The Dish

A tragic but heartwarming tale about a little girl named Elena:

“They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live,” Keith Desserich said. Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk. But Elena was still able to write. “That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK,” Brooke Desserich said.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them — a lot of messages, actually. “We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said. Then the couple started finding them everywhere. “We started to collect them and they would all say ‘I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.’ We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them,” Keith Desserich said. “Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found.

The notes were made into a book for cancer research.

(Hat tip: The High Definite)

The reasons seem pretty obvious:

The party-buckers on the 220-215 vote on Saturday night included 39 Democrats who voted against the bill. Of them, 31 represent districts that voted for John McCain over Barack Obama. Republicans are targeting many of them for defeat in the 2010 election. Of the other eight, three are serving their first terms in districts in which they defeated or succeeded Republicans in the 2008 election.

“I read the versions of the House [health reform] bill. I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding – if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children," – Republican congressman Anh Cao of Louisiana, who voted for health insurance reform last night.

Nick Bilton is one voice in an exchange about digital information over at Edge:

I feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show … Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation.

Nick Carr highlights other aspects of the debate. Personally, I love both ways of understanding the changing world. I still read my NYT on dead-tree every morning, with coffee and ginger snaps, and then plunge into the bloggy chaos. Why do we always have to choose between them? Why not both?

(Hat tip: Arnold Kling)

Razib Khan dusts off some religious history books:

I agree with Winnifred Sullivan’s argument in The Impossibility of Religious Freedom that one of the ways in which the American religious injunction toward neutrality was made practicable was that religion qua religion was fundamentally shaped by a belief-centric (orthodoxy) Protestant model. Why did Roman Catholicism and Judaism not change that model? Because both of these religions in the United States were heavily “Protestantized.”

The vast majority of American Jews do not adhere to the orthopraxy, a system of behaviors and actions, which defined Judaism for nearly 1,500 years. Rather, their Judaism is defined by an unadorned monotheism, a small set of rituals, holidays and taboos, and a “culture.” Similarly, American Catholics are very hard to differentiate from mainline Protestants in their beliefs & practices; the Americanist won over the long haul. In fact, they would no doubt be shocked at how Protestant American Catholics had become in their outlook.

Jonah Lehrer muddles it:

A new paper demonstrates, once again, that the human brain is the ultimate category buster, blurring the lines of good and bad, black and white, until everything is gray. The reason is that our behavior is deeply contextual, profoundly influenced by our surroundings and immediate situations. Whether or not we're able to resist sin, then, might depend more on the details of the sin – and whether or not it triggers our automatic urges – then on the strength of our moral fiber.

That, at least, is the tentative conclusion of a clever new fMRI study by Joshua Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University, who argue that sometimes we do the right thing because the wrong thing simply isn't tempting, even if it leaves us better off. Consider a hypothetical wallet, stuffed full of cash, which you find on the subway. Our moral intuitions (influenced by Genesis) tell us that everyone wants to take the money and run, that we're all attracted by the possibility of unearned cash. But this latest study suggests that, at least for the people who take the wallet to the police, there is no temptation to resist. They don't steal because they don't want to steal; telling the truth isn't hard work. They are living, in other words, in a state of moral grace, at least when it comes to the wallet. (Interestingly, Greene and Paxton found that people who behaved dishonestly in the experiment exhibited more activity in brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, associated with self-control. In other words, they might be trying harder to resist, but it's doing no good.)

Morgan Meis meditates:

Some think of faith as a simple matter – you have it or you don’t. For these people, further inquiry is unnecessary. Faith is not accessible to reason. Kierkegaard agrees, a little bit. He never thought that faith could be understood through logic or rational thought. Faith, for him, had to have an element of the absurd or it wouldn’t be something special, something outside the normal rules. But he did not think of faith as simple. He saw it as the hardest thing, the greatest challenge, the center of the grand torture we call life. He once said, “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

Huffs Church, Pennsylvania, 10.30 am

A reader writes:

Why are you still a Roman Catholic? Why have you not started attending an Episcopal church? Familiar liturgy, similar theology, radically different morality. The US Episcopal church has committed itself to being a community where all people are members, where all people can be married and blessed and become priests and bishops. We in the US are paying a high price for our commitment to equality–a schism in the worldwide Anglican communion–but we are standing firm. We've got Anglican African bishops and Pope Benedict himself trying to poach Episcopal parishes. We're tiny, we're beleaguered, and we are standing up to the entire world and the entire Christian community to do the right thing.

I know that an Englishman named Sullivan is genetically indisposed to ever imagine attending a branch of the Church of England, but, man, we could use your help. This is where you belong.

Another writes:

As a former Catholic, I read "As The Onslaught Continues" and feel really bad for you.  On the one hand, I appreciate that you do not abandon your faith. But on the other hand, I look at my own situation and have hope that one day you will truly send the right message and stop supporting a faith that does not support you.

I know that you are an intelligent and thoughtful person and you hope that one day your church will come around.  I thought that way for decades and as a child, I knew I would live to see the day when my church would see the light on many issues.  I finally stopped waiting 5 years ago and decided that I needed to stop supporting (with my time, talents and treasure) a church that was not supporting all people equally.
 
I joined the Episcopal church and I could not be happier with my decision. The church is not perfect either, but at least they are moving on the tough questions and struggling with them every day. As a white and straight male, I can not imagine what it must feel like to have people consider you as less than equal.   Keep up the good work and I hope this does not come across in a bad way.  I just ache for your situation.  I still love the Catholic church, but I had to love it enough to walk away.

Another:

Thank you for such a wonderful post. I left the Catholic Church some 30 years ago, when they refused to marry my fiancé and I. We were straight, but he was divorced. I remember being just shocked that they would toss me out. Who were they serving, I wondered? I spent a long time in the spiritual ether-world before I finally settled in as a Buddhist practitioner. But my family are long-time Catholics; I find myself back in those churches now, mostly for funerals. And am struck by how empty they feel. They are protecting the principle (what principle was that anyway?) and sacrificing their people. It’s tragic, a pyrrhic victory for an imagined morality.

If you are time-traveling, not very:

So here's the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy of Earth's known history, there's only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth's history we couldn't even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time — assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we're down to about 2% survivability.