Cat Uses a Fork

For Pity's Sake

Way to Go, Zach!

...for getting inducted into the National Junior Honor Society.

Looks like our boy will finish seventh grade, if not with a perfect 4.0, very close to it.

Superstition and Religion

Superstition is that certainty that we live in a world beyond our comprehension and beyond our control. That is how it should be, anyway, if words are used correctly.

The advantage in starting a thread is that you can frame the proposition by inventing your own definitions. I don't consider you definition of supersition to be valid.

"The certainty that we live in a world beyond our comprehension and beyond our control" defines science and technology, not superstition. I would think that all scientists to a man and woman accept that they live in a world partially at least beyond their comprehension and control. It's an appropriate non-arrogant attitude to face when confronting the vastness of our ignorance and what we don't know relative to what we can even theoretically know. Conversely, the witchdoctor who rattles a bone over our ill body surely believes that his world in comprehensable and controllable.

What superstition really is a belief that events are caused by non-causal behaviors. Wikpedia has some examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition

"When a Dayak village goes out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friend; for if they did so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.

"While a Gilyek hunter was pursuing game in the forests of ancient China, his children at home were forbidden to make drawings on wood or in sand; they feared that if the children did so, the paths in the forest would become as perplexed as the lines in the drawings and that the hunter might lose his way and never return. "

The question is whether generally supersition as defined above relates to religion. The answer is that it need not. The number 13, horsehoes, back cats, and broken mirrors may indeed have roots in our pagan past, but theist and atheist alike embrace such supersititions today with alacrity.

A Literal Bible

I have been pondering a poll that Gallup just publishing, stating that "one-third of Americans think that the Bible is literally true."

http://www.galluppoll.com/content/default.aspx?ci=27682

" About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word."

"Although even those who believe in a literal Bible can still be at odds in their attempt to interpret exactly what the Bible says about key areas of Scripture and moral issues, a literal belief structure has been the basis for justifications for a variety of important positions in American life. These have included opposition to evolution and the teaching thereof in public schools (going back to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial), opposition to same-sex relationships, the proper relationship between husbands and wives with a marriage, observance of a day of rest, the belief that positions as preachers or priests should be maintained for men only, and even such seemingly unrelated topics as immigration."

My hunch is that one-third of Americans are testifying to something other than the notion that it must be taken literally word for word, since even a passing knowledge of the Bible shows that large portions of the Bible are figurative or have layers of meaning. The Song of Solomon makes no sense unless it is read symbolically. Also, consider two of the most beautiful passages in the Bible. In Psalm 23, when the divine Shepherd "maketh me to lie down in green pastures", it would surprise me if any read this to mean that we were to be treated as meadow animals. And, in I Corinthians 13, I think few people believe that the absence of love will really turn them into "a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." A literal interpretation of the Bible would result in such ancient Biblical truths as a flat earth, the divine right of kings, polygamy, slavery, and the stoning of disobedient children. It could be that a slice of that one third is simply ignorant about the Bible. But perhaps the remainder are using the word "literally" as a figurative symbol that they are committed to a certain kind of Christianity, but fundamentalist only in a cafeteria sense-- in terms of opposing civil rights, rejecting evolution, promoting the subordinating of women, and the intrusion of sectarianism into public policy.

Mormonism and Christ

LDS theology is an interesting example of a kind of special pleading which I call for want of a better phrase hijacked pleading. The Mormon's public view of Jesus Christ is on their web site.

http://www.lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg

In it, we find the following:

Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God the Father in the flesh. He was the Creator, He is our Savior, and He will be our Judge. Under the direction of our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ created the earth. Through His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and by giving His life on the cross—that is, by performing the Atonement—Jesus Christ saves us from our sins as we follow Him. Through His Resurrection, Jesus Christ saves us from physical death. Because He overcame death, we will all be given the gift of resurrection.

The words the LDS site use are the same terms that you would hear from any Baptist pulpit. But, as a matter of Mormon doctrine, the words the Baptist understand have almost no correlation to the same words the Mormon understands. "Son of God", "atonement", "resurrection" , "incarnation", and "God the Father" are words that LDS theologians have radically redefined, as we see here.

http://www.probe.org/cults-and-world-religions/cults-and-world-religions/the-mormon-doctrine-of-jesus.html

I'm using the LDS only as an example of how all groups be they secular or sectarian define and re-define what we assume to be commonly understood words in such a way to advance dogma to the point where any kind of a cogent conversation is next to impossible on matters of conviction.

Way to Go, Ben!

WordMasters is a national vocabulary competition that involves three analogy challenge meets. The Gold Division, in which two of our entire fifth grade classrooms participate, is especially challenging. Approximately 8,270 fifth grade students from 287 schools throughout the nation participated in this division this year. Two students from Cochise placed among the top 2% of all competitors at their grade level and qualify for High Honors – Ben Wik in Ms. Williams’ class and Jared Balbona from Mrs. Guttell’s class. Samantha Getzen, in Ms. Williams’ class, finished in the top 10% and qualifies for Honorable Mention.

God is Not Great: A Rebuttal

The following letter to The New York Times Book Review was written by Perry Dane, professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law-Camden.

"Michael Kinsley, in his review of Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great, comments admiringly that "the book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever." The examples that Kinsley cites, however, are all silly, shallow, or just plain obtuse.
"For example, I am not a Christian, but I certainly see no fatal logical contradiction in the Christian conviction that Christ "died for our sins" and also "did not die at all." To the contrary, the notion that the eternal, immaterial, unchanging God would incarnate as a creature capable of passing through death in the first place -- even or especially a death followed by a resurrection -- suggests such an infinite, category-defying act of loving self-emptying that it is easy to appreciate why a believing Christian would find that idea a great source of power and hope.
"Even more telling is Kinsley's smart-alecky paraphase of Hitchens, "Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift?"
"As both Kinsley and Hitchens should know, neither the Bible nor any serious person has ever suggested that the Ten Commandments first introduced the idea that murder or adultery is wrong. Rather, the reveloutionary message of the Ten Commandments is that this moral order is tied both to the order of the cosmos and to a direct relationship of covenantal love and responsibility between God and a community of human bengs.
"Kinglsey rightly wonders whether Hitchens's supposed logical "sallies" would "give pause to the believer." He fails to appreciate, however, that the real lesson here is that religious beleivers and nonbelievers do not merely posit different answers to the same questions; rather, they often ask diferent questions, and draw on different paradigms and concerns. To imagine that the debate between them could be resolved by "logical" one-upmanship, or that relgious folk are merely to dense to see what others find obvious, is not only offensive, but naive and, dare I say it, illogical."

A Response

Dane's letter is a pretty good example of special pleading. The fact that he denies being a Christian shows only that some non-Christians happen to be quite sympathetic to Christianity.
I certainly see no fatal logical contradiction in the Christian conviction that Christ "died for our sins" and also "did not die at all."

Notwithstanding what Dane can or cannot see, the two assertions "Christ died" and "Christ did not die" cannot both be true. If the statements "He died" and "He did not die" were made about any other person in history, then Dane would surely agree that they were contradictory. But because the statements are made by Christians about the founder of their religion, he thinks the rules are different. That is special pleading.

the notion that the eternal, immaterial, unchanging God would incarnate as a creature capable of passing through death in the first place -- even or especially a death followed by a resurrection -- suggests such an infinite, category-defying act of loving self-emptying that it is easy to appreciate why a believing Christian would find that idea a great source of power and hope.

That does not begin to explain how the statements could be consistent. It only explains, sort of, why Christians believe the contradiction: Believing it makes them feel powerful and hopeful. I'm sure it does exactly that, but a statement does not become true just because it is a source of power and hope.

neither the Bible nor any serious person has ever suggested that the Ten Commandments first introduced the idea that murder or adultery is wrong.

That is not quite the point. The point is that many apologists for religion do suggest, in all seriousness, that we humans could have no way of knowing that murder and adultery are wrong if God had not, in some way, given us that knowledge.

the revolutionary message of the Ten Commandments is that this moral order is tied both to the order of the cosmos and to a direct relationship of covenantal love and responsibility between God and a community of human beings.

The Bible nowhere says any of that. Given certain assumptions, it could be a reasonable interpretation of the Bible, but those assumptions are neither necessarily true nor obviously true. If Duke is suggesting that skeptics are wrong to reject assumptions of that nature, then that is special pleading.

the real lesson here is that religious beleivers and nonbelievers do not merely posit different answers to the same questions; rather, they often ask different questions, and draw on different paradigms and concerns.

There can be no good short response to such a broadly phrased assertion, but I will offer some general comments.

Dane might be under the postmodernist impression that all paradigms are equally true. I don't think most Christians accept that notion, and I certainly don't.

The "lesson" that skeptics and believers "often ask different questions" is irrelevant on those occasions when we are asking the same question and getting different answers. If the question is "Is the Bible the word of God?" it doesn't make a bit of direct difference if there are lots of questions that Christians ask and I don't ask, and lots of other questions that I ask and Christians don't ask.

The real problem, if it has anything to do with different questions being asked, is that one side or the other might not be honest about what they're really asking. For most skeptics and believers alike, "Is the Bible the word of God?" is not a real question, because each of them already convinced of the answer. The believer's real question might be "How can I remain convinced that the Bible is the word of God?" while the skeptic's real question might be "How can I remain convinced that the Bible is not the word of God?"

If that is the case, then they are both wrong. But not all skeptics or believers approach the question with their minds so firmly made up. Some of them sincerely want to know which way the evidence points when that evidence is examined without any assumptions about which way it is supposed to point. And when the question about the Bible's origin is asked with that attitude, then it becomes relevant to note that of all the hundreds of millions of books that have ever been written, practically all Christians (Mormons are the most famous exception) claim a divine origin for one, and only one. Skeptics should hardly need any special pleading to defend their belief that the Bible is just like all other books. Special pleading is only useful in defense of claims of

Miscellenia

"A baby sucks on a pencil and her panicky mother fears the child will get lead poisoning. A politician argues that hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as our nation's energy source. A consumer tells a reporter that she refuses to eat tomatoes that ahve genes in them. And a newsmagazine condemns the prospects of cloning because it could mass-produce an army of zombies.

"These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy -- inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil "lead" is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.)

Steven Pinker, in a review of Natalie Angier's The Canon.

Downing Street Memo

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Text of the Downing Street Memo AfterDowningStreet.org

Freedom's Seeds in Sorrow Sown

Blades of grass and pure white stone
shelter those who've come and gone.
Just below the em'rald sod
are boys who've reached the arms of God.
Buried here with dignity,
endless rows for all to see.
Freedom's seeds in sorrow sown,
'neath blades of grass and pure white stones.

How do I want to think about the military especially on this Memorial Day? It's easy to honor those who have fought and died in "good wars"-- wars that truely seemed to be in defense of our freedom. It's more complex in the case of this war, fraught as it has been with actions that mock the ideals of our nation. And I think we have grounds to be especially contemptuous not just of the civilian leadership but also the military leadership in this conflict who acquiesed to our country's war policies-- neutered lap dogs of the neo-cons.

Having said that, I think it is appropriate that we honor all those who serve, no matter how wrong-headed the war may have been. In the Viet Nam war, for example, there were countless soldiers who acquitted themselves honorably. America may be lost the war, but they-- the soldiers who fought-- won their battles. And the same must be true in this conflict. I think we must separate those who fight from those who decide they fight and also accord them due appreciation for their service and sacrifices. In the words of Rudyard Kipling:

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that,
an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country"
when the guns begin to shoot.

September

Patience has run out and I feel a change in direction happening within the chambers of Congress. While we don't have the votes right now to change the president's policy, I believe that come September we will have the votes from both Democrats and Republicans to change policy and direction. In September, General Petraeus will report back on the progress of the surge, and Congress will take up both the $460 billion base defense appropriations bill and the $141 billion Iraq supplemental.

The surge is not producing the results that were promised. And, based on my discussions with Iraqi Government officials, I don't believe they have the motivation to bring about the political and economic benchmarks agreed to. This is why September will be key.

Murtha: September is the Key

Several Republicans have said that they will give the buildup until the end of the summer to work, but McCain said he is more patient.

"I have tried to discourage my Republican colleagues from saying that September is some kind of seminal moment," said McCain. "I am aware the American people are frustrated. I share that frustration. I don't think the American people are aware of the consequences of failure."

McCain: September is Not the Key

Flying Jets Into Buldings

The only thing that guarantees a truly open-ended collaboration among human beings is their willingness to have their views (and resulting behavior) modified by conversation--by new evidence and new arguments. Otherwise, when the stakes are high, there is nothing to appeal to but force. If I believe that I can get to Paradise by flying a plane into a building, and I am content to believe this without evidence, then there will be nothing another person can say to dissuade me, because my leap of faith has made me immune to the powers of conversation.

--Sam Harris

My take is that Sam's statement has they same kind of value as chanting "All we are saying, is give peace a chance." To trust in the good will of others much less ourselves is beyond naive. It is fatuous and dangerous. Dialogue and skepticism is not enough either. Such attitudes underestimate the resiliance of people to change their core values and beliefs and to defend those values and beliefs with every tool as their disposal. Flying jets into buildings is merely the logical extension of deeply seated beliefs that we scarcely can comprehend, using rational-- not irrational-- actions to advance those beliefs. If there is hope, it lies with taking as a given the depravity of humanity, and to accordingly create institutions that promote transparancy and accountability, divide and diffuse centers of power, and protect and promote secularism, pretty much using the formula that our founding fathers conceived. I no more trust power in the hands of scientists and scholars than I do in the hands of politicians and priests, and religionists (or areligionists for that matter) have no monopoloy on fanaticism, as Hoffer suggests in my link below:

http://mymallandnews.bizland.com/truebeliever.htm

Ten Utterances

My professor, who's a retired rabbi, pointed out that they're not, in fact, called the "Ten Commandments" but the "Ten Utterances."

I would be curious to learn in what book, chapter, and verse does your professor find the word "utterances". Consider, for example, Deuteronomy 6:1 "Now these are the commandments..." and verse 17 in the same chapter "You shall diligently keep the commandments ..." Modern translations of the Christian Bible today use exactly the same manuscripts as does the modern Torah.

See Ex 34:28 here,

http://www.blueletterbible.org/

and then click on the link for the word "commandments", which takes you here,

http://cf.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H01697&Version=kjv

and shows you how that Hebrew word was translated in other contexts. And sure enough in 807 places in the KJV, it's translated "word" and only in 20 places "commandment". So indeed it's normally a very generic word ("utterance" or the like) and either it only means commandment in very specific contexts, or it doesn't mean commandment at all and the translator added that idea.

Christians and Crime

Here are statistics about religious affiliations of those in prison (which could be interpreted as an undesireable outcome, I would think)http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religiousaffiliations of inmates.

I am willing to concede that the vast majority of folks who are on death row, the vast majority of people who do abortions and have abortions, and the vast majority of those that lie, cheat, steal, and get divorced in his country come from Christian households and call themselves Christians. But I consider these statisics to be interesting but not especially revealing as the definition of who is a Christian is so broad as to be probably meaningless.

Would you agree that as these people are self-identifying as Christian that they probably had at least a moderaterly religious background?

I don't know. In the US at least, "Christian" appears to be the default self-definition.

"Are you Jewish?"

"Nope"

"Are you Hindu?"

"Are you joking?"

"Are you atheist?"

"Whatzat?"

"Oh, you must be a Christian?"

"Whatever."

This kind of self-definition may mean nothing more than that person hears "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" every December. The "no true Scot" fallacy cuts both ways.

Are you saying that they are not "true Christians" because they engage in activities that fundamentalist Christianity disapproves of?

I"m saying that the phrase "true Christian" is not meaningful as an objective category.

Kindergarten Isn't Enough

Robert Fulgham in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten offers the following pearls.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

I never went to kindergarten, so perhaps I missed some of these life lessons. But I also suggest that most people learn a lot more than what kindergarten teaches, and wisdom is a slow, long, and hard slog. Here are some non-kindergarten life lessons from Sloan Wilson, the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

1. Beware of people who are always well-dressed
2. The hardest part of raising children is teaching them to ride bicycles. A father can run beside the bicycle or stand yelling directions while the child falls. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.
3. Children go away and live their own lives, starting when they are about eighteen. Parents who accept this as a natural part of the order of things will see their children surprisingly often.
4. Friends are fun, but they are more dangerous than strangers. Strangers ask for a quarter for a cup of coffee, while friends ask for a thousand dollars, no questions asked. Some friends also have a roving eye for your wife and your daughters.
5. Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
6. When things break around the house, call a handyman. No intelligent man is capable of fixing anything, unless he has made home repair his business.
7. Either afloat or ashore, it is normal for everything to go wrong. No one should be surprised or unduly upset by foul-ups. They are a basic part of the human condition.
8. Many children should be treated as adults and many adults should be treated as children. Age has every little to do with capabilities.
9. Liquid shoe polish doesn’t work.
10. When I was young I was briefly interested in politics, but politics soon board me. I was interested in business for a long while but business eventually bored me. Religion I never understood at all. Although it may sound sentimental, the only meaning I have found in life has been in my wife and children. Without them, I would be in more despair than a bankrupt millionaire.

Russell and Causality

"There seems no reason to regard causation as a priori, though this question is not simple. Given certain very general assumptions as to the structure of space-time, there are bound to be what we have called causal laws. These general assumptions must really replace causality as our basic principles. But general as they are, they cannot be taken as a priori; they are the generalization and abstract epitome of the fact that there are causal laws, and this must remain merely an emperical fact, which is rendered probable, though not certain, by inductive argument."

Bertand Russell (1927)

(I've no idea what Lord Russell is saying, but I enjoyed typing it.)

Situational Ethics

I think that there are really a number of issues wrapped up in the cliche:

1. Is it ever necessary to do something morally wrong?

2. Is it acceptable for someone or for society in general to derive benefit from an evil act that a third party committed?

3. Is the morality of an action dependent on the harm done or by the benefits obtained?

I am not arrogant enough to suspect that I know the answers to those questions.

I respect intellectual humility and I know you are being sincere by disclaiming arrogance. However, I suggest that difficult ethical dilemmas can only be resolved by wearing a mantle of arrogance. My father, for example, was a conscientious objector during World War II. He had no problem undergoing malaria vaccine or medical starvation tests to defend his conviction that the taking of human life for any reason is murder. But when pressed on whether or not we need police or soldiers, Dad's answer would basically come down to an ethical claim that he saw was Biblically derived but nevertheless was also hopelessly subjective. Thus, for my father, a humble man, his moral creed was placed into the subjunctive: "For me, the taking of human life is wrong." I really don't see how this differs from someone who says, "For me, the taking of human life is right."

One approach that appeals to me was suggested by the existentialists, who embrace the presupposition of individual moral choice-- one of the few philosophies that really do so. What they ask you to do when you are trying to decide whether to join the Free French underground to fight the Nazis or care for your dying mother or who you need to throw overboad in a storm-tossed lifeboat is to be in effect God's consigleri, pope, president, and grand pooh bah of the universe, making a decision not merely for yourself but for all of humanity, and by so doing defining yourself and humanity by how you make that choice. The paradox is that sometimes we need to be selfish or at least a-ethical to make the clearest ethical decisions. An example is in the one choice that in my opinion accounts for most of one's misery or happiness-- who you marry. The question to ask is not will I be good for her, fulfill her, please her? The one question that must be asked and the answered in a clear affirmative is: is she good for me? It is that selfishness that in the scheme of things is selflessly ethical.

The questions you raise above basically relate to situational ethics, a theory of Christian ethics that was developed by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s, based on the theory best articulated by the Beatles that "All you need is love." Thus, to put it simplistically, for Fletcher the ends jusitify the means if somehow the means are rooted in agape love.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_ethics

The more I think about situational ethics, the less I think it provides much ethical guidance, as it is highly conditional or what Kant would call hypothetical on some fuzzy construct that we identify as "love". I'm not sure how much use it would be in resolving, for example, William Styron's scenario in Sophie's Choice, that compelled Sophie to select one of her children at Auchwitz for the ovens. However, I do think Fletcher's thinking was at least a step in the right direction away from the moralistic absolutism common not just among many Christians but people generally. John Caputo in his challenging but well-written book Against Ethics deconstructs ethics to the point where it becomes sometimes not just irrelevant but dangerous and that fixed moral rules are something of a mirage.

L is for Love

which I shouldn't include--
except it's the only thing
better than food

logotheraphy
lugubrious
locomotor ataxia
Lethwards
leg it - to run
loco week - marajuana
lu lu - desirable
longhandled underwear
lepidopterist
leading cases
Lis Pendens - litigation pending
lickety brindle
l'envoi
limbus of the mon
Ligan
Lotus Eaters
leveraged lease
littoral
Lying for the Whetsone
lungi
largo
Leviathan
lope
lagniappe
lupine
LIFO
lexiographer - harmless drudge
Lager Beer
Lang Syne
Lanterize
loll
lachrymal
limn

The Kingdom of Ends

From an ethical perspective, the ends can never justify the means, because that statement suggests that you should do whatever it is you have to do to get the results you desire, morals and ethics be damned.

But how can the results you want be ethical unless the ends justify the means? For example, arguably, the atomizing of Hiroshima was ethical as the means corresponded (let us stipulate) with its ethical goal of bringing the war to an end.

This of course is the classic dilemma posed by two seemingly antithetical systems of ethical thought-- utiliterianism ("greatest good for the greatest number") and the unconditional Kantian ethics of the Categorical Imperative.

But it seems to me that the contradiction may be more apparant than real, in which one exercises the sometimes Machiavellian art of the possible to achieve what Kant calls the Kingdom of Ends

Miscellania

1. Solitary bees make circular cells, which become hexagonal under pressure.

2. Tomatoes (Lycopersicon lycopersicum) were cultivate in South and Central America for centuries before they were introduce to European gardens in the 16th century.

3. Chemistry is from the Arabic kimia, whence al-kimia (alchemy), from kamai (to conceal).

4. Boyle's law: "The volume of a gas is inversely as the pressure." Robert Boyle (1627-1691)

5. More than half of all cat owners have had some college.

6. Robert Conot, author of the 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the ceations and endeavors."

7. There are: 60 minims = 1 fluid dram; 8 fluid drams = 1 fluid ounce; 16 fluid ounces = 1 point; 8 pints + 1 gallon. (apothecaries fluid measures)

8. Gout strikes the male population nineteen times for every one time it attacks females.

Religion and Child Behavior

I'm a father with two middle-school boys. One thing I try to do is watch for is families that seem to raise admirable children. These are children who have a wide circle of friends, strong self-esteem, that know what they want out of life, that have the inner motivation to excel at anything they want, that have the respect of peers and teachers, and that seem to be on a good path to future success. I also watch for families that seem to raise kids that go in the other direction, as a lessons learned in how not to raise kids. These are children who have little self-esteem, who are bullies and trouble-makers, who struggle academically, and who do not seem to have much interest in a good future.

Obviously, the vast majority of kids fall somewhere between these extremes. But, based on my observation, I hazard the following observation. The children that fall into the first group in distinction to the second group in terms of their religious background are not kids who lack no religion whatever-- parents who take the view that when their kids get of age, they can get a relgion if they want to -- or kids who have a fundamentalist background with lots of "don'ts" and strict religious indoctrination-- parents who force their kids to walk such a moral tight-rope that they will inevitable fall off-- but parents who have some religious traditions withut being overly excessive in their ethical demands.

Based on my somewhat limited obervation with children from parents of a variety of different religions and also the absence of religion, my conclusion is that the most desirable and wholesome children have a moderately religious background that guides the child and allows his or her values to incubate and that doesn't restrict the natural development of a child's conscience.

Your observation is clearly limited. Based on my own limited observations I could say the following.

...my conclusion is that the most desirable and wholesome children have had no religious background and have been guided by humanistic principles which allows them to develop a healthy respect for their societal responsibilities and the rights of others. (Such observations include my own three children incidentally.)

I'm just a curious parent, not a scientist. But you rise valid points. Certainly, the variables you raise are important. As a landlord of more than two decades, I have had the opportunity to look into people's lives more closely than many people, and my wife is a preschool teacher that yet gives another window into peoples lives.

It's possible that I've extrapolated from a sample that is far too small. However, on my children's behalf, I'm trying to be as pragmatic as possible, and let the evidence take me where it will. I'm perfectly willing also to concede that parents that raise well-adjusted kids may not necesserily invoke a religion per se but they do enforce some kind of a moral code within their own family that does much of the same thing. Thus, they may call themselves atheists while at the same time ensuring that their kids adhear to high and honorable ethical values. This is different that parents that are indifferent to any kind of a transmission of ethics be it in the guise of religion or using some other mechanism, although they may also describe themselves as atheists or not even use that word at all. Factors, such as education and ethnic background, may indeed inform whether it is the former rather than the latter.

I think you are groping tentatively towards a much more sensible approach in your last sentence. Well-adjusted children tend to come from stable, comfortable and loving backgrounds by and large and religious belief is largely irrelevant.

The Worst President: Bush or Carter?

My heads hurts trying to figure that one out.

On the Hardening of Pharoah's Heart

Exodus 14:4: "Then I will harden Pharaoh's heart, so that he will pursue them; and I will gain honor over Pharaoh and over all his army, that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD."

Romans 9:17-18: "For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth." 18So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires."

Here is a solid non-Calvanistic treatment of these difficult passages. As I've mentioned in other postings, I reject as non-scriptual interpetations that erode as individual's free choice, recognizing that such freedom is integral both to morality and to who God is. References to predestination are, in my view, akin to how I raise my children-- by guiding and encouraging them, I predestine them to be good students and good citizens. But, ultimately, the choices they must make are outside of my control. To the commentary in the link, I should also note that the Bible makes a distinction between the heart and the mind and also the will and soul. Moral choices involve an interplay between heart or emotions, mind, will or predisposition, and soul or sense of ethics. The resolution of a moral choice is not merely an act of the heart.

I think this is an example of the usual desperate straw-clutching that apologists indulge in when trying to make an old legend fit their preferred beliefs.

If the author did not want the reader to think that God actively hardened Pharaoh’s heart he could have simply said that God did nothing to stop Pharaoh from hardening his heart. Of course this leads to further awkward questions.

Why did God sit passively by and let Pharaoh harden his heart when at other times he seemed to have no problem with interfering with people’s free will to either avoid something nasty or often to cause something nastier?

One is also led to ask, if Pharaoh was entirely responsible for hardening his own heart, why mention God’s non-participation in this process in the first place?

In passages like this, I agree that there may be special pleading and tailoring to fit a preconceived notion. Another example is Isaiah 40:22, where God "sitteth upon the circle of the earth" is somehow the earth is made to mean a sphere. Having said that, I think there is also a kind of interpretation that goes in the other direction, in which the critics deduce absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods from the Bible because they choose to read it as or more literally that the fundiest fundamentalist. Thus, for example, rather than appreciating the powerful stories of moral choice in the Garden of Eden, human pride in the Tower of Babel, brotherly hate in the Cain and Abel, and so on they fixate for example on whether Genesis 1:19 "means" a 24 hour solar day. Critics also in my view look a factual discrepancies as some kind of blemish on the credability of the Bible, for example, in Ezra 2:15, 454 of Adin's offspring returned from Babylon, whereas according to Nehemiah 7:20, 655 of Adin's children returned from Babylon. This kind of fact checking proves nothing more except the obvious: that copyists made errors. It says nothing about the intrinsic truth of the Bible. So what is the truth of the Bible? What you see of the Bible depends on where you stand. If you start with the assumption that the Bible is filled wth lies, you will see nothing but lies. If think that the Bible is true, then you will find truth. To ask whether the Bible is true or false is akin to asking whether or not the following is true or false:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

These are questions that cannot be answered, except in the context of how one feels and looks at life.

Nigerian 419 Scams

The Bulletin Magazine (sort of Australian Time or Newsweek) has done some numbers on Nigerian scams, and to be honest, they are scary.

133 people were interveiwed about being in the scams. (sending money to Nigeria).

Of those, only 2 people were actually conducting a business. The rest were scams.

$16m was lost by those people.

About US$400,000 a months is being sent from Queensland to the scammers. Thsi is estimated to be about $2mill a month Aust wide.

Most people in the end game of the scam were receiving death threats if they backed out, including threats to their families.

2/3rds of people contacted by the police, refused to believe they were being scammed, and continued to send cash.

Most of the scammers were in Lagos, but were actually run by people in England and Spain.

There may in fact be links to Russian mafia. 2000 scammers were arrested in the last 2 years in Nigeria.

While many links are traced back to England, because the crimes have not been commited in England, no arrests have been made.

A Hong Kong Woman managed to recover $4m, a Brazilian bank got back $100m of $240m lost.
People, we are in the wrong game.

Thank you for supplying these statistics.

These Nigerian 419 advance fee scams rely on a computer-savy, dishonest English speaking nation with a large, educated expatriate population. They in turn rely on the availability of a credulous and greedy target population. There are people who deserve to be victims because they credulous and greedy. They get no sympathy from me.

Is Good An Opinion?

So an atheist thinks good and evil is not a view point or opinion? To you the strong is not impose their goodness to the weak?

I'm very sorry to say that it appears you are losing this argument. First, atheism has nothing whatever to do with an understanding or recognition of good, evil, power, and weaknesses. Secondly, it seems that your argument boils down to the claim that what you and I call good and evil are merely opinions, somewhat akin to my opinion that the Cubs will win the pennant this year. If I kick you in the shins, it is more than likely that you will find that a less than good experience. Why can I conclude that having not even met you? The answer is simply because we share a common physicality from whence comes our understanding of goodness and badness and indeed taboos and traditions that stretch across cultures and over time-- not as an absolute but generally. The facts from anthropology, biology, and history do not support a theory of radical moral relativism.

K is for Kugel

and kreplach and knishes
and other ka-koph-o-nous Jewish dishes.

kale - money
keister -- buttocks; suitcase
kid - passive homosexual
kite - letter
kidvid
knell
kakistocracy
kleptomania
kid simple
kinescope
kitchy-kich-e-kook

Blasphemy Challenge

That changed when I mentioned that a list of verses from the Bible which they feel show the ludicrousness of the Bible, might mean something different in the original Hebrew. To make my point I did what anyone should do when reading a translation, if possible, I checked the original. Rather than debate my argument on the merits, on a subforum supposedly devoted to discussing the Bible, they proceeded to attack me. Each individual claimed that my knowledge of Hebrew was irrelevant, then they began to ridicule my intelligence, and things escalated from there.

Allow me me to be your Virgil through on this particular ring of the inferno.

First, I hope you hang around. You will find a few people who are commited to their religious tradition who soemtimes make valuable contributions and advance the debate. A kind of brain surgery in which your presuppositions and conclusions are tested forcing you to either modify of reinforce them. This kind of refining fire can sharpen you if it doesn't melt you. Having said that, there are a number of bigots on this forum who gather like flies to a dead rabbit, and their sole reason for existence is manifest their bottomless bigotry usually in the most vile and vulgar way that they can conceive to you. The best thing you can do in these instances is to not oxyginate them with any kind of a response. The upshot is that this kind of tar-baby wrestling is a waste of time and will only degrade you. There are also a number of people who in terms of their mental bandwidth are on the wrong side of the bell curve, and these you can also pass by without regrets. However, having said all of that, there are some people on this forum who are deep, creative thinkers in the best sense, some whom have advanced schooling in theology, philosophy, and other areas, and are among the best interloculors that you will find anywhere. For me at least, it makes it worthwhile.

As to the substance of your post, I'm skeptical that one can assign a definitive interpretation to specific original words. Of course, there are no original words, in the case of the texts of either of our traditions. We are after all reading copies of copies of the originals. Secondly, I think it is a somewhat meaningless exercise either to demonstrate the credability or the absurdity of those texts. I think it's perhaps even a fallacy when someone tries to nail a theological point by saying, "Well, according to the original language, this is the way it is." The fallacy lies in the fact that words don't interpret themselves. We need to interpret and contextualize those words. The Bible as a whole contains many kinds of writing, and unless we agree that we are reading poetry in distinction to history, say, no knowledge of original words is going to advance our understanding, IMO. Sometimes, a statement may have one meaning or many meanings. Sometimes, the meaning of that statement may change over time, as it is reinterpreted in application to new circumstances, not unlike our Constitution. I think, however, to assign a single meaning to statements in the Bible or any writing for that matter is a mistake. The best one can do, in my opinion, is to approach it as you would any truth proposition-- here is what it is; here is what I think it means; and here is why I think it means thus.

Hating the Dead

I think that the propaganderist in no less complicit than, say, the colonel in committing an atrocity, as the former creates the emotional and intellectual climate in which the latter can occur, oft times. However, at the end of the day, I also think we must disassociate what has actually transpired in time and place to predicating words or beliefs. For example, in terms of whom my kids associate with, I don't care a wit to professed beliefs. They have Mormon, Catholic, Shinto, and atheist friends. What I do care about and watch very carefully is behavior.

Someone expressed the opinion that the product that Flynt put out was more benign product than the product that Falwell put out. Having little experience with the former, I'm in no place to make such a value judgment. I just don't know.

A good way to test a proposition such as I propose-- resolved: one must not hate or mock the dead-- is to invoke extreme examples. I think of the most vile atheists that have died in my life time, and I ask myself whether or not my POV would change.

They include Mao (10-20 million dead) and Pol Pot (2-4 million dead) and in this country Timothy McVeigh (technically a self-described agnostic http://www.tektonics.org/guest/mcveigh.htm) and Jim Jones, who, although he began his career as an ordained minister ended his life and the lives of almost 1,000 others as a militant atheist. (Refer you to tapes Q595, Q597, and Q757 for example, in which he articulates his anti-Christianism and pro-atheistic views in many places. cf. http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Tapes/Tapes/TapeTranscripts/transcripts.html) I want to be clear that I make no claim that the atheistic views necesserily informed their actions in each of these cases. I'm simply invoking extreme cases to test for myself whether my principle still obtains.

I once read a column by Patrick Buchanen that defended the antics of those when a serial killer was given his injection-- I think it was Bundy. He said their glee was actually a moral statement-- a claim of recognition that society has its moral limits. I don't deny that the execution of Adolph Eichman and McVeigh were in some sense a moral victory. However, nevertheless, perhaps perversely I still cling to my view that one steps over a boundry that should not be crossed when one rejoices in the death of another, no matter who they are or what they did, including all those in this post. That doesn't mitigate their crimes either of action or thought, but speaking for myself, it puts me in a place where I prefer not to be.

I'm not unsympathetic to the hate unleashed on Falwell. I suspect that history won't be kind to him or to the media that faciliated him giving millions of people the impression that this-- his extremist and sometimes idiotic rhetoric-- was the face of Christianity, a face that I simply don't recognize at all.

Trolling

I have a history with folks on some forums, and for such people that I have come to respect not for their agreements but for the depth and subtly of thought, I try to give a considered response in kind. There are others who with internet courage communciate in a way that they would never communicate in real life. I either pass them quickly by without much thought or throw a dart their way that may stick or not stick. I really don't much care. But I do try to start with the presumption of mutual goodwill and rationality, but if that gets tested, I move on without too many regrets.

Always

Interview With God

Jerry Falwell: RIP

I'm impressed at the predictable giddiness and glee of some folks at the death of Reverand Jerry Falwell. First, he was a human like you and me, and his serial silliness and obnoxiousness shouldn't detract from the obvious fact that his death leaves in its wake grief for some people. That he was hateful and fostered hatefulness is, I think, no excuse to be hateful. Secondly, I think his entire career needs to be weighed fairly. Despite his introduction of political wedge issues as founder of the oxymorically named Moral Majority and his attack of first amendment and civil rights, I think in the hindsight of history he will be regarded as consequential. I don't think he so much as mobilized the evangelical religious right as embody and articulate their frustrations and grievances, giving new voice to millions of Americans living between Washington DC's beltway and Hollywood. I think Falwell was at his best in his stalwart support of Israel, albeit for apocalyptic reasons and in spite for residual anti-semitism, and also for his role in forcing Bakker's PTL Club into bankruptcy. And, although I saw him on the wrong side of issues after issues, I do give him points for the courage of his convictions.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Death, for all its ugliness, gives nobility and poignancy to life and to the departed. The democracy of the dead cannot help but to soften sharp differences, reminding us that for all of us the electrocardiogram's sine will someday flatten.

Some of us feel compelled to express our opinion that the world is a better place without a deluded, hateful bigot like Falwell.

And perhaps you are indeed correct. It may well indeed by that the world would be a better place in the absence of Falwell, bin Laden, Bush, and others. A few minutes ago, I just heard Christopher Hitchens on CNN contending that Falwell exacerbated Middle East tensions, probably resulting in the deaths of unknown numbers of people. Granting all that, I still say that it is unethical to crow over the death of any human-- not because of their evil-- but how it reflects on you-- not as an atheist but as a human. The joyousness I see on this thread is an exact mirror of the joyousness I saw from those very people that you despise when the untimely death of Madelyn O'Hare was revealed. That should tell you something about the strange brotherhood of those two groups of people.

I'm a victim of a religious upbringing myself, but I came to understand that fundamentalism and reality can't mix.

Sure, but have you really dispensed with fundamentalism and embraced reality when you characterize the totality of a man's existence in laundry list is of ad homs? And the irony is that it is the process of demonizing those people that you think haven't seen the light that energizes them. The Falwells and Coulters and other bigots need your hate and bigotry in the same way that fire needs air. And I suspect you also at some level are grateful for their hate and bigotry as well. It's a strange world when we choose to live irrationally.

I think the two scenarios are very different in that we are comparing the rants of delusional people to the rants of rational people.

My objection is two-fold. First, why rant? It seems to me that the best way to defeat intolerance is to consciously eschew emotionalism of any kind, which in itself is a kind of capitulation to the manipulators and no manifestation of rationality. The KKK of today is the merest fraction of the KKK of the '20s, and that was achieved not by confronting hate with hate as the haters on this thread seem to enjoy but with legislation, litigation, agitation, and confrontation within the marketplace of ideas-- not the marketplace of emotions.

Larry Flynt, who had ample reason to hate Falwell, I thought reflected his own values while at least giving a nod to Falwell's humanity-- which is more than most people here are willing to do. The bigger person always wins and it appears that Flynt was the bigger person in this case.

http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_135185122.html

My second objection derives from one of the few superstitions I allow myself, perhaps embodied in the categorical imperative, the golden rule, the tao, karma, and other similar constructs. And that is it is both unethical and unwise to regard people living or dead as utterly and hopelesly corrupt and evil. In our culture of death where lives are expendable be it in foreign wars on within the walls of Texas jails, I prefer the presumption that humans as individuals matter and have merit irrespective of what they believe or did.

However, I don't think the teletubbies will miss Falwell.

Why are you so troubled by people continuing to express the disgust they feel for Jerry Falwell, simply because it is so soon after he died?

There is a section in Dante's Inferno where hypocritic ministers are burried ass-naked upside down, because their life was in contradiction to God's will. If there is a hell, I suspect that would be Falwell's fate. I think he caused tremendous damange, although his day had long passed. I cannot understand why McCain even thought it necessary to make nice with the man.

But to get back t your question: this is how I feel both as a pacifist and as a free speech absolutist and also one who like everyone else struggles with questions of ethics. It's a current event that slicely across a number of my fundamental beliefs, such as epistomolgy-- the difficulty in discerning truth from falsehood -- and applied ethics, which I relate absolutely to epistomology, in which perceiving and understanding is more than looking and seeing.
I actually encounted two situations yesterday that relate to the difficulty of figuring out the right course of action. A friend of my son in the middle school was involved in an incident that has caused him tremendous humiliation-- I won't get any more specific than that. I told my boy that this isn't the time to step away from him and that he also has an absolute obligation to contact the school psychologist if there is a continuing downward spiral in behavior and morale. Also, yesterday, after a band concert, we went with some of my boy's friends to In & Out Burger. Outside was a teenager asking for change so he could eat. This was an affluent area, and it seemed more than a bit weird to encounter a begger in that area. So we took off. But a block away, me and my wife had a change of heart, swung the car around, found the kid, went into the restaurant and bought him a meal. An ethical decision? Who knows? The skeptic in me says, no way.

But that also is life, where we are faced each day with a myriad of ethical dilemmas with ambiguous outcomes, where we in effect are our our own judge and jury acting on behalf of all of humanity. To me, ethics starts from the premise of autonomous choice-- that as we decide, so we are. To make the leap between principle and application, I rely fundamentally on my experience and common sense firstly, but also on writings that have influenced me deeply, such as parts of the Sermon on the Mount, Emerson's essay on Compensation, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and the xtian existentialists. To boil it all down, my core belief is that all truth starts from a place of doubt, that reason and faith is integral to ethics, but that there are limits to reason just as there are limits to faith.

This Will Wake You Up

Spontaneous human combustion.

It's my new ring-tone.

Here's what Scientologists believe:

1. In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.

http://www.scientology.org/

(So far so good.) The rest comes from Wikpedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAmEO-oLHzA

2. The thetan (soul) lived through many past lives and will contue to live beyond the death of the body. Thetans have existed for tens of trillions of years. (Yes, trillions.)

3. Psychiatry and psychology are destructive and abusive practices.

4. An e-meter-- basically two tin cans with a small electronic charge-- can help the practitioner (referred to as a preclear or PC) to unburden himself or herself of specific traumatic incidents, prior ethical transgressions and bad decisions, which are said to collectively restrict the preclear from achieving his or her goals and lead to the development of a "reactive mind".

5. According to Hubbard, some of the past traumas may have been deliberately inflicted in the form of "implants" used by extraterrestrial dictatorships such as Helatrobus to brainwash and control humans.

6. There is a huge Church of Spiritual Technology symbol carved into the ground at Scientology's Trementia Base, so loyal members can return from the future to consult with their founder's works.

7. Xenu, an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy", 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their spirits/body thetans cause ill effects on humans today.

8. Islam and Jesus are extraterrestial memory implants.

9. Scientology pays members commissions on new recruits they bring in.

10. The Church says that psychiatry was responsible for World War I, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and the 9/11 attacks.

Hence the primal scream.

Talent and Fairness

It doesn't seem fair that a creep like Wagner could write such beautiful music.

I'm puzzled by your statement. What does "fairness" have to do with talent or genius?

I don't know if you ever saw the 1984 movie Amadeus, but its dramatic tension derived from the fact that the cut-up delinquent Mozart out-composed the more pious hack Antonio Salieri. The former ended up in a pauper's grave but famous for the ages and the latter in an insane asylum consigned to oblivion.

The problem with getting your history from the movies is that truth is often subordinated to the needs of the plot. The supposed rivalry between Mozart and Salieri is largely a fiction. Although music historians have tried to correct the mistakes of the movie, they have largely worked in vain and the false history has displaced the true in populat culture. The author of the play on which the movie was based, Peter Shaffer, has said publicly that it is fiction, not fact—to no avail.Salieri was an important and respected musician in his time, and while as a composer he was not a match for Mozart—feasibly the greatest composer of all time—he did quite well and his works were popular in his day. He composed over 40 operas and a small number of instrumental works. In addition he taught composition to a number of well known composers, among them Beethoven, Czerny, Hummel, Lizst, Meyerbeer, and Schubert. Salieri did not go insane and he was not confined to an asylum, merely hospitalized a short time before his death. He and Mozart apparently got along quite well and composed a cantata together. Salieri attended the premiere of the Magic Flute and liked it. He conducted Mozart's works including a performance of Mozart's G-minor Symphony.In the last few years full recordings of three of Salieri's operas have been made and his work is being rediscovered and appreciated again.

Exploding Birds

Someone (my boy, actually) told me that birds explode when they eat uncooked rice or bread dipped in bleach. Any truth to this?

The rice, no.

I haven't heard of bread dipped in bleach before. Is that a new culinary delight?

Miscellania

1. Etruscans invented false teeth around 700 BC.

2. Surface water, such as rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs, supplies 71 percent of the nation's water use, 2/3 of which returns to the ocean.

3. Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that have no mass or electrical charge and can hurtle with ease through the entire earth.

4. "Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals." (Einstein)

5. Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to travel outside the orbit of known planets, on June 13, 1983.

6. Cut by the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon is 227 miles long and nine miles wide in places.

7. According to Indian legend, the leave in fall turn red because heavenly hunters killed a celestial bear and his blood is dripping on the trees.

8. 15 percent of the population is painfully shy.

9. Massa, a lowland gorilla, died at the age of 54 in the Phialdelphia Zoo in 1985.

10. Prostrate cancener can be treated with surgery, hormone treatment, radiation, or anti-cancer drugs.

Defending the War

Here are reasons that some people still defend this war:

1. Inability to accept defeat, no matter what the economic or human costs.
2. Belief that the war is still winnable or that the goals are sill achievable.
3. Belief that the war in Iraq is part of a war on Terrorists who pose a threat to the US.
4. Predisposition to war as a problem solving technique.
5. Inability to critically evaluate the Bush Administration because of Republican allegiance.

My response:

To your excellent list, let me add this.

7. A belief that the US can act without regard to consequences.

Bush-Cheney are the political equivalent to Paris Hlton. Both appear to act in such a way that they can violate with impunity rules of behavior or laws that govern the behavior of other people or nations. In the case of the Bush administration, violated rules of international nborms include no pre-emptive war; no foreign-based ground troops; no torture; no harm to non-combatants, and others.

It is also becoming clear how small the circle of decisions makers were. By Cheney's own admission, the CIA was excluded from key deliberations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/10/AR2007051002117.html

Who was "the decider"? Was it Bush, who had almost no international expertise or interest? I think it was almost entirely the alpha dog in the White House, the vice president, and everyone else in the administration at least initially fell into line. In other words, the "debate" was almost entirely in Cheney's head.

Finally, in looking at your list, it occurs to me how each of the reasons has its base in beliefs or perceptions. Tenet's argument was that we were not lied into the war and that the facts were not fixed to promote the war. To the contrary, he claims, the war was launched because enough people "believed" that the war should be launched. To put it another war, the US went to war because there was a massive failure in epistomology.

And yet another reason.

8. No reason. They just do.

I’m not sure how many people actually support the war without a reason, but I’ll bet if we combed the streets, we would eventually find one. You actually began a case for that with "To the contrary, he claims, the war was launched because enough people "believed" that the war should be launched." We know that belief requires no justification. It usually does, of course, but justifications are not necessary as a basis for a belief.

J is for au Jus

from beefstakes to gooses,
to piglets and quails
all running with juices

jiffy - the amount of time light travels a meter
jerkin
jackanapes
jactitation of marriage
jehu - drive like Jehu 2 Kings ix.20
jinnistan
jordeloo
jolly dog - bon vivant
justiciar
jake - OK
jew flag - $
joy house brothel
jungle buzzard
jerratrics
jodkpurs
joie de vivre pronounced zhwa de vevr
jejune
jockette
juice head
joint - hangout;penis;place of robbery
jolt - stiff drink;prison setence;to strike
jug - jail;solitary;safe
judicial notice

Abandoning Iraq

So the Coalition should just pack up and leave defenseless people whose lives are in danger in large part to foreign folly?

"Es gibt keine patriotische Kunst und keine patriotische Wissenschaft. Beide gehören, wie alles hohe Gute, der ganzen Welt an..." - J. W. von Goethe (1749-1832)

Ja, das Leben gehort den Lebenden an, und wer lebt, muss auf Wechsel gefasst sein.

But I prefer Kantian moral philosophy to Goethe's aphorisms, and our presumed duty to protect "defenseless people" fails the categorial imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." If the defense of the oppressed was a moral law, we would naturally have US troops in Dafur, Tibet, Burma, downtown Detroit, and an infinity of other places.

That people may suffer if the US leaves is firstly an assumption not a fact-- we don't know if that is true. Secondly, it seems apparent that defenseless people are suffering and tens of thousands have died because US troops are in Iraq. If we dismiss Kantian ethics and put the moral basis of our decision on a utiliterian basis, then the higher morality is that which causes either more help or less harm, which may in fact be the US's unilateral departure.

Realistically, I think it's likely that if the US left Iraq, the Iraqi myrmidons of the US imperium will suffer. But, equally realistically, such internal blood-lettings have been a part of that world for the last thousand years that venerates the lex talones, and we have no more hope of changing these deep-seated tribalistic passions than we do in sweeping back the ocean.

A President We Can Be Proud Of

My fingers went to my teeth as I watched the president arrive with the queen down the red carpet on C-Span. For a moment, it looked like Bush was going to give the royal buttocks a pat, something that we could only expect from a man who last year groped the German chancellor. When you dress a monkey in a monkey suit, you still see the monkey. And Bush on cue found a way to embarrass himself with his broken English causing the queen to mutter either "Some year", "Oh, dear", or "Bring me beer."

I just hope that in the next election cycle, we elect a president that we can take pride in. It would be a change from the Clinton-Bush legacy.

How to Give a Pill to a Cat

meow

Bush's Atheism

Christopher Hitchens

"I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, 'I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.'"


"I think it’s false to say that the president acts as if he believes he has God’s instructions. Compared to Jimmy Carter, he’s nowhere. He’s a Methodist, having joined his wife’s church in the end. He also claims that Jesus got him off the demon drink. He doesn’t believe it. His wife said, 'If you don’t stop, I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids.' You can say that you got help from Jesus if you want, but that’s just a polite way of putting it in Texas."

I think James Moore and Wayne Slater's characterization in The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power that Rove is agnostic is accurate. What Rove and Bush have done is use god-talk as one more political lever. Former president Clinton, Carter. and Lyndon Johnson are somewhat the same, although their belief system had deeper cultural roots. I have my doubts as to whether it is even possible to be a person of faith and a world class politican. Such inherently clashing world views create a kind of neutering schizophrenia, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson.

Please, Sir, I Want Some More

MENU

FOR THE LUNCHEON

IN HONOR OF
HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II
AND
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE PHILIP,
DUKE OF EDINBURGH

Wild Asparagus Veloute
Chive Oil
Heirloom Tomato Fondue

Seared Baby Sea Bass
Ramp-Vermouth Sauce
Lemony Risotto

Ruby Red Grapefruit Fillets,
Jicama and Florida Avocados
Citrus Dressing

“Spring Garden”
Raspberry Meringue
Dark Chocolate Sorbet
Mint Granita

Purposeful Agnosticism

Allan Bradt's book The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persisitence of the Product that Defined America describes how the industry successfully defended itself when the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer became clear in the early 1950s.

From a review by Jonathan Miles in The New York Times Book Review:

"Faced with damning evidence, the industry devised a cagey defense: rather than denying the harms of smoking, it insisted there were "two sides" to the story, and corralled skeptical scientists-- perennially available on any subject-- to rebut or at to least cast doubt on the medical consensus. Journalists were urged to consider "fairness" and "balance" in covering the invented "controversy." The industry's pubic relations arm, Brandt writes, was "adept at taking a single dissenter and assuring widespread media coverage of his views." This purposeful agnosticism, which served the tobacco industry well, will sound eerily familiar to anyone following th global warming "debate"-- another case in which a few pedigreed skeptics, whose views align with those of a powerful ndustry, are framing consensus as controversy."

The same strategy in which doubt is fact has been used in other so-called debates, such as creationism, gun control, and holocaust revisionism. It also helps to leverage American first principles to defend the indefensible, for example, freedom of religion for creationism, the second amendment for mass gun ownership, and freedom of the press for holocaust revisionism.

I is for Insects

and it couldn't be sadder;
they're the lowest known food
on the gastronome's ladder.

in lim - at he outset
Ixion
in rem versus in personam
in loc
intestate
in pari delicti
iron maiden of nuremberg
iormungandur
ice-blink
in flagrante delicto
imp of darkness
indifference curve
ipse dixit
ingestion
inter-record gap
ink slinger
irish turkey - corned beef
inspissate
igneous
intaglio versus cameo
ichthyology
inamorta

Paris Packs Her Toothbrush

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A judge sentenced Paris Hilton to 45 days in county jail Friday for violating her probation, putting the brakes on the hotel heiress' famous high life.

Ms. Hilton gets no sympathy from me, who has parlayed her last name into fame and fortune. As is true with many other celebrities-- politicians, royals, and stars-- Paris surrounded herself with a retinue who facilitiated and applauded her serial violations of the rules to which the little people must adhear. Chris Farley, John Bulishi, Elvis, Anna Niocole and a myriad of others died of the fast life, and it may well be that a brief stay in a non-Hilton establishment will save Paris' life.

Miscellania

1. A mildly cold temperature of 65 degrees F can trigger accidental hypothermia.

2. There are no houseflies in the state of Alaska.

3. The chemical structure of most nerve gases is related to that of methylphosphonic acid.

4. According to Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, "there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upwards for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton."

5. Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

6. There are more than 1,000 rings around Saturn.

7. Saphenous veins taken from the patient's legs are used to detour blood around blocked heart veins.

8. Recombinant DNA ("genetic engineering") is a process that splices genes from one organism into genes of another, producing new forms of life.

9. Immanuel Velikovsky in his book Worlds in Collision blamed a near miss of a comet for such biblical events as the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues of Egypt, and said that the comet settled into an orbit that is now known as the planet Venus.

10. Ultraviolet radiation damage ranges from wrinkles and liver spots to precancerous dark patches known as actinic keratosis and, finally, basal-cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma.

Is Jesus God?

My understanding is that Jesus = God --> atonement.

Of course that makes nonsense of the verse "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." 1 John 4:14. and you need to explain all the verses in which Jesus refers to God or addresses God as a distinct person—the "why hast thou forsaken me" uttered on the cross, etc.

Jesus seems to see Himself as from and of God and of course the writers of the Epistles identified Him as God.. In John 10:30, Jesus says, “I and my Father are one” and in John 14:9, He says, “he that hast seen me hath seen the Father.” I’m not sure that this is a ringing claim of His godhood. Was Jesus claiming that he was God or that he was one with God, as suggested in this familiar hymn?

We are One in The Spirit,
We are One in The Lord,
We are One in The Spirit,
We are One in The Lord.
And we pray that all unity may one day be restored,
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

But to address your objection, it is true that the Bible speaks of Jesus sitting on the right hand of God and asking Him that God's will be done, as in Matthew 26:39: “O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” When Jesus was talking to “my Father,” was he talking to another person who was distinct from him or to himself, much as we do when we have an interior dialogue? My thinking is that it is latter. To put it in other words, God as logos was incarnated into human form to atone for the sin's of humanity-- not as Mel Gibson seems to suggest in his movie through physical pain-- but through the spiritual pain of separation from who He once was. The word "son" refers to this phase of humilitiy of obedience to his own divine mandate, not a biological title or a indication of personhood separate from God. I see no evidence that the Holy Spirit has personhood. We talk about the "pleasant" sunshine or the "angry" sea. These are metaphors-- images of something we're trying to describe. The Holy Spirit is one and the same with the incarnated and resurrected Jesus. The "Comforter" of John 14:10 is not a person but our faith that "Jesus is the Christ...the same yesterday, today, and forever." I also find it curious and perhaps compelling that the apostle Paul began each of his epistles without referencing the Holy Spirit, a strange omission if the Holy Spirit was indeed a person of the godhead:

Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”

I Corinthians 1:1, 3: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God…Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”

II Corinthians 1:1-3: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God…Grace be to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…”

Galatians 1:1, 3: “Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead)…Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Ephesians 1:1-3: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at …Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.”

Philippians 1:1-2: “Paul and Timotheus, the servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus, which are at Phillipi…Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Colossians 1:1-3: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God…Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We give thanks to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…”

I Thessalonians 1:1: Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the Thessalonians… Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

II Thessalonians 1:1-2: Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the Thessalonians… Grace unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philemon 1:1, 3: “Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and Timothy our brother, unto Philemon our dearly beloved, and fellowlabourer…Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Titus 1:1, 4: “Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness…To Titus, mine own son after the common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior.”

It's clear to me that Jesus in referring to Himself is rarely straightforward, sometimes refering to himself as the son of man and at other times to the son of God and on occasion dodging a direct answer or rephrasing it into another rhetorical question. This is a good example:

"And how do you explain Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God ? Again, this verse draws a clear distinction between Jesus and God."

On the face of it, Jesus is not merely drawing a distinction, but claiming that He is the very antithesis of a core quality that is God. In discussions of theodicy, for example, some make the claim that the essential nature of God is one of transcendent mystery: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." (Is 55:9) . But time and again, the Bible makes it clear that God is good, not just good as a quality that we cannot perceive, but a quality that we can perceive. That we perceive God to be good but when He is actually evil or that we perceive God to be evil when he is actually good is incomprehensible, and, I believe, false. It would negate even our ability to perceive and interpret any kind of good, much less God’s goodness, including the death and resurrection of His Son. My best guess is that Jesus-God had perceived the insincerity of his interrogators were just toying with them. He wasn't describing Himself as either evil or distinct from God.

The Original Greek

Those who believe often make the claim that what they believe is the most important thing anyone can believe—that religious knowledge outweighs all other knowledge of any kind. Well then, let me ask you: Can you read the holy scriptures in Hebrew, Latin, or Greek?

I think it's a cheap trick-- perhaps even a fallacy-- when somone tries to nail a theological point by saying, "Well, according to the original Greek this is the way it is." I agree that belief needs a foundation of some kind. I don't think that foundation is the ability to speak with the tongues of men and of angels and to have read Luther or Renan or Kung. What is needed in my view is firstly the humility to recognize the limts of faith and the limits of reason and to discern where they overlap and where they do not conjoin. Secondly, I believe what is needed are life experiences-- knowledge of good and evil people and awareness of the unfolding of history and events-- to get some understanding of buth the tragedy and the paradoxes of our existence. Finally, in my view, what is needed is not so much a knowledge of theology per se as a knowledge and an appreciation of the Bible itself, in distinction to secondary sources such as commentaries, lectures, or sermons from other people. We are at the same place that the church fathers are in that respect, having nothing more than our mind and conscience and the words in the Bible.

Carl Sagan

"There is (today in the West) . . . a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would betoken at least a more interesting universe, but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of toughmindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival.

"(such as)...astrology, the Bermuda Triangle "mystery", flying saucer accounts, pyramidology, Scientology, Kirlian photography, psychic surgery, flat and hollow earths, prophacy, astral projection, Velikovskian catasrophism, Atlantis and Mu, spiritualism ..."

"It may be that there are kernals of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, a need to replace experiments by desires. . . . They are mystical and occult doctrines, devised in such a way that they are not subject to disproof and characteristically impervious to rational discussion."

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)

H is for Henry VIII

gluttonous sinner;
he cut off Anne's head,
then sat down for dinner.

habiliments
hoboism
hhd. - hogshed
hoi polloi
hoary
hash house - restaurant
hay bag - woman vagrent
heifer den - brothel
hook shop - brothel
holophrases
horizontal decalage
hot short - stolen car
hunky - Lithuanian - honky(?)
human action theory - praxeology
hereditaments
hue and cry - horn and voice
hieratic
hibernal
heyoka
heckle
hustings
hesperus - evening star

The Inner Ring

While watching CIA Director's gormless performance on 60 minutes on Sunday, it first all off made me dismiss as laughable the Mark Lane-like conspiratorial fantasies of CIA involvement in all kinds of evil from the Kennedy assasination to Jonestown and beyond-- a diabolo ex machina of dark and shadowy forces. These folks cannot do anything well. George Tenet is no James Bond, and the witlessness of this pathetic man and his organization should now be more than obvious. Perhaps we can give CIA a pass for missing the 9/11 attack, but to embrace the serial lies that preceeded the Iraq war is beyond belief. In fact, Tenet's capacity to believe the unbelievable appears to be what drove his epistomology-- not fact, not analysis, but belief.

But the question I reflect on is what should this be so? Tenet had what virtually every other American did not have: access to millions of dollars worth of inteligence, and almost daily access to the president. Yet, he found himself unable to express his concerns. Tenet now says that his phrase "slam dunk" doesn't refer to the quality of pre-invasion intelligence. It refers to his ability to support a propaganda campaign when America enters the war, as if that is the job of the CIA.

Like I said: pathetic.

The CBS interview brought back a recollection of a lecture C.S. Lewis delivered more than sixty years ago. In the Inner Ring, he says that he isn't convinced that " the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World. Even if you add Ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside, take many forms which are not easily recognizable as Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every Inner Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, avoidance of routine duties, evasion of discipline.

"My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it-this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing-the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner ringer." I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in-one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. "

Tenet's desire to be a lord of the ring-- to ascend and be special and noted and well-regarded-- neutered his honesty. I also see this in journalists-- especially national reporters and columnists and the White House press. They too want to be part of the inner ring. A quail dinner with Karl Rove at his historic estate, a concert at Lincoln Center with the Secretary of Defense, a private briefing and a request for advice from the president, and whatever integrity they once had is gone forever.

Such is the power of the Inner Ring.

G is for Garlic

whose charisma lingers
in your hear, on your breath,
even on your fingers.

glabrous
gild the pill
golden opnions
gothamites
gamaheu
gad
gowed up - under the influence
gormless - witless
green in my eye-- crudility
grimalkin
greek fire
gambage
gibe
grommet
gigahertz - billion hertz
gustatory
gaff wheel - gamling wheel
gams - girl's legs
gander
gash - street women
gimick - lame person
gin mill
glass jaw - coward
glom
gold dust - cocaine
gonov - thief
glissade
gorilla - thug
griffin
ghetto - "palce of our divorcement"
gelid

Reinhold Niebuhr

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944)

The True Believer

Jim Jones and The Temple of Doom