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Non-believer Sigfried Gold argues in the affirmative. One reason why? Faith isn’t as easy as atheists sometimes imagine:

If the language expressing that faith sometimes seems over the top, full of hyperbole, expressive of an impossible certainty, let us have some sympathy for what believers are trying to overcome with such language. People don’t believe because they are certain; they use professions of certainty as a support for a nearly unsupportable belief–and, again, they do so because it is worth it to them.

The more evidence we provide that belief is wrong, the harder believers will work to maintain their faith. Their beliefs and justifications are riddled with absurdities, but demonstrating that only serves to push each side further into its corner. The question for thoughtful atheists is not how believers manage to sustain their belief, but why they choose to do so: what do they get out of it? They are not primitive people needing myths and fairy tales to explain a frightening universe. They gain a source of hope, purpose, camaraderie, and moral guidance that some atheists find enviable.

Alex Mar talks to a prioress about why she became a nun:

None of the women I meet this week give me the “revelation” story I expect and kind of hope for—apparently, it doesn’t really happen that way. When I asked Carol, a clearly devout woman, now serving her second term as prioress [a nun in charge of a priory], what led her to enter the convent, her eyes didn’t gloss over as she recounted some miraculous dawning of awareness. “It wasn’t anything spiritual and all that,” she said simply.

“The leaders and the popular girls” in the class ahead of her had entered, and another group of seven from her year were poised to become postulants. “We all went to the convent. Because in those days you went to college, we used to laugh, for an MRS: that’s where girls went to get smart men. There was no Peace Corps; there were no professional women; there was none of the women’s movement at that time.” Women could work as nurses, teachers, or secretaries, she said, “and that was only until you got married.” And while Carol describes her family as a happy one, married life seemed limiting. “At home my mom was a great cook, but she didn’t like it,” she says. “She read all the classics—I always remember her reading—but it didn’t look like she was excited about being a housewife.”

Her young teachers at St. Agnes were another story. “The nuns, they were happy. Great teachers, and interested in things.” Besides, she admits, “because I was much taller than the other girls, I thought, ‘Hmm, I wonder if I’ll ever get married.’” Carol graduated from high school in 1956 and that same year, along with nineteen other eighteen-year-olds—Sister Adrian included—entered the convent. She entered to be able to do more; not for a moment did she consider the cloister.

(Hat tip: Longform)

Adam Gopnik considers how we interpret knowledge of neuroscience:

Neurology should provide us not with sudden explanatory power but with a sense of relief from either taking too much responsibility for, or being too passive about, what happens to us. Autism is a wiring problem, not a result of “refrigerator mothers.” Schizophrenia isn’t curable yet, but it looks more likely to be cured by getting the brain chemistry right than by finding out what traumatized Gregory Peck in his childhood. Neuroscience can’t rob us of responsibility for our actions, but it can relieve us of guilt for simply being human. We are in better shape in our mental breakdowns if we understand the brain breakdowns that help cause them.

This is a point that [Brainwashed authors Sally] Satel and [Scott O.] Lilienfeld, in their eagerness to support a libertarian view of the self as a free chooser, get wrong.

They observe of one “brilliant and tormented” alcoholic that she, not her heavy drinking, was responsible for her problems. But, if we could treat the brain circuitry that processes the heavy drinking, we might very well leave her just as brilliant and tormented as ever, only not a drunk. (A Band-Aid, as every parent knows, is an excellent cure whenever it’s possible to use one.)

The really curious thing about minds and brains is that the truth about them lies not somewhere in the middle but simultaneously on both extremes. We know already that the wet bits of the brain change the moods of the mind: that’s why a lot of champagne gets sold on Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, if the mind were not a high-level symbol-managing device, flower sales would not rise on Valentine’s Day, too. Philosophy may someday dissolve into psychology and psychology into neurology, but since the lesson of neuro is that thoughts change brains as much as brains thoughts, the reduction may not reduce much that matters. As Montaigne wrote, we are always double in ourselves. Or, as they say on the Enterprise, it takes all kinds to run a starship.

Sam Sacks pens an extended essay on the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, which he approaches from a literary perspective, claiming the tale “stands out for the perfection of its design, the mastery of its techniques, and the power of its climax.” One point he makes:

Perhaps what most stands out on the first reading of the Joseph story is the restrained use of the fantastical devices that haunt the rest of Genesis. God is here, but only tacitly, and the exact extent of His involvement is unclear to the characters and the audience alike. The story begins with a supernatural occurrence that is handled with such irreverence that it seems almost ironically deployed. Joseph is 17 and the most beloved son of Jacob, who has ostentatiously advertised his favoritism by giving Joseph the iconic coat of many colors. Joseph has become, as a result, a coddled brat—the very first thing we see him do is tattle to Jacob about some talk he overheard while tending to his sheep. The next thing we see him do is announce to his father and his steamingly resentful older brothers the prophecies revealed to him in dreams:

And Joseph dreamed a dream and told it to his brothers and they hated him all the more. And he said to them, “Listen, pray, to this dream that I dreamed. And, look, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, look, my sheaf arose and actually stood up, and, look, your sheaves drew round and bowed to my sheaf.” And his brothers said to him, “Do you mean to reign over us, do you mean to rule us?” And they hated him all the more, for his dreams and for his words. And he dreamed yet another dream and recounted it to his brothers, and he said, “Look, I dreamed a dream again, and, look, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing to me.”

Here, at the outset, is the first signaling of a narrative complexity that will become more and more enfolding as the story progresses. Joseph is the hero of this tale, his dream is divinely inspired, and in time events will vindicate his visions. But the story is only passingly interested in the predictive accuracy of his dreams—its emphasis is instead on Joseph’s boastfulness, his spoiled naiveté, and the contempt he blithely incites among his brothers. The story is prioritizing the conflict of familial envy over the more grandiose problem of divine revelation.

(Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari’s Joseph’s Coat Brought to Jacob, 1640, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ann Friedman surveys women who are using the pullout method as their primary birth control:

These women describe a deliberate transition from the pill to the pullout. They buy organic kale and all-natural cleaning products, and so can’t quite get down with taking synthetic hormones every day. They are more driven by sexual pleasure — they see orgasms as a right, not a privilege — and hate the feel of condoms. They wouldn’t call themselves porn aficionados or anything, but they don’t think it’s demeaning to have a man come on them. They’re sick of supposedly egalitarian relationships in which they bear the sole responsibility for staying baby-free. They’re scared to stick an IUD up there, no matter how many rave reviews the devices get. And despite the fact that non-hormonal contraceptive options remain frustratingly limited, there are new tools at their disposal: With period-tracker apps, charting your menstrual cycle is no longer the domain of hippies and IVF patients. They know when to make him put on a condom. Plus, they can keep a packet of Plan B on hand at all times, ready and waiting should anything go awry.

Marcotte points to another reason for coitus interruptus:

Not everyone is decisive when it comes to knowing when to start having kids—or, if you want more than one kid, when the time is right to try for another. For some, it becomes easier to just be inconsistent with contraception or switch to less effective methods and let fate make the decisions for you. We all know a lot of people who say they’re not trying to have a baby exactly, but they’re not not-trying either—basically carving out emotional space to consider starting a family without having your mom start emailing you the names of fertility doctors if it doesn’t happen right away. Switching to the pullout method in particular allows men and women to choose, in the heat of the moment, to throw caution to the wind and maybe just get pregnant.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper revisits Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying four decades after its publication:

[The] myopia of privilege and puerile rebellion afflicts the character of Isadora and her epic quest for the “zipless fuck,” the now duly canonized term for no-strings-attached sex—a notion that also belongs to another era, when sexual liberation had not yet uncoupled itself from aesthetics. “The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motive. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving.’ No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone.” But after this idealized litany of its effortless virtues, Isadora concedes that a zipless fuck “is rarer than a unicorn.”

No shit. That’s mainly because the idea that nobody has anything to prove in a zipless fuck simply isn’t true.

Indeed, the female partner is trying to prove a very specific point: that she can fuck just like a man, without the specters of rape, murder, pregnancy, or abortion lurking somewhere in her brain. The quite ideological point of the encounter is, in other words, to unburden herself from all the hang-ups that are so specific to the female experience in the sexual arena.

Meanwhile (and far more predictably), the male partner is trying to showcase his own sexual prowess; otherwise, why bother? Sex with strangers, sex without intimacy, once the first rush of new smells and hands wears off, is not an uplifting experience. It usually leaves a residue of shame and horror—that’s partly what makes it so thrilling at the time.

So for today’s readers of Jong’s novel, Isadora’s “problem” might well be restated as something like this: Why should a woman go through such emotional acrobatics to prove such a minimal and depressing point? That she can fuck like a man? That her orgasm, if she has one, is free from emotional attachment? Great! Now, darling, tell us how your orgasm will close the wage gap between men and women. The orgasmic economy of the ’70s is null in 2013. Jong recognizes that there’s a war between men and women, but she chooses the wrong weapon in the struggle.

Readers bolster a recent thread:

Please don’t perpetuate the myth that Americans who opposed the Vietnam War treated servicemembers with disrespect, unable to tell the difference between supporting the war and supporting the troops. I’m a former Air Force officer, and this popular rewrite of history is bad for the military and bad for America.  The myth is so convenient and seductive.  It fosters military resentment against civilian society.  It can be brought out at any time to curb dissent, because no one wants to be lumped in with the mythical protester who spits on troops.

The opposite of this myth is much closer to the truth: the people who turned their backs on Vietnam veterans were those who supported the war but not the troops.  Vietnam veterans were shunned by older veterans, men who had served in WWII and the Korean War who made up the core of veterans organizations like the VFW and the American Legion.  They strongly supported the Vietnam War, but they treated the new generation of service members as unworthy of the brotherhood.  To the older guys, they were losers and long-hairs.

Consider the founding motto of the Vietnam Veterans of America:  “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” This would be a very odd founding motto if the real problem was disrespect from anti-war protesters or Americans in general.  Jerry Lembcke’s 1998 book The Spitting Image debunks the whole myth about how Americans treated returning Vietnam vets.  Another good book on this popular misunderstanding is A More Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger.

Update from a reader:

You do know that Jack Shafer [here, here and here], Jim Lindgren, and others have demolished Lembcke’s work, right? In fact, Lembcke himself has even backtracked on many of the claims in his book when confronted by Lindgren’s evidence.

Another update from a defender of Lindgren:

He has never claimed that spitting never happened. One can not prove a negative, and, as Lembcke readily acknowledges, it is entirely likely that in the Vietnam era someone, somewhere has been spat upon. His point is that such incidents were rare, isolated, and could not have occurred nearly as often as people seem to think they did. Everyone has heard these stories. Forty years after the war they still turn up in newspaper articles every week – which is Lembcke’s point, that a handful of unconfirmed reports have passed into widely accepted myth and now serve to cast soldiers as victims, scapegoat the anti-war crowd, and assuage our collective guilt over a stupid war.

Another testifies to the generational divide among veterans that the first reader touched upon:

I demonstrated against the war when I was in college, then dropped out and eventually enlisted in the Marines from ’73-’75 (Ooo Rah!).  Afterward, I went back to school on the GI Bill and had a work-study with the VA to do veteran outreach.  Whenever I tried to contact organizations like the American Legion and the V.F.W.  in order to bring them together with the Vietnam vets or to solicit their political clout to take up issues that were important to the vets (Agent Orange, extending the period to use VA bennies), I got a blast of anger and disdain.

By that time, vets looked like other students, so the older vets from previous wars wanted no part of the “long-haired, dope smoking, treasonous losers.”  They wouldn’t even buy anyone a goddam beer.  More than once, I heard that the Agent Orange issue was “Commie bullshit” and the Vietnam Memorial design was denounced as a “black gash of shame.”

All of this taking place against a backdrop of TV and film portrayals of Vietnam vets as bitter, crazed loners with guns made sure that the returning troops had nowhere to turn except inward for any support or pride. Most went onto productive and happier lives, but the suicide, alcoholism, homelessness and ruined lives of some of those honorable men and women belongs to the whole of America, not to any one group. I am glad that troops today are respected for what they do. It would have made a world of difference to those who went before them.

Another notes:

Yes, there were no “Welcome Home” parades, but that was based in part on the characteristics of the Vietnam-era tours of duty, in which soldiers were rotated into units, and then rotated out after their time was up, arriving in and departing from the theater of war individually.

A veteran speaks to his personal experience of returning home:

I served three tours in Vietnam (1967–1971) and never encountered or heard first-hand from anyone I know any negative behavior towards veterans. In my last duty station before my enlistment ended, I was able to attend a local university part-time, often in my uniform, and no one cared. In fact, the only three times I was discriminated against or mistreated were instances in which the scorn came from older, conservative types in towns San Diego, CA and Racine, WI, with local histories of thinking of enlisted men as scum. The young people I met everywhere realized we were just also young people.

A lot of that victimization hype, I think, was driven by people who were gung-ho military and patriotic about Vietnam realized that they had been duped. It was easier for them to make up stories about public mistreatment to gain victim status from liberals a hippies – even though they had actually been victimized by the government and military.

An older veteran of two wars also shares his experience:

I was just 21 when I returned from Korea in 1954.  We arrived in Bremerton, WA, processed through and caught a train to Minneapolis/St Paul.  The overall reception I received on that train was like a returning warrior. My meals were paid for by the others in the dining car and the club car was like a “coming home party.  I felt like a million bucks!

The only negative encounter I had regarding my return from Vietnam was in the SEA-TAC air terminal where a half dozen or so of us, USAF and Army, encountered peaceniks who shouted “baby killers” at us as we walked to our respective gates. The most positive incident was when my wife and I visited old friends in Memphis in 1989 and were invited to attend a 4th of July celebration with them.  Very emotional and all veterans of Vietnam received a standing ovation.

I believe Republicans used “Support our Troops” primarily in conjunction with the invasion of Iraq and then hi-jacked certain parts from post-Vietnam to further “pacify” the public.  For example, when it was discovered and publicized that the returning war dead were being “shuttled” from Andrews AFB to awaiting hearses with no press coverage allowed, they, the Bush White House, put more emphasis on the slogan.

One more reader:

Generally, the people who treat our returning vets poorly is our own government; and we’re doing it right now by ignoring current science on PTSD and foot-dragging on rape in the military. As the 2008 nominee, John McCain opposed the 21st century GI Bill because it was too generous; he introduced his own legislation designed to keep troops from leaving the military for college.

According to Adam Gopnik, both the new book and film on J.D. Salinger miss the point:

The subject of the book and documentary is not Salinger the writer but Salinger the star: exactly the identity he spent the last fifty years of his life trying to shed. Cast entirely in terms of celebrity culture and its discontents, every act of Salinger’s is weighed as though its primary purpose was to push or somehow extend his “reputation”—careerism is simply assumed as the only motive a writer might have. If he withdraws from the world, well, what could be more of a come on? If it turns out that he hasn’t entirely withdrawn from the world but has actually participated in it happily enough on his own terms: well, didn’t we tell you the whole recluse thing was an act?

This kind of scrutiny might possibly say something about a writer like Mailer, whose loudest energies (if not his best ones) were spent playing in the public square, not to mention Macy’s windows. But it couldn’t be worse suited to a writer like Salinger, the spell of whose work is cast, after all, entirely by the micro-structure of each sentence—on choosing to italicize this word, rather than that; on describing a widower’s left rather than right hand; on the ear for dialogue and the feeling for detail; above all, on the jokes.

Dana Stevens is also underwhelmed by the film:

The mystery of J.D. Salinger—why he wrote, why he stopped publishing, who he was—has survived half a century of attempts at desecration, from the importuning, wisdom-seeking fans who for decades staked out his house in Cornish, N.H., to the sickening second life of The Catcher in the Rye as a manual for high-profile murderers. That mystery is certainly hardy enough to withstand the voyeuristic onslaught of this self-aggrandizing, lurid documentary, which leaves the viewer feeling that we’ve been given a tour of Salinger’s septic tank in hip waders without ever getting to knock on his door and say hello.

But Tom Shone finds a redeeming quality:

[J]ust as you’re about to pelt the screen with peanuts for sheer phoniness, we get the real thing: the only known film footage of the actual Salinger, shot during the war, when he was at his most tall, dark and Clive Owenish, doffing his hat to Parisian women offering him flowers. He takes a single flower and tucks it into his hat brim — a piece of gallantry he nonetheless performs with ineffable and beguiling shyness.

Derek Mead dissects the myriad problems with California’s push to make revenge porn illegal:

Proving intent will already be difficult at a criminal trial, as the law essentially sets up a he said, she said situation (or whichever pronouns you prefer) in every single case, which are difficult to prosecute. … It’s also more disgusting than a contract dispute over plumbing services or something more mundane, which adds an extra barrier for victims to overcome when thinking about a civil suit. That’s not to mention the extreme cost: Spending thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in the hope of winning a judgment against an ex is a course of action few people can justify.

That, combined with the fact that photos online will never go away, is a good reason to try to deter revenge porn by criminalizing it. With lawmakers already making hamfisted laws to ban or restrict photography in the name of privacy as well as protect copyright as aggressively as possible, it’s easy to wonder why legislators have been reserved in this case. But adding more broad laws that improperly regulate the internet isn’t the answer.

Recently, law professor Mary Anne Franks criticized a Florida bill attempting the same thing:

[S]he says the law is ultimately “both too broad and too narrow.” For example, the bill applies to “any photograph or video of an individual which depicts nudity,” but doesn’t define nudity. It’s “an extremely broad formulation that could potentially include a photograph of someone standing next to a picture of Botticelli’s Venus,” says Franks. At the same time, it’s “a narrow definition, in that it would presumably not apply to depictions of graphic sexual activity unless certain parts of the body are visible,” she says. Franks tells me of an actual case in which a man ejaculated on his sleeping girlfriend’s face and then uploaded pictures to the Internet — that would not violate Florida’s law.