Month: June 2012

A reader writes:

While your attempt to find "Reading about Mormonism's origins, history, and doctrines certainly makes you reflect on that possibility. It has made me ask questions about my own (Christian) faith, about the absurdity of what I believe. I've asked myself, if I were hearing or reading the Gospel narratives for the first time, what would I make of them? Would they be "weird" or "ridiculous"? Its a useful question for any person who persists in their attachment to a religious tradition. And it can be unsettling.

The more I've thought about this, though, the more I do think there are real doctrinal — not just sociological — reasons Mormonism really is more weird than at least my Christian faith (I'll leave others out of this, for now). All religious traditions ask us to take certain beliefs on faith; they are not, in the narrow sense, empirical. I can't prove that Jesus was the Son of God or that he rose from the dead. I can't prove his miracles. I fully admit all this, and imagine a variety of religious believers from different backgrounds would admit to similar core propositions that elude rational justification.

However, what bothers me about Mormonism is not their similar notions. It's their claim to empirical truths which are self-evidently not truths. For instance, we know that the picture of the Americas in the Book of Mormon is just wrong.

Richard and Joan Ostling, in their sterling book, Mormon America, outline the opinion of many scholars, both within and outside Mormonism, and it seems pretty clear that any dispassionate investigator can't find much of anything, archaeologically,  to corroborate the history the Book of Mormon describes. We know that the Israelites were not, as the 1981 introduction to the Book of Mormon put it, "the principal ancestors of the American Indians." We easily can detect the historical anachronisms that litter the Book of Mormon — the use of the wheel, horses, and domesticated animals, for instance, or for certain plants such as wheat, or the metal work involved in the type of steel swords used in Book of Mormon warfare. (All this is mentioned in the Ostling's book.)

Of course, none of this even begins to touch on the literary analysis that shows how much of the text of the Book of Mormon probably was borrowed from 19th century Bibles (for instance, a third of the book of Isaiah finds its way into the Book of Mormon) or from the swirl of ideas he would have been exposed to — rather than coming from an ancient text written in "Reformed Egyptian."

I'm not trying to be mean or snide in noting this. But these are not doctrinal issues. They are historical claims made in a book that, by the account of those who believe it, should be read literally.

For me, whatever I believe about Jesus or Paul or the claims of the New Testament, I know a city called Jerusalem existed. I know that the cities Paul traveled to were real. The basic geography and the historical figures involved seem to check out. This does not mean the New Testament is without problems. And I've read my "historical Jesus" materials. But even more, Christian approaches to Scripture, for centuries and centuries, have emphasized the difference between the spirit and the letter — even in those benighted medieval years, a rather elaborate four-fold mode of interpretation prevailed. Believing that the Gospels are inspired does not prevent me from also acknowledging the human personalities involved in their writing, their circulation over many years, and more. I don't think this simply is a product of time or age (read Augustine on Genesis), but disposition and intellectual stance. It's a skeptical disposition and reasoned engagement with sacred texts that Mormonism simply doesn't allow for.

(Photo: wheat via Wiki. From Wiki: "'Barley' is mentioned three times in the Book of Mormon narrative dating to the 1st and 2nd century BC. 'Wheat' is mentioned once in the Book of Mormon narrative dating to the same time period. The introduction of domesticated modern barley and wheat to the New World was made by Europeans after 1492, many centuries after the time in which the Book of Mormon is set.")

Scott Horton is a contributing editor of Harper’s who blogs about civil liberties at No Comment. If you haven’t yet read his award-winning piece “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides‘”, you should definitely do so. Here is my long take on the report. Previous Horton videos here and here; “Ask Anything” archive here.

If Obamacare is struck down, some argue that the GOP will "own" the healthcare system and be blamed for its failures. Waldman rejects this fantasy:

What's more likely to happen is that Democrats will continue to talk a lot about health care, coming up with new proposals and trying to make the intricate case for why their latest complex policy fix really will make people's lives better. Republicans will then say, "This is just more big government of the kind the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. We need to unleash the power of the free market." Then they'll filibuster whatever it is Democrats want to do, the proposals will die, and Republicans will pay no particular price at the polls.

Cheerful now?

It's unclear:

Surely, if the hair on our heads has its uses – protection from the sun, a little bit of warmth and also, perhaps, sexiness – men who lose theirs are at a disadvantage. Why then have the genes associated with male pattern baldness been successfully passed on, rather than becoming a little more rare with each generation? Why, in other words, haven't bald men gone extinct? … [M]ost [theories] revolve around making some attempt to argue that baldness offers some kind of evolutionary advantage. Some researchers suggests, for instance, that it signals dominance and status, while others suggest that it shows people that they offer maturity, wisdom and nurturance.

I'm with the latter explanation.

(Vintage ad via The Art Of Manliness)

Channing Tatum dances half-naked to YMCA for throngs of horned up women. Yep, gay culture is over.

Many in the Christianist movement to make gay people act straight are acknowledging what all the data tell us. No one stops being gay or having same-sex emotional and sexual attraction. If you really believe loving someone of the same gender is sinful, you can force yourself to act like a heterosexual and function with constant therapy. The "cure" is over – and it never truly existed in the first place. Money quote:

This week, 600 Exodus ministers and followers are gathering for the group's annual conference, held this year in a Minneapolis suburb. The group's president, Alan Chambers, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the conference would highlight his efforts to dissociate the group from the controversial practice usually called ex-gay, reparative or conversion therapy.

"I do not believe that cure is a word that is applicable to really any struggle, homosexuality included," said Chambers, who is married to a woman and has children, but speaks openly about his own sexual attraction to men. "For someone to put out a shingle and say, 'I can cure homosexuality' — that to me is as bizarre as someone saying they can cure any other common temptation or struggle that anyone faces on Planet Earth."

It's a start, at least.

A reader's answer to the question:

You can't be both cool and culturally conservative. Consequently, being uncool helps preserve their edge in channeling cultural resentment.

Every so often a certain manner of post will pop up on my Facebook wall, usually along the theme of how rebellious it is to show deference to symbols of American authority (e.g. "I know that NO ONE's going to repost this because it's so UNCOOL, but I'm going to say the pledge of allegiance/post pictures of flags/support the troops anyway!"). These are almost always posted by the people I grew up with, i.e. working-class, non-college educated white people from upstate New York. To the outsider, this level of ostensible cognitive dissonance seems almost comical; really, how exactly does one rebel by pledging allegiance to their own government? It makes perfect sense, however, when you believe that these traditional sources of authority, tradition, and general cultural touchstones that once spoke to everyone, at least everyone you knew in your own life, have been supplanted by something else.

Of course Republicans are uncool - that's the way they like it. "Coolness" is an ephemeral, ever-shifting state, and holding yourself out as the antithesis of that says that you stand for these traditional sources of authority that everyone else is abandoning in the relentless pursuit of keeping up with the chaos of cool. The GOP would lose one of their best advantages if they tried to keep up with cool, especially when you consider that the older folks that form their base are quite well aware, from their own personal experiences, that coolness will outpace you in life, no matter how hard you try to keep up with it.

Another:

Coolness is emotional? I think Conor P. Williams was much closer with "cutting edge". Republicans are uncool because they cling desperately to some 30-year-old ideal. Democrats are much cooler than Republicans, though they'll never officially be "cool", because they don't. Democrats have always been more willing to change their opinions in the face of new evidence. On gay rights or gay marriage, energy policy, environmental policy and immigration, Democrats have been at or close to the cutting edge for decades.

But that's not the only reason. Because of the perception that Democrats are the more cutting edge of the two parties, young people are more attracted to them. After all, young people are most (or only) familiar with the current state of affairs and science. And so there's a positive feedback loop, where young voters are more attracted to Democrats in the first place, and then Democrats have to stay sharp so as not to lose those young voters. Imagine how cool they'd be if young people voted.

Andrew Hyde learned that it's very, very high:

Use Amazon to run your website: .01 to download a file. Use Amazon to sell your book: $2.58 per download + 30% of whatever you sell. Amazon’s markup of digital delivery to indie authors is ~129,000%.

Kelly Burdick does more math:

Amazon’s total fees ate away almost a third of Hyde’s royalty: The book retails on Amazon for $9.99, and under the 70% percent royalty plan Hyde imagined he would get $7. But Amazon charges $2.58 per download to deliver the ebook, with the author’s royalty being calculated on what’s left after the delivery fee is deducted.

More on the tyranny of Amazon in publishing here. Regarding the Dish's first self-published book, The View From Your Window, Blurb's print-on-demand price for a soft-cover version has regrettably gone up 33% since we launched it in late 2009. But we now offer it to you with no markup from us.

We've long known that the core of this blog is its readers. That was clear to me back during the six years I did this on my own for nothing but a tip jar. The depth and breadth of opinion and knowledge and experience in the Dish readership is staggering. But I just got a little mathematical summary of our readers' relationship with each other and this blog from the Beast stats department that puts some of this into numbers.

Two things leap out. First off, more than 70 percent of you have bookmarked the Dish as a regular destination. This is simply off the charts for most websites. It's why we see such stability in our traffic numbers; and why our million or so monthly unique readers stick around. A third of them, in our Urtak survey, were under 35. If you're a regular reader and haven't bookmarked us, it's one simple, cost-free way to help us thrive in today's economy.

But the next gob-smacking number is the amount of time the average Dish reader spends on the site every day. It's 16.2 minutes per visit. On the Internet, that's a lifetime. Yes, these stats are gold for advertisers and I hope airing them helps the enterprise. But more important, these stats are just a sign of how this blog is much bigger than one person now, a collective brain and heart figuring out its own way ahead. I'm just happy to be along for the ride.

Veronique de Rugy thinks it's too high:

The nuclear energy industry in the United States is powered by corporate welfare on plutonium. What is in theory a wonderful technology is in practice an economic white elephant. The data accumulated during the last 30 years suggest strongly that nuclear plants will never be able to cover their operating costs, let alone recoup the billions it costs to build them.