what people generally don't do is "delete" the unpleasant bits. They explain and analyze them, but they don't delete. I wanted to make sure I was correct in thinking that Benedikt was doing something un-Jewish by deleting sections of the Haggadah...

Seems to me that it is the essence of all religions to change over time. It is what they do...

Sadly, religious traditionalists (and even more strenuously religious fundamentalists) don't understand the very nature of their own religions, i.e. they are an expression of a people's understanding cast into a religious experience, i.e. text, services, traditions, pageantry. And as such, they are bound to change as the community of religious believers change and as the society around them changes and as the world around that changes. What evolutionary theory teaches is that to be static is to die. Life is a dynamic process. A living religion is a dynamic process.

I'm 100% behind Allison Benedikt when she stands her ground and affirms her shaping of her own religion: "I am Jewish, you mother fucker. And I'm not unique." That is the perfect reply to somebody "standing on authority" and trying to define her. She will define herself. That is what people and communities have done throughout history!

I like the viewpoint of Rabbi Andy Bachman. Here are the key bits:

The cyber-argument that is taking place at Goldblog, between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic (and soon Tablet) and Village Voice editor Allison Benedikt, presents two classic symptoms of the current problem about American Jews talking about Israel.

Allison's original piece, "Life After Zionist Summer Camp," appeared in Awl and you can read it here.

Jeffrey responded to the piece with his own take, calling it "Giving Up on the Zionist Dream." You can read it here.

...

The Sages have another teaching on the number 4 that is worth remembering. At Sukkot, the holiday that commemorates our Exodus from Egypt and journey to Freedom in the Land of Israel, we are commanded to hold in our hands 4 species--a lulav (which produces sweet dates), myrtle (a sweet fragrance), an etrog (fragrance and taste) and willow (which has neither taste nor fragrance.) One represents the Jew who learns; another is the Jew who does good deeds; a third is one who learns and does good deeds. And the 4th -- the willow -- does neither. But we hold all 4 together because we are diverse and most strong when we are united.

I see Bachman's view as that of a healthy dynamic that stresses unity within the community in accepting divergent viewpoints. That makes for the strongest community and it means they are more likely to already incorporate the variants which most successfully will adapt to the future.

By the way, for those not in the know: the "Yeshuan Heresy" is Christianity and DeLong is hinting that the Queen of Heaven has been resurrected in the image of the Holy Mother, Mary.

My only complaint about DeLong is that he doesn't always take time to make sure everybody can understand his arguments. As a "prof" he is given to erudite statements that fly over the heads of the unwashed. But how will the unwashed become washed if nobody stops to lend them a towel and a basin of water?

The Beam in Your Own Eye

I love stories about religious figures, especially when they so obviously flaunt their ignorance of the essentials of their own religion.

Take Matthew 7:5

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

This admonition by Jesus isn't holding back a New York Catholic archbishop as Maureen Dowd points out in her NY Times op-ed column:

With his cigars, blogs, Jameson’s and Irish affability, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan prides himself on his gumption.

Certainly his effort to kill the gay marriage bill, just one vote away from passing in Albany, shows a lot of gall.

The archbishop has been ferocious in fighting against marriage between same-sex couples, painting it as a perversity against nature.

If only his church had been as ferocious in fighting against the true perversity against nature: the unending horror of pedophile priests and the children who trusted them.

In the second-generation round of the Church vs. Cuomo, Archbishop Dolan is pitted against Andrew Cuomo, the Catholic governor who is fiercely pushing for New York to become the sixth and most populous state to approve gay marriage.

I guess in the archbishop's ranking of sins 'buggering a child' is less harmful than a 'same-sex marriage'. Go figure! My problem is that in the first case, you are wrecking a kids life, a little kid who doesn't understand what is being done to him by a calculating "man of the cloth". In the latter, you have two consenting adults who want to have a public acknowledgement of their relationship.

I'm amazed that the Catholic church manages to keep its churches full while it persists in its bizarre medieval world view of male-only priests, woman-hating morally simplistic anti-abortion crusades, and their refusal to address the rampant criminal behaviour of its own priests. But what do I know? Obviously I'm not "talking to the big fella upstairs" who seems to approve of this kind of sleazy behaviour. Certainly Jimmy Swaggart was living proof that God loves a boozing, skirt-chasing, sinning hypocrite.

It is hard to believe that the Catholic church has much of a future when:

The church refuses to acknowledge the hypocrisy at its heart: that it became a haven for gay priests even though it declares homosexual sex a sin, and even though it lobbies to stop gays from marrying.

In yet another attempt at rationalization, the nation’s Catholic bishops — a group Dolan is now in charge of — put out a ridiculous five-year-study last month going with the “blame Woodstock” explanation for the sex-abuse scandal. The report suggested that the problem was caused by permissive secular society rather than cloistered church culture, because priests were trained in the turbulent free-love era. It concluded, absurdly, that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were causes.

In another resistance to reform, the bishops voted on Thursday to keep their policies on sexual abuse by the clergy largely the same, with only small revisions, ignoring victims’ advocates who were hoping for meaningful changes.

At their meeting in Bellevue, Wash., one retired archbishop from Anchorage actually proposed an amendment to get rid of the “zero tolerance” provision on abuse so some guilty priests could return to parishes. That failed, at least.

I have no problem with religious communities setting standards within their community for their own members. But I have a real problem when minorities living in a pluralistic society become politically active in order to impose their own twisted logic on the larger community. That's when I start quoting Matthew 7:5.

I love Dowd's humourous twist on things:

Worn out by the rampant sexting of Anthony Weiner and the relentless blogging of Archbishop Dolan, I’m wondering if our institutions need to rejigger: Maybe pols should be celibate and priests should be married.