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Setbacks For The Wisconsin Republican Agenda

March 13th, 2012

This has been a notably bad week for Wisconsin Republicans. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess issued a strongly-worded permanent injunction against the voter ID (otherwise known as “voter suppression”) law, writing-

…voter fraud is no more poisonous to our democracy than voter suppression… A government that undermines the very foundation of its existence – the people’s inherent, pre-constitutional right to vote – imperils its legitimacy as a government by the people, for the people, and especially of the people.

Niess is the second Dane County circuit judge to issue an injunction against the law; Judge David Flanagan had previously granted a temporary injunction in response to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP’s Milwaukee branch. Flanagan, however, has been criticized for his having signed a recall petition against Governor Walker. No such charge of bias has been raised against Niess.

Speaking of recall elections, Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board ordered recall elections against all four GOP senators that had been targeted in the petition drive, and same order is expected soon for Governor Walker and Lieutenant Governor Kleefisch-

The Government Accountability Board voted unanimously to agree with GAB staff members’ findings that enough valid signatures were filed against all four senators and recalls against Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and three other GOP senators should go forward.

The board also voted to ask a judge for an extension from March 19 to March 30 for its deadline to order the elections, meaning the recall primary could be held on May 8 and the general recall election on June 5. With no extension granted, the recalls would need to happen on May 1 and May 29. The GAB will ask Dane County Judge Richard Niess for the extension at a hearing Wednesday.

Recall elections against Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch are also expected to go forward.

On Monday, Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel of the GAB, said that about 930,000 signatures were filed against Walker. The GAB said nearly 26,000 had been struck so far, and some 905,000 valid signatures appear to have been filed. Recall organizers had said that number was more than 1 million.

Later Monday, the GAB said that of the 842,860 filed against Kleefisch, there were 813,735 found to be valid. The board’s staff continues to search for duplicate signatures.

The numbers reported so far targeting Walker and Kleefisch are far higher than the 540,208 valid signatures required to trigger recalls.

No recall elections of Democrats seem to be on the horizon.

Finally, a large rally in Madison over the weekend suggests that many Wisconsinites remain enthusiastically committed to the recall efforts-

Thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from office.

An estimated 35,000 people, including many members of public employee unions who lost nearly all their collective bargaining rights because of the Republican-backed law, chanted, drummed and waved anti-Walker signs. It was a re-enactment of a scene that played out daily in some form or another in the weeks leading up to the decisive vote.

“We’re baaaack!” Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, told the crowd at the Capitol Square, eliciting a roar of approval. Neuenfeldt, whose union organized the rally, said Walker has sold out Wisconsin residents to benefit big business, and he called those gathered to redouble their efforts to recall Walker from office.

Of course, the same electorate that swept Republicans into power 14 months ago could rise up to save the six targeted politicians, as a recent poll suggests-

Most Wisconsin voters approve of the job embattled Governor Scott Walker is doing and oppose the effort to recall him from office before the next election.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 52% of Likely Wisconsin Voters at least somewhat approve of Walker’s job performance to date, while 46% at least somewhat disapprove. These findings include 40% who Strongly Approve of how the Republican governor is doing and just as many (40%) who Strongly Disapprove.

However, these results no doubt reflect the huge number of pro-Walker political ads that the Governor started running months ago. Whether they will hold up or not when the electioneering gears up on the Democratic side, no one knows. But for political junkies, the next couple of months promise to be quite a ride.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

Living In The Anthropocene Era

March 4th, 2012

Given the dim-witted ignorance of science currently being manifested by prominent Republicans (from Rick Santorum’s cynical climate-change denial to Rush Limbaugh’s obvious misconceptions of how the birth control pill works), it was refreshing to read a story this week in a magazine as popular as Time outlining very concisely the influence billions of human beings are having on the natural world-

For a species that has been around for less than 1% of 1% of the earth’s 4.5 billion-year history, Homo sapiens has certainly put its stamp on the place. Humans have had a direct impact on more than three-quarters of the ice-free land on earth. Almost 90% of the world’s plant activity now takes place in ecosystems where people play a significant role. We’ve stripped the original forests from much of North America and Europe and helped push tens of thousands of species into extinction. Even in the vast oceans, among the few areas of the planet uninhabited by humans, our presence has been felt thanks to overfishing and marine pollution. Through artificial fertilizers – which have dramatically increased food production and, with it, human population – we’ve transformed huge amounts of nitrogen from an inert gas in our atmosphere into an active ingredient in our soil, the runoff from which has created massive aquatic dead zones in coastal areas. And all the C02 that the 7 billion-plus humans on earth emit is rapidly changing the climate – and altering the very nature of the planet.

Human activity now shapes the earth more than any other independent geologic or climatic factor. Our impact on the planet’s surface and atmosphere has become so powerful that scientists are considering changing the way we measure geologic time. Right now we’re officially living in the Holocene epoch, a particularly pleasant period that started when the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. But some scientists argue that we’ve broken into a new epoch that they call the Anthropocene: the age of man. “Human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth is already an undeniable reality,” writes Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who first popularized the term Anthropocene. “It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”

To carry this line of reasoning one step further: with the advent of genetic engineering and the growing understanding of human psychology and neurology, it is also we who might decide what human nature will be. That old Existentialist adage, “existence precedes essence,” used to apply just to one’s own self-understanding; the suggestion was that, from the subjective viewpoint of lived experience, one first finds oneself existing, and then discovers that one’s “essence” or “nature” follows from what one chooses to do. But now it appears that this might soon become true not just from a subjective point of view, but also from an objective, scientific one: it seems that not only human nature, but also nature itself has become our responsibility. And given our track-record up to now, this should certainly cause some angst.

Posted in Science/Technology | 2 Comments »

This Is Not A Motion Picture

February 21st, 2012

Let your eyes wonder freely over the image below. Do you see it moving? Click on the image to see a larger, more effective version-

There is nothing moving in this image, as you can see when you stare fixedly at any given portion. For many more revealing illustrations of the visual system’s usually hidden complexity, visit MichaelBach.de.

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Philosophical Quote Of The Day

February 18th, 2012

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311)

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Santorum: Academia, Protestantism, and Politics Have All Fallen To Satan!

February 16th, 2012

Well, this is pretty remarkable. It’s not news that Republicans these days are obsessed with outing crafty devils. First there was Rick Perry, who held a prayer rally with the New Apostolic Reformation, a group completely convinced that major American cities are in dire need of (literal) demon-cleansing. But mere demons are too small-time for Rick Santorum: Satan himself, he sincerely believes, is behind the fall of many of our most important institutions: academia, mainstream Protestantism (the Catholic Church having so far been spared, thank God), and politics. Being from academia myself, I can tell you that if I’ve sold my soul to the devil, the horned one has cut me a raw deal – so far I’ve received nothing for my precious soul but pay cuts and committee work.

In any case, if after listening to this excerpt from Santorum’s 2008 speech at Ave Maria University you’re not scared $#%@less at the thought of this guy actually becoming President of the United States, you’re taking way too many meds-

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

…

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.

…

The fourth, and this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too.

Posted in Irrationality, Politics | 5 Comments »

Climate Change’s Closing Door

February 15th, 2012

The Guardian reported last November that, judging by “the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure”, we likely have little more than five years left to put a lid on carbon emissions before losing the chance of avoiding serious climate change. Although I’ve never been tempted to doubt the scientific consensus on climate change, I think I’ve been relying on wishful thinking to avoid feeling too anxious about it (probably like almost everyone else), but I’ve got to admit that these warnings are starting to get to me-

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this “lock-in” effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world’s foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.

“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”

If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.

If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations

Funny, I don’t remember hearing about the IEA report via American mass media, although given how little time they spend on reporting scientific findings, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. I’m still patiently waiting for an intrepid reporter at one of the zillion Republican debates to challenge Rick Santorum on his explicit climate change denial in the face of the ever mounting evidence. He did say recently: “You hear all the time, the left – ‘Oh, the conservatives are the anti-science party.’ No we’re not. We’re the truth party.” Surely that invites a polite question on what he means by “the truth” here, and how he would go about establishing it…

By the way, lest you think that the IEA is some liberal advocacy group whose studies can’t be trusted, it’s actually an international organization with 28 member states, including all of the following-

Posted in Mass Media, Science/Technology | Comments Off

Incendies

February 12th, 2012

I finally got around to watching Denis Villeneuve’s excellent film “Incendies”, based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play. The tag line on IMDB reads: “Twins journey to the Middle East to discover their family history, and fulfill their mother’s last wishes.” It would be best not to investigate the plot further if you’re interested in watching it – let it unfold for you as it does for the twins. The film plays like a Greek tragedy (actually, a particular one, at least from the point of view of one of the apparently minor characters), set, via flashbacks, in the insanity of a sectarian war (clearly Lebanon some thirty years ago, but Villeneuve transparently obscures that fact, perhaps to underline the ultimate message’s universality). I advise not watching it right before going to bed, unless you want to wake up early in the morning thinking about it without being able to fall back asleep (if you were able to fall asleep in the first place). The plot is both completely ridiculous and, on reflection, completely plausible – which is what makes it, in the end, unforgettable. Here’s the trailer-

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Stew And The Negro Problem’s New Album: “Making It”

February 9th, 2012

I had the pleasure of meeting Stew (AKA Mark Stewart) on his recent visit to UW Oshkosh, where several departments (including, I’m happy to say, the Philosophy department) had invited him to talk to students and faculty about his unique approach to art, music, and life. I’ve met a lot of “artists” in my time, mostly during my years as a musician in Los Angeles, but Stew is one of the few that I think deserves the title without the scare-quotes. He’s one of a rare breed that’s becoming rarer as the musical eclecticism of the 1970s fades into the ever-thickening fog of baby-boomer memory: a pop-rock-singer-songwriter with a unique voice and style. Here’s a song (entitled “The Curse”) off the new album, which he wrote with his ex-partner, bassist/vocalist Heidi Rodewald, about the breakup of their relationship during the Broadway production of their award-winning musical “Passing Strange” a few years ago. The photos of famous L.A. locales – with fleeting images of Frank Zappa and the two Captains (Kangaroo and Beefheart) tossed in for good measure – don’t seem related to the clever lyrics, but they probably have biographical significance for Stew, who grew up in the City of Angels during the 60s and 70s. And since I lived there for 25 years myself, they certainly tickle my nostalgia-bone a bit.

By the way, Stew talks about the new album in an interview with Terry Gross (on Fresh Air) here.

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Would Plato Have Loved The Bossa Nova?

February 4th, 2012

The Boston Review has an interesting article on a recent law passed in Brazil that mandates the teaching of philosophy to high school students-

Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.

Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years.

“But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic, the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege. Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents. To foster that discussion, Ribeiro must take on a deeply rooted political defeatism. …

…the 2008 law is above all a political project. In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy’s potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil’s Social and Political Organization (“to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals,” one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).

The official rationale for the 2008 law is that philosophy “is necessary for the exercise of citizenship.” The law—the world’s largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere—thus represents an experiment in democracy. Among teachers at least, many share Ribeiro’s hope that philosophy will provide a path to greater civic participation and equality. Can it do even more? Can it teach students to question and challenge the foundations of society itself?

(Thanks Marshall)

Most of the philosophy professors I know would be overjoyed if philosophy – at least the history of ideas, critical reasoning, and introductory ethics – were taught in U.S. high schools. Could this be done in a country as anti-intellectual as the United States?

By the way, contrary to Brazilian creativity, Plato was no fan of musical innovation, as this excerpt from The Republic suggests:

Then to sum up: This is the point to which, above all, the attention of our rulers should be directed,–that music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard

‘The newest song which the singers have,’

they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited.

Posted in Education, Philosophy | Comments Off

A Sad Sign Of The Times

February 3rd, 2012

Of Wisconsin guns and politics, as reported by the Chicago Tribune…

The Republican lawmaker who presides over the state Assembly said Friday he’s been carrying a concealed weapon during floor sessions.

Speaker Pro Tem Bill Kramer, of Waukesha, essentially controls the chamber during debate, presiding over procedures and controlling the debate. He also can order spectators out of the chamber if he so chooses.

He told The Associated Press that he obtained permit No. 16,657 under Wisconsin’s new concealed carry law in November. He said he has carried a hidden Glock 26, a subcompact semi-automatic, onto the floor at times.

He said he feels he needs the weapon given the toxic atmosphere at the state Capitol, and he’s not the only lawmaker packing in the chamber.

…

Republicans decided last year to allow lawmakers in the Assembly and Senate to carry concealed weapons. The GOP chose to allow them in the Assembly’s galleries but banned them in the Senate’s galleries.

So it seems that the Wisconisn GOP values the lives of state senators over those of state representatives…

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The Value Of Liberal Arts Skills

January 27th, 2012

An interesting article in USA Today reports on a study confirming the intuition that the sorts of skills honed by – or at least needed to do well in – a liberal arts education gives people a leg up in life:

Recent college graduates who as seniors scored highest on a standardized test to measure how well they think, reason and write — skills most associated with a liberal arts education — were far more likely to be better off financially than those who scored lowest, says the survey, released Wednesday by the Social Science Research Council, an independent organization.

It found that students who had mastered the ability to think critically, reason analytically and write effectively by their senior year were:

•Three times less likely to be unemployed than those who hadn’t (3.1% vs. 9.6%).

•Half as likely to be living with their parents (18% vs. 35%).

•Far less likely to have amassed credit card debt (37% vs. 51%).

Grades and other factors influence a student’s chances of success, too. Graduates of colleges with tougher admissions standards tended to have fewer debts and were less likely to live with their parents, the study found.

A report this month by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which studies the labor-market value of college degrees, found that recent graduates with a bachelor’s degree in architecture had the highest average jobless rate (13.9%, vs. 8.9% for all recent college graduates). Education and health care majors had some of the lowest jobless rates.

The findings released Wednesday “show something new and different,” says lead author Richard Arum, a New York University professor. “Students would do well to appreciate the extent to which their development of general skills, not just majors and institution attended, is related to successful adult transitions.”

This is likely be a morale-boost for many university professors, who tend to feel under-appreciated and certainly underpaid. Unfortunately, there is no data on whether those high-scoring students picked up their liberal arts skills in college, or whether they’d already entered college with them-

Arum also cautions that the study doesn’t speak to whether high-scoring graduates picked up their skills while in college. It follows up on research last year showing that 36% of college graduates showed few or no gains in learning between their freshman and senior years.

It would be nice to know what proportion of that 36% showing few or no gains in learning over their college years were in the high-scoring group, and whether the sort of learning tested in that previous study focused on skills or discipline-specific knowledge; without this further information, little can be inferred from the juxtaposition of the two studies.

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Image Of The Day: Dali and Rhino

January 15th, 2012

Dali & Rhino, Phillippe Halsman, 1952

I don’t know… it certainly says something to me…

(Thanks Berry)

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier… Iranian Scientist?

January 12th, 2012

In case you haven’t heard, another Iranian scientist who was perhaps working on nuclear issues has been killed in Tehran. Reuters reports-

TEHRAN, Jan 12 (Reuters) – An Iranian nuclear scientist was blown up in his car by a motorbike hitman, prompting Tehran to blame Israeli and U.S. agents but insist the killing would not derail a nuclear programme that has raised fears of war and threatened world oil supplies.

The fifth daylight attack on technical experts in two years, the magnetic bomb delivered a targeted blast to the door of 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan’s car during Wednesday’s morning rush-hour. The chemical engineer’s driver also died, Iranian media said, and a passer-by was slightly hurt.

Israel, whose military chief said on Tuesday that Iran could expect to suffer more mysterious mishaps, declined comment. The White House, struggling for Chinese and Russian help on economic sanctions, denied any U.S. role and condemned the attack.

While Israeli or Western involvement seemed eminently plausible to independent analysts, a role for local Iranian factions or other regional interests engaged in a deadly shadow war of bluff and sabotage could not be ruled out.

That last paragraph, which grudgingly admits that there are at least two competing explanations, is to Reuters’ credit. All of the pundits I’ve heard discussing this homicide have simply assumed that Israel is responsible, given the circumstantial evidence: targeted assassinations fit Israel’s modus operandi, and no doubt there is a continuous covert war ongoing between Israel and at least Iran’s proxies. But, having seen Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy recently, I can’t help but wonder…

Normally I deride conspiratorial thinking, but in this case I’ll make an exception, just to make a point. Has it struck anyone as odd that the Israeli defense minister apparently telegraphed this killing the day before it happened? Might it not have given the Iranians (or some Iranian faction) the opportunity to kill Ahmadi-Roshan and conveniently blame it on Israel? But why, you ask, would the Iranians kill their own scientist? Well, who knows? Maybe they suspected him of spying for Israel, the U.S., or some Sunni Arab state (the Sunnis fear the Iranian mullahs almost as much as Israel does). Or maybe he was not particularly valuable to them, and they killed him just for the sake of further driving a wedge between Israel and the West? Almost all the pundits, after suggesting that Israel was the likely culprit, go on to point out that a strategy of killing scientists, besides being morally reprehensible, is hardly likely to slow down Iran’s nuclear program much, and it gives Iran a huge propaganda advantage. But they fail to draw the obvious conclusion: that maybe – just maybe – Israel didn’t do it.

So we have at least two competing, somewhat plausible (and somewhat implausible) possibilities here, but so far no firm evidence for either of them. My point is not that we should believe that the Iranians did it; that would be nearly as irrational as, say, the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Rather, it is that we should feel comfortable putting neither forth as even “probable”, at least without further information.

Could someone please tell the pundits that?

Posted in International, Mass Media | Comments Off

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet…

January 9th, 2012

…that IS the question, these days. And although I’m not one to partake of the latest internet fad (just search this blog for my posts on Facebook), I’ve taken to announcing my Blog Here Now posts on Twitter. May the Gods of unabbreviated writing have mercy on my semi-literate soul…

Follow me @herzberglarry.

Posted in Daily Post, Internet | Comments Off

We Might As Well Be Cars

January 9th, 2012

USA Today had an interesting story a few days ago on the attitude of a growing number of Americans towards God, Religion, and Athesim: So What?.

Researchers have begun asking the kind of nuanced questions that reveal just how big the So What set might be:

•44% told the 2011 Baylor University Religion Survey they spend no time seeking “eternal wisdom,” and 19% said “it’s useless to search for meaning.”

•46% told a 2011 survey by Nashville-based evangelical research agency, LifeWay Research, they never wonder whether they will go to heaven.

•28% told LifeWay “it’s not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose.” And 18% scoffed at the idea that God has a purpose or plan for everyone.

•6.3% of Americans turned up on Pew Forum’s 2007 Religious Landscape Survey as totally secular — unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not important in their lives.

Hemant Mehta, who blogs as The Friendly Atheist, calls them the “apatheists”

Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C., calls them honest.

“We live in a society today where it is acceptable now to say that they have no spiritual curiosity. At almost any other time in history, that would have been unacceptable,” Budde says. She finds this “very sad, because the whole purpose of faith is to be a source of guidance, strength and perspective in difficult times. To be human is to have a sense of purpose, an awareness that our life is an utterly unique expression of creation and we want to live it with meaning, grace and beauty.”

Nah, Helton says. Helton, a high school band teacher in Chicago, only goes to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth to hear his mother sing in the choir.

His mind led him away. The more Helton read evolutionary psychology and neuro-psychology, he says, the more it seemed to him, “We might as well be cars. That, to me, makes more sense than believing what you can’t see.”

Well, okay… as long as I can be a Model S Tesla…

Now, normally I’d be happy to see growing skepticism about religious beliefs (and, for that matter, about atheism as a sort of metaphysical dogma). But this sort of “apatheism” seems to have more to do with intellectual laziness than well-reasoned doubt. It certainly doesn’t follow from the failure of religious dogma to answer the deepest questions of existence that “we might as well be cars”. The dilemma between simple-minded religion and simple-minded materialism has always been false, but the growing (literal) awesomeness of physics and cosmology has never before made the mysteriousness of existence so clear.

Let’s just take a brief moment to appreciate how amazing it is that we’re thinking about the universe together on this blog… here… now…

Grand Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232, courtesy of NASA

For more awesomeness, visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive…