Includes everyone:
Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million.
NASA puts ocean currents to music:
Sarah Laskow explains:
The tool NASA used to make the visualization — ECCO2 or Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean — actually has a greater purpose than providing entertainment for stoners. The tool “attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begins to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.” In other words, it’s the sort of model that can help scientists understand how carbon concentrations and climate change will affect the planet. It just happens to also look extremely cool.
I have every respect for authors who find themselves unable to believe in God, yet want to take religious faith "seriously." But this review of Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists from David Brooks gets at something fundamental – the occasional cheapness, even condescension, involved in rummaging through ancient religious wisdom to add a bit of meaning to your life. Using the examples of C.S. Lewis and Augustine as models to be turned to for young people wanting a "richer inner life," Brooks compares these spiritual autobiographers to de Botton:
"These writers don’t coolly shop for personal growth experiences like someone at the spiritual mall. They find themselves enmeshed in paradoxes of a richness unimaginable before they became entangled in them — that understanding comes after love, that one achieves fullness by surrendering self, that as you approach wisdom you are swept by a sensation that you have been suppressing all along, and all you need do is release…
…There’s something at stake in these accounts, a person’s whole destiny and soul. The process de Botton is recommending is more like going on one of those self-improving vacations. If all his advice were faithfully followed, we’d be a collection of autonomous individuals seeking a string of vaguely uplifting experiences that might perhaps leave a sediment of some sort of spiritual improvement."
Freeman Dyson unpacks our fascination with string theory:
String cosmology is a part of theoretical physics that has become detached from experiments. String cosmologists are free to imagine universes and multiverses, guided by intuition and aesthetic judgment alone. Their creations must be logically consistent and mathematically elegant, but they are otherwise unconstrained. … The fringe of physics is not a sharp boundary with truth on one side and fantasy on the other. All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.
"Final Notions" by Adrienne Rich, who passed away this week:
It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simpleIt will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought
As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take your flesh, it will not be simple
Continued here.
(Partial view of the most common words used in the final statements of Texas death row inmates.)
It's been going on since they were first re-told. Robert Capon's Kingdom, Grace, Judgment asks us to open our eyes and see them afresh:
The Prodigal Son, for example, is not about a boy's vices; it is about a father's forgiveness.
The Laborers in the Vineyard are by no means the central characters in the story; they are hardly more than stick figures used by Jesus to rub his hearers' noses in the outrageous grace of a vineyard own who gives equal pay for unequal work.
And if there is a Christ-figure in the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is not the Samaritan but the battered, half-dead man on the ground.
Our relationships are defined, the parable insists, by the one who walks through our history as victim, not as medicine man …
It is the patients in their sufferings and deaths, not the help in white coats, who look more like Jesus on the cross. Jesus drives the same point home in the parable of the Great Judgment: it is precisely in the hungry, the thirsty, the estranged, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned that we find, or ignore, the Savior himself.
(Painting: The Good Samaritan by Aimé Morot (1880) shows the Good Samaritan taking the injured man to the inn. Via Wiki.)
Ben Zimmer chronicles writers' love-hate relationship with the thesaurus. It began with Peter Mark Roget's first edition in 1852:
Roget’s thesaurus was crucially a conceptual undertaking, and, according to Roget’s deeply held religious beliefs, a tribute to God’s work. His efforts to create order out of linguistic chaos harks back to the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was charged with naming all that was around him, thereby creating a perfectly transparent language. It was, according to the theology of St. Augustine, a language that would lose its perfection with the Fall of Man, and then irreparably shatter following construction of the Tower of Babel.
By Roget’s time, Enlightenment ideals had taken hold, suggesting that scientific pursuits and rational inquiry could discover antidotes to Babel, if not a return to the perfect language of Adam. Though we no longer cling so tightly to these Enlightenment notions about language in our postmodern age, we still carry with us Roget’s legacy, the view that language can somehow be wrangled and rationalized by fitting the lexicon into tidy conceptual categories.
The jury is still out:
T. M. Luhrmann embedded herself in two evangelical churches for her new book, When God Talks Back. Joan Acocella ponders the book:
Luhrmann warns us against calling the evangelicals’ visions and voices “hallucinations”; that is a psychiatric and, hence, pathologizing term. In her vocabulary, such events are “sensory overrides”—sensory perceptions that override material evidence. She cites evidence that between ten and fifteen per cent of the general population has had such experiences.
Cris Campbell reviews a recent paper by Luhrmann on non-drug induced hallucinations:
Luhrmann emphasizes that hallucinatory experiences are shaped and constrained by learning and expectation. Hallucination experiences are socially constructed and culturally patterned. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of the supernatural and religious, where hallucinations are highly valued. Luhrmann calls this “Spiritual Training”
A new documentary wonders:
The inspiration for director Kevin Miller:
Miller was prompted to pursue the project in large part because of “an inherited belief (of hell) from tradition that puts us in a dilemma. “If that view of hell is true, it seems like we can have a good God or we can have hell, but we can’t have both.”
In the comments section at Unreasonable Faith, Miller explains his outlook:
My philosophy is that the universe is what it is no matter what we believe about it, so we should always hold our beliefs loosely. The history of humanity is a history of changing our beliefs in light of new evidence. It’s rigidly held belief that always gets us into trouble. That’s essentially what “Hellbound?” is all about.
Previous Dish discussions on hell here, here, here and here.
The Dish 