Prometheus Unbound

William Clifford (1879):

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out. The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.

The existence of the universe is a mystery. And we are, all of us, embedded in that mystery, and so we need to keep talking about it, like Jacob wrestling the angel, and not drive it away as if it were a vampire and we are the possessors of an intellectual garlic that “tames” it. I think that those of us who call ourselves agnostics or atheists can armor ourselves against the “ontological mystery” (the mystery of being) as effectively as any religious fundamentalist.

The religious fundamentalist intellectually arms herself and controls the ontological mystery by pretending, for example, that the Bible settles all questions about it once and for all. She says prayers to ward off the dangers of the ontological mystery, and reads books of apologetics. These are her garlic waving gestures. 

But we agnostics and atheists wave the garlic too. We read, for example, Richard Dawkins’s books and echo his answers in response to every uncomfy question raised about the ontological mystery. Once we do this, and we have arranged our tidy arguments, and identified our targets and classified them, we imagine that we have “settled” something. But the the mystery of existence still sits out there, resisting our “answers.”

And it won’t go away.

What, for example, is this thing called love?

In February of 1967, Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were on the television show, What’s My Line? and Woody Allen was on the panel.

Steve Rossi is my uncle, and “Rossi” is his stage name. His actual last name is Tafarella. In the decades immediately following World War II, American entertainers with “ethnic” sounding names would often ”Anglicize” or “simplify” them for mass consumption.

Anyway, I noticed that someone had posted the “Allen & Rossi” segment of the show on YouTube, and here it is (my uncle is the one on the left):

Here’s some current video of my uncle, some forty years later, now in his late 70s, writing jokes at a kitchen table, and still as happy and bemusing as ever:

Russ Wilcox is the co-founder and CEO of E Ink, which produces the low-power/high-contrast “electronic paper” screen that has made Amazon’s Kindle 2 such a huge success.

Wilcox spoke to Xconomy.com and set some dates for what’s just over the horizon with regard to “e-paper.” Here’s what he says is next:

What you’ll see next is a great range of screen sizes. So far the industry has been using the 6-inch size, which has helped to drive down the cost for everybody, by consolidating on one manufacturing process. But we are starting to introduce displays that are in many different sizes. And you will see flexible displays going to market, at small volumes this year, but 2010 will be a big year for flexible displays. And then at the end of 2010, you will start to see improvements in the ink. We will have a whiter white and a blacker black, and we will start to experiment with color. You will probably see 2011 be the year of color.

All of those things will progressively broaden and deepen the applications. As you have flexible displays, you can do big displays and something that is much more like a newspaper experience, or in color so that it’s much more like a magazine. So we’ve taken on books, and we will extend to other types of formats over a relatively short period of time. There are a lot of mobile devices that could use a low-power, thin, plastic display, so you will see us in other types of devices as well.

And here’s what Wilcox says about e-paper and what it will mean for the traditional newspaper:

Worldwide, the book industry is an $80 billion industry. If, by distributing electronically, they could save 30 percent on their costs, that would add $25 billion a year to their profitability. The newspaper industry is twice as large, and could probably save 50 percent. What we’ve got here is a technology that could be saving the world $80 billion a year. So we take the long view. This is a business problem that you could drive a truck through. So what we need to do is simply be a good supplier, provide a platform upon which others can participate, and provide an ecosystem where lots of companies want to gather. . . .

The next big wave after e-books will be e-newspapers, enabled by the flexible screens in larger sizes. Then there will be a second wave of e-newspapers enabled by color. The benefit of that is that color enables advertising. The majority of print media is heavily subsidized by advertising, including almost all magazines and newspapers, so e-paper can’t really get to where it’s going until it supports advertising. Once that happens, you’ll see whole new business models emerging.

Pretty exciting stuff!

British atheists recently put together some money and purchased bus ads around their country proclaiming, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Christians promptly responded with counter-ads of their own.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton offers his perspective on the competing ad campaigns, reflecting on them via David Hume and Blaise Pascal:

David Hume made probably the best case for the improbability of God in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which ripped into evidence-based attempts to prove the Christian deity’s existence. Look around the world, Hume said. What supports the idea that a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent designer made it all? Just as likely that it was created by a team of lesser gods, or a decrepit god who subsequently died, or impersonal natural processes. Proportion your belief to the evidence and it is at least as probable that one of these is true as that a unique all-powerful creator exists. And the existence of evil tips the balance. Free will doesn’t explain illness, famine, earthquakes. At most, it points to an impersonal and indifferent world-maker.

And yet Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) had already pointed out that a rational gambler wouldn’t stake everything on hell not existing—because it’s reasonable to worry about even the outside chance of eternal torment. Back on the buses, Christians have already responded with various “God definitely exists” counter-campaigns. But if they want to avoid misleading advertising—and scare a few cynics into faith on the way—they might do better with “There might be a God. Start worrying and prepare for the Day of Judgement, just in case.”

I think that Warburton has, in his advice to the religious side, hit upon the true nature of what people tend to mean when they say that they have “faith” and believe that God exists. It is not really an inner confidence that God exists, but a hope. The degree of probability that God exists is not what matters. It may be high (60%) or low (4%). What matters is that they don’t want to go to hell, and so they buy a religious LOTTERY TICKET (just in case).

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Read each question slowly, and respond honestly.

1) If it is in fact the case that you are, right at this moment, occupying a very definite volume of space, then why is it that you do not know, without first taking a moment to reflect upon it, the exact position of your feet?

2) Before you drew your attention to your feet, were they a part of you—or just appendages attached to you?

3) Do you count your feet in the volume of what you occupy at this very moment? Or could you live without them—your feet—and would you still be you—without your feet?

4) Obviously, all of your body parts could be whittled away from you by such questions as those above, so let’s cut to the chase and talk about your head. Perhaps you are just in your head. If so, do you occupy a very specific place within your head, or are you dispersed all throughout your head (as odd pieces of furniture are strewn about a room)?

5) Do you move about in your head, or are you stationary?

6) If you could have an electrical light and a tiny Victorian mirror placed in your head, could you see yourself? What would you look like? And when you moved up there, what is it that would be moving, and is that you?

7) Are you something occupying a definite volume of space—or are you nothing and nowhere? And if you are nothing and nowhere, then who is reading this quiz, and if you are something and somewhere, what and where are you, exactly?

End of quiz.

_____________________________________

I’m sorry if this quiz did not help you find yourself. But keep looking. Augustine wrote: “God, I pray you to let me know my self.” And the man who brought Buddhism to China, Bodhidharma, once told a student that he would pacify his mind if he went in search for it. When the student protested that he had searched for his mind but could not find it, Bodhidharma said to him: “There, you see, it is pacified.”

Is the game worth the candle—or not?

And if life is worth living, why aren’t you doing it?

I like this reflection on suicide in Walker Percy’s brilliant Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book (Pocket Books 1984, 80-81):

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide? Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and you will go on the green tapes and that’s the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can’t believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, soul survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders, who it turns out, are worried sick—over what? Over status, saving face, self esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors. . . .

The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it. You are even free to go home and, like the man from Chicago, dance with your wife.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little travelling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he knows he doesn’t have to. 

F.F. Bruce, a biblical scholar rather better known in the 1960s than he is today, once said this:

[T]he Bible is not an anthology; there is a unity which binds the whole together.

Bruce, as an “old school” conservative scholar, has long been passe in academic circles, and this kind of statement of his is easily refuted, but since there are fundamentalist apologists who continue to quote Bruce in defense of a literalist reading of the Bible, I think that Bruce’s statement deserves a fresh deconstruction.

First, it’s a ridiculous assertion.

Of course the Bible is an anthology and not a unity. There is no evidence that, for example, the writer of the Genesis story mandating circumcision for Abraham’s children, and setting it as “an eternal covenant”, would have accepted Paul’s assertion that the practice could now be superseded by additional revelation. The unity that one might perceive between Genesis and Paul is contrived by the Christian reader, and not accepted by, most obviously, the Jewish reader.

There is, in short, nothing inherently “harmonious” between the book of Genesis and Paul’s spiritualizing notions about circumcision. 

Interpretive contrivance also takes place with regard to the unity of the gospel accounts and Paul’s writings. There is simply no reason whatsoever, for example, to believe that the writer of the Gospel of Mark would have accepted that his book was in harmony with any—let alone, all—of the other three gospels and the letters of Paul. Indeed, there are very good reasons to think that the Jesus of Mark’s gospel is very different from the Jesus found in Matthew, Luke, John, or Paul’s letters.

You can SAY that these writings are all (ultimately) harmonious portraits of Jesus, but this is only because you are intent upon harmonizing them (not because you have any EVIDENCE that the authors would have accepted the harmonization).

Furthermore, we have absolutely no way of knowing whether Paul would have agreed that his doctrines were consistent with, say, Matthew’s gospel (or any of the other gospels) for the very simple reason that Paul had never read any of the gospels, and thus could not tell us what he thought about them!

This needs emphasis. A third of the New Testament was written by someone who had never read the gospels. Scholars universally acknowledge that Paul died BEFORE Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John had been written.

In short, all of our “harmonic” and “unifying” interpretations of Biblical texts take place from the vantage of an a priori premise that they should, in fact, somehow harmonize. We know what we are searching for, and so we find it. It is a form of circular reasoning that one can do with any two (or more) texts.

I can say, for example, that all the ideas in Shakespeare harmonize beautifully with the Bhagavad Gita, the plays of Euripides, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the Gospel of Mark. I can build a harmonious intellectual/theological system that “accounts” for every line from all these texts, and yet all that I have done is engaged in a process of creative association and repression, privileging the interpretive importance of some passages over others and making everything “fit.”

In other words, I have simply ignored the authors’s intentions and understandings of their own works, as well as the way that the first audiences for these works would have received them.

Put simply: Biblical “harmonization” is an ahistorical, creative form of reading. If I read the Bible (or any two texts, for that matter) in this way, I have not really harmonized anything, nor do I know whether the original authors or audiences would have accepted—or even understood—my harmonization.

Can we put the inanities of young earth creationism to bed now? And can we finally just admit the obvious—that, yes, we descended from ape-like ancestors?

The NY Times reports today that, in Kenya over the past three years, proto-human footprints (almost certainly belonging to the species Homo erectus) have been unearthed, and they reveal bipedal walking and running akin to modern humans.

In other words, more than a million years before there were modern Homo sapiens walking bipedally in Africa, there were Homo erectuses, with substantially smaller brains, doing so.

Put bluntly: human beings are the descendents of ape men not all that much different (in their walking or appearance) from the ones depicted in the Planet of the Apes movies.

Money quote:

Studying the more than a dozen erectus prints, scientists determined that the individuals had heels, insteps and toes almost identical to those in humans, and they walked with a long stride similar to human locomotion.

The researchers who made the discovery, as well as independent specialists in human origins, said the prints helped explain fossil and archaeological evidence that erectus had adapted the ability for long-distance walking and running. Erectus skeletons from East Asia revealed that the species, or a branch of it, had migrated out of Africa as early as 1.8 million years ago.

The lead author of the journal report is Matthew R. Bennett, a dean at Bournemouth University in England, who analyzed the prints with a new laser technology for digitizing their precise depths and contours. The tracks were excavated over the last three years by paleontologists and students directed by John W. K. Harris of Rutgers University in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya.

Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who studies the evolution of human locomotion but was not a member of the research group, said the prints established what experts had suspected for some time. Erectus, he said, “probably looked much like us, both walking and running over long distances.”

Although the discoverers were cautious in attributing the prints to Homo erectus, Dr. Lieberman and other experts said in interviews that it was highly unlikely they could have been made by other known hominid contemporaries.

“The prints are what you would expect from the erectus skeleton we have,” said Leslie C. Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, which supported the research. “We are seeing erectus in motion.”

William L. Junger, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said the footprints were further evidence that erectus had “undergone a major structural change in body plan, and it’s much like our own.” One obvious exception: the erectus brain, though advanced from previous ancestors, was still well below the size of the Homo sapiens brain.

No erectus foot bones have been found anywhere, but other well-preserved skeletons showed the species to be taller and less robust than earlier hominids. The strides of these footsteps suggest that the individuals were an average of 5 feet, 7 inches tall; one, presumably a child, was 3 feet.

Read the whole article here.

Hey, you “Christian” Republicans out there!

Jesus was a liberal.

That’s right.

Jesus said to sell all you have and give it to the poor, and he said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Doesn’t that sound just like a liberal?

He said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (That’s in the gospel of Luke.)

And he said, “If a man asks for your shirt, give him your coat also.” (That’s in Matthew.)

And he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “those who take up the sword will perish with the sword.”

I swear it’s all in the gospels (and the gospels tell us NOT TO SWEAR AT ALL, and that would include upon the Bible, and yet all you conservatives FREAKED when Obama didn’t put his hand on a Bible during his second swearing-in ceremony).

Oh, and Jesus never married, but hung around with 12 guys who abandoned their families for his “higher cause.”

Did you catch that, all you “Christians” who call yourselves Republicans?

Jesus’s apostles DITCHED THEIR WIVES AND KIDS, as well as their RESPONSIBILITIES TO THEIR PARENTS. Jesus told them, “Let the dead bury their own dead.”

Okay, I admit that this last quote of Jesus is callous and sounds like a Republican, but most everything else that Jesus said sounds like Al Franken!

I really can’t imagine any Republican politician talking about the poor, the rich, peace, the family, or obligations to parents in ways that Jesus would have approved, can you?

In fact, Jesus sounds a little bit more like Barack Obama and Martin Luther King than Rush Limbaugh or Tom DeLay.

But really now, neither American political party has much similarity to the Jesus of any of the gospels.

And all the vitriol spitting that comes from Republican “Christian” conservatives hardly matches Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” and to engage people with understanding and compassion, as in, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke again).

I can’t imagine how any obviously committed person of the right could enlist, honestly, Jesus to his or her cause.

Indeed, what kind of cultish “Christianity” is this that can blatantly make a mockery of both the words and spirit of Jesus, and then call this the true “Christian religion” and mix it with the crassest Machiavellian politics and verbal slanders?

Oh, that’s the Republican Party circa 2009.

John Cleese deconstructs “twittering” in ten short seconds here.

The groovy guy dancing, horns, and duds put me in mind of this late medieval Italian painting at the Getty Museum in Westwood:

So says TPM Online.

Money quote:

As others noted during his 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial campaigns (see update), in an essay Jindal wrote in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, a serious right-wing Catholic journal, Jindal narrated a bizarre story of a personal encounter with a demon, in which he participated in an exorcism with a group of college friends. And not only did they cast out the supernatural spirit that had possessed his friend, Jindal wrote that he believes that their ritual may well have cured her cancer.

The love affair between Rush Limbaugh and exorcist Bobby Jindal is getting intense.

Exorcist Jindal seems to have a serious crush on El Rushbo:

In an interview with Limbaugh in 2007, Jindal gushed that he reads Limbaugh’s books and that he is a “huge fan” of Limbaugh’s program.

And Rush loves the exorcist too:

[T]he people on our side are really making a mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal on the basis of style. Because if you think — people on our side I’m talking to you — those of you who think Jindal was horrible, you think — in fact, I don’t ever want to hear from you ever again.

The intensity of emotion on display between these two men needs a song:

Don’t think. Don’t discuss. Just follow.

The authoritarian personality on display:

“[T]he people on our side are really making a mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal on the basis of style. Because if you think — people on our side I’m talking to you — those of you who think Jindal was horrible, you think — in fact, I don’t ever want to hear from you ever again.” – Rush Limbaugh

Twittering dittos?

There is a Russian joke that I like, and that bears upon the global economy. It goes like this:

Ivan sees his friend, Dmitri, fall into an old well. Ivan runs up to the rim of the well and calls down, “Oh my God, Dmitri, can you hear me!” “Yes,” says Dmitri, “I can hear you.” “And are you bleeding? Have you broken any bones?” “No, I’m not bleeding, and I don’t think I’ve broken any bones.” “And the bottom of the well—what’s down there?” “I can’t actually say,” says Dmitri, ”I’m still falling.”

Yale economist, Robert Shiller, thinks we are only halfway to the bottom of the housing market, and, in consequence, that the economy’s general recovery is still 3-5 years off.

See a five minute interview with Shiller, and a chart that he produced on the housing market (based on his research), here.

Schiller’s trend data suggests that a house that you might have purchased at the peak of the housing bubble for $210,000 and can now get for, say, $155,000, will probably be worth about $100,000 three-five years from now. 

I was starting to gain a bit of optimism about the economy’s prospects for 2010, but Shiller’s analysis is sobering. 

On an upnote, young people and renters should be able to find affordable housing over the coming years.