Month: October 2010

Michelle Goldberg has a sobering piece on Glenn Beck's go-to "historian," David Barton:

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage. …

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes.

He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

From a new paper about novices and experts, Jonah Lehrer explains "the virtues of unconscious thought when it comes to predicting the outcome of soccer matches":

[Dutch psychologist Ap] Dijksterhuis wasn’t interested in dismantling the myth of expertise. Instead, he was interested in the spooky powers of the unconscious. The first two conditions demonstrated that both deliberating too much (the conscious analysis protocol) and not thinking at all (the “immediate decision” approach) were terrible strategies. In both instances, the experts gained nothing from their expertise – they might as well have been randomly picking winners.

Everything changed, however, in condition number three, that setup where people looked at the matches and were then distracted. In this case, the ability of the experts to predict the outcome was significantly improved. Although their performance was still underwhelming, the payoff of expertise (the difference between the know-it-alls and the know-nothings) more than tripled. The practical lesson is clear: The next time you want to bet on a sports game, distract yourself with a little Sudoko for two minutes. Then, trust your gut. Your unconscious knows more than you know.

PhysOrg reports on a study that connects love and pain:

"It turns out that the areas of the brain activated by intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain," said Arthur Aron, PhD, a professor of psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the study's authors. Aron has been studying love for 30 years. "When thinking about your beloved, there is intense activation in the reward area of the brain — the same area that lights up when you take cocaine, the same area that lights up when you win a lot of money."

(Hat tip: 3QD)

I'm talking about the Dish and our tenth anniversary on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon/evening.

“The guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.”

– Ecstatic Poems, by Kabir. More info on the fifteenth century mystic Indian poet here.

Joseph Berger reviews “The Boy: A Holocaust Story” and examines the enduring mystery behind a photograph whose subject we may never know:

“Looking at a photograph,” [author Dan Porat] writes, “the viewer sees the surface facts and comes to believe he or she has grasped the inner truth of the events depicted, can feel the pain, can see the evil, while in fact knowing nothing of the protagonists, circumstances or context associated with those events.”

But that is the mystery and joy of photographs – a single moment, with no real context, just a guessing game, an inquiry, a provocation to wonder and ask. Of course, photographs lie. But the lies can point beyond to kinds of truth unconnected to the actual reality in the photograph itself.

Christian Century has posed a question to eight theologians:

Suppose someone who hasn't been keeping up with theology for the past 25 years now wants to read the most important books written during that time. What five titles would you suggest?

Their recommendations here.

John Horgan takes another whack at Sam Harris' argument that science is a moral guidepost:

Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs? …

Jonathan Martin watches as Fiorina and Whitman keep their distance.