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bin angry– a rant

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If there’s something that could inspire me to the kind of nationalistic joy that prompts a person to dance in the street waving a flag and chanting “USA! USA!,” I don’t know what it is. But Osama bin Laden’s death it isn’t.  As eloquent as Obama’s address last night was, the phrase “justice has been done” and the ensuing interviews by news anchors with the friends and family of people who died on 9/11 turned my stomach. It’s as though they were being asked to give official approval to everything the U.S. has done in the name of the “war on terror” since that day, now that finally the attack’s ringleader has been located and summarily blown up. Osama bin Laden has become a caricature of ultimate evil– now that he is dead, the ends justify the means and we can celebrate. Justice has, after all, been done.

Aside from the generally repellent idea of dancing in the street because a man– any man– was found and killed, there remain all of the concerns that Radley Balko outlines in a post this morning grimly titled “He won.” America has not become better toward its own citizens or the citizens of the world post 9/11. We have sacrificed liberty for security in spectacular and unnecessary ways. We have displayed the full colors of our fear and willingness to clamp down on the freedom of expression and religion when prompted with an outside threat. In seeking revenge for the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans we have offered up the lives of almost 6,000 soldiers and $1 trillion dollars in order to occupy two countries which did not threaten us, not to mention who knows how many lives of the residents of those countries. None of these revelations about America’s character gets to be wiped from the slate now that bin Laden has been located living in a mansion in Pakistan, shot in the eye and buried at sea somewhere. Congratulations to the soldiers who accomplished it, and it’s good that it happened– though it would have been better to take him alive, so that he could have received a trial and been held accountable for the full extent of his actions. Being handed the kind of death that so many better human beings from so many countries have unjustly received (and which I might guess some currently languishing in Guantanamo would prefer to receive) seems like rather a cop-out. Though I suppose it’s fitting considering that like most residents of Guantanamo, he didn’t get to face his accuser and be confronted with the evidence against him.

So I propose this: let’s be glad bin Laden is dead, but not pretend that his death satisfies some kind of karmic debt to 9/11 survivors. That presumes that bin Laden bears the full responsibility for the deaths of their loved ones and that the suffering they have been experienced can only be assuaged by his own death. It portrays them as simple revenge-seekers. And let’s also not pretend that all or even most of what America has done in response to 9/11 has been about locating the guilty parties and punishing them. New justifications have been invented and accepted until the War on Terror became an everlasting battle between Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, with everyone’s freedoms scattered by the wayside. You can’t treat bin Laden as an essential kingpin, an Arabic Wicked Witch of the West, and then turn around and say “Killing him was great, but nothing will change.”

Bring the troops home– all of them. Restrict any intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq to humanitarian efforts to repair all of the damage caused.  Make it possible for people to migrate to (heck, even visit) the country without being suspected of being 9/11 terrorists Part 2. Own up to the fact that the U.S. government has approved torture and extradition, and hold responsible parties responsible. Acknowledge for each Guantanamo prisoner the right of habeas corpus, or send them home. And stop using the “we’re at war” excuse to daily invent new ways to deprive American citizens of their dignity and privacy. Make America into the place our popular imagination still celebrates without irony, a land of the free and home of the brave. Do this, and then maybe you’ll catch me waving a flag. I don’t currently own one, but am pretty sure there’s plenty of time to head to the shop.

The “E” word applied to food. No, it doesn’t stand for “educated.” Or “empathetic.”

The “E” word applied to food. No, it doesn’t stand for “educated.” Or “empathetic.” published on No Comments on The “E” word applied to food. No, it doesn’t stand for “educated.” Or “empathetic.”

Eric Schlosser lays down the law in the Washington Post:

At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting this year, Bob Stallman, the group’s president, lashed out at “self-appointed food elitists” who are “hell-bent on misleading consumers.” His target was the growing movement that calls for sustainable farming practices and questions the basic tenets of large-scale industrial agriculture in America. The “elitist” epithet is a familiar line of attack. In the decade since my book “Fast Food Nation” was published, I’ve been called not only an elitist, but also a socialist, a communist and un-American. In 2009, the documentary “Food, Inc.,” directed by Robby Kenner, was described as “elitist foodie propaganda” by a prominent corporate lobbyist. Nutritionist Marion Nestle has been called a “food fascist,” while an attempt was recently made to cancel a university appearance by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” who was accused of being an “anti-agricultural” elitist by a wealthy donor.

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production — overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels — is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers. During the past 40 years, our food system has changed more than in the previous 40,000 years. Genetically modified corn and soybeans, cloned animals, McNuggets — none of these technological marvels existed in 1970. The concentrated economic power now prevalent in U.S. agriculture didn’t exist, either. For example, in 1970 the four largest meatpacking companies slaughtered about 21 percent of America’s cattle; today the four largest companies slaughter about 85 percent. The beef industry is more concentrated now than it was in 1906, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” and criticized the unchecked power of the “Beef Trust.” The markets for pork, poultry, grain, farm chemicals and seeds have also become highly concentrated. America’s ranchers and farmers are suffering from this lack of competition for their goods. In 1970, farmers received about 32 cents for every consumer dollar spent on food; today they get about 16 cents. The average farm household now earns about 87 percent of its income from non-farm sources. While small farmers and their families have been forced to take second jobs just to stay on their land, wealthy farmers have received substantial help from the federal government. Between 1995 and 2009, about $250 billion in federal subsidies was given directly to American farmers — and about three-quarters of that money was given to the wealthiest 10 percent. Those are the farmers whom the Farm Bureau represents, the ones attacking “big government” and calling the sustainability movement elitist.

From Joel Salatin’s article in Flavor magazine last year, Rebel with a Cause: Foodie Elitism:

This winter, the Front Range Permaculture Institute invited me to come to Fort Collins, Colorado, and give a speech at a fundraising event. They filled a huge community theater with people, and ticket sales were enough to pay my travel and honorarium—with enough left over to buy 40 CSA shares for poor families in their community. What a wonderfully empowering local effort. (They didn’t wait for a government program.) Perhaps nothing would reduce perceptions of elitism faster than foodies buying CSA shares for impoverished families.  At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal. . .  We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.  To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behavior. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?  The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Woo in the courtroom

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A Michigan couple were accused of sexually abusing their severely autistic daughter. Julian and Thal Wendrow were jailed and their children taken from them and placed in foster care for months before prosecutors dropped the charges. Their daughter Aislinn had supposedly made these accusations– not verbally, as she is mute, but through Facilitated Communication, a method of allowing people with severe autism (as well as people in vegetative states) to communicate that is apparently still being used despite having been thoroughly discredited.

Facilitated Communication is, quite simply, facilitators “helping” a patient communicate by literally moving his or her hand across a keyboard to type out messages. The easiest way to test whether this is actually evidence of the patient speaking or the facilitator is obviously to allow the patient access to certain information of which the facilitator isn’t aware, and then ask him or her questions about that information and see whether the answers are accurate or at least appropriate. This has been tried, time and time again, and it has failed time and time again.  The hope is that FC will somehow reveal a hidden consciousness in the patient which wasn’t clear before, but all evidence to date shows that it is simply a matter of facilitators making statements on behalf of the patients– knowingly or not:

About two hours away, in Schenectady, N.Y., the coordinator of the autism program at the O.D. Heck Developmental Center was skeptical. But his staff members swore by it, and as they were skilled and caring people, psychologist Doug Wheeler decided not to challenge them. Nobody, it seemed, had any interest in asking hard questions. But then some of the messages the autistic patients were typing startled the Heck Center’s staff. Some of the typed messages, for example, would have triggered invasive diagnostic procedures, such as exploratory surgeries or biopsies. Wheeler decided that, despite the faith of the staff who were using FC, the technique called for verification before major decisions were made based on the messages. When Wheeler searched the available journal literature, he found nothing other than Biklen’s article. He decided to conduct his own experiments with a view toward proving to skeptical members of the staff that FC really was a breakthrough. Wheeler designed an experiment using facilitator/student pairs that had used FC effectively. “Students would be shown simple photographs of common familiar objects and asked to name or describe them,” Wheeler later recalled. “The facilitators would be ‘blind’ to the pictures by use of a three foot high divider running down the length of a table. The divider would end at the far end of the table in a ‘T,’ allowing pictures to be hung on each side. The facilitator could not see the student’s picture and the student could not see the facilitator’s picture Over a period of three months and 180 trials with 12 students and nine facilitators, FC didn’t work, not once. Since Wheeler’s experiment failed, what had accounted for the way words had poured out of the autistic clients of the Heck Center after FC was introduced? Wheeler’s trial, and subsequent research by others, suggested that facilitators were unconsciously guiding the hands of the patients. They were so heavily invested in what promised to be a breakthrough in the way autistic people lived, they had become blind to their own role in the communication.
“I wanted so hard to believe that it was real, that I wasn’t able to listen to objective thinking about it,” one of the Heck facilitators told the PBS investigative series Frontline in 1993. “It grabs you emotionally right here and once you’re hooked, I mean, you are hooked.” True believers refused to give up. One expert insisted FC required “faith.” Some parents and FC advocates excoriated Wheeler. But he was also startled to receive calls from all over the world, from fathers in jail, from mothers whose children had been taken away, after charges of abuse had been leveled through FC messages. Abuse charges were remarkably frequent. In 1995, the New York Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities reported that over three years it had received 21 allegations of abuse — often sexual in nature — via FC messages. Just one case was considered “confirmed.” The rest were tossed because there was no evidence or because it was simply impossible for the abuse to have occurred.

As you can imagine, the same proved to be the case with Aislinn.

On Jan. 28 and 29, 2008, Judge Marc Barron held a hearing to determine the accuracy of facilitated communication so that it could be used when Aislinn testified in the coming hearings and her father’s trial. Barron ordered that Scarsella leave the room when Aislinn was asked a question. After the question had been posed, Scarsella could return and facilitate Aislinn’s answer on the keyboard. “Do you have a brother or a sister?” Aislinn was asked. “3FE65,” she answered. Could she clarify that answer? “7BQJVWTTT7YI.” “What color is your sweater?” “JIBHJIH.” Belief is a stubborn thing. There were plenty of signs that Aislinn’s supposed accusations against her father were never valid. In early interviews with police she was unable to name her dog or her grandmother, facts Scarsella didn’t know. With Aislinn’s FC being the only evidence that abuse had occurred, the charges were dropped. On Feb. 22, 2008, after 80 days in jail, Julian Wendrow was released. The police said they still feared for the children. “We’ve got the scarlet letter,” Julian told msnbc.com. “Some people will still look at us and think I raped my child.” The family has been reunited, but the damage has been severe. The Wendrows, who are now suing Scarsella and a variety of officials involved in their case, spent an estimated $60,000 on their defense, money they can’t afford because Thal lost her job. The Wendrows suspect the case precipitated her firing. She’s been unable to find another. They fear their house might be foreclosed upon in February. They no longer use FC for Aislinn. Instead, they talk to her, touch her, hope they’re reaching her.

A federal judge ruled in March that governmental immunity protects the prosecutors in this case against claims of malicious prosecution, but let stand some other claims against them and the Wendrows’ suit will go to trial.

James Randi’s term for irrational ideas which are unsupported by science and appeal to mystical notions is “woo-woo,” or just “woo.” For some reason, though FC has been known to be woo since at least 1993, it was used as sufficient evidence to separate parents from their children and accuse them of rape in 2008.  That should absolutely count as malicious prosecution, but in the U.S. protections for prosecutors are so strong that it’s virtually impossible to hold them responsible for it.

Being nonverbal or very slow to begin speaking is common for kids on the autism spectrum. And some of them, while they do not speak, are capable of communicating through text– of their own accord. That doesn’t mean that inside of every autistic child who does not do so, there is a person who is “locked in” and can only express him/herself through FC.  But the hope for this to happen has created an inadvertent monster that just refuses to go away, and it is ruining peoples’ lives.

If you have iTunes, you can go here and listen to show 200 of Penn Jillette’s radio show in which Randi, who has done a lot of work on facilitated communication, calls in to discuss it with Penn and co-host Michael Goudeau who has an autistic son. The show was recorded on 5/9/06.  In the interview they tear into an article  from Time magazine on FC and really delve into why, though parents might desperately want it to work, it’s important to be skeptical about it.

Hmm….profound

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Also:

If there is no bulb, do not turn on the light.
If you have no car, do not drive.
If there are no clothes, do not get dressed.
If there is no food, do not eat.
If you have no voice, do not speak.

How not to counter-protest

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Gawker reports that the Westboro Baptist Church were met in Mississippi by some people who decided to try and out-douchebag them. And succeeded:

The feel-good blog item of the day is the story of when the small town of Brandon, Mississippi successfully foiled Westboro Baptist Church’s plan to protest a Marine’s funeral. (Here is a video of the refreshingly protester-free road as Marine Staff Sgt. Jason Rogers is returned home on April 14.) How’d they do it? They sicced the police on them and beat them up.    Here is the story that is blowing up the blogosphere, which was originally posted on an Ole Miss sports message board:  

[Westboro Baptist Church] did show up, a few showed up a couple of days early.
 A couple of days before, one of them ran his mouth at a Brandon gas station and got his ass waxed. Police were called and the beaten man could not give much of a description of who beat him. When they canvassed the station and spoke to the large crowd that had gathered around, no one seemed to remember anything about what had happened.  

Rankin County handled this thing perfectly. There were many things that were put into place that most will never know about and at great expense to the county. Most of the morons never made it out of their hotel parking lot. It seems that certain Rankin county pickup trucks were parked directly behind any car that had Kansas plates in the hotel parking lot and the drivers mysteriously disappeared until after the funeral was over.   

Police were called but their wrecker service was running behind and it was going to be a few hours before they could tow the trucks so the Kansas plated cars could get out. A few made it to the funeral but were ushered away to be questioned about a crime they might have possibly been involved in. Turns out, after a few hours of questioning, that they were not involved and they were allowed to go on about their business.   

Ranking [sic] deserves a hand in how they handled this situation.        

As much as we despise the Westboro Baptist Church, it seems like police illegally detaining people in order to squelch atrocious and unpopular but constitutionally-protected free speech, is not something we should encourage! Although the part about parking cars behind them was pretty good.

No, it wasn’t. That’s also against the law, I’m pretty sure, and even if it wasn’t it would still be a horrible way of attempting to combat people whose views you don’t like.  Is it really so hard to grasp that the way to protest speech is with more speech?  That actually attacking people or blocking their cars into a parking lot so they can’t drive anywhere just makes you the bad guy?  The glee with which this post describes the effort by a mob of people who don’t like the WBC to threaten, silence, and physically attack them is disgusting. “What they say is hateful, so we’re entitled to take any action we want against them.” No, you’re not. You’re entitled to speak back, and to ostracize them if you want. That’s it.

The WBC has announced that they will be protesting at ReasonFest, a gathering for atheists and agnostics at the University of Kansas on May 6th, and it sounds like a counter-protest is planned.  I’m betting that means people will show up in support of ReasonFest, of the right to be an atheist or agnostic, and to repudiate everything the WBC stands for. And I’m betting that means they will hold signs, shout things, and attempt to have conversations with WBC protesters if possible, which is what a counter-protest is supposed to be: the use of free speech to condemn the content of someone else’s free speech.

National debt blamed on pussification of America

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From Mother Jones:

Freshman Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) has been known to say some pretty outlandish things from time to time. He’s told constituents that “Islam is not a religion,” called the President of the United States a “low-level socialist agitator,” and asked supporters to “grab your muskets!” Now, he’s outdone himself. Late last week, West spoke to the conservative group Women Impacting the Nation, and after West alleged that 33 percent of the federal budget goes to Planned Parenthood, the discussion wandered—as discussions usually do!—to the subject of the increasing sissification of America’s men. No, really, that’s what West talked about. Via Tanya Somander:

We need you to come in and lock shields, and strengthen up the men who are going to fight for you. To let these other women know on the other side—these Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women that have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness—to let them know what we are not going to have our men become subservient. That’s what we need you to do. Because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow.

Right, that’s it. America’s financial weakness, our burgeoning national debt, exists because men simply aren’t manly enough. They have been hoodwinked by America’s liberal women into blowing loads of government cash on reproductive services ($317 million total per year), rather than doing something more masculine…like, you know, spending it on the military ($680 billion for 2010).  But since military spending is contributing to the national debt in such a huge way, and the debt has grown to such an extent because America’s men have been neutered….then that means…*gasp* War is for pussies!  Or to be more accurate, War is for men without testicles!

I will be eager to hear West, who served in the army in Iraq and acted as a civilian advisor in Afghanistan, announce this stunning conclusion at every speaking engagement henceforth.  I also hope he will correct his apparent misunderstanding of the reproductive services offered by Planned Parenthood, as I’m pretty sure neutering is not one of them. At least 58 U.S. soldiers have, by contrast, had their testicles blown off in the last year in Afghanistan.

Just to be clear, I am not making light of the work done by U.S. soldiers or the suffering they have experienced. Rather, I declaim it by pointing out that in telling these lies, Rep. Allen West is not doing them– or the rest of us– any favors.

Have we evolved to reject evolution?

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Following on the Pope post, there are various theories about whether people might reject evolutionary theory because it contradicts their intuitions. One was described by developmental psychologist Paul Bloom in an article he wrote for Natural History magazine entitled “In Science We Trust.” Bloom, who lays out a theory of intuitive mind/body dualism in his book Descartes’ Baby, believes that we have intuitive “theories” about physics and agency which cause us to operate as though they’re inherently separate things. Following from that, he basically argues that we may reject or misunderstand evolution because we have a hard time imagining something conscious being made out of non-conscious things (that is, consciousness as an emergent property), or that evolutionary change could happen without conscious guidance. This doesn’t make it impossible to understand and accept evolution– of course, since plenty of us do just that– but it would suggest that we have some built-in biases in our thinking which predispose us against doing so. Bloom writes:

A minority of Americans subscribe to an unusual theory about the origin of people and other animals. They are often adamant about the truth of this theory, and believe that it is the only one that should be taught to children. But if you press them on the theory’s details, their answers are muddled. It turns out that these people understand little of what they are defending; they are just parroting back what they have heard from others. Who are they?  They are Darwinians–people who claim to believe in evolution by natural selection. . .  Psychologist Deborah Kelemen of Boston University, for instance, finds that children insist that everything has a purpose. Educated Western adults believe that human-made artifacts have purposes (cars are to drive around in) and that body parts have purposes (eyes are for seeing), but young children take this further, saying the same for animals (lions ate for being in the zoo) and for natural entities (clouds are for raining).  And psychologist Margaret Evans of the University of Michigan found the most direct evidence for natural-born creationism. She carried out a series of studies in which she asked children flat out where they believe animals come from. Their favorite answer is God. That is true of children whose parents are fundamentalist Christians–no surprise–but it is also true for children whose parents accept the theory of natural selection! Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was right to complain, then, that it seems “as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism.” . . .   Looking within the United States, the difference between Darwinians and creationists does not reduce to smarts or education: studies of college students found no difference in how well (or poorly) they understood the theory of evolution, whether they believed it was true of not and no matter how much biology they’d studied. When researchers asked the students who endorsed Darwinian beliefs to explain the theory of natural selection, their answers were on average no more accurate than those of the students that rejected evolution. Many in each group misunderstood the theory, coming up with something closer to Lamarck’s view than Darwin’s.   So while an evolutionary biologist might argue that giraffes evolved long necks because the ones with longer-than-usual necks got more food from trees and hence tended to have more offspring, many students would say that it is useful to have a long neck and so (somehow) giraffes will have longer-necked children. They believe, as Lamarck did, that there is some mysterious force that causes animals to become better adapted to their environments, and they confuse this with modern evolutionary biology.  

Those are just a few excerpts; you can read the whole thing for free at the link above. I don’t find it at all surprising to think that there are plenty of people who profess to accept evolution but don’t actually understand evolutionary theory. I wouldn’t be surprised, for that matter, if such people constitute the majority of evolution-accepters. The idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics which Lamarck advocated just seems to be easier for people to grasp whether they are pro-evolution or not. The matter of why some people find this misunderstanding of evolution perfectly okay and others abhorrent does not seem to be about who is more educated or who thinks more critically per se, but very likely more about religious and/or political affiliation. That’s my thought, but I don’t have the research to back it up…yet.

In the meantime, people advocating that evolution should be taught in public school science classrooms and never creationism should sit down with a cup of tea and a copy of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea if they’ve never done so. Consider it an intellectual gift to yourself.

The Pope misrepresents evolution

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Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him
as an Australopithecine.

Apparently in his Easter address last night, the Pope had some unflattering words for evolution:

Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn’t a random product of evolution.  Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point “in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.”  “If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature,” he said. “But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason.”  Church teaching holds that Roman Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds: A Christian can, for example, accept the theory of evolution to help explain developments, but is taught to believe that God, not random chance, is the origin of the world. The Vatican, however, warns against creationism, or the overly literal interpretation of the Bibilical account of creation.

…which is kind of like saying that enjoying a thick, juicy steak every now and then doesn’t conflict with vegetarianism because hey, steak is the only meat you eat. Just a technicality here, Pope, but I don’t think you can really claim to accept evolution if you a) don’t understand it, and b) firmly exclude humans from it.  As Jerry Coyne says sardonically on his blog, “Hey, Pope! Haven’t you heard about natural selection? Human evolution isn’t all mutation and genetic drift, you know.” I’m guessing that the Pope actually doesn’t have the foggiest idea how much randomness has to do with evolution; he’s just using it to mean “not guided by God.” Because who cares about causality if God isn’t the cause?

One of Coyne’s readers notes the irony in the fact that (if you ignore the word “randomly”) the statement “in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it” is quite beautiful, touching, and humbling. He/she says

I actually think that is a lovely poetic passage. We are bits of the universe that have evolved to bring rationality into the world — what a beautiful sentiment! It sounds rather like Sagan. I’m amused that, for me at least, it had precisely the opposite of its intended effect.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m sure it’s possible to understand evolution and still find it depressing and threatening, but it’s remarkable how many people who find it depressing and threatening do not understand it.  A hard-liner could quibble about the idea that we evolved “to” do anything at all, but in the context of simple order of events it is quite true that we evolved rationality into the world, in the same way that Daniel Dennett wrote that we evolved free will into the world. At least our version of it, in our world. Richard Dawkins, probably the greatest proponent of evolutionary theory alive today, likes to dwell on the unlikelihood of each of our personal existences, however significant they are to us. In Unweaving the Rainbow he wrote:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

The reaction I have to such thoughts is awe and wonder. The reaction that people like the Pope have is apparently revulsion and fear– we, you and I, could not have come into this world without an act of special creation. Life has no meaning otherwise.  Yet here all of us evolution-believers are, comfortably denying ourselves to be the product of a design independent of the process of natural selection, and yet somehow managing to not commit mass suicide in a fit of despair. Some of us believe that there is a god behind the whole process and others don’t, but the simple idea of being evolved individuals doesn’t shake any existential pillars and cause our sense of teleology to come crashing down. How is that?

I know, by the way, that the Pope wasn’t announcing anything new– that the Church’s doctrine has long been that evolution can be accepted but that the human soul was a special creation. But Benedict chose this Easter to reiterate that doctrine in a way that betrays a clear willingness to see understanding (much less accepting) evolution as optional, whereas drawing inferences about its existential significance is not. In that sense he was pretty much promoting willful ignorance as ordained by God. And that I find depressing.

Update

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The ACLU of Michigan has filed a brief on behalf of Terry Jones:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan has weighed in on the Terry Jones saga, filing a brief supporting the controversial pastor’s right to protest this afternoon in front of a mosque.  In the eight-page brief to the 19th District Court, the ACLU argued that efforts to make Jones pay a peace bond to protest outside the Islamic Center of America constitute prior restraint of his rights to free speech and assembly.  “The ACLU vehemently disagrees with the content of Pastor Jones’ speech, but we feel equally strongly that if the First Amendment is tohave any meaning, it must mean that the government cannot suppress free speech because it, or anyone else, disagrees with that speech,” ACLU Staff Attorney Jessie Rossman told The Detroit News today. “While we are not representing Pastor Jones, we filed this friend of court brief to help provide additional analysis with respect to the critical constitutional issues at stake here.” . . .   The ACLU’s brief argued that the government cannot suppress speech by making Jones pay a bond based on the cost of police services necessary for anticipated actions of others, calling it an “unconstitutional prior restraint of free speech.” The group also cites a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that said it’s unconstitutional to have a group bear the cost of police protection due to the content of their message.

Radley Balko comments “Count on this to be forgotten next time a conservative uses the they-never-help-out-Christians version of the tired ‘Where’s the ACLU?‘ mantra.”

Some thoughts on religious anthropomorphism for Easter

Some thoughts on religious anthropomorphism for Easter published on No Comments on Some thoughts on religious anthropomorphism for Easter

Michael Blume writes concerning the “personification of the universe” model of religion:

Religious traditions seem to derive their motivational, cooperative and then reproductive potentials from the belief in superempirical agents – ranging from deceased ancestors to various spirits, angels and demons to gods, bodhisatvas and alien visitors from outer space to God. . .   In fact, non-personal systems such as early Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism (etc.) had to adopt superempirical agents (such as bodhisatvas, khami, tirthankaras, the Lord Tao and many more) in order to survive demographically. The underlying logic is rooted into evolutionary theory itself: As human beings, we might be ready to accept commandments from supreme “personalities”- but not from abstract and non-living objects or principles.  As Friedrich August von Hayek rightfully observed: A theistic commandment such as “Be fruiftul and multiply” (Genesis 1, 28) may be accepted by religious believers as authoritative and even beneficial, although it cannot be verified empirically. By personification, religion is able to attribute value to forming families and having children.  In contrast, to accept empirically tested hypotheses as “teaching” normative commandments would constitute a natural fallacy contradicting our evolved feelings as well as philosophical lore. Although modern definitions of Darwinian or Evolutionary Fitness agree on the importance of reproductive success in evolutionary processes, we are simply not ready to accept any “commandments” thereof.

I’m pretty well convinced myself that when it comes to religion, agency is where it’s at– even when official theology says otherwise. If you want to read a good defense of that point, I would highly recommend Jason Slone’s book Theological Correctness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t.  He marshals a great deal of evidence from experimental psychology to show that people who are thinking religiously are thinking in terms of agency, and that they think of supernatural agents (gods, spirits, bodhisattvas, and so on) as essentially being like humans with some superpowers tacked on.

The argument is basically that religion is ultimately about intuitions– that theology is something believers accept to signal that they are part of their own particular religious community, but their reflexive reactions suggest that there are more deeply-rooted, fundamental ways of thinking about agency which are applied when thinking about the supernatural.  In other words, that given the right circumstances you can “tease out” convictions in people about how supernatural agents think and behave that rely more on ordinary intuitions about how humans think and behave than on the particular dogma that defines one’s faith.