The Dish

"The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasps’ reality … All the various definitions of the universe have had ulterior motives, being concerned with the future rather than the present. Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death, and to postpone death. But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.

There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly," – Alan W. Watts, "The Wisdom Of Insecurity."

Don’t miss the finale.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

One of the shrewdest, bravest journalists on the subject:

A reader writes:

My wife pointed out to me that this Sunday will be very telling. The young and thoughtful members of families who have so far flocked to Obama will sit down with their possibly more volatile relatives, and the conversation will turn to the political contest.  Here these Obama supporters, the often passionate and sometimes quiet relations, ubiquitous in every family, will explain Obama’s speech to those who have not seen it.  It will, I can hope and see, raise the level of discourse within these families on this segregated Sunday of all Sundays.  They will see the bright and hopeful faces that I see in Obama supporters.  The elderly will take note and smile indulgently; the middle aged will think, perhaps remembering the earliest moments of their conscious childhoods, that maybe we are not a broken nation, forever splintering.

The kitchen sink has been hurled, and the "worst" that could have happened, what I personally have been fearing since the summer, is over. I have been afraid of a Wright-like controversy for almost a year. These are fears born of being a white man working in a "black" high school in the Bronx. Seeing everyday the unadulterated complexity of black America in its beauty and ugliness. A beauty for which we would not be America, and ugliness all too often demonized in popular culture.  Fears that white America would wake up and realize that a black man was running for president.  I will be showing this speech to my students this week, and I hope they hear it.  It’s not my primary reason for supporting Barack Obama, but next year, when some of my students inevitably start blaming white people for whatever, or talk about thug life as the best life, or wax poetic on the relative virtues of 50 cent vs. Lil’ Wayne, I can  look them in the eyes and say: "What about Obama?" We are not past it all yet, but as far as I can see in my 31 years, we are finally moving.

Honolulu, Hawaii, 4.30 pm.

This controversy really is separating the thoughtful and hopeful conservatives from the others. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it seems to me to be helping conservatism reform itself as well. Here’s Steve Chapman.

Clive Crook on climate change delusions:

…the best chance of progress is to see Kyoto as the disaster that it was. Its impact on greenhouse-gas concentrations has so far been minimal, and not just because the United States stood aside. With every other rich country signed on, the decades-old upward trend in emissions has not slowed. Japan and Canada are hopelessly above their quotas. In western Europe, only three countries are now on pace to hit theirs. […]

International action on global warming is called for. The best way forward is to switch from a tightly managed global regime based on quotas of carbon emissions to a more loosely coordinated system based on the price of carbon. To curb greenhouse-gas emissions, carbon-based energy has to get more expensive, whether you directly limit the amount emitted, or raise the price that emitters pay for the privilege. Steering the price and letting the market set quantities, rather than the other way around, has many economic advantages. But the best reason for doing it this way is geopolitical: it would make it easier for governments to act in concert and would give them less cover for shirking their responsibilities.

Glenn Greenwald wonders why Barack Obama has been routinely forced to answer for extremist statements by people he has absolutely nothing to do with – solely because he’s, er, black. You think this would happen to white people? On those grounds alone?

Barney Frank and I have long sparred on many issues. He’s a liberal Democrat; God knows what I am any more, but a libertarian independent conservative may come close. So we’re not going to think alike most of the time. But he’s a brilliant and very funny man, as anyone who has tried to debate him knows. If he were straight, in my view, he’d be Speaker of the House by now. And however ornery and prickly he can sometimes be, he has also fought these last few years for pragmatic sanity on gay rights unlike anyone else in the Congress. He has recently been razzed by some gays for being pragmatic about employment discrimination, and stood up for himself. His speech on ENDA was very moving and sincere which, for a cranky, emotionally restrained man like him was a sight to behold. Yeah, I sound gushy don’t I? Well it’s Easter (not that he’d care). And he’s done this. It’s a strange world where simple sanity requires courage. But good for him.