analogion

"What Kind of Christian Are You"— Quiz Results

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 07:39:00 +0000

So I stumbled across this Quiz Farm site and discovered that they have a couple of quizzes designed to show you where you fit in the spectrum of theologies that people have. Mind you, these are amateur quizzes, nothing professional, but fun to look at anyway. So I took the "What type of "Christian" theology do you hold?" Quiz. Here's what I learned about my theological position among the churches:

You Scored as A New Kind of Christian or Emergent Liberal Hippie
(aka dangerously close to not being a Christian at all)

Sigh...you are a liberal/emergent type. You tends to be suspicious of systematic theology. Why? Not because you don't read systematics, but because the diversity of theologies alarms you, and no genuine consensus has been achieved, God didn't reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth who alone is God. You tend to be very critical of traditional Christians and like to think or Christianity more like a "save the world" club then as a relationship w/God. Beware, you have found yourself in a dangerous place. Doctrine matters, truth matters, and when you leave those behind you may be very close to leaving Christianity behind with you.

82% New Kind of Christian or Emergent Liberal Hippie (aka dangerously close to not being a Christian at all)

80% Fundamentalist

72% Classic American Evangelical

70% Reformed Protestant

62% Roman Catholic

Those who know me might find that very, very funny. But I do think it shows, albeit in garbled fashion, the effect of all the NT Wright I've been reading, and the intensive study of Mark that i've been engaged in over the past year. Of course, the preachments at the end of the narrative assessment— 'Beware, you have found yourself in a dangerous place. Doctrine matters, truth matters, and when you leave those behind you may be very close to leaving Christianity behind with you'— pretty much tell you where the quiz author is coming from.

So then I thought, well, just for balance i should take the other "Theology" quiz. Here are the results of that one:

You Scored as Calvinism

You are a Calvinist. You hate eveyone that does not believe like you, you are hateful and proud. You do not witness. God can save the world without you.

80% Calvinism
75% Atheist
20% Arminian

Again, the Buddhist in me thinks this is very, very funny. Again though— it's interesting that I would score both times fairly high on the "fundamentalist" or "calvinist" index. i think the NT Wright influence shows up, and the Gospel of Mark. Only problem is, i strongly believe the bible is more literary than historical, and I don't believe in creationism or in penal substitutionary atonement. So I guess i'm not a very good fundie or calvinist. "Hateful and proud" though? "75% Atheist"? Well, perhaps in the same sense that the early Christians were persecuted for being "atheists"— didn't believe in the state/cultural gods.

So there was one more quiz on offer, the "Eucharistic Theology" Quiz. Almost to my surprise (after the other two):

You Scored as Orthodox

You are Orthodox, worshiping the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the great liturgy whereby Jesus is present through the Spirit in a real yet mysterious way, a meal that is also a sacrifice.

Orthodox— 100%
Calvin— 63%
Catholic— 50%
Zwingli— 31%
Luther— 25%
Unitarian— 0%

So there ya go! Certified "100%" Orthodox when it comes to "eucharistic theology". Interesting that a quiz about eucharistic theology would get it right— and I guess the question is, Is there really any other kind? Of theology, i mean.

Anyway, you answer most questions on a scale of 1 to 7 or some such. In almost every instance, my responses were instantaneous and were either 1, or 7— almost no "in between". Since i know the theory, history, etc behind the phrasing of many of the questions, and can't always agree with either side (Protestant or Catholic)— or do agree to some extent with both— i occasionally backed off from a full 'yes' or 'no', possibly leaning towards one side or another, but often just choosing the middle as a kind of both/and or neither/nor. For instance, "The priest transforms bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ": As we say in the prayer, 'I believe, O Lord, and I confess that this bread is truly thine own most pure body and that which is in this cup is truly thy most precious blood'— but I don't believe the priest does any "transforming" of bread and wine into anything else. More like, "I am only a witness", as he says in confession: "Send down thy holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts and make this bread to be the precious body..." etc: God does it, not the priest. So i marked the middle option: yes and no, but also neither/nor. But on the other hand, I flatly denied that 'The "accidents" remain, but the "substance" is changed.' It's not that i don't believe that the eucharist is really the body of Christ; I just totally don't buy such metaphysical constructs to "explain" anything.

Interestingly, the "What is your true religion" quiz tells me i'm 83% buddhist and only 72% christian— and at the same time, 72% atheist/agnostic!

Well, you could waste a lot of time on these things. There are 155 different religion quizzes, not counting the theology ones, I think. And though i am pretty strictly Orthodox, i'm sure at the same time i do escape most people's easy categorizations, for better or worse.

Beyond Mesopotamia: A radical new view of human civilization reported

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 05:54:00 +0000

Well, I don't know about the "radical new view". Sure, science is sober and wants to stick just with the facts— but we've had enough facts for a long time to show us that there's always been a lot more civilization in the Age of Mesopotamia and before, than just in Mesopotamia. Have major cities ever existed without major international trade? When the Third Millennium gives us not just Sumeria, Babylon, and Egypt but Ebla, Mohenjo-Daro (and see here), and others)— obviously there had to be a lot more than Mesopotamia before that. Those ancients got around! Mesopotamia: always the Middle East, not the "Near" East, as if Europe (which didn't even exist at the time!) were the center of the Universe— in fact, it's bad enough to call it the "East", in the first place— maybe we should call it the Center!

Anyway, new integrated views now about the 5th Millennium:

Beyond Mesopotamia: A radical new view of human civilization reported

A radically expanded view of the origin of civilization, extending far beyond Mesopotamia, is reported by journalist Andrew Lawler in the 3 August issue of Science.

Mesopotamia is widely believed to be the cradle of civilization, but a growing body of evidence suggests that in addition to Mesopotamia, many civilized urban areas existed at the same time— about 5,000 years ago— in an arc that extended from Mesopotamia east for thousands of kilometers across to the areas of modern India and Pakistan, according to Lawler.

“While Mesopotamia is still the cradle of civilization in the sense that urban evolution began there,” Lawler said, “we now know that the area between Mesopotamia and India spawned a host of cities and cultures between 3000 B.C.E. and 2000 B.C.E.”

Evidence of shared trade, iconography and other culture from digs in remote areas across this arc were presented last month at a meeting in Ravenna, Italy of the International Association for the Study of Early Civilizations in the Middle Asian Intercultural Space. The meeting was the first time that many archaeologists from more than a dozen countries gathered to discuss the fresh finds that point to this new view of civilization’s start. Science’s Lawler was the only journalist present.

Archaeologists shared findings from dozens of urban centers of approximately the same age that existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus River valley in modern day India and Pakistan. The researchers are just starting to sketch out this new landscape, but it’s becoming clear that these centers traded goods and could have shared technology and architecture. Recovered artifacts such as beads, shells, vessels, seals and game boards show that a network linked these civilizations.

Researchers have also found hints, such as similar ceremonial platforms, that these cultures interacted and even learned from one another. A new excavation near Jiroft in southeastern Iran, for example, has unearthed tablets with an unknown writing system. This controversial find highlights the complexity of the cultures in an area long considered a backwater, Lawler explained.

These urban centers are away from the river valleys that archaeologists have traditionally focused on, according to Lawler. Archaeologists now have access to more remote locations and are expanding their studies.

Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science. This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com.

You can kiss that Perrier goodbye... someday

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 06:58:00 +0000

Restaurants, schools tap into local water supplies

You've heard of eating locally, but the latest fad may be drinking locally. Some restaurants and schools are starting to serve filtered tap water instead of bottled water, citing the eco-impacts of packaging and shipping a product that's already available right thar in the kitchen. But it seems that pushing pints of Perrier is such a moneymaker that only some restaurants, mostly snooty ones, can afford to quit; cutting-edgers include Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Mario Batali's Del Posto in New York. "Serving tap water is a great idea that we'd all love to be able to do, but it's not going to happen all at once," says one Manhattan restaurateur. Rockin' lunch lady Ann Cooper led Berkeley's schools to make the switch, and experts say it just makes sense. "The rationale for buying bottled water is a fantasy that has a destructive downside," says Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "These companies are marketing an illusion of environmental purity."

source: The New York Times, Marian Burros, 30 May 2007 via Grist Environmental News and Commentary

Pretty amazing, actually: i'm sure many of my readers remember when a glass of cold tapwater was standard at any restaurant from Woolworth's to Manhattan's best prix fixe. Now, "we'd all love to be able to do [it], but it's not going to happen all at once"! And as far as i know, the water hasn't changed much.

In fact I get pretty angry about this. One restauranteur praised Alice Waters, but said “I think she gets carried away sometimes”. Why? He wondered where he would make up the lost revenue if he eliminated bottled water.

Geoffrey Zakarian, the chef and an owner of Country in Manhattan, described the ban as “a worthy thing to do.” But he added, “You have to make a profit.”

Tom Colicchio, the chef and an owner of Craft restaurant and several spinoffs, was incredulous that restaurants would contemplate such a change. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said. “Why would you do that — not from a money standpoint, but from a service and hospitality standpoint? Fifty to 60 percent prefer bottled water, especially sparkling.”

In fact, “We have been marketed to the point that [school-] children believe they can’t drink water out of the tap.” Yet "there is no reason to believe that bottled water is safer than tap water". (NYTimes)

And i read a while back that every day americans throw out enough plastic water bottles to fill Yankee Stadium!

Biologists Convert Protein Sequences into Classical Music

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:15:00 +0000

Check this out! UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music....

In the Shadow of Saturn

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:09:00 +0000

One of the most amazing things I've ever seen— The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun to see a sight unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn and slightly scattering sunlight, in the above exaggerated color image. Saturn's rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the above image. Visible in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn's E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus, and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

Well, while we're at it, you might enjoy this worm's eye view of Mars. Boring!

Click either picture to view big.

Jury-Rigging the Trolls

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 10:01:00 +0000

got a newletter today from a science news feed (physorg.com) which mentioned spammers who are "trolling the Internet and collecting millions of e-mail addresses".

interesting, this word "trolling". Of course, the behavior in question is the cyberian analog of "trawling", a form of fishing in which a boat moves along slowly, dragging a net, usually to "harvest" large quantities of fish. A "troll" is an ugly short guy who lives under a bridge and grabs passers-by; there is no verb "to troll", but if there were one, presumably it would mean to be and to do what trolls are and do. But could there be such a thing as a "troller"? The mind reels... But the secretaries who type all the documents of the world of business and law, as well as those of science publications, don't know anything about trawling, so they think of "trolling" because they've read all the fairy tales, and internet spammers and the like can readily be imagined as creepy short people who hide under bridges with malicious intent, or at least as very similar to such persons.

Another example of the same kind of malapropism is "jury-rigged". In WW2, GI's would say that something patched up or cobbled together out of bubble gum, bailing wire, and spare parts was "Jerry- [i.e., 'German'] rigged". But again, no secretary/typist knows anything about WW2 GI slang, so when they hear "Jerry-rigged" on the Dictaphone, they interpret it as "jury rigging", the practice of suborning the members of a jury so as to procure a favorable verdict. So, patching something up with loose parts and bubble gum becomes an act of "jury rigging".

Suppose it's a jury of trolls?

Drives me crazy!

The Spread of Born-Againism

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:18:00 +0000

Interesting report here from the Pew Forum on Latino religion in the US. "About a third of all Catholics in the U.S. are now Latinos, and... more than half... identify themselves as charismatics, compared with only an eighth of non-Hispanic Catholics." About 23% of all US Hispanics are some kind of Protestant, usually evangelical, and "Latinos who are evangelicals are twice as likely as those who are Catholics to identify with the Republican Party."

None of it, here in Africa, or elsewhere, is about doctrine. People are hungry for an experience: "many of those who are joining evangelical churches are Catholic converts. The desire for a more direct, personal experience of God emerges as by far the most potent motive for these conversions. Although these converts express some dissatisfaction with the lack of excitement in a typical Catholic Mass, negative views of Catholicism do not appear to be a major reason for their conversion."

Born-againism is emerging as the face of Christendom in the 21st century, throughout the world. It certainly and completely defines Christianity in Africa, no matter what church you belong to.

Salvation and Justification

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:26:00 +0000

I have been following the wrightsaid list and occasionally commenting. The list is dedicated to a discussion of the work of NT Wright's work; Wright is arguably the foremost New Testament scholar in print today. Here is something that occurred to me in the context of a discussion there:

---------------------

Jews of the first century were not thinking about "going to heaven" like we do when we think of things like justification etc. Nor were they worried about "being saved" in the sense we talk about it. In fact the expression "go to heaven" is found only once in all of scripture, in the story of Elijah and the fiery chariot— admittedly not the usual expectation even of pious jews! And "being saved" in today's sense is just not a concern of the old testament: rather, "save me, O God" in the Psalms, for instance, always refers to enemies in this world (usually those of the king)— and it requires a spiritualizing reinterpretation— which is not wrong!— to turn such prayers into prayers for an otherworldly, eternal bliss.

The fact is, the bible is endlessly and everywhere concerned only with the reign of God— what are its conditions, when will it come, what will happen with the people (like the babylonians or the romans or the unjust of israel itself) who oppose his reign; what what the status of israel will be in those days, and so forth. In the eschatological sense, "salvation" refers to the conflagration in which "sinners will be consumed from the earth and the wicked shall be no more" (Psalm 104, end)— and note here that the psalmist immediately adds and concludes, "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" because he knows he is not among those sinners; he is the beneficiary of God's mighty acts on behalf of Israel (Psalm 103). And he is a beneficiary, and even an heir of God, not because of works righteousness, but because he is a member of that "blessed... nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen for his inheritance" (Psalm 33). This is the background of St Paul's thought, and it's context is the Roman occupation of Palestine which very much sharpened Israel's hope in God's reign, but did not change it into a longing for an eternal otherworldly kingdom.

by contrast, we moderns conceptualize the bible, and christianity generally, as all about "going to heaven", and we ask whether we get there by "works righteousness" or by "being saved". And in doing so we faithfully follow the assumptions of renaissance and enlightenment protestantism, which has framed the discourse of theology in northern europe for the past 500 years. Yet the expression "works righteousness", which seems to fit so neatly (or not) into the late mediaeval glove of "salvation", is a phrase that is simply unknown among catholics and orthodox— and that is to say, among any of the early church fathers and even later teachers— with rare exceptions like the treatise of St Mark the Ascetic entitled "No Righteousness by Works" (5th c, i think)— exceptions which may take their start from the same theme, but have a completely different aim and purpose. This difference between earlier christian discourse and that of the reformers and their students already and in itself suggests that some kind of paradigm shift is present, to which we ought to attend. But like all paradigms, it's hard to see, because it entails not so much new words as a new use of old words, so that on one level everything looks the same, but isn't.

In interesting ways, the thought of the fathers develops the ascetical and spiritual aspects of that biblical concern with God's reign, while emphasizing somewhat less its social, political, and social-eschatological (as opposed to personal-eschatological) aspects. I am convinced that, in part, this was because the social meanings were not such a pressing concern in what was, for almost 1200 years, a Christian state which more or less faithfully tried to organize itself around the gospel (whatever ambiguities there may have been). In their teaching on the spiritual life, always practical and always based on experience, the fathers' concern is never about "works righteousness" (either pro or con), for their views of salvation and justification were not the same as those of late western mediaeval catholicism. It was these latter that gave rise to the modern (protestant) discourse in the first place. Luther's anxieties about salvation, resolved by his insight into "justification by faith alone", were possible because the "heavenly kingdom" had already come to mean something completely beyond this world and not part of it. This was not the case in the fathers, who very much had a sense of already being spiritually part of something transforming, however much they also understood their need for purification and enlightenment.

It's good to ask, as scholars at least since Sanders have, how the jews (supposedly) got the protestant sense of "works righteousness" out of their relationship with God. Had God taught it to them, and done so, specifically, in the Old Testament? Why would he do that, if he was only going to reverse it when St paul came along? Or is "works righteousness", the way Luther and those of us who come after him tend to think of it, really a proper way to understand what the OT is all about? Is it even a proper way to understand how the jews themselves understood or understand their own OT? If, even today, fully traditional jews do not think that the OT teaches "pelagianism" and are not really into "works righteousness" or "earning salvation", etc, how can we say that saint paul, writing to jews, was exercised about the concerns we read in his words about works righteousness, salvation, and the kingdom? In fact, it has become fairly clear in the past few decades (some would say, at last!) that the modern concerns with "works righteousness" and "salvation" are related more to certain formations of mediaeval western religion than to either the OT or judaism. But it is very hard for us to understand that "kingdom of heaven" does not mean "going to heaven", and we persistently fall back into thinking salvation and justification as about the latter. Yet that is our problem, not Pauls.

Where does that leave St Paul, then? What is he talking about? Well, it's not exactly surprising, even if it is refreshing, to find that he was talking about the same thing jews always talked about, which was the reign of god in the world, both now and in the end. What are the conditions by which we are citizens of that kingdom? "Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness... shall never be moved" (Psalm 15)— is not about earning salvation, but is a description of what sort of people belong to God. And of course, we want to make this condition of being "God's people" manifest by our actions, for (indeed) by not "walking uprightly and working righteousness", we negate the condition and show that it doesn't describe us. But the condition (covenant) itself is prior to the actions by which we manifest our membership in it; we never "earned" our membership. So: St Paul is asking, how do we jews have part in the kingdom established by God's covenant? This was pressing question because new people were being brought into it. So the question of how we jew have part in it bears directly on that of how others may come to have part in it. What made us God's people was not going through ritual circumcision, which indeed made us a separate, nationalistic in-group— it was never a matter of ritual or even generally moral acts— never that— but as for abraham in the first place— faith or trust in God's ability to do what he promised.

We have the hardest time seeing that Paul is talking about the meaning of the Torah, not about a generalized "moralism" or "nomism", because we are not really interested in becoming Jews— we no longer feel that "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4), but from the Christians. So we generalize his words about "the Law" (the Torah, really), and turn them into a general concern with "earning salvation through our own efforts". This almost works, because from the begining it's been about God establishing his own kingdom, not us establishing ours— though it takes Paul's talk about Law/Torah out of its context and robs it of its salvation-historical meaning. Still it's true that what is necessary is for us to trust and to get with God program, not our own. Only now, Paul is saying, Abraham's original faith in God's program is focused as "the faith of Jesus Christ"—- in other words, in the faith that Jesus the Messiah had, in what God was doing in and through him; and then flowing from this, our own trust in what God was doing, in Jesus his Messiah. And what was God doing? Establishing his reign. "And we are ambassadors for the messiah," Paul writes.

The hard part, i think, is (re)conceptualizing christianity as the "reign of God" rather than "being saved and going to heaven". But once you see that the scriptures don't talk about "getting saved and going to heaven", but repeatedly about when God will actually rule this world of his, and how that will come to be (in terms of the past—- when he will undo the trouble adam caused, and even heal adam of death; in terms of Paul's present— what God has done in Jesus his Messiah; and in terms of the future— when he will establish "jerusalem" as a terebinth of righteousness)—- then the Judaism Paul depicts will no longer seem to mirror the late-mediaeval german catholicism which most of the theology of the past 500 years had been using him to caricature and to argue with, in which we think we "go to heaven" by "works" or by "faith".

In case of identity theft, be aware:

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 15:39:00 +0000

There are 4,923,984 people in the U.S. with the first name John. Statistically John is the 2nd most popular first name, which is hard to believe because i've met about 4 such people in my life. The name "Jon" is not to be confused with it, by the way. John is Jonathan, John is Jochanan, which explains the 'h'.

Anyway, 99.63 percent of people with the first name John are male. That would mean 18,219 people who are not male have the name John. It is not known who these people are, or why they have the name John. I am not one of them.

There are 68,993 people in the U.S. with the last name Burnett. Statistically it is the 490th most popular last name, although it's tied with 28 other last names.

There are 1,133 people in the U.S. named John Burnett.

I actually met one of them once. If you're reading this, Hi John!

(You can find out this info at http://howmanyofme.com/search/).

Is the Deadly Crash of Our Civilization Inevitable?

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:31:00 +0000

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on February 13, 2007, Printed on February 13, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47963/

Humankind is doing more things, faster, across a greater space than ever before, producing changes of a size and speed never seen before.

Thomas Homer-Dixon compares our current situation to driving too fast along a country road in a dense fog. Some ignore the fog and keep their foot pressed on the accelerator, but most of us feel like fairly helpless passengers on this wild ride.

In 1870, the average income in the world's richest country was about nine times greater than that in the world's poorest country. By 1990 it was forty-five times greater.

In 2006, the world's 793 billionaires held combined wealth of $2.6 trillion. (If liquidated in 2006), this wealth could have hired the poorest half of the world's workers -- the 1.4 billion workers who earn a few dollars a day -- for almost two years.

Between 1977 and 1996, the weight of the average American cheeseburger grew over 25 percent, and the volume of the average soft drink grew more than 50 percent. About 40 percent of the world's population now lacks sufficient water for basic sanitation and hygiene, and nearly one out of every five people does not have enough to drink.

Between 2000 and the beginning of 2005, China's daily oil imports soared 140 percent. Saudi Arabia, has pumped a total of 46 billion barrels of oil in the past 17 years, without admitting to any decrease in its stated reserve figure of about 260 billion barrels.

Since 1950, industrialized fishing has reduced the total mass of large fish in the world's oceans by 90 percent. The atmosphere's level of carbon dioxide is the highest in 650,000 years.

Is a deadly crash inevitable?

Thomas Homer-Dixon is director of the Trudeau Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto. He is the author of "The Ingenuity Gap" and his newest book "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization."

Terrence McNally: What are the biggest questions driving you right now?

Thomas Homer-Dixon: I have a 20-month-old son, and I'm concerned about the future for him. I'm trying to figure out what might happen and how we can make it better.

It's unlikely that the future is going to be a linear extrapolation of the present, but I've pretty well arrived at the conclusion that the diversity and power of the stresses that we're encountering are going to cause some major volatility. I expect social, political, economic and technological crises and breakdowns. It's hard to say what they're going to look like, but the probability of some major problems developing is rising.

So how are we going to respond in times of crisis?

In the book I introduce the metaphor of earthquakes. I talk about tectonic stresses building up under the surface of our societies and of global society. Now this is something that Californians are very familiar with. Everybody in the state knows that there are mighty tectonic plates pressing together along the San Andreas Fault, among others. Potential energy builds up, and at some point it's released in earthquakes that can have devastating consequences.

And I think the same is at least metaphorically true for our world. Stresses are building, and at some point I expect there will be a release of pressure because our institutions and our adaptive capability will be overloaded. We just won't be able to cope.

TMN: You point out that it's not linear, and it isn't any one thing that's going to do it. It's the combination and interaction. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond puts forth five factors that have led to collapse -- human environmental impacts, climate change, the behavior of your enemies, the behavior of your friends and how you respond. What are the converging stresses you see?

THD: Demographic, energy, environmental change, especially scarcity of water, shortages of cropland and forest in poor countries, climate, and then finally widening gaps between rich and poor people around the world.

You touched on something a moment ago that's very important. The real problem is that they're all happening together. We've learned in recent decades that revolution or societal collapse tends to happen when societies are stressed from multiple directions simultaneously.

Any one of the problems we face could be a major challenge for human society, but we have things going in the wrong direction in five different ways at the same time. Millions around the world are in a situation of severe water scarcity. That's already having major economic impacts, causing poverty and dislocation, and undermining institutions. Add climate change and the problem becomes that much worse. The two things will multiply each other. You could have a really catastrophic problem where, say, the precipitation fails and there's already water scarcity.

TMN: And the energy issue impacts everything -- moving water, moving people.

THD: Or drilling deeper into the ground to pull more water out of the ground. Energy is kind of a master resource. If we have enough cheap, high quality energy, we can cope with a lot of our other problems. But once energy becomes a lot more expensive, then the combination of climate change and water scarcity will be that much harder to deal with.

TMN: I recall Buckminster Fuller made the basic point that truly accurate economic value is related to energy.

THD: In fact there's a whole way of approaching economics that uses thermodynamics. Herman Daly in particular has pioneered this. Energy is a currency that is fundamental and physical, and it gets you away from prices, which are often distractions. The price of something -- a barrel of oil, a bushel of grain -- includes so many other factors that may not have anything to do with underlying abundance or scarcity of these things.

TMN: The economics of a snail, or a pond, or an entire society -- all have to do with the energy that keeps the organism alive.

THD: Physicists would tell you all of those things are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. That basically means they're complex systems, and they require a constant input of high quality energy to maintain that complexity. Human beings have created cities and societies and technologies that are extremely complex. We use those things to solve our problems and to raise our standard of living, but that takes enormous inputs of high quality energy. The energy footprint of Los Angeles, for instance, is hundreds of times larger than the city itself.

The question is ultimately whether we can sustain that indefinitely, especially since we're probably moving to a post-petroleum age. Energy is going to become steadily more expensive, in terms of the amount of energy that it takes to produce energy.

TMN: Peak oil is either already here or perhaps it's a decade away. That may not sound like such a bad thing -- the fact that we've used up half the oil in the ground. Many might say, my God, only half in a hundred years.

THD: We still have half of it left.

TMN: But every single barrel from now on is harder to get. We've gotten the easy half.

THD: Once you've passed peak production in a field or a region, the decline can be quite rapid. The major oil field in Oman and a lot of the fields in Texas are declining at 12 percent a year. The North Sea field that the U.K. depends upon is declining 8 percent a year. That's a very rapid shift from increasing production to decreasing production -- a shift into a world of scarcity. When we pass the peak in global oil production, energy prices will rise dramatically and very quickly.

TMN: Our current way of feeding ourselves in America is unsustainable. Everything on our plates travels an average of 1,300 miles to get there. We've rigged all of our economic systems and our agricultural systems as if energy would never run out.

THD: Here's a statistic that I came across in writing this book that really astonished me. We've quadrupled the human population in the last century, from 1.5 billion to 6.3 billion, in part because we've had a lot of cheap energy. In particular, that cheap energy has allowed us to increase the amount of energy in our food production systems by 80 fold.

TMN: So it takes 80 times more energy to feed four times more people.

THD: Exactly. We've created a food system, a water system, and cities that are fundamentally dependent upon a resource that is not indefinitely available.

TMN: The whole idea of free trade is built on globalized exchange, which depends on long distances.

THD: In his book "The Flat Earth," Thomas Friedman says we're moving to a frictionless global economy where everybody can compete on an equal plane. But that's only the case if we have abundant cheap energy. As energy becomes more expensive, people will start moving production closer to consumers. It won't make sense to have your production facilities in China if you're selling your goods in the United States. You're going to want them at least on the Mexican border.

TMN: It's going take playing the film backwards to save ourselves.

People have heard about the litany of crises in your book, but what's unique I think is the stance you're willing to take about what's going to happen. Jared Diamond says that there are two main factors that define whether societies succeed or collapse. Societies that survive practice long-term thinking and are willing and flexible enough to change their values when they no longer serve them.

What do you feel will save us from ourselves? What is The Upside of Down?

THD: I agree with Jared on both those factors. At the end of my book I spend a fair amount of time talking about the importance of value change. We need to move away from what I call strictly utilitarian values which focus on simple likes and dislikes that emphasize consumption of material goods, towards moral values, and even what I would call existential values. These relate to what we consider to be the good life, what brings meaning into our lives, what kind of world do we really want for our children and our children's children. These are fundamentally values conversations.

My difference with Diamond is that I don't think we're going to really begin those conversations in a proper way until we face some crises or breakdowns. In other words, my impression of his argument is that collapse is something we have to avoid, in all cases and in all forms. On the other hand, I believe there is a spectrum of forms of collapse. At one end is the ideal, optimistic future where we solve all our problems and we live happily every after. At the other end is catastrophic collapse. We have tended not to fill in all the spaces in between, but that's actually where things might be very interesting. There may be some forms of disruption and crisis that will actually stimulate us to be really creative. Most importantly, they may allow us to get the deep vested interests that are blocking change out of the way.

TMN: And that will be part of what allows us to finally have that values conversation?

THD: Exactly.

TMN: It seems that we're more willing to admit that when we talk about individuals. The 12-step notion, for instance, that people don't change till their backs are against the wall, till they hit bottom. We're usually not willing to say that about society because it's too frightening.

THD: I introduce it very much in personal terms, exactly the kinds of things that you mentioned. Many of us have had times in our lives where crises have challenged us in the most fundamental ways. We've had in some sense a breakdown of the basic systems that we rely upon to manage our lives. And we've had to rebuild, we've had to think very carefully about what we're doing, re-examine our values, break patterns. And often we've ended up much better off afterwards.

When you look at research that's come out over the last 15 to 20 years, the most complex adaptive systems in the world all go through patterns of growth and increasing complexity till eventually they become rigid and break down. Then they reorganize themselves, regenerate and regrow. All highly adaptive systems have breakdown in them at some point or other.

The key thing though -- and this is where I think that Jared Diamond's argument just doesn't give us the purchase that we need -- is that we have to keep the breakdown from being catastrophic. There has to be enough resilience in the system, enough information, enough adaptive capacity that things can be regenerated. With catastrophic breakdown, recovery is often impossible.

TMN: So you're saying, let's be realistic and not afraid to talk about breakdown. If an intervention is needed -- if things are that bad or about to become that bad -- we've got to be able to deal with it and not be disempowered.

THD: We need to start thinking now about what we're going to do in those occasions.

There will be times of frustration and fear and anger on the part of many people when fundamental verities and patterns of life are suddenly challenged. They'll be scared. And in those moments, extremists can take advantage of the situation and push our societies in directions that are very bad. Those of us who are nonextremists need to be prepared to push in other directions and create something that's good.

TMN: I recently interviewed Niall Ferguson about his book "War of the World." He quotes Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler as both come to power in the midst of the Depression. They sound remarkably alike, and yet one of them took things one way and one of them another.

THD: In fact that's exactly the example I use in my book. The great depression was a breakdown that challenged the fundamentals of the capitalist system. In fact, in the 1930s a lot of Americans thought that capitalism was a failed system. FDR used the opportunity created by that catastrophe to rebuild the fundamentals of American capitalism, to introduce a lot of Keynesian policies that laid the groundwork for American economic power for the next five decades. On the other hand, that crisis was used by Hitler to generate one of history's most horrific regimes.

TMN: Another lesson of history -- In his book Plan B 2.0, Lester Brown says that we should take hope from the fact that we turned our economy and our productive capacity around on a dime to fight and win World War II.

THD: And that turning on a dime occurred in the midst of a crisis. My suggestion is that we're not going to see fundamental shifts until we confront a major crisis. Whether we're able to exploit such crises effectively will largely depend upon whether we've planned well in advance, whether we've thought through how we're going to mobilize at those critical moments.

TMN: What is the role of religion in this?

THD: Our religious institutions are supposedly the places where we think about these larger values issues. But when we go in the door of our church or our mosque or our synagogue, we're given a creed, we're told what to think. We're not given a space in which to have a conversation about these things. So one of the issues that I discuss at the end of the book is how can we create what I would call an "open source democracy," an environment in which we can have some of those really deep discussions about values that we can't within our current religious institutions.

TMN: You're saying that we're in bad shape, and things are probably going to break down -- though not necessarily collapse, and it's that breakdown that's going to finally give us the impetus to change. But you're also saying that we're going to have to adapt our values institutions -- our politics and religion -- in order to successfully prepare for that moment.

THD: Whether we effectively take advantage of what I call "moments of contingency" will largely depend on whether we know where we're going. And we won't know where we're going unless we've had those values conversations ahead of time. Those conversations have to start now.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/47963/

Bonnie

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:28:00 +0000

A story I wrote for a discussion group I'm on. Someone mentioned he found it curious that so many 'counter-cultural' types were becoming Orthodox:

I had this girlfriend once, her name was Bonnie. Pagan, wicca, vegan, into free love, occasional various mind-altering substances, you know the sort. Actually I liked her a lot. She had this way of pursing her lips and a strange hairdo that actually worked, which she made up herself. Met her at a poetry thing in San Francisco, on Bright Wednesday (the wednesday after Pascha ('Easter'), in other words after "the ordeal by fire and by water is over and we can once again draw breath", as the psalmist says (more or less)). Got a wild hair after talking with her about how she'd broken up the week before with her drug using boyfriend, and admittedly somewhat to impress her, i got up on stage, recited a poem i'd written a long time before about breaking up, and sang "Christ is risen" in Byzantine Greek, figuring no one would ever guess what it was, even though I said it was "a little chant I learned in a monastery in Greece once." Interestingly, right after I sang, some pagan lesbian wicca women came in from a meeting next door, and asked us not to be so loud, which we hadn't been.

Anyway, "Monastery in greece, huh?" she said when I sat back down.

"Uh, yeah. Actually it was a long time ago." Actually not so much, just three years, only I didn't say that.

Didn't mention too much about being orthodox at first, either, though it eventually came up one saturday a week or two into our relationship when we were at this party in the hills of Marin County and I went over to her and said, "Um, actually i'm minor clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church and I have to go to a service this evening, so i'm sure you won't mind if I kinda just drop out for about an hour and a half, will you?" She looked at me, pursed her lips, and said very slowly, "You.... what??!" So I had to repeat myself. "Uh, yeah sure, fine, why not?!" She had the most bemused expression on her face. "Be my guest!" We were both having a pretty good time with parallel and sometimes intersecting conversations, so she obviously wasn't dependent on me or I wouldn't have even tried to get away with it. But I just *hate* to miss saturday vespers when I don't have to, and the church was nearby.

So anyway I came back an hour and a half later as I said I would, and managed to rescue her from this sorta creepy guy who was trying to get her into the hot tub. It was pretty easy; I just said, "Hi, I'm back", and she turned and said to me, "You're the most fascinating man I ever met." Obviously she'd been thinking about it.

"Don't bet on it honey, you never know who else you're going to meet." I was trying to play it very cool, but I was really astonished i'd gotten away with it. This girl was totally cool. Independent! I like that in a person!

By some weeks later we were having some real conversations about Orthodoxy, off and on, and she was blowing her mind because she'd left christianity once and for all forever, some long time earlier. That was after trying for a year at the age of 14 to envision her newly departed father roasting in the pits of hell because he wasn't "born again", a practice her pastor had recommended she take up. You know, gotta get used to some ideas, sever those worldly attachments, we're all glory bound over here, nevermind those other ones. And she never figured christianity would seem attractive in any sense again, but here we were. Minor clergy in the ROC, and all that.

So she said to me one evening a little later, "My friends at the hospital [where she worked] all ask me about this Orthodoxy thing. I was telling them that, as near as I could figure, it was all a whole lot of total individuals doing the same thing together."

I said, "That explains a lot, doesn't it?"

Religious Beliefs and Violent Entertainment

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 14:05:00 +0000

An item from Alternet: "A recent study indicated that those with strict religious beliefs enjoy violent and sexually explicit movies as much as any other person. In 2005, a study of 1,000 Americans sponsored by MarketCast and Variety found that those who were the most conservative in their religious beliefs were actually more likely to see films rated R for violence than those who consider themselves more liberal in their religious beliefs."

The Rise of Pentecostalism in the World

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 07:04:00 +0000

An interview that goes in conjunction with the Pew Forum Report. I seriously believe that charismatic or pentecostalist "christianity" will become the biggest challenge facing Orthodoxy in the 21st century. The idea of "being saved" already totally determines Christian religious discourse all over the world; it is the one issue a missionary has to be prepared to answer.

This interview is found at http://foreignexchange.tv/?q=node/1757, which it is mistitled "In Depth: Democratic Hopeful". I post it here in its entirety. You might also like to see this related article, which I posted on my Africa blog.

--------

Fareed Zakaria: With globalization many had predicted there would be a decline in religion, but the opposite has been true. The most interesting fresh twist to this phenomenon is the rise of evangelicalism and to discuss it as well as a new study on the rise of Christian Pentecostalism around the world is Luis Lugo, the Director of the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life.

Luis, let me ask you: Why is it that evangelicalism and... Pentecostalism as a kind of rough rubric for Pentecostals and charismatics— people who speak in tongues, who have you know a feeling of personal revelations and things— why is that specifically on the rise? The--the figures... are quite extraordinary; 23-percent of Americans could be so characterized; 49-percent of Brazilians; 60-percent in Guatemala; 56-percent in Kenya; 34-percent in South Africa. Particularly in Latin America and--and Africa this is way up from 25 years ago.

Luis Lugo: Well I think there were several reasons that Pentecostalism has taken root and grown so fast.... First of all, Pentecostalism seems to generate a very intense personal experience with a divine which is often described as extremely joyous. So that’s— that’s one element and you see this throughout the survey; no one indicates a higher degree of intimacy as it were with the world of the spirit and then Pentecostals and that’s true across the board. It’s also the case that Pentecostal has proven itself extremely adaptable. In societies which do not make a sharp distinction between the body and the spirit, Pentecostalism fits right into that context because it doesn’t make that sharp distinction. It sees that the world of the spirit is impacting every day life in a very profound sense, and this is both the divine, the gods in direct intervention, but also the world of angels and demons. There’s a strong emphasis in Pentecostalism on exorcism for instance; you see that clearly indicated in the report. Many of these folks who get attracted to Pentecostalism are internal migrants within their own societies and they find in Pentecostalism an instant community, a strong outreach, and then plugging them into churches, but also the proliferation of small groups— Bible studies, Bible reading. It’s clear from our survey findings that no one participates more in small communities than Pentecostals.

Fareed Zakaria: So--so it sounds to me like this is a--an interesting reaction, a reaction that started in the Western world to the rise of industrial capitalism and then globalization because it seems as though what it is providing people with is a sense of community, a sense of intimacy, a sense of companionship but also providing them with some highly individual and--and personal relationship which is very different from the very hierarchical nature of the old Catholic Church or the old Anglican Church.

Luis Lugo: I do think that there is very much a part that globalization is playing here. We’ve already mentioned immigration which is part and parcel of globalization, one of the most remarkable aspects.

Fareed Zakaria: Because it’s--it’s disorienting people and they want--

Luis Lugo: That’s precisely right.

Fareed Zakaria: --some certainty?

Luis Lugo: That’s right and not just people who cross borders, but people who cross internal borders, you know let’s say from rural areas to--to urban areas. They are also disoriented, so I do think that it--that it’s fair to say that this represents if not a backlash at least a response to the disorienting forces of modernity, of globalization. It’s--we picked this up for instance in the moral absolutism of Pentecostals; no one is more committed to a set of moral absolutes than--than Pentecostalism--than--than within Christianity, so it does seek to provide people with--with an anchor, a moral anchor that--that is both as you say highly personal, but also communitarian. And that combination seems to be--seems to be working in the spread of this movement.

Fareed Zakaria: It’s also very anti--I don’t know if I’d use the word anti-scientific but certainly at odds with science in the sense that you know there’s a very strong emphasis on things that you would normally find difficult to explain through normal scientific or rationalist methods. You have you know--in the United States 54-percent of Pentecostals say they have received direct revelations from God; 34-percent say they have experienced or witnesses exorcisms. That seems to me more of the old smells and bells stuff of the--of the old Church, you know people who saw the Virgin Mary or things like--. Oh, what explains this--there’s an almost a return to some of the mystery of the old Church?

Luis Lugo: Yes; I think that is definitely the case--the return to mystery and the sense of the supernatural. I would caution you against drawing easy conclusions though based upon some Pentecostal beliefs including the conclusion that they’re necessarily anti-scientific. It’s entirely possible for Pentecostals to have a very strong sense of--of the divine--of divine healing, etcetera and that going along side-by-side with a commitment to modern medicine and so forth. So I would not necessarily draw that--that sharp distinction here.

Fareed Zakaria: Are they--are they Republicans or Democrats?

Luis Lugo: In this country they tend to be quite Republican, along with other evangelicals. We typically--when we do our surveys put Pentecostals and evangelicals together because they do have a very similar moral orientation and--and political orientation, so they are heavily Republican. It--it--but that’s another mistake that people make; sometimes they--they view the moral conservatism of Pentecostals which in this country leads them to the Republican Party around these cultural world issues and then are surprised to find that elsewhere such as in the recent elections in Brazil for instance they actually threw their support behind Lula Da Silva, the left-center candidate and so there again people--it’s people are surprised by that. Well if you know that in the Latin American context political conservatism is closely associated with the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in society you would see then why a religious minority like Pentecostals would support candidates that go away from that orientation--that open up the political and religious system.

Fareed Zakaria: Now the one place where the inroads are not that impressive is Asia. One of the things that I noticed in the surveys--even in South Korea where there seems to be remarkable headway, you still have 50-percent of South Koreans describing themselves essentially as--as non-religious.

Luis Lugo: The single biggest churches are in Korea; we’re talking hundreds of thousands of--of people, so in Korea it has had an impact. In the Philippines which is the one majority Christian country in Asia it’s also had a significant impact mostly through the Catholic charismatic renewal. And then in--in parts of India, where incidentally there were Pentecostal like outbreaks 50--60 years before Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles in 1906 in the--the Southern--Tamil Nadu and Kerala areas of India, so there is a longstanding history there but you’re quite right. We have not seen the numbers in Asia that we have seen in Africa and Latin America.

Fareed Zakaria: Let me ask you finally about one similarity that struck me, which is the similarity in the Pentecostal and charismatic conception of the end of days and the end of life on earth with what in Shia(ism) people talk about the return of the Mahdi. There’s--you know people are now worried about Ahmadinejad and his--the fear that he might be trying to hasten the end of the world. This is actually a core belief in--among these charismatics you were talking about.

Luis Lugo: No one believes more strongly in the second coming of Christ, which all Christians believe than--than do Pentecostals. Moreover, they have a very strong sense of--of what they call the rapture of the church which does have a whole prophetic set of teachings around it and--and so the expectation, the imminent return of--of the Lord is very much part of the Pentecostal mindset. It’s part of what propels Pentecostals to be so evangelistic; no one that we’ve been able to determine is as intent on spreading the faith and converting people than our Pentecostals and part of the reason from the very beginning has been that if--if the Lord is going to come soon then we better get as many people saved as--as we possibly can. There are some interesting issues here with respect to--to Islam. I’m glad you brought it up because when you look at those four or five countries that we surveyed where there is a challenge from Islam of one kind or another, Pentecostals even more than others tend to take a very negative view of--of Islam and tend to therefore support the US-led War on Terror. This is one immediate foreign policy implication of--of this movement. In places like the Philippines for instance and Nigeria, high levels of support for the US-led War on Terror and--and some serious concerns about--about Islam--that’s reinforced by the fact that there’s a strong Zionism that’s built into Pentecostalism--very strong pro-Israel positions. Even in countries that have you know really no stake in--in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Pentecostals much more so than others take a very strong pro-Israeli position and I think this is also due to their--their understanding of the end-times and the role of Israeli in the coming of the Messiah. So there are some interesting overlaps and parallels here between Pentecostalism and--and certain aversions of Islam with respect to the coming of the Mahdi, yeah.

Fareed Zakaria: Well this is a fascinating report and fascinating conversation. Thank you very much, Luis Lugo.

Luis Lugo: Thank you; my pleasure.

See also this related article, on my Africa blog.

Chaudhry on Richard Dawkins

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 08:08:00 +0000

And this was from a leftist news weekly— In These Times— jbb.

The Godless Fundamentalist

In The Root of All Evil, biologist Richard Dawkins reveals his own lust for certainty

By Lakshmi Chaudhry

December 8, 2006

Religion fucking blows!” declares comedian Roseanne Barr in her latest HBO special. Her pronouncement, both in its declarative certainty and self-congratulatory defiance, could easily serve as the succinct moral of Richard Dawkins’ documentary, The Root of All Evil.

The big-screen version of a two-part British television series follows the noted biologist as he embarks on a global road-trip to the veritable bastions of theological conviction—the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a Christian conservative stronghold in Colorado Springs, a Hassidic community in the heart of London—bullying, berating and heckling the devoutly faithful he encounters along his way.

Confronting cancer patients who have traveled to Lourdes in hopes of a cure, Dawkins tells the viewer in the first scene, “It may seem tough to question the beliefs of these poor, desperate people’s faith.” By the end of the documentary, Dawkins’ bravado is not in doubt. When talking to Ted Haggard, a New Life Church pastor (more recently infamous for his predilection for crystal meth and gay prostitutes), after witnessing one of his sermons, Dawkins tells him, “I was almost reminded of the Nuremberg rallies … Dr. Goebbels would have been proud.” To a hapless guide at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, he taunts, “Do you really believe that Jesus’ body lay here?” And then there’s his remark—”I’m really worried for the well-being of your children”—to a Hassidic school teacher, Rabbi Herschel Gluck, whom Dawkins accuses of brainwashing innocent kids.

As he storms his way around the world in the state of high dudgeon, Dawkins’ attitude can be best described as apocalyptic outrage. The effect is in turns bewildering, embarrassing, grating and even unintentionally comic, as we watch the distinguished Oxford University Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science channel his inner Borat. When the astonished rabbi exclaims, “You are a fundamentalist believer,” even a sympathetic, true-blue San Francisco audience cannot help but chuckle in assent.

As his rabbinical nemesis rightly suspects, Dawkins’ fondness for sweeping generalizations reflects his own deep-seated fundamentalism, a virulent form of atheism that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose. “They condemn not just belief in God, but respect for belief in God. Religion is not just wrong; it’s evil,” writes Gary Wolf in his Wired Magazine cover story, “The New Atheism,” whose leading exponents include—in addition to Dawkins—Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Yale, punk rocker Greg Graffin and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. These are the self-styled “Brights,” the moniker of choice for Dawkins to describe “a person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements.”

The “bright” worldview is also remarkably free of complexity. Dawkins’ view of faith can be summed up thus: Religion is dangerous because it requires that we suspend our powers of reason to place our faith in the shared delusion that is God. This, he asserts, is the first step on that “slippery slope” to hatred and violence.

When we cede our “critical faculties” to believe in the idea of a higher power, Dawkins claims, we are immediately invested in a panoply of increasingly ludicrous propositions: that the Virgin Mary ascended directly to heaven, Moses parted the seas, God created the world in seven days, or beautiful virgins await good Muslims in heaven. Why not, he asks, believe in fairies or hobgoblins?

Faith, in his universe, is interchangeable with superstition, eccentricity, madness, and, at its most benign, infantilism. Religious conviction is a marker of human backwardness, both in a historical and psychological sense. According to Dawkins, human beings invented religion as a “crutch” for ignorance. Without science to help us understand the world around us, we turned to gods/faith/superstition to cope with our sense of helplessness. Today, religion remains a source of succor to those unable to outgrow their childish desire to see the world in terms of “black and white, as a battle between good and evil”—unlike atheists who are “responsible adults and accept that life is complex.”

“We’re brought from cradle to believe that there is something good about faith,” says Dawkins, as he compares this belief to “a virus that infects the young, for generation after generation.” Fortunate are the “responsible adults” who grow up to shake off these beliefs, unlike the rest of humanity who remain trapped in their infantile desire to be taken care of by an all-powerful deity.

Unlike fairytales, however, our religious beliefs are not harmless, says Dawkins, they instead lay the foundation for the murder and mayhem inevitably wreaked by true believers. His evidence: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the 9/11 attacks, and less spectacular crimes against humanity like suicide bombers, anti-abortion killers, and so on.

This broad-stroked caricature of faith is delivered with a breathtaking disregard for historical context, in which social, political or economic conditions are simply ignored or discounted. “[Dawkins] has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the November Harpers’, while reviewing his bestselling book, The God Delusion. And on screen he is no different. Of course, there are sound political causes for the Palestinian conflict, Dawkins hurriedly acknowledges—only to assert in the same breath that the real culprit is religion, which teaches its adherents to think, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

Not unlike the religious simpletons he claims to disdain, Dawkins sees the world in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil, cloaked here as Science vs. Religion. Where Religion is corrupt, tyrannical and false, Science offers intellectual integrity, freedom and truth. As Robinson notes, Dawkins fails to acknowledge Science’s less admirable achievements, be they eugenics, Hiroshima, or the more mundane travesties committed by unethical doctors or fat-cat researchers in service of corporate funding.

“Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime,” Robinson writes.

In this version of atheist theology, Science attains the same status as Dawkins’ loathed “alpha male in sky,” whose laws rule all things known and unknown. If we do not quite understand how the universe was created or the human brain works—or the competing, contradictory claims about the virtues of, say, table salt—all we need to do is wait and keep faith in the scientific method, which will reveal all in good time. The ways of Science are no less sacred or mysterious than that of God.

Like his fellow fundamentalists, Dawkins has no use for moderation or its practitioners. The people of faith featured in his documentary are strict, true believers, who adhere to the most rigid interpretations of their respective faiths. There are no Muslim doctors, church-going geneticists or Catholics who support abortion rights. Anyone who believes in evolution and God is just as deluded or in denial, and, as he tells Wired, “really on the side of the fundamentalists.”

Nothing less than a complete renunciation of all things spiritual will suffice. “As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers,” he writes in The God Delusion, in an eerie echo of President Bush’s post-9/11 point of view: “You’re either with us or against us.”

It would be silly to argue that the new atheists’ crusade is as dangerous as the so-called war on terror, but that crusade does give aid and comfort to fundamentalists everywhere by affirming their view of faith: one, science and religion are mutually opposed and exclusive worldviews; two, religion is immutable and outside history; and therefore, three, the Bible (or the Quran, for that matter) must be taken literally, and is not open to interpretation. For both camps, ignoring one law or moderating a single injunction is the first step toward rejecting the faith in its entirety.

This great war of ontologies, seductive though it may be in our beleaguered times, becomes immediately absurd if we remind ourselves of one simple fact: Science and Religion are historical in the richest sense of the word. They both inform and reflect our changing ideas about ourselves and the world around us. From the practice of throwing a woman on her husband’s funeral pyre in India to determining intelligence by the shape of person’s skull in Europe—both of which seem hateful today—religious and scientific beliefs ebb, rise and transmute themselves over time. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the vast bulk of what we call History, which the Brights seem just as willing to rewrite as their theological adversaries.

As innately human endeavors, religion and science are therefore as unreasonable, noble, immoral, kind, tyrannical, odious, compassionate—in other words, irredeemably human—as the people who literally embody them. Yes, the laws of nature and those of God might still exist without human beings, but there would be no one to name or know them as such, or act on that knowledge. Taken together, they express our need to both submit and to control, to know and to believe, to be in the visible world and to transcend it.

That the vast majority of us would find it difficult to choose between the two should be hardly surprising. The antidote to fanaticism is not a new puritanism of reason, but the contradictory, ambiguous, compromised reality of ordinary human experience.

Lakshmi Chaudhry has been a reporter and an editor for independent publications for more than six years, and is a senior editor at In These Times, where she covers the cross-section of culture and politics.

Enigma of ancient world's computer is cracked at last

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:38:00 +0000

The Antikythera Mechanism

A 2,100-year-old clockwork machine whose remains were retrieved from a shipwreck more than a century ago has turned out to be the celestial super-computer of the ancient world.

Using 21st-century technology to peer beneath the surface of the encrusted gearwheels, stunned scientists say the so-called Antikythera Mechanism could predict the ballet of the Sun and Moon over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that would bedevil Isaac Newton himself.

Built in Greece around 150-100 BC and possibly linked to the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, its complexity was probably unrivalled for at least a thousand years, they say.

"It's beautifully designed. Your jaw drops when you work out what they did and what they put into this," said astronomer Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University, Wales, in an interview with AFP.

A reconstruction of Antikythera Mechanism.

"It implies the Greeks had great technical sophistication."

The Antikythera Mechanism is named after its place of discovery, where Greek divers, exploring a Roman shipwreck at a depth of 42 metres (136 feet) in 1901, came across 82 curious bronze fragments.

At first, these pieces, thickly encrusted and jammed together after lying more two millennia on the sea floor, lay forgotten. But a closer look showed them to be exquisitely made, hand-cut, toothed gearwheels.

It was clear that, within this find, 29 gearwheels fitted together, possibly making some sort of astronomical calendar. But of what, exactly?

For a quarter of a century, the textbook on the strange find was a work written by a historian of science and technology, Derek de Solla Price.

He hypothesised that the Mechanism in fact had 31 gearwheels, and did something pretty astonishing -- it linked the solar year with a 19-year cycle in the phases of the Moon. This is the so-called Metonic cycle, which takes the Moon 235 lunar months to the same phase on the same date in the year.

Edmunds' team, gathering experts from Britain, Greece and the United States, has now taken the tale several chapters forward.

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, they describe how they used three-dimensional X-ray computation tomography and high-resolution surface imaging to peek beneath the Mechanism's surface, yet without damaging the priceless artefact.

There, they read inscriptions on the bronze cogs that had been unseen by human eye since that Roman ship came to grief aeons before.

The original device, they believe, is likely to have comprised 37 gear-wheels and comprised two clock-like faces, one front and one back, which would have fitted into a slim wooden box measuring 31.5 x 19 cm (12.5 x 7.5 cm) and a thickness of 10cms (four inches).

The machine was a 365-day calendar, which ingeniously factored in the leap year every four years.

And it not only provided the Metonic cycle, which was known to the Babylonians, it also gave the so-called Callippic cycle, which is four Metonic cycles minus one day and reconciles the solar year with the lunar calendar.

It could also predict lunar and solar eclipses under the Saros cycle, a 223-month repetitive interplay of the Sun, Earth and Moon. This function, presumably, would been useful for religious purposes, given that eclipses are traditionally taken as omens.

The Machine was also a star almanac, showing the times when the major stars and constellations of the Greek zodiac would rise or set and, speculatively, may also have shown the positions of the planets.

But even more impressive is a tiny pin-and-slot device that factors in a movement of the Moon that, for centuries, puzzled sky-watchers.

In this so-called main lunar anomaly, the Moon appears to move across the heavens at different speeds at different times -- the reason being its elliptical orbit around Earth.

"Newton used to say he would think about this until his head hurt," notes Edmunds, wryly.

This latter discovery prompts the scientists to wonder if the great Hipparchos, who drew up the first catalogue of the stars and wrote about the lunar anomaly in the 2nd century BC, may have had a hand in designing the Mechanism.

Adding circumstantial evidence to this theory is that the shipwreck was found to have jars and coins from Rhodes, where Hipparchos lived.

The computer is so advanced in its mathematics and technology that the history of ancient Greece may have to be rewritten, contends Edmunds.

"We now must ask: What else could they do? That's a difficult thing, because this is really the only surviving metallic artefact of its kind. Who knows what else may be lost?"

It was not until the end of the first millennium AD and the golden age of Islamic science that anything so technologically wondrous surfaced again, if the archaeological evidence is a guide.

This was an eight-geared astrolabe, depicting the movements of the Sun and Earth, by the Islamic astronomer al-Biruni in AD 996.

Had the Greeks' knowledge somehow survived and been transmitted across the centuries, to inspire al-Biruni? Or had it withered away and disappeared, leaving Islamic scholars with the task of rediscovering what had been known a thousand years before?

http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=84029305

Theology of Vespers

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 20:46:00 +0000

Interesting discussion on a yahoo group i belong to. We were talking about "Morning vs Evening (When the Liturgical Day Begins)" when one correspondent wrote,

Our books should reflect our conviction that a day runs from sunset to sunset... but frequently they don't.

And another responded,

Perhaps because few if any of us have a real conviction that the day does run from sunset to sunset.

In real life the day does run from morning to evening. What on earth is gained by trying to pretend that there is a liturgical day that does otherwise?

And so this came out of my own fingers, after having on the previous day expressed some agnosticism on the question as to why our liturgical books seem at odds with our theological understanding of when the day begins, but thinking about it some more:

This might be a question of lack of culture, yes?

If we do serve the offices of the church as set forth by the fathers from the beginning on a daily basis, in time we actually do come to think of the evening as the start of a new day. Tonight we will begin singing of the glorious Apostle Thomas and, coincidentally or not, also of St Innocent of Moscow. We hadn't thought much about them this week, and won't, until tonight, but tonight will be all about them, for it's the beginning of their day, and we will sing about them. And after singing about them for an hour or so, as we do, and bringing out the first light of evening and blessing God for the day which has just ended, and for the new (new!) light of Christ which is now shining in our hearts, in the darkness of this world (and, not coincidentally, also amid the gathering shadows of Crow Hill, outside sultry Kampala), we really will have a sense, by the end of the service, that something has ended and something new is just beginning, as many things do, in darkness, in stillness, in the earth, to be kept secret until it is revealed in splendor (in the morning), when we shall exclaim: "The Lord is God, and he has shone upon us!"— after which we will perfect and fulfill what has thus begun, by the service of the Holy Liturgy.

We know from the scripture that "there was evening, and morning: one day" (Gn 1.4 I think). Not even: "the first day"— for there had not yet been a second; how could we call that day "first", since in doing so we would already have made it relative to a "second", when that second had not yet been brought into existence. No, that could come only later; for was God under no compulsion to bring it forth at all— he had created "one day", and he had already seen that it was "good". But if there was ever to be a second, it would have to have the same shape, the same order, if it was to be a "day" at all. For the first ever defines the class, otherwise we call it something else. But the scripture says: "evening, and morning: one day", so a "day" (as it is called) begins in the evening. But we have to ask why. In the Church's experience, why?

In our modern culture, beginning at dusk does indeed seem artificial: We— (ah! but who are we, really?)— "We" like to say a day begins at midnight. Why, though? Isn't that an odd and arbitrary time? Everybody's asleep, nobody even notices it, except the banks, which have arranged their software so as to assess interest automatically at midnight. But for us— the very idea that the creation of a new day meant nothing at all! Or that the day "really" begins in the morning, when we get to wor!. The latter, of course, makes better felt sense, but it's still all about us. And the Bible is not so androcentric, nor the ancients as interested in themselves, when they much more sensibly (and sensorily!) counted twelve hours starting when the light ended, and again when it began. They lived in the fields, their feet were in the soil, they saw the sun, moon and stars overhead. They knew when God's day began or ended. It had nothing to do with them; that they had to conform their lives to it.

The new day begins when God creates it, not when we get off to work, whether that work is the work of the financial office or of the Midnight Office. And our service books set forth the work of man, who responds to God. Now, at dawn, "man goes forth unto his work, and to his labor until the evening", as it says in the vesperal Psalm (103 LXX / 104 MT), which recounts the day's activities: so our books set forth man's work, they begin when the work of homo adorans begins, with the early morning office. And in this sequence, after all, the beginning of Vespers is still the end of the old day— for as is well known, the change to the new day, which in fact we have gathered to observe, does not come till the Prokeimenon, which is in the middle of Vespers, not its beginning— so that the vesperal service is appropriately placed in our service books at the end of the human workday.

But God's work begins with the separation of light from darkness and the creation of "evening, and morning, one day". Man can't do that. So the day itself, apart from the work we will do in it, begins with the evening, during Vespers, when God creates it. We ask mercy for the day past and bless God for the new day he is creating— and after that, we take a little nourishment and receive a little "rest for our infirmity", as the prayers say— but only so much as, and only so that, we may rise early with the Morning Star, to await the Rising Sun of Justice, and behold the Dawn of Mercy, and to praise his marvelous works, as is due.

But when we rise to do this, he has already been at work, creating the day in which we could do this.

In the world of banks and offices, some of this may have been forgotten; but shall the Church also forget?

Our correspondent relates:

In the CofE over the last decade there has been something of an encouragement in revision of lectionary and sanctorale and daily office to pretend that the day begins in the evening. Personally, I am pleased to say that the 'final' versions of these works have discarded the idea. It's still available as an option for the cognoscenti ('anoraks' if you
prefer!), but there is no encouragement to observe evening prayer as if it were the start if the day, except for a small number of red letter feasts. That seems like reality to me.

Some things may seem like reality to us, but it could be only that we have not seen what reality is. "There was evening and there was morning: one day." Was he "pretending", or did the sacred writer actually understand something other than what the banks know?

(in)capable?

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 20:17:00 +0000

'...what John Paul the Great termed "the culture of death." We're not talking just about abortion, which kills millions of human beings each year. We're talking about the slow suicide of the West generally. The more sex is detached from marriage and procreation, the less life-giving it becomes—biologically and spiritually. Not only is the birth rate now below replacement level in all "developed" countries; people find it increasingly difficult to see sex in particular and life in general as having any purpose other than self-gratification. For the majority, that means physical self-gratification. Consequently, we are becoming fewer, richer, fatter, and incapable of countering the spiritual energy of militant Islam. Western humanity is becoming a maladapted species. If we don't change, we will die—and deservedly so. The antidote is the Way, the Truth, and the Life: Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man.' (from this blog).

I think it's a good thing that the birthrate is going down in developed countries; I remember when the western part of the US was pretty much open territory where anyone could go and spend a few days alone, and i totally agree with, for example, Thomas Merton, on the value and necessity of solitude. What will we be like when the entire world becomes a theme park like America more and more is, or a slum with boom boxes like Kampala (imitating America) so often strives to be? At any rate, looking at the stats on the number of cheetahs left (or whatever)— I can only hope that the birthrate of the non-developed world (locally, 7 live births per woman) goes down as well.

So it's true. And I'm hardly the first to comment that our relationship to life, to the environment, to ourselves, to the rhythms of nature (our nature) to birth and death, to celebration and life, to anything you can think of, really— are become utterly distorted. "[W]e are becoming fewer, richer, fatter, and incapable of countering the spiritual energy of militant Islam." Or, apparently, of our own kinds of fundamentalism— which, arguably, has historical connections with the quranic ideology of Islam anyway. But what's to be done?

As a seminary teacher in a very definitely Third World country, I constantly wonder: What will it take? Is renewal possible? From whence will it be born? What is "Orthodoxy", here, now, always?

More on "Inerrancy"

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 07:37:00 +0000

Dr. Jim West continues his discussion about the purported "historical accuracy" (inerrancy on historical matters) of the Bible, at his biblical-studies blog:

"My belief is that Yahweh acted in history and as such is subject to historical reconstruction."

Ah, there it is! Yahweh is subject to historical reconstruction! But he isn't, he is in fact subject to nothing. Joe clearly and articulately, in that one sentence, stabbed the tail on the donkey of historicism's attempts to delimit, restrict, and confine Yahweh to what can be historically verified. That is the very heart of my contention that historicism leads to idolatry. God is replaced with history- and since, in the mind of historicists, history can be firmly established, then God too can be firmly- confined.

Joe continues

"This record which we have is historical and as such may be investigated and tested. Once it has passed scrutiny then we may properly do theology. I feel that to blindly put our faith in any document without testing it is dubious at best."

"Once it has passed scrutiny, the Bible can be trusted". I reverse the order though and submit that when it comes to our relationship with God, which is of course the purpose of the biblical message, the proof is in the relationship itself. Which came first, Joe and others? Faith or a book? Faith gave birth to the Bible- not the other way around.

Joe concludes

"...once I became a Christian I needed historical revelation to guide me in the principals of faith and teaching."

Leaning on historical reconstruction is leaning on a reed. Kierkegaard fumed against this because he saw it as a sign of unbelief. In essence what it says is that "If God can't prove it to me, I can't trust God". This is, at its ground, blasphemous.

it strikes me that all attempts to overcome secularism amount to this same bogus desire for "signs", for "proofs". And it's an evil and adulterous generation that looks for them!

It's an evil and adulterous generation that looks for signs and proofs, but the reason is that they have already accepted that positive, sensory approach to knowledge is the only one that leads to truth. Pointing this out is not an appeal to mystical or theological ways of knowing— both because we're not operating on that level yet! and because anything less than what the saints discern is purely a product of one's own ideas and rightly regarded as unverifiable— dogmatic claims to unverifiable knowledge are what led to the need for positive science, including positive historiography, in the first place. But it is simply to say that "scientific" truth is not the only kind of truth there is, and that the bible is not particularly interested in "scientific truth", any more than other great literature is.

Are there, then, "mistakes" in the Bible? Only if it can be shown that the Bible intended to report mere "facts" in the first place. Reportage of fact can be either true, or mistaken, or a lie. But if the purpose was never to report fact as such, then how can we speak of "mistakes". Was Tolkien "mistaken" when he said the Balrog dragged Gandalf into the abyss?

This is not to say that there are not historical facts in the Bible. It's just to say that historical facts are not the point of the Bible, and that whatever historical facts are there, are there in the service of other aims— ones that the fathers were getting at when they studied and preached "typology".

I am reviewing some old notes about the interpretation of Scripture, in preparation for my classes with the seminarians beginning next week. I was struck by something I wrote years ago:

Interpretation:
The truth of the Bible is not just objective; its meaning is participation.

Therefore, truth has to be seen as an effect of interpretation, not merely as its object.

Now, where did I get that? Probably Paul Ricoeur or somebody.

Teachers Have It Easy, Yes?

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 07:22:00 +0000

Have a look at this review of Teachers Have It Easy, a new book on the teaching profession in America. It describes exactly why I never managed to become a teacher, even though I was in fact teaching Latin part time within a year of graduating from high school.

What will become of a society that doesn't seem to think educating its young is a top priority?

Biblical "Inerrancy"

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 06:46:00 +0000

There's an interesting discussioin going on at Biblical Theology, a weblog about biblical studies, theology, and current events, operated by Jim West,a fairly big guy in the world of online biblical scholarship. The discussion starts with this post concerning the historicity or not of biblical texts. Readers should be aware that the background of this discussion is the big debate raging nowadays between "minimalists" who recognize very little in the OT as being demonstrably historical (and that's the operative word— demonstrably), and "maximalists" who want to take everything in the Bible as historically true unless positively proven otherwise. To quote the relevant parts of the initial salvo:

What historians of Ancient Israel generally offer is theology in the [guise] of history. If the [historical] make-up is scrubbed off and the pristine skin of theology is laid bare for what it is, then we have [only] a simple retelling of the story of the Bible[, which is not really the same as history]. Or perhaps an archaeological example will be better. If the patina of theology is scrapped off the underlying historical events, the one who scrapes will soon discover that the patina is so thick that the actual artifact is forever encased— and hence lost unless the patina is thoroughly shattered, which would sadly also shatter the membrane thin artifact beneath. What the maximalists offer us is more patina on the existing patina of historicism. If this is not the case ... let two or three witnesses (aside from the Biblical text, or even along side of it!) be called and testify to what they have seen and heard— or else admit the hearsay nature of the evidence and dismiss the case called The Historical Israel.

...“Historical Israel”, whatever that was before the period of the Maccabees, is encrusted in a virtually impenetrable layer of ideology. It is, of course, absolutely true that “the real issue is, which evidence is to be taken seriously”. But it is precisely the paucity of evidence itself, even from Ancient Near Eastern sources outside of the Biblical text, that is the center of the entire problem. Even if one privileges Assyrian texts or Babylonian or Hebrew, one is still left with near emptiness in one’s historical hand. Historians of Ancient Israel must develop new, more sophisticated tools for examining this relic so as to peel off ideology and expose genuine history (Historie ["history-as-event"]). The best models for this kind of reconstruction are found in the works of Garbini, Liverani, Thompson, and Lemche. If scholars are to offer the public a reconstructed history of Israel they must adopt the methods of these scholars rather than the method of the maximalists who simply use the Biblical text to “Retell” the history of Israel. The Biblical text is, in the excellent phrase of Gerhard von Rad, Theological Historiography. It is Geschichte ["history-as-story"] and not Historie. It is theological story telling and sermonizing, and not historical recapitulation of actual events.

...[W]hat methodology [to] use when doing historical reconstruction?
1- Examine all texts relating to events, locations, or persons; and collect any relevant archaeological evidence (this includes ANE texts as well as canonical and extracanonical texts).
2- Collate said texts and artifacts.
3- Where there is verification of factually presented statements by multiple attestation textually and archaeologically- accept them as historical.
4- Where there is no verification- factual statements cannot be established as factual.
5- If there is no establishment of fact- judgment must be suspended until further data becomes available.

I found the following comments to be particularly illuminating, in other words, right on target:

[That] ...there is no way to understand the Bible without a historical foundation... [is true only IF] we realize that there is precious little history that we can uncover from biblical texts. ... The Bible is the Word of God and is the primary source for all our knowledge of God. God reveals himself in the Bible by speaking through his inspired authors. The Holy Spirit takes the words of those inspired writers and makes them real, personal, and applicable to our own lives and situations. Hence, again, the Bible is the starting point and basis for all our thinking about God [but not for our thinking about history]. ... the Bible isn't about history— it's about God— Ernest Wright notwithstanding.

The stories contained in the bible, in all their multiplicity- do not have a historical purpose. Whether they be aetiologies, or novellas, or any other genre; their purpose is theological, not historical. [Those who search the Bible for history] are approaching the bible mistakenly. It's as though you came to a music book, [which teaches] music theory, and used it to reconstruct the history of Prague. Sure, there might be mention of Prague, and Prague is a real place, but that is not the purpose of the book.

There is, indeed, historical recollection, in a fragmentary form, in the Hebrew Bible. We have, at best, snippets of historical remembrance- but ... those historical fragments are so overlayed with theological and ideological external layers that the recovery of "history" is impossible. The Hebrew Bible is not, and never was intended to be, a history book.

I find [maximalist] theorizings an overreaching intended to build a firm foundation on a paper thin sheet of ice. Further, I take [maximalists] to be, at heart, unbelievers. For [they] will not believe unless you have proof. And [they] will not have proof unless [they] can establish historical fact. And [they] must establish historical fact, or [they] have no evidence. And without evidence [they] have no proof. And so the circularity goes.

...making the Bible into a history textbook lowers its value, while treating it as a theological text increases its significance. To put it plainly, those who wish the Bible were history lessen it as [Word of God].

I think the last few paragraphs are an especially good summation of the whole issue. We have to keep in mind two things: Absence of evidence of historicity is not evidence of the absence of historicity, of course— one is not claiming that— but even less is absence of evidence any kind of proof of historicity! The fact should be obvious, but people are very invested in having a "historically true" Bible!

A monk on Mount Athos, gee, almost 20 years ago now! once said to me, quite in line with Jim West's comment that he finds maximalists to be "unbelievers", that "fundamentalism is the last refuge of rationalism"— a quip which he got from the great Gerontas Aimilianos of Stavronikita, as I recall. And he cited specifically the need to make historical proof the basis of faith.

Right on, right on, right on! It's interesting how little the fathers of the church were interested in a purely historical reading of scripture. Oh, to be sure, they had no reason to doubt that the Bible was historically accurate, but that didn't interest them. For them— and, I submit, for us as well— the real question is always 'What is there about this (story, passage, text) that parallels and therefore illumines my own life?'

I've long had a hunch that what is called 'biblical literalism' or 'biblical inerrancy'— the idea that scripture has to be, and stands or falls on whether it is, historically accurate— was a novel doctrine which arose as a consequence of the invention of photography. The latter facilitated a new definition of historical truth as what would be photographically accurate— and this new definition cast earlier ideas of truth as what would be emotionally or spiritually or socially meaningful into doubt. Earlier culture had its paintings, but now it was realized that a painting of, say, a battle, or even of a person, couldn't be "historically accurate", but was a vision realized by the painter as much as it was a representation of the event or person in question. Today, of course, postmodern criticism has taught us that even photographs are composed and framed and shot from a point of view, which might not have been the best perspective, or even the only possible one.

Whether my idea that theories of biblical literalism were first propounded in modern form consequent on the invention of photography is accurate or not, it does seem that there is an inherent connection between such theories of biblical truth and the arising of modern science. For the question of biblical history could only become a question about the scientific historicity of the bible, when historiography became a scientific endeavor. What seems to have gotten missed along the way is the fact that now science defines and controls the truth of the Bible, for all truth is expected to conform to positivistic scientific norms. And what seems to be happening nowadays is a much-belated recognition that scientific truth is not all there is to the world. Well, we had to try it out; it looked good at first. Only later did we see the ways that it's blind.

Rightly do a number of modern Orthodox commentators like Phillip Sherrard, David Hart, and others (though I can't cite any passages just at the moment, it wouldn't be hard to find if I had to) point out that scientific positivism, which is purely exterior and sensory, is actually inimical to and at some odds with spiritual understanding. Really, it doesn't take a geronta to see that!— because, obviously, as everyone knows, Crime & Punishment is as true in its own way, or perhaps even more true in a more compelling way, than E=mc2.

***

By the way, another biblical studies link apparently worth watching is groups.yahoo.com/group/biblical-studies/.

Book and Cosmos— added pictures

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:16:00 +0000

Added some pictures of the Great Blessing of Water to the blog entry I made on cosmology yesterday. Be sure to look if you missed them.

My Place in Humorspace

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 06:45:00 +0000

Well, the results are in. Contrary to what some have said, I do have a sense of humor:

the Prankster
(23% dark, 19% spontaneous, 31% vulgar)
Your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | LIGHT

Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. You're not pretentious, but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke, but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist.

You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs and it's highly likely you've tried this yourself. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Conan O'Brian - Ashton Kutcher [Note: Whoever they are— jbb.]

Test tracked 3 variables. Compared to other people of age and gender:

Higher than 99% on dark;
higher than 99% on spontaneous;
higher than 99% on vulgar.

[I don't get that last one, unless it refers to the choice of the cat picture and the fact that I couldn't answer any questions about movies, movie stars, or tv shows, since I don't watch them.

Link: The 3-Variable Funny Test.

(Go ahead, take the test, but if you paste the code to your own blog, be sure to pull the graphics off their page and put them on your own site, and clean up all the "free online dating" links in the code itself.)

Kidsbeer

noreply@blogger.com (john) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 06:19:00 +0000

At the risk of actually advertising it: Here's "Kidsbeer", a non-alcoholic, guarana-based beer-like brew aimed at children in Japan. Why?— "Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink":

Guarana not Alcohol

Kidsbeer proves hit suds for minors

SAGA (Kyodo) Kidsbeer, a nonalcoholic brew aimed at children, is catching on with young drinkers and is posting monthly shipments of 75,000 bottles, according to maker Tomomasu Co.

Shipments of Kidsbeer, a nonalcoholic brew aimed at children, are growing rapidly.

The beverage, one of whose ingredients is the Latin American plant guarana, sells for around 380 yen per 330-milliliter bottle. The bottles themselves are colored brown to make the drink look even more like its more potent counterpart, the company said.

The drink started out as Guarana, a cola beverage that used to be sold at the Shitamachi-ya restaurant in Fukuoka, run by 39-year-old Yuichi Asaba.

Asaba renamed the sweet carbonated drink Kidsbeer, a move that made it an instant hit.

Asaba outsourced its production to Tomomasu, a beverage maker based in Ogi, Saga Prefecture.

Tomomasu tinkered with the drink by decreasing its sweetness and increasing its frothiness, the company said. It began shipping the transformed drink in late 2003.

Though the initial shipment was only 200 bottles per month, the beverage was soon adopted by other restaurants and even by department stores, which began offering it as a gift package.

Asaba said kids and other people "can raise a glass with this, even if they cannot drink any liquor."

Satoshi Tomoda, president of the beverage maker, said: "Children copy and mimic adults.

"If you get this drink ready on such occasions as events and celebrations attended by kids, it would make the occasions even more entertaining."

The Kidsbeer label captures a nostalgic mood as it was modeled after classic beer labels.

"Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink," reads the product's advertising slogan.

Japan Times, Aug. 6, 2005

Coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate are deleterious monocultures which create serious problems for economies and environments. I suppose guarana will be the new coffee.

analogion

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(in)capable?

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