Month: November 2009

Edge ran an except from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, which combats various justifications for the almighty. From the book:

Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did?  Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while  genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

Gabriel Arana analyzes the Olson case:

If Perry v. Schwarzenegger reaches the Supreme Court and Boies and Olson are successful, gays and lesbians nationwide would not only have the right to marry, they stand to gain many of the legal rights they have sought for decades. Don't Ask, Don't Tell would be invalidated, as would employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. In the eyes of the law, gay people would be equal to straight people, and any legislation that discriminated against them could be challenged and easily struck down against this precedent. However, defeat could legitimize such discrimination against LGBT Americans, making it far more difficult to sue for parental or housing rights. The door to any federal litigation on marriage equality would be shut for decades.

This is risky because Boies and Olson are entering a legal no-man's land. The coalition of lawyers who fought to overturn Prop. 8 at the state level decided not to mount a federal challenge "because federal litigation puts in play the federal doctrines that as yet are underdeveloped," Pizer says. Marriage and family law tend to be state law, she explains, and the federal framework is sketchy.

It's a deeply risky strategy. But it has the educational benefit of grasping fully the discrimination in so many aspects of life that the gay minority still experiences. And it does so under the simple rubric of equality under the law, embraced by a classic conservative thinker like Olson.

It's taken almost two decades for the essentially conservative arguments of Virtually Normal to find a leading Republican champion. And yet Republicans and conservatives, if they hadn't been brainwashed by religious fundamentalism at the base and by cynicism among the elites, should have been pushing this from the get-go.

Stefany Anne Golberg on the appeal of vegetarianism:

[V]egetarianism is, in large part, artificial. It is based neither on ritual nor on necessity. It is a diet by humans for humans. A diet of modernity, whose survival will most likely depend as much on innovations in food technology as the simplicity of the family farm. I say that is the strength of vegetarianism. It can offer a freedom that meat-eating cannot: a diet that is about choice and a liberation from the prescriptions of "normal" daily life. A whole new way of eating that doesn’t rely on the whims of Nature. In short, a form of decadence. An acceptance that, like artists, we can fashion our own food and ergo, our own lives.

Extra reminder: I'm hosting a discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, at the Historic Synagogue at 6th and I Street NW Washington Dc this coming Tuesday at 7 pm.

If you haven't read it yet, Hanna Rosin's article on the connection between degenerate Christianism and America's crisis of private debt is well worth a look:

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates.

Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

It's staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.

At some point these charlatans need to be chased out of the temple. Which these days means the Republican party.

A father and young child get separated in the subway system.

Created by Vancouver sculptor Jamie Salmon. See many more hyper-realistic pieces by him and five other sculptors here.

Jessa Crispin reviews Time by Eva Hoffman:

It's no longer just fast food restaurants and "democracy" that the United States is exporting — it's also our anxiety about time. From how business is conducted to the fight to slow the aging process, our unhealthy attitudes are becoming the common thread that ties our flattening world together. As Hoffman writes in her new book Time — an overview of the way humans experience, fight with, warp, and understand the concept — Americans' insecurity with the ticking clock was in some ways born out of the opportunities for growth and expansion that did not exist in other parts of the world. We worked harder and competed with one another because there was a chance for upward mobility. Other nations are now taking our lead — there are still cliches about the striking French and the siestaing Spanish, but citizens of other countries are taking on the longer work hours and the obsession with youth that has plagued the U.S. for generations.

Americans have always been a work-focused people. And despite the fact that this stresses us out immensely (Americans report feeling more stressed than citizens of other nations, and we also suffer from more heart disease and other stress-related health problems than others), we report feeling happiest when at work. In fact, if we had more free time, surveys suggest that the majority of us would fill it with more work. We have a very difficult time unplugging, and many of our technological advances have ensured that we don't have to. Cell phones, e-mail, laptops, jet travel, and hotels wired with wi-fi all allow the capability to be at work all the time, even on vacation. Part of it might be what Hoffman refers to as our quest for "big promotions, big money, big homes" and that fear that came with knowing that "if you didn't succeed in 'making it,' as the colloquial phrase had it, you had only yourself to blame."

New York, New York, 3 am

DiA compares the outer bounds of science to religion:

One source of strength for the scientific side, in the centuries-long clash of scientific and theistic worldviews, has always been that science didn't involve anything supernatural or untestable. But string theorists have been going around for decades talking about an 11-dimensional universe where we can only directly perceive four of the dimensions, and the multiverse hypothesis seems to involve positing an infinite variety of universes that no one could ever perceive, even in theory.

It's not always readily apparent to non-physicists why this kind of talk is less supernatural than a belief in the persistence of the soul after death. During the course of the Reformation, much of Christianity abandoned its belief in miracles, in favour of a vision of a purely moral and spiritual God who did not physically influence events. Science and church could be reconciled through such a worldview; but atheists might still ask, if you believe in a deity that has no physical impact on or presence in our universe, in what sense does that entity exist? These days, it seems to the average non-scientist that the same question could be posed to a lot of physicists.

Obviously, there's a huge difference between hypothesising extra dimensions which might only be testable through prohibitively expensive high-energy experiments in order to potentially arrive at a mathematically complete version of quantum physics, and hypothesising a vague supernatural being in order to solve a host of unrelated "problems" so fuzzily described that it's not clear whether they are problems at all. But strictly in terms of how the argument between theists and atheists plays out in the public domain, there is a different quality to the tenets that are emerging on the atheistic, particle-physics side of things these days.

Patrick Moberg has seven more.