At Jerry Coyne’s blog today, Coyne takes after Michael Shermer for being a little too cozy with religion:

It always amuses me when an accommodationist tells the faithful that no, there is no conflict between science and religion, at least not if they stopped believing the things that cause a conflict.  In a Darwin-anniversay piece on CNN, Michael Shermer comes out as an accommodationist, and more:  he suggests that people really should modify their beliefs if they conflict with science.

In New Atheistland, accommodating other people’s beliefs (if you think they are false), and giving too much serious intellectual leeway to the question of whether God actually exists or not, is a big no-no. Such things put you in danger of being in “conflict with science”, and renders you a suspicious citizen of New Atheistland (if you call yourself an atheist). And so Shermer said, among other (to Coyne’s mind) ghastly things about religion, this:

If one is a theist, it should not matter when God made the universe — 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened.

To which Coyne retorts:

Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them?  Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian, or a devout Muslim.

But perhaps if Shermer had used the word “need” as opposed to “should”, it would not have raised Coyne’s ire? (As in, “It need not logically matter when God made the world.”) Strictly speaking, theism, evolution, and a great age for the Earth are not logically incompatible.

Of course, evolution and an old Earth are logically incompatible with a literalist reading of the Bible, but the literalist reading is, in any case, blatantly false. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, gives clear structural markers of being written as poetry. Specifically, it is written in poetic parallelism (the 1st day corresponds to the 4th day, the 2nd day to the 5th, the 3rd day to the 6th). What we are reading is a poet laying out the world’s stage (on days 1, 2, and 3) and the things that move (the “actors” on days 4, 5, and 6). To put it in Shakespearean terms, Genesis 1 is a poetic expression of “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women players.” And in this profound sense, Genesis 1 is a reflection of this truth.

What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.

And for this, of course, Shermer runs the risk of being demonized as an “accommodationist”, a “theologian”, and a “faithiest” by the confidence atheists who mentally inhabit that very narrow intellectual peninsula, New Atheistland.

Yes. A very particular scientific observation, in fact. The author of the first chapter of Genesis clearly based his narrative on something that he had empirically observed: the world appears to be composed of two things:

• stage elements (light, sky, waters, land, and plants); and
• moving elements (sun, moon, stars, animals, and humans)

In other words, the world is a stage with actors. The Genesis 1 author then sets this stage-actor insight into poetic parallelism to build a creation story that accords with the Hebrew week:

Stage elements                                          Actors

Day 1: light                                                 Day 4: the sun, moon, and stars

Day 2: waters below and above                   Day 5: sea creatures and birds

Day 3: land and plants                                Day 6: animals and humans  

Once you know the poetic parallelism at work, it’s hard to ever forget the order of creation, or the organizing stage-actor principle underlying it, which one might put in Shakespearean terms as “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In short, undergirding Genesis 1 is a still valuable empirical surmise of the universe as actually experienced. Unfortunately, fundamentalists attempting to harmonize Genesis 1 with science have missed Genesis 1’s singular empirical categorization, and where it lies: beneath the text’s poetry.

The film version:

Notice, at the very beginning of the clip, the strategic placement of the tree, and Tommy Lee Jones crooking his neck ever so slightly, not blinking, as if his fate is to, as it were, be dangled by the neck from that tree?

And the dream, metaphorically, is that of a lost father, and what the father gave the son, and the son’s subsequent aloneness, as his own death looms upon some future, as yet unknown, ”tree”: My God, why have you forsaken me? The terror of the father’s uncanny absence and presence would somehow both be there, and not be there, at the end.

This looks promising. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road (2006), has been turned into a film, and a review in Salon suggests that the movie is actually better, on balance, than the book. That doesn’t happen every day. Here’s what Salon’s reviewer says:

John Hillcoat’s “The Road” is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy. . . . Hillcoat’s movie takes the core idea of McCarthy’s novel — What does it mean to hang onto our humanity? — and boils it down to its essence.

If you’re a philosophically minded person, this seems like one of those ”must see” films. But I’m not feeling much from the trailer, so I don’t know. I think it’s the musical score that is leaving me skeptical. The proper response to an apocalypse is silence, or the sounds of trees rustling in the wind, or ocean waves. The gravity of the event isn’t properly gauged to the music in the trailer. I’m thinking of one of Woody Allen’s 1970s films, Interiors, in which he was dealing with existentially heavy themes without humor, and so absented all music, even in the opening and closing credits, to produce an emotionally powerful effect. I wonder if the effect of this trailer would be different for me absent the music:

Oops. It doesn’t embed. Watch at YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY

Okay, I just tried watching the trailer with the music muted, and something else jumps out at me: the flashing jump shots, from one camara angle to another, take away from the gravity of the film’s content. The trailer, obviously, is trying to build up raw “rollercoaster ride” excitement, competing with 2012  for the attention challenged, apocalyptic moviegoer crowd. Hopefully, the director chose a more subdued tone in the progress of the film itself. Silence and stillness can themselves be forms of horror more in keeping with a Cormac McCarthy novel (as the film version of No Country for Old Men, in it’s concluding scene, attests). As I recall, the film ended in silence.

In the 1970s, All in the Family had an episode (in season six) in which Thanksgiving dinner is disrupted over Michael Stivic’s atheism, and Michael and Gloria’s determination not to raise their baby with a religion:

Robert Wright, in the New York Times this weekend, articulated clearly his view of how the viral terrorism meme spreads, in an age of global communication, to psychologically susceptible people (like Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan): 

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them. This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.

By this very selfsame logic, doesn’t it follow that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, by stoking Barack Obama hatred and demonization, are spreading an Obama assassination meme?

This past week a group of Evangelicals came onto the UCLA campus in Westwood and gave away 2000 free copies of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). But, as usual, there is a catch to such things. The edition of Darwin’s book was accompanied by a fifty page Introduction dissing the theory of evolution! Here’s the ministry responsible for the campaign, at its website, gloating over the success of its counter-intuitive evangelism strategy:

“You’re not supposed to be here today. We are not ready!” That was the reaction of one atheist at UCLA when we showed up on the 18th to give away 2,000 books. He was right. We originally intended to give the copies of On the Origin of Species out on the 19th, but because of the threats of book burnings, of “unilateral resistance,” and the many threats to tear out the Introduction, we changed our strategy. We are so glad we made this move. Atheists had planned to disguise themselves as students and collect multiple copies themselves to stop students getting the books.

The ministry is headed by Ray Comfort of “banana creationist man” fame (see here). The ministry also claims to have distributed over 170,000 copies of Darwin’s Origin so far, and they have gone onto some of the world’s most prestigious campuses to do so (including Oxford and Berkeley).

Needless to say, Richard Dawkins is pissed. And Dawkins is no slouch in the clever retort department. Perhaps the New Atheists will mount their own counter-evangelism campaign: distributing an edition of the New Testament with an Introduction by Richard Dawkins and with footnotes by PZ Myers?

Glenn Beck’s got a one hundred year plan (oh, shit):

“We need to start thinking like the Chinese.”

In other words, Glenn Beck thinks that focused, insurgent, belligerent, fanatically committed mass movement Maoism—with its disciplined cell groups, ideological purity, and relentless propaganda—is the right model, tactically, for the advancing of ”conservatism” in the 21st century. How ironic is that?

Reason? Seriousness? Dialogue? Maturity? Calm? Suspicion of mass emotion? Nah. Mao.

Mao! 

Here’s how Conor Friedersdorf puts Beck Zedong’s bright idea:

It includes a series of adult education seminars where citizens will be taught political activism, self-reliance, and the dread community organizing. The often tearful Fox News personality also promises a book that will include more specifics. “We need to start thinking like the Chinese,” Mr. Beck said at a recent rally. “I’m developing a 100 year plan for America.”

Andrew Sullivan rightly nails this latest inanity to come out of Teabagger Land:

[T]he vessel for rethinking will not come from proud ignoramuses and populist Elmer Gantrys. It will not come from reiterating propaganda but from confronting unpleasant facts about conservatism’s recent catastrophic failures and mistakes. They’re not thinking; they’re emoting. They’re not engaged in reforming conservatism; they’re engaged in escapist denialism about real problems. They are a sign of profound cultural sickness, not resurgent political and civic health.

The flies change but the shit is the same. If you wonder why the Republican Party is undergoing a purging of moderates from its ranks, this reading of Mao’s essay, “Combat Liberalism”, is helpful. It’s not hard to see how a person like Glenn Beck could find a monomaniacal person like Mao Zedong tactically informative:

“I wonder if you wonder.”

Great layers of inuendo and connotation in an exchange of wits between Barbara Stanwyck and Jimmy Stewart in the film noir classic, Double Indemnity (1944):

And here’s another great example of insinuation in a different genre:

Until last night, I’d never seen Christmas in Connecticut (1945), but my wife got me to sit down and watch it with her—and what a great holiday movie! Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan have smoldering chemistry (it’s surprising that they don’t melt the snow). Anyway, it’s a great Christmas film that, if you’ve managed to have missed it over the years (as I had), you might want to locate. Here it is at Amazon, and here’s the original trailer for the film: