Month: August 2010

Michael Shermer continues to rebut Deepak Chopra:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics.

Chopra’s theology notwithstanding, the hydrogen atoms in the sun are not sitting around in a cloud of possibilities waiting for a cosmic mind to signal them to fuse together to form helium atoms and thereby to throw off heat and light for our planet. The ordinary laws of physics are sufficient for these purposes. If large enough, a cloud of hydrogen gas collapsing under the force of gravity reaches a critical point of pressure. Hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms and give off heat and light — and they would do so even if there were not a single mind in the entire cosmos to observe it.

Jonah Lehrer exercises his free will by writing a blog post.

This week author Anne Rice announced that she is no longer Christian:

I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen .

Dreher won't accept this:

I'm sorry, but this is weak, and makes me wonder what really happened. Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century. Does she really know no liberal Christians? Has she never picked up a copy of Commonweal? Does she really think that if she asked a Christian on the streets of Nairobi or Tegucigalpa what they, as Christians, thought of Nancy Pelosi, they would have the slightest idea what she was talking about? And Christianity, anti-science? Good grief. Has she not noticed that Catholic Church, to which she did belong until yesterday, has affirmed evolution, and embraces science? How can a woman of her putative sophistication really think that Christianity is nothing more than a section of the Republican Party at prayer?

I tend to agree, but it does reveal the impact of Christianism in this culture to swamp and delegitimize actual Christianity. Dreher, of course, remains appalled by the neologism, regarding it as somehow anti-Christian. In fact, it's precisely an attempt to save the message of the Gospels from the menace of Republican cultural politics.

I'm still struck by how big a wave my little profile of more than twenty years ago still makes. If you're wondering who Ben Sherwood, he was, by all accounts, the biggest asshole among Rhodes Scholars in recent history. And I failed to stop his relentless career.

Earlier this week Atul Gawande hosted a live-chat on his article about hospice care:

The fundamental issue I found … was not the percentage of people at the margin who really do want to spend their last days on a ventilator with a feed tube and dialysis machine, or getting knocked down by a fourth round of chemotherapy with a minuscule chance of helping. Perhaps there ARE more of these folks in America than elsewhere. But the crucial problem is that for most people, this is misery. They don’t want this when they really get down to thinking and talking through it. The failure of our system is that we are not good at helping people sort out what is most important to them when they are dying and then helping them achieve it.

Natural law – morality, religion and politics. Bob Wright has a chat with Robby George:

William Easterly attends an Anglican church in Bolgatanga, Ghana:

You need to understand how [other people] see themselves. A good guess is that the people in the congregation this morning, in one of the poorest regions of Ghana, do NOT see themselves primarily as “poor” or “developing”, they see themselves as Christians. Another guess is that similar feelings about religious faith would apply to other Ghanaians in other religious services, like Muslims, Catholics, traditional religions, etc.)

Perhaps this fits into the recurring Aid Watch theme about humanizing aid recipients, how poor people have a life, and may not even see themselves as poor at all, and so may according to some other perspective NOT be poor. This is not to deny the material hardships of people around Bolgatanga …

Those who seek to reduce the life of faith to something outside of faith miss the point.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7.32 pm

Ed Yong describes a device that allows severely paralyzed individuals to write via sniffing. The gadget's first user is referred to as "LI1":

LI1 is one of the quickest users and she only manages around three letters per minute, with one mistake with every six letters. That’s may seem frustrating but the freedom of expression more than makes up for it. As Plotkin and Sela write, “The speed of this self-expression is less important to individuals who, put bluntly, have no other options.” When LI1 and LI2 were asked to suggest improvement to the controller, neither mentioned speed.