Year: 2013

Philosopher Charles Foster considers how foreign we are to ourselves:

I can know, in a scientific sense, almost nothing about myself. I have no real insight into my motives or influences. I say that I have views and desires, but I have no way of saying whether they are really mine, rather than parroted. … Those close to me probably know me better than I know myself. At least they constantly surprise me by telling me things about me that I would never have suspected, or never had the psychological ability to identify or acknowledge. But, although their view of me is more accurate than my own, it’s still woefully incomplete and distorted.

As a consequence, Foster says, “we should approach humans with awe”:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition insists that humans are made in the image of God. God, in that tradition, is unknowably vast. Unknowability and vastness generate a vertiginous awe whenever we look at God and they should, by extension, generate a similar awe when we look at creatures moulded in his/her/its image. You don’t have to accept the notion of the Imago Dei or any other theological principle to conclude that human beings should be viewed this way. You just have to be baffled. I’m unfathomable, you’re unfathomable: stand back in wonder, confusion and reverence.

“Religion … is not, as some would persuade us, an interest attached to life, a subsidiary activity; nor is it a power which governs life from the outside with a, no doubt divine, but certainly incomprehensible, sanction for its authority. It is simply life itself, life dominated by the belief that its value is in the present, not merely in the past or the future, that if we lose ourselves we lose all. ‘Very few men, properly speaking, live at present,’ writes Swift, ‘but are providing to live another time.’ Such seems to me an irreligious life, the life of the world. The man of the world is careless of nothing save himself and his life; but to the religious man, life is too short and uncertain to be hoarded, too valuable to be spent at the pleasure of others, or the past or of the future, too precious to be thrown away on something he is not convinced is his highest good. In this sense, then, we are all, at moments, religious…

A religious revival is sometimes preached and spoken of as if it could be quite independent of other conditions and without relation to anything save, perhaps, a stricter moral behaviour. But, since the religious life, in the view I have tried to represent it, is synonymous with life itself at its fullest, there can be no revival of religion which is not a revival of a more daring and more sensitive way of live. And such a life may as easily be stifled under a mountain of moral prejudice, as dissipated by moral experiment – perhaps more easily,” – Michael Oakeshott, “Religion and the World,” in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life.

After detailing what he’d like his funeral to be like, from his casket to his suit, Wes Janisen gets to the heart of the matter:

I suppose I could continue, could tell you that Panda Express should cater the wake, could go into the kinds of flower arrangements I’d approve of and how to handle any awkward speeches from drunk family members — but that would really be more for your comfort than it would be of any importance to me. I guess that’s really what funerals are all about though, aren’t they, appeasing the living more than the dead? We hold these ceremonies for people we loved and we talk about “what they would have wanted,” but at the end of the day it’s our own peace of mind we’re looking for. Death is so heinously incomprehensible that we living folk go to elaborate lengths to give our dearly departed a proper send-off, but I can’t help but feel we’d skip it all if only we knew what came next. After all, the person in the casket never finds out if their funeral doesn’t go well; they don’t hear the priest mispronounce their name, they don’t sit through the embarrassing cat talk — they’re way too busy being dead, whatever you imagine that entails (sweet oblivion, golfing with God, a new life as a llama at a petting zoo?)

It is this line of thinking which leads me to the final instruction for my funeral: no matter what happens, no matter how badly it goes, don’t sweat it too much. Life is so full of serious, so full of tribulation; death seems like a great opportunity to have a no-pressure gathering of friends and family.

Knowledge alone does not make a scientist:

When people talk about problems with science education, they are generally are talking about science as a body of knowledge. If you know certain facts from within that body of knowledge, you know science. There is another definition of science though, and it is antithetical to the body-of-knowledge definition. For lack of a better word, I’m going to call it testing and discovery. … Body-of-knowledge science is about building assumptions. Testing and discovery is about breaking them. These are two different attitudes, and therefore must be kept separate. Otherwise, testing and discovery will be swallowed up by “science” as just more facts to memorize.

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Lana Hope, homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family, describes the appeal of her former faith:

A few years ago one of my friends had a birthday party, and he invited all the homeschool families he knew to his party. It may seem odd to an outsider to have young children at his 20th birthday party, but it was not the least bit weird to me (parties with my family are the same way; there were as many kids under 13 at my 18th birthday party as there were teens). But after an entire evening of playing board games with people of all ages, washing dishes together, and praying for each other, one of my public school friends (the only person who had attended public school at the party) said to me, “That was so much fun. I never experienced this in my life.” She explained that she never had an evening playing board games with children of all ages. In fact, she never went to someone’s house and had them pray for her either. It was foreign to her, but she liked it.

Fundamentalism offers that kind of community. Yes, the community creates pain and breaks sometimes, but it’s still community that often attracts people to fundamentalism.  I was looking through photos of my teen years earlier this week, and every photo of me has a child in the picture.

PZ Myers reflects on the anecdote:

We’d like to believe that the triumph of secularism is inevitable — how can we fail when we’re going up against such nutty ideas? — but maybe it isn’t, if we neglect social and community and family ideals and pander only to nerdy asocial guys in tech. We really need to wake up to the reasons normal people find value in weird religions.

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Morgan Meis visits the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit on Chagall and observes that the artist “had about a five-year period during the Second World War in which he became utterly obsessed with painting Jesus Christ”:

The paintings have little to do with Jesus as we usually see him — the central figure in the Christian Passion narrative. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jewish Jesus through and through. In many of the Crucifixion scenes (like The Artist with Yellow Christ, 1938 and Persecution, c. 1941) Jesus’ nether parts are covered with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. In Study for The Yellow Crucifixion (1942), Jesus is wearing tefillin, little black boxes containing verses from the Torah that are wrapped around the head and arm, with black straps going down to the hand.

The meaning of Chagall’s Crucifixion paintings, in their historical context, is thus pretty clear. From the time of the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s, through the end of WWII, Chagall was preoccupied with the fate of European Jews. He saw Jesus on the Cross as a universally recognizable symbol of human suffering. Chagall hoped that Jews and non-Jews alike would be able to relate to this symbol. By making Jesus unmistakably Jewish, he was highlighting the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus as a Jew. In the midst of the Holocaust, Chagall wanted to make the universality of Jesus’ crucifixion specific again, he wanted the world to look at Jewish suffering.