Advertising on the Cheap

Here's a new one: posting ads in the comments of obscure personal blogs. I thought maybe someone had actually read my blog. I'm sure some spammer thinks he's pretty hot shit because he came up with a cool bot that dumps millions of stupid ads in people's comments. Like anyone would fall for this shit.

Though I have to admit that sometimes you fall for dumb ads when you least expect it. I just took my car into Just Brakes because the brakes started making grinding noises and I freaked. I don't have a regular mechanic yet for my new (old) Saturn and so I panicked and fell back on a radio ad I'd heard from them about cheap brake deals. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!! "Cheap brakes." Yeah, it's gonna be $500. And so after I take it in I decide to do some research on them and find all these complaints about Just Brakes doing work that doesn't need to be done, gouging their customers in the process. Great. Good thing I already signed a form authorizing it. I'm considering this an expensive lesson in the value of researching car mechanics. I just pray that everything works as advertised and I don't have to deal with these jokers again.

Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong

With clarity and incisiveness, Daniel Dennet has laid out exactly what is wrong with Intelligent Design theory: there is no theory. Oh, sure, ID advocates claim that their theory is that some intelligence, which they refuse to speculate on, created life on this planet. But as Dennet points out, this is not a theory. It is merely an assertion. A scientific theory (well, a hypothesis; it has to be tested and developed before it can become a theory) has to be composed of testable assertions. ID has none. It could. As Dennet says, it would be possible to come up with testable ID assertions, like that aliens designed our 6 million years ago, and then look for evidence to prove these assertions, but this has not been done, presumably because ID advocates know they are full of hot air. Anyway, this is a brilliant piece, probably the most concise and damning takedown of ID that I've seen so far.

I realize, upon reading it, that defenders of evolution are taking the wrong approach by doing just that--defending evolution. It makes it look as though there really is some doubt, something about evolution that needs to be defended. This might work with other scientists, but not with people who are not trying to be rational. Instead, this whole debate could and should be totally reframed in terms of ID. What is ID? What isn't it? Why are ID advocates doing what they are doing? How are they doing it? Why don't they do it with other scientific theories, like quantum theory or gravity or thermodynamics, some of which are on much shakier ground than evolution is? Though this information appears in the media, there has been no concerted attack on ID. I think if there was, and it was done in a way that regular people could understand, ID would have a much harder time hanging on.

Surprise, Surprise

The Discovery Institute, the Seattle think-tank that has been ramming Intelligent Design into the national nostril this summer, likes to put on a good face. There are lots of scientists on their roster, lots of official-sounding publications on their Web page. But what do those scientists on their roster even think about them? Do they agree with the Discovery Institute? Do they even want to be listed as members? You would think so, but this article makes me skeptical. Like the cute ape pictures and DNA molecule drawings on their Web site, and like ID itself, the Discovery Institute's scientific credentials appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

My wife and I watched Wild Strawberries Saturday night, an old Ingmar Bergman film. What a wonderful movie. It's the tale of an old doctor driving to a ceremony with his daughter-in-law, where he will receive an honorary degree from a university. Along the way he reminisces a lot and has several disturbing dreams that hint at things he could've done differently in his life. It was a beautiful meditation on loneliness and how even late in life we can find happiness for ourselves and ease some of the pain we have caused others. It has some of Bergman's characteristic dark strangeness, particularly in the dream sequences, but what struck me most about it was how human it was. It deals with ordinary people in ordinary situations, and overall struck me as the sort of film that just isn't made in America anymore. Partially that's because filmmaking and storytelling techniques have evolved, but I think it also has something to do with the worship of celebrity that has infested all aspects of our culture. We can't tell stories about ordinary people unless something extraordinary happens to them. We've forgotten how interesting our day-to-day lives actually are. Of course, I'm sure that if I search, particularly among independent filmmakers, I could find counterexamples, but certainly very little reaches the mainstream that is on a recognizably human scale and is not about some extraordinary tragedy/event/whatever. All cultural vitriol aside, this was a very beautiful and uplifting movie, and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks ordinary people are fascinating.

Global Warming Irregularities Exploited by Skeptics Are Fixed

This story appearing in USA Today reveals that a key fuel source for arguments by global warming skeptics has been explained. For some time now, weather balloon data on tropical temperatures has failed to show predicted temperature increases. Skeptics used this data to argue that the models showing significant global warming were flawed. However, researchers have discovered that several of these important weather balloons had drifted off course, and were reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime temperatures. When this was corrected, the reported temps conformed exactly to current climate models showing global warming. The petroleum industry has yet to comment on their smackdown. Take that, you oil-slurping vampires.

Congress Makes Me Sick

The latest issue of Rolling Stone, of all the magazines in this country, has a brilliant and nauseating article on how, exactly, Congress works. Or doesn't work. I'd always assumed that the majority of congressmen and women were a bunch of lying, corrupt bastards, but it's gross to see how true that is and how the corruption and lying actually happens.

The article follows Rep. Sanders, an independent from Vermont and seemingly one of the few honest men in Congress, as he tries to get several measures passed in Congress. Three of the four amendments he introduced before the summer recess passed by large margins, but none of them made it into law. Wanna know how and why? Read the article. It's truly disgusting, and it makes me think there needs to be some serious housecleaning in Washington, which involves more than sweeping out the Republican leadership, though that would help a lot.

And on a final note, I also think it's very sad that this article appeared in Rolling Stone, rather than Time, or Newsweek, or the New York Times, or some other publication that should be covering stuff like this. Not that Rolling Stone can't have serious journalism in it, obviously they do, but for God's sake, they're a music magazine! Their bread and butter is writing about Britney Spears and the latest flop by Oasis! OK, they've covered political stories since Day 1, I know, but I still think this is one more instance where the major, mainstream news outlets are completely and totally failing to do their job.

Jesus Gonna Be Here... As Soon as He Evolves

I listen to Slate.com's daily podcast every morning, and today they did an interview with Jacob Weisberg, author of an article on Slate about the teaching of evolution, one of my favorite topics. Mr. Weisberg makes the claim that religious people are right to be worried about evolution; it does, he says, tend to lead people toward atheism or agnosticism. His claim is not that evolution and (monotheistic) religious belief are incompatible. After all, there are people who believe in God and evolution. However, he claims that one of effects of evolution since Darwin's seminal The Origin of Species has been to lead people away from religious belief because it provides a non-supernatural answer to one of religion's biggest questions: how did we get here? Thus he feels religious people are justified in fearing evolution.

However, I disagree with Mr. Weisberg on several points. First, I do not think evolution is a stake in the heart of religion. Rather, it is another nail on the coffin. Western society was already becoming more secular when Darwin made public his theory. The conflict between religion in science began in earnest with Galileo, and is not science's problem. It is religion's attempt to use its weight to support specific scientific theories that is the problem. In Galileo's day, it was fairly obvious to most people that the sun revolved around the earth. After all, they only had to look at its motion throughout the day. However, Copernicus, Galileo, and others discovered evidence that this was not the case. This was a scientific question, but the church decided to weigh in in favor of one hypothesis--the wrong one, as it turns out. This gives them a credibility problem, especially when they claim divine guidance.

It is the same with evolution. Until Darwin, there were few compelling reasons to disbelieve the church's claim that God created the earth in seven days, etc. But now there is good evidence to the contrary. Rather than accepting that a literal interpretation of the bible is not correct, as some denominations, including the Catholic Church, have done, many religious people choose to throw the weight of their belief behind the disproven hypothesis. This does not make it right. On the contrary, it gives them a credibility problem, forcing people who agree that evolution is a resonable theory to choose between religion and science. If religious people did not force this unreasonable distinction, evolution would not make people more atheistic.

At the heart of this issue, to me, is a retention of primitive, mythic thinking. As much as many theologians (and certain biblical authors) point out that God is a transcendent concept that is not reducible to our ideas about it/him/her/whatever, many of us persist in seeing God as the modern analog of Zeus: a big, bearded fellow who sits up in the clouds watching everything we do to make sure we aren't screwing around. In this scenario, God aka Superman basically casts magic spells to create the world, making creatures, mountains, iPods, etc pop out of thin air and start disobeying him. He does all this in the time span of the modern work week, cause he's concerned about the market, too. This is the only creation story that evolution discredits. If, on the other hand, we accept that God really is transcendent and awesome and unknowable, then we accept that the seven days account is no more than it claims to be: a myth, a way of talking about creation on human terms (i.e., the magic spell aspect) while acknowledging that the truth is bigger, greater, and more awesome than anything we can come up with. If religious opponents of evolution would remember this, they would see that there is no problem. From our perspective, maybe God's creation of the world looks a whole hell of a lot like evolution.

I realize this raises problems of theodicy (survival of the fittest, etc) and knocks down man a little in the cosmic scheme of things because we weren't created "special." (Though if man is created in God's image, what about apes and chimps? I'm sorry, but they look pretty damn similar to us, even with the hair.) But theodicy is still a problem even if God did create the world with magic spells in seven days because there is still suffering. In fact, I'd say it's even more of a problem in this system because suffering is an anomaly rather than an integral part of the system of creation. If we accept evolution, we actually have a rationale for suffering and can begin to look at its transformative aspects. And as for man being special, well, we're still the only creature we know of who has language, and who has developed the ability for abstract symbol manipulation, and advanced tool-making, etc. And maybe we aren't special anyway. Why is a man more special than a turtle? Maybe if we stepped down from our pedestals for a moment and actually began helping one another, as Jesus suggests, rather than believing our own press, we really would be a special species that could be worthy of God's praise.

Can Christians Come to Christ?

The 8/05 issue of Harper's magazine has a wonderful essay by Bill McKibben titled "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong." Unfortunately you can read the article in its entirety only in the print version at the moment, but there are some excerpts on the Harper's Web site.

McKibben's basic point is that despite 85% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, as a nation we fail to behave in a Christian manner. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, sell all our belongings and follow him, help the poor, sick, weak, and so on, and yet by any metric we are failing to do these things, even when one factors in the donations to and actions of private and religious charities. Compared to all other wealthy, industrialized nations (including Japan, a non-Christian nation, and many European nations where Christianity has become so anemic that they can be considered secular cultures), we have higher murder rates, higher poverty, less health care, worse school systems, and on and on.


This point has been made before (by me, among other people), but McKibben makes it eloquently. He also very interestingly traces the roots of this phenomenon to a series of theological makeovers Christianity has received in this country. The two major thrusts of this makeover are, on the one hand, the millenarians, who obsessively search for signs of the coming apocalypse in the bar codes at Wal-Mart and in some cases hope to hasten the End Times by advocating, say, war in the Middle East, and the corporates, neo-New Agers who basically promote a feel-good Christian pop-psychology in suburban megachurches that says little about Jesus and lots about you, the worshipper, and how you can feel good about yourself.

Of course there are many variations on (and marriages between) these strands of pseudo-Christianity, but they are what they are because that's how people like to think. We (the people) are obsessed with disaster scenarios (witness the popularity of movies like Independence Day or the truckloads of other science fiction books, movies, video games, and so on that touch on post-apocalyptic themes), and we are fascinated by destruction. I am sure that as the Spaniards watched Tenochtitlan burn, some of them were excited about destroying an entire culture and one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. There is a little bit of Shiva in all of us, so it's no wonder that people find this kind of thing compelling--especially if they think religion will give them the knowledge to predict and to a certain extent influence the outcome of the apocalypse. As for the corporates, they wanna hear about how Jesus is going to make them more content at work and deal with their kids better and how they deserve to keep all the money they make and God helps those who help themselves so you don't have to do it and you're a Christian so you're saved, what's to worry about? No matter that Jesus basically contradicted all that stuff.

As I said in my previous post on this, Jesus had a radical message, and that message was love. He wanted, as McKibben says, to radically reorient human relationships around the principle of love. But as Foucault scholars will be quick to point out, human relations, in large swaths of the American Christian community, are based instead on power, often economic power.

Do I follow Jesus' message? No, I don't. Maybe somewhat, but not to the extend that I wish I did. So I'm a hypocrite, but I'm honest about it. The problem with these modern-day moneylenders in the temple like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family is that they're not. They say in very loud voices that they represent Christian values when what they really represent is a narrow conservative political view that in a lot of ways is anti-Christian. (Millenarians, get out your pens and start connecting the Antichrist dots.) But they say it so loudly that our culture, as a whole, fails to question them, and a true and vital interpretation of Christianity is pushed to the sidelines. Like McKibben, I hope that one day we will have a truly moral majority, but until that day, all we can do is quietly labor on the sidelines.