Author: Andrew Sullivan

God, Aliens, And Us, Ctd

But first, E.O. Wilson explains why he believes extraterrestrial life is out there:

Many readers counter Linker’s doubts that monotheistic faiths could cope with the discovery of E.T.:

There is no problem here. It’s called the scandal of particularity. God revealed himself to the Jews and not to other nations. Nevertheless, it became incumbent upon the chosen people to spread the good news to the other nations. “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6

The nations were the aliens of their day.

Samaritans, then the Greeks, then the Romans, …. the Irish and the Native Americans we all aliens to the promise, yet God preaches peace to those who are far off and to those who are near. Eph 2:17  The Irish took to the Gospel like ducks to water. So much so that there were no Irish martyrs. Why would we assume that ET wouldn’t be receptive to the good news as well?

Damon Linker says, “the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe.” And that is a problem how? Indeed, the would need to be intelligent in order to receive the gospel. He seems to think that God speaks to us because were better than others.

Not so. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers” Deuteronomy 7:7-8

Finally, does Linker think created in God image means body shape? Surely, he can’t be that naïve!

Another notes “one obvious flaw” with Linker’s position:

The monotheistic religions I know of all believe in “Angels”, who are not human, nor are of earth (also Devils/Demons, fallen versions of the same). To adapt to finding a THIRD group of intelligent beings, is different than if they believed we were unique in our intelligence and will.

Another reader:

Has Damon Linker communicated with all of the space aliens out there? If not, how can he write the line that you quote: “Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?”

If he doesn’t chat with them, how does he know that they have no divine origins and guidance, that they do not have religion? How does he know that God has not revealed himself to them? If they are out there, maybe some space people live in far greater harmony with God than we do on earth.

Another notes:

Seventh-Day Adventists, the denomination of my youth that I no longer claim, believe quite readily in aliens.  The story is that other worlds do in fact exist, that god created a universe of many inhabited planets with unique beings, that each had a Tree of Life and a temptation and that we are the only planet that fell.  So life on this planet is part of a “Great Controversy” between God and Satan to determine who’s right about everything, and the other planets are simply waiting and watching for the outcome.  Adventism came out of the mid 1800s, I’m sure there are some cultural contributions to the SF narrative in their eschatology.  But I’ve never seen anyone really pick it apart.

One more reader:

For a decade or so, all the subjects surrounding these questions have been discussed in conferences held by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley and in its journal, Theology and Science. So Christian, Jewish and Moslem theologians are involved and will not be caught unaware. Both CTNS and the Vatican (with an observatory in Arizona) are active participants in SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Quote For The Day

“We … as all ‘God-fearing’ men of all ages, are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. Even the most ‘Christian’ civilization and even the most pious church must be reminded that the true God can be known only where there is some awareness of a contradiction between divine and human purposes, even on the highest level of human aspirations.

There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves.

Strangely enough, none of the insights derived from this faith are finally contradictory to our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it. For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory,” – Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

A Poem For Sunday

8033056000_e6803f3a4c_k

“A Penny for Your Thoughts” by Mary Ruefle:

How are we to find eight short English words
that actually stand for autumn?
One peculiar way to die of loneliness
is to try. Pretend November has
a sliver of ice in her throat.
Pretend it is nice, pretend the sliver
of ice is nice, and beckons you.
Talk for half an hour about the little churchyard
full of the graves of people who have died
eating nachos. Go on until you can go no further brown.
Let the river flow. It is written in stone.
Let the sparrows take your only coin
and fly with it, twittering over some main event.
What color ribbon will you wear in your hair?
Now the clouds look burnt. But first they burned.
To you I must tell all or lie.

(From Trances of the Blast © 2013 by Mary Ruefle. Used by permission of Wave Books. Photo by Brian Smithson)

“The Tradition Of The Argumentative Jew”

Leon Wieseltier praises it:

Learning to live with disagreement … is a way of learning to live with each other. Etymologically, the term machloket refers to separation and division, but the culture of machloket is not in itself separatist and divisive. This is in part because all the parties to any particular disagreement share certain metaphysical and historical assumptions about the foundations of their identity. But beyond those general axioms, the really remarkable feature of the Jewish tradition of machloket is that it is itself a basis for community.

The community of contention, the contentious community, is not as paradoxical as it may seem.

The parties to a disagreement are members of the disagreement; they belong to the group that wrestles together with the same perplexity, and they wrestle together for the sake of the larger community to which they all belong, the community that needs to know how Jews should behave and live. A quarrel is evidence of coexistence. The rabbinical tradition is full of rival authorities and rival schools—it owes a lot of its excitement to those grand and even bitter altercations—but the rivalries play themselves out within the unified framework of the shared search. There is dissent without dissension, and yet things change. Intellectual discord, if it is practiced with methodological integrity, is compatible with social peace.

The absence of the God’s-eye view of an issue, and the consequent recognition of the limitations of all individual perspectives, has a humbling effect. A universe of controversy is a universe of tolerance. Machloket is not schism, and the difference is crucial. Though disagreement may lead to sectarianism, most disagreement in the history of this ever-thinking people has been contained, and has been brilliantly developed, on this side of sectarianism. I do not mean to exaggerate the loveliness of the system: There has been heresy and there has been heterodoxy, and Jews have persecuted other Jews for their opinions. Intellectual integrity is always a risk to community, because some minds may think themselves, rightly or wrongly, beyond the limits. But the tradition of Jewish debate, especially legal debate, is striking for how rich it remains within the limits. Whether or not heresy and heterodoxy are forms of heroism, it is important to acknowledge that fidelity, and the internal growth of a tradition inside its carefully examined boundaries, may also be heroic.

Face Of The Day

Arba'een ceremony in the Tehran, Iran

Shi’ite people gather at Imam Hussein square during the Arba’een ceremony in Tehran, Iran on December 13, 2014. Hundreds of Shiite worshippers attend religious ceremonies in Tehran on the anniversary of the 40th day after the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of Prophet Mohammad who was killed in the Battle of Karbala in 681 AD. By Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

“The Best Of All Possible Worlds”

The phrase comes from the early modern philosopher, G.W. Leibniz, used in his book Theodicy – though it was made famous when Voltaire later mocked it in Candide. Marc E. Bobro unpacks what it means:

In the book, Leibniz defines “world” as “the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe.” In this world, everything is dependent on something else for its existence — so that in order for the whole world to exist, a first cause must have brought it into being. But an infinite number of worlds were “equally possible,” so that in creating this world, the first cause must have been able to consider all other possible worlds. This first cause, being “infinite in all ways” — including in power, wisdom, and goodness — must have chosen the best of all possible worlds.

It is a point of interpretive controversy how close to perfection Leibniz believed the best world comes.

While most think that Leibniz considered it to be good in absolute terms, both metaphysically and morally, at least one commentator, Matthew Stewart in The Courtier and the Heretic (2006), considers Leibniz to be “in fact one of history’s great pessimists,” who recognized the vanity of striving for progress in this world that is ultimately indifferent to our desires. … But this cynical view of Leibniz’s optimism requires not only an excessively imaginative and tortuous reading of some of his most important works; it would also seem to be undermined by the dedication Leibniz brought to several other efforts, including especially his project to advance all the sciences. A proper understanding of this project reveals that Leibniz’s philosophical and theological optimism in fact shaped his vision of advancing the sciences, and that his political and ecumenical work was often aimed at furthering that end.

Leibniz made clear that he did not mean that the best world is composed only of the best parts, just as “the part of a beautiful thing is not always beautiful.” While some aspects of the world may not seem good in themselves, they are part of a whole that is better than all the alternatives. No part could in fact have been other than it is, neither better nor worse, since then the world would no longer be as it is, and this world is the best, having been chosen by an infinitely wise God.

Everybody Loves Edu-Porn

Rose Eveleth flags new research suggesting as much:

When [researcher Katrina] Pariera looked at the results, she saw a striking difference between how people thought about instructional and non-instructional pornography. The usual perception of pornography being worse for someone else was flipped. People actually thought that viewing instructional porn had the same impact on adults (both men and women) as watching The Matrix did. Which is to say, no real effect. And, unlike non-instructional pornography, there was no difference in how men and women felt about it. (When asked about pornography more broadly, women tend to be more likely to perceive negative impacts than men are.) In other words, “instructional pornography was rated as having a mostly positive effect, suggesting the genre is perceived as somewhat socially desirable.”

The above video is NSFW but great for a long Saturday night free of holiday parties:

Arguably the most comprehensive and best sex education documentary ever made, “A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century Sex” is a documentary series about everything sex, which ran for 8 episodes on UK Public TV in 2006. All 8 episodes here are in full, indexed and in chronological order.

Why The Fuck Don’t More Linguists Study Cursing?

That’s what Gretchen McCulloch wants to know:

Strange to say, but it doesn’t seem like the syntactic study of swear words has really progressed much beyond these obscure, semi-satirical papers from the 60s and 70s. I found a long-ass list on the “anal emphatic,” a sociolinguistics paper on fuck in the British National Corpus, a paper on taboo-term predicates in ASL, and some semantics papers on “that bastard” and on “fucking brilliant” (here’s an accessible overview of the semantics side) but otherwise not much has been written and it’s permeated even less into popular culture. Wikipedia, for example, currently has a mere four sentences under the grammar section of its fuck article, despite extensive usage and etymology sections. It’s certainly not for lack of interest: after all, the history, sociology, and culture around fuck and other swears generates practically a book a year.

I do hope that any linguists reading this will let me know if there are other papers that I’ve missed, or perhaps even be inspired to write one. I mean, you’d think we’d know more about swears by now, for fuck’s sake.

Lushes Who Lecture

Rebecca Schuman slams the “long-established drinking culture in academia,” arguing that “it’s destructive, it’s pathetic – and it’s widely accepted”:

Every academic on Earth has witnessed, as I have, the untoward behavior – at best mildly embarrassing, at worst criminal or life-threatening – of a scholar in his or her cups: the uninhibited blabbing (revealing everything from latent racism to deep departmental secrets); the slurring diatribes mistaken for erudition; the sudden and unwelcome onset of handsiness. I have been the ungrateful recipient of more than a few instances of three-sheets eminent scholars curiously fascinated by my “scholarship” (having, of course, read or heard nothing about it). …

[S]ure, many faculty who drink do manage it in moderation: Dr. Elbow-Patches nurses a few fingers of single-malt while grading; Profs. Erudite and Polemic deconstruct Marx over Two-Buck Chuck. Great. But there’s also a substantially more embarrassing subset of academics who take advantage – to a dangerous fault – of academia’s flexible hours, minimal supervision, and long-standing culture of booze-soaked bonhomie. Many are the stuff of legend at scholarly conferences, which they treat like lost Vegas weekends. We’re talking grown-ass adults getting puke-loaded and passing out in bars; 55-year-olds drinking with grad students (or, worse, their undergrads) and thus, unsurprisingly, engaging in unethical or illegal behavior.