The Dish

Jonah Lehrer has some fascinating thoughts on how they are related after reading an article by Tom Stafford on confabulation.

Timelapse movie: The Alps — part I from Michael Rissi on Vimeo.

A new series of timelapse movies which I recorded this summer and autumn in the Swiss Alps. Most locations are only reachable on foot, some need alpine hikes of 3-5 hours. I spent several weekends in cottages of the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC), where I shot these clips. The music is from Beethoven's great 7th Symphony, 2nd movement.

Don Draper's many words of wisdom.

Carlene Bauer tells her story:

There was always a tiny voice inside me saying “That can’t be right” whenever I heard something that seemed to contradict who I understood God and Jesus to be from reading the Bible—all-loving, all-forgiving. For example: it had been made clear to me that Catholics were lesser, wrongheaded Christians because they worshipped Mary and the Pope and thought works would save their souls. The disparagement made it seem that unless Catholics recognised that they needed to accept Jesus as their saviour (for the evangelicals you had to get down on your knees and make the overture in full awareness of your decision), they were going to hell. Now, my father, my grandmother and uncle were Catholic. My best friend at the time was Catholic. It didn’t seem right that God was looking down on them with arms crossed, shaking his head when they seemed sincere in their belief. Why would God allow there to be so many wrongheaded Christians?

An epic smackdown:

And no need to bother with an art competition.

Edge ran an except from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, which combats various justifications for the almighty. From the book:

Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did?  Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while  genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

Gabriel Arana analyzes the Olson case:

If Perry v. Schwarzenegger reaches the Supreme Court and Boies and Olson are successful, gays and lesbians nationwide would not only have the right to marry, they stand to gain many of the legal rights they have sought for decades. Don't Ask, Don't Tell would be invalidated, as would employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. In the eyes of the law, gay people would be equal to straight people, and any legislation that discriminated against them could be challenged and easily struck down against this precedent. However, defeat could legitimize such discrimination against LGBT Americans, making it far more difficult to sue for parental or housing rights. The door to any federal litigation on marriage equality would be shut for decades.

This is risky because Boies and Olson are entering a legal no-man's land. The coalition of lawyers who fought to overturn Prop. 8 at the state level decided not to mount a federal challenge "because federal litigation puts in play the federal doctrines that as yet are underdeveloped," Pizer says. Marriage and family law tend to be state law, she explains, and the federal framework is sketchy.

It's a deeply risky strategy. But it has the educational benefit of grasping fully the discrimination in so many aspects of life that the gay minority still experiences. And it does so under the simple rubric of equality under the law, embraced by a classic conservative thinker like Olson.

It's taken almost two decades for the essentially conservative arguments of Virtually Normal to find a leading Republican champion. And yet Republicans and conservatives, if they hadn't been brainwashed by religious fundamentalism at the base and by cynicism among the elites, should have been pushing this from the get-go.

Stefany Anne Golberg on the appeal of vegetarianism:

[V]egetarianism is, in large part, artificial. It is based neither on ritual nor on necessity. It is a diet by humans for humans. A diet of modernity, whose survival will most likely depend as much on innovations in food technology as the simplicity of the family farm. I say that is the strength of vegetarianism. It can offer a freedom that meat-eating cannot: a diet that is about choice and a liberation from the prescriptions of "normal" daily life. A whole new way of eating that doesn’t rely on the whims of Nature. In short, a form of decadence. An acceptance that, like artists, we can fashion our own food and ergo, our own lives.

Extra reminder: I'm hosting a discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, at the Historic Synagogue at 6th and I Street NW Washington Dc this coming Tuesday at 7 pm.

If you haven't read it yet, Hanna Rosin's article on the connection between degenerate Christianism and America's crisis of private debt is well worth a look:

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates.

Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

It's staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.

At some point these charlatans need to be chased out of the temple. Which these days means the Republican party.

A father and young child get separated in the subway system.