Month: March 2012

Does College Make You Less Religious?

Garry Wills examines Santorum's claim:

I think it inevitable that questioning of childhood beliefs should take place at various stages of adolescence. This does not happen in junior year or senior year on campus. It is part of a long process called growing up. … An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

Eric Reitan has more:

Scholars in academia engage in critical and reason-based thinking on every conceivable topic of human interest—including religion and religious dogma. As such, conservative Christian teachings are not immune to the academy’s critical attention. But for those who view these teachings as identical with the revealed truth of God, such critical attention will be seen as nothing but hubris; nothing but the vaunting of human pride over God’s word.  

Learning is, in this view, a spiritual vulnerability. Those who are less educated are less likely to critically assess the pronouncements of a religious authority—a critical assessment which, given Santorum’s vision of cosmic holy war, is a Satanic attack on divine truth. 

What Is “Free Will?”

Alfred Mele breaks down the different things people might mean when they talk about the concept:

According to some people, free will is housed only in non-physical souls; it’s a supernatural power. According to others, whether or not souls exist, free will doesn’t depend on them. People in this second group divide into two subgroups. Some will tell you that the ability to make rational, informed, conscious decisions in the absence of undue force – no one holding a gun to your head – is enough for free will. Others say that something important must be added: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a deep way that I will say something about. Sometimes, perhaps, you would have made a different decision if things had been a bit different. For example, if you had been in a slightly better mood, you might have decided to buy two boxes of girl scout cookies instead of just one. But this is not enough for the kind of openness at issue. What is needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it actually was at the time – your mood, all your thoughts and feelings, your brain, your environment, and, indeed, the entire universe and its entire history.

Sam Harris explains why we care:

If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.

Would The World Be Better Off Without Religion?

With harsh words for the neo-atheists, Bryan Appleyard answers:

[A]bsence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't. … The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

Loving The Unknown

Marilynne Robinson embraces it:

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

The Culture War Tide Is Turning

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Rush Limbaugh – are you sitting down? – apologizes:

For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week.  In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke … My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.

I note that Limbaugh hasn't apologized yet on the air in the same context as he called another human being a "slut" he wanted to make a sex tape he could masturbate to. I note also that uses the same terminology as Santorum did when referring to this: "absurdity." Hmmm. This is the "I was only kidding – I'm an entertainer" defense. He is an entertainer except when he isn't, of course. But the apology to Fluke should be taken as genuine, and also as a sign of something deeper.

In the culture wars, the right increasingly has more to lose than to win, as I recently noted. Listen to Limbaugh:

In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.

Santorum seems to realize he has over-reached as well. Krauthammer notes exactly what I did in the live-blog of last Tuesday night:

Remember that odd riff with which he began his Michigan concession/victory speech? About three generations of Santorum women — mother, wife, daughter — being professional, strong, independent, i.e., modern? That was an unsubtle attempt to update his gender-relations image by a few decades.

In the last debate, Santorum scuttled away from a subject, contraception, he was only recently willing to say he would talk about during his presidency. Krauthammer cautions:

The less said about contraception the better, a lesson Santorum refused to learn. It’s a settled question. The country has no real desire for cringe-inducing admonitions from politicians about libertinism and procreative (vs. pleasurable) sex.

Which is to say that Andrew Breitbart's legacy, summed up by Sister Toldjah as "Apologize For WHAT?" lasted a few days.

And Limbaugh, of all people, ended it.

The Ghost Of Searches Past

Google's new privacy policy went into effect this week, which means that your Google searches can influence what you are shown on YouTube or other parts of the web that Google controls. Tim Carmody didn't want to be reminded of his web history and erased it all:

Titanium plating and rehabilitation clincs for a badly broken arm. Disability and unemployment benefits. Speech therapy for toddlers. Emergency child care. Respite care. Autism. Autism. Autism. I remember these things, and that time, every day, with or without Google’s help. … Google and its partners, Facebook and its partners, do not get to choose when and how I am made to remember the moments I needed to turn to it. I want no targeted advertising, no special YouTube results, playing on my nostalgia or purporting to understand who I am and what I need based on the web activity of a person who is no longer here.

Alexis Madrigal mitigates such concerns:

The saving grace may end up being that as companies go to more obtrusive and higher production value ads, targeting may become ineffective. Avi Goldfarb of Rotman School of Management and Catherine Tucker of MIT's Sloan School found last year that the big, obtrusive ads that marketers love do not work better with targeting, but worse.

In the meantime, Wired provides a guide to erase your Google web history.

How Women Can Get Their Men To Open Up

Prison:

[T]here were women who described being really disillusioned with men in the outside world and finding that men who were incarcerated, who have a lot of time to think about things, are very reflective, read a lot of books—they really appreciated what these men cultivated in themselves and brought to the relationship. And a lot of this for women focused on communicativeness. I heard over and over stories of men writing 20-page letters and spending multiple hours in visits with nothing to do but talk. The women really, really valued these conversations and thought men on the outside hadn’t been socialized to communicate in these sorts of ways, hadn’t been in circumstances to develop those skills.

Does The Sperm Make The Man?

Matthew Lin examines ejaculate's place in culture:

[M]en who suffer from infertility have reported feelings of depression and inadequacy, even though they have little control over the range of genetic and environmental factors that may contribute to their condition. These attitudes reflect the belief that sperm act as a stand-in for the male and his self-worth: The better the sperm, the better the man.

[Lisa Jean Moore, author of Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid] writes, "an important part of the experience of male infertility is the projection of the sperm’s characteristics…onto the men who produce them." In many cases, however, ARTs like intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), the technique where a single sperm is injected into an egg, enable men to overcome infertility problems like low sperm count, motility, and poor morphology.

The question remains: Will the advent of such procedures reduce the emasculating stigma associated with infertility, or will it perpetuate the notion that good sperm equals a good, masculine man—i.e. One capable of producing a baby?

(Photo by Flickr user Asiatic League)