Stuff Christian Culture Likes

Posted on Friday 23 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

http://www.stuffchristianculturelikes.com/

I happened upon this site recently, and was compelled to click through the 80 or so pages — there are now 234 posts, and only three posts per page, with no easy way to skim or search through all of them, except by clicking backwards page by page. It’s been posted since 2008.

The author says she is “a preacher’s kid and I’m also married to a preacher’s kid” but she writes now like an outsider, rather like an anthropologist. Her tone is occasionally wry, but not snarky.

I was fascinated by this site mostly because I have family living in Tennessee who are part of a Christian community. In fact, several posts on this site rung bells considering my family’s Facebook posts. Such as these, here with comments by the blogger.

Bible verse as Facebook status

When Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” the Christian’s answer is often a verse. And just as often, dozens of people (presumably also Christians) click that they “like” it, no matter how obscure the reference. It begs the question, if their pastor or his wife made Ezekiel 23:20 their status, would everyone still be compelled to like it? Unfortunately we will probably never know.

Africa

Christian culture sure does like Africa. It is their continent of choice for missions work. If you grow up in American Christian culture you hear so much about Africa that you have a strong suspicion that God will make you a missionary there when you grow up. You learn in Sunday school that Amy Carmichael prayed for blue eyes every day and then she grew up to be a missionary in India and thus her brown eyes help her blend in better and that’s why God didn’t give her blue eyes. You are pretty sure God will do something like that to you even though your eyes are blue, but he’ll probably send you to Africa and not India like Amy.

Taking pictures with poor foreign children on missions trips

Kirk Cameron

Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt

Evangelicals like to invoke the shadow of doubt whilst discussing God’s existence and his will. Being certain feels awesome. But Christian culture’s very favorite thing to know beyond a shadow of a doubt is where one will spend eternity. Where will you spend eternity? That person happens to know beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Homeschooling

Studies show that homeschooling is preferred two to one amongst Christian culture families. They often cite a reason for homeschooling is a way to protect their kids from the world.

There are many other posts that I would expect in this context.

Michele Bachmann

Saying “Love the sinner, hate the sin”

When pressed, a person in Christian culture will often concede that it’s okay to be gay as long as you don’t act on said gayness. You know, because of Leviticus. And they won’t think twice about saying this to you over shellfish after working on Saturday while wearing clothes with two types of fibers and after cutting the hair on the sides of their heads. Then after all this they might remind you that they love that sinner but sure hate that sin. If you choose this moment to tell them they’re quoting a Hindu, expect them to be defiant, or at the very least confused. They may be just as baffled by another of his quotes: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

Not Secular Humanism

Perceiving Persecution

Christian culture sees persecution in all sorts of things and they often say they’re under attack. The institution of marriage is under attack, the right to life is under attack, free speech is under attack and on top of all that, the liberal media tries to make them look dumb. Although they say free speech is under attack, they have no use for the ACLU. Some of them call it the Anti-Christian Liberals Union or Anti-Christian Litigation Unit.

Countering the Gay Agenda

Christian culture is deeply afraid of some sort of indoctrination by homosexuals. At this website they say “Gay activists realize that if they can capture the hearts and minds of the next generation, they will, for all practical purposes, have won the culture war.” There’s that culture war again. The fact that Christian culture is so invested in the idea of a culture war is interesting because the Jesus they claim to follow didn’t promote a culture, but rather a consuming love that casts out all fear. The fact that Christian culture is so frightened makes you wonder what their motivation is.

Proposition 8

With the overturning of Prop 8, Christian culture is certain the end times* are upon us.

*The “end times” are the eschatological writings which depict a time of tribulation that precedes the return of the Messiah, i.e., what the Left Behind series was about.

Mike Huckabee’s stance on gay marriage

The possibility of donkey marriage becoming legal is terrifying to people who hold moral conventions close to their hearts. But Jesus did not endorse morals or politics. Jesus endorsed love and relationship. In particular, he endorsed showing unmerited favor (i.e., grace) to members of society whom the Pharisees deemed unsavory (i.e., tax collectors and prostitutes. Do homosexuals fall in this category?). Making same-sex marriage legal would mean Christians would have to relinquish some political and moral control and trust the issue to God. It is quite a conundrum for the Christian culture, indeed.

Biblical inerrancy

Christian culture is adamant about Biblical inerrancy. Sometimes it’s better to not get them started.

Not healthcare reform [a post from 2009]

Christian culture is rather unhappy about the proposals for healthcare reform. They’d threaten to move to Canada like they did when Obama won, but Canada has socialized medicine, so they’re up a creek on this one.

Not Obama

With Barack Obama as president, Christian culture is certain the end times are upon us.

Not Environmentalism

Not Legalizing Gay Marriage

Beliving that America is a Christian nation

Sarah Palin

White European Jesus

and of course,
Fox News

and of course,
Being Politically Conservative

At the same time, there are many posts about things I’ve never heard of at all — or would never have suspected were essential to Christian culture, or am surprised to see, such as this first one.

Disclaiming Pat Robertson

In an event of staggering rarity, Christian culture and non-Christians currently agree on something. Almost everyone seems to think that Pat Robertson is certifiably insane.

Sufjan Stevens

The Ungame

Screen printed dress shirts

Lost

Saying “Great Insight”

Worship leaders saying the lines before they are sung

The iPad

The Duggar family

Not Harry Potter

Getting rid of their secular music

Spanking

Astroglide

Pukka shells

Coldplay

But enough! I’ve spent another hour accumulating these links. (Why? See comment to previous post.)

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on Stuff Christian Culture Likes

Plinks: Adam Frank, PZ Myers, Hendrik Hertzberg

Posted on Thursday 22 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Just after yesterday’s post about Donald Prothero, on “The Serious Consequences of Science Illiteracy”, comes this op-ed by scientist Adam Frank in the New York Times, which says pretty much the same thing….

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/opinion/welcome-to-the-age-of-denial.html

The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.

Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.

The list goes on.

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PZ Myers notes that Muslim fundamentalists are just as assertive about the veracity of the Qur’ān as Christian fundamentalists are about the Bible–

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/22/hamza-tzortzis-can-learn/

And there are Muslims who think that the Qur’ān is “not inaccurate or wrong” and therefore science must be rationalized in its context.

Myers quotes quotes his conclusions, and responds,

#1 and #2 are correct. #3 is assuming what they want to demonstrate. #4 is an exercise in rationalization, and cannot generate new knowledge; it’s an admission that science will drive progress and understanding, while the religious apologists will follow along behind and try to steal the credit.

*
One of the most incisive writers in The New Yorker, bylined in “The Talk of the Town” section, with the lead item every time I’ve noticed, is Hendrik Hertzberg. This past week I clicked through links and found his blog, and this particular post, about the Pope’s recent comments about atheists. The whole post is worth reading, but I was struck by this passage:

Something that has always puzzled me is the stated belief of some Christians in a God who is simultaneously (a) good, kind, forgiving, etc., and (b) capable of condemning people who lead virtuous lives to eternal torment (or even some lesser punishment) solely because they do not happen to believe He exists; or because they do believe He exists but decline to accord Jesus the status of supernatural savior, personal or otherwise; or because they regard the Bible as an admirable collection of folktales but no more divinely authored than any other purportedly sacred text or, for that matter, than the works of Shakespeare or the music of Mozart; or because they do not agree with this or that tenet of a particular religion.

If such a cruel, vain, and tyrannical God did exist, I can’t for the life of me see how the proper response would be to worship or even praise Him. Wouldn’t a more logical, more morally sound, more self-respecting response be to join a rebellion against Him—the Hell Liberation Front or some such—and try to overthrow Him?

I can’t help feeling pleased and grateful that Pope Francis doesn’t believe in that kind of God, even if for other reasons (lack of evidence, plus an inability to formulate a question or questions to which a God or gods would be a satisfactory answer) I can’t join him in believing in any sort of God at all.

PS. I should note that part of my purpose in this blog is simply to gather links and quotes that I might otherwise lose, as happened a while back when I was let go from a job and lost everything I had bookmarked on a work computer. That is, I don’t post these *necessarily* to be provocative, to anyone easily provoked. I have half a mind to write a book someday about how science fiction is an analog to the great philosophical debate of existence, to which religion and atheism are sideshows.

Posted in Philosophy, Quote at Length, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Plinks: Adam Frank, PZ Myers, Hendrik Hertzberg

How to Be a Successful Prophet: Applying The Jack Smith Rule

Posted on Wednesday 21 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Jack Smith was a long-time columnist for the Los Angeles Times — here’s his Wikipedia entry — who died in 1996. What I remember after all these years from his reign, as a long-time reader of the LA Times since the 1970s, is his recurring suggestion that you can take any prophecy — he was focusing on psychics’ predictions — and become a more successful prophet than the psychics simply by taking any of their predictions, and predicting the opposite. No, the world will not end on such and such a date; no, Elizabeth Taylor will not marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, and so on.

(Here is an example from 1986 of one of his columns that discusses this, though I cannot find an earlier first source.)

Now, while Jack Smith was focusing on psychics, the same rule easily applies to religious fundamentalists, who are always predicting the end of the world, or various other calamities they would like to blame on liberal policies. Whenever you see one of these predictions — from Pat Robertson predicting the end of the world back in 1982, to Harold Camping‘s two recent end of world predictions that failed to come true, you can easily predict the opposite, and you will be a more successful prophet than they were.

As time has progressed, this principle seems to apply not just to fundamentalist pastors, but to popular figures in the conservative/Tea Party/Republican wing of American politics. One of my favorite, humorous (to me) websites, Right Wing Watch, daily documents loony statements by the likes of Glenn Beck, David Barton, Mike Huckabee, Kirk Cameron, and their like, about the imminent end of Western Civilization or the collapse of American society because of Obama, the gays, or the atheists.

So I here establish what I’ll call the Jack Smith Rule. I will use this in future posts. Take any prediction by a psychic, by an evangelical preacher, or by a right-wing spokesman, about the end of western civilization, the collapse of society due to gays being allowed to serve in the military, the consequences of same sex marriage, and so on and so on.

Predict the opposite.

You will win.

Their paranoid fears will not happen.

Here’s an easy one. Orson Scott Card’s latest rant has gotten much publicity [though it was posted in May], especially his comment that Obama is about to form some national police force…

Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.

Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people “trying to escape” — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.

By the Jack Smith rule, let us predict: no, this will not happen.

Let us check back in three years, say, and see whose prediction, Card’s or mine, will come true.

(There have been similar predictions from right-wing politicians that Obama will somehow circumvent the Constitution and get himself elected for a third term. No, this will not happen either.)

There are so many more opportunities to apply this Jack Smith Rule. I am lining them up.

Posted in Thinking | Comments Off on How to Be a Successful Prophet: Applying The Jack Smith Rule

Donald Prothero on science illiteracy, the Dunning-Kruger effect

Posted on Wednesday 21 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Another interesting blogger I’ve run across is Donald Prothero, author of a recent book called Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future, and a contributor to Skepticblog.

This post reads like an introduction to the theme of that book. The US thinks of itself as the #1 superpower in the world, with a monopoly on scientific achievement. But others were #1 in science in past centuries and millennia — the Greeks before Rome, the Arabs from roughly 800-1100 A.D., the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century. They were undone by Roman conquerors, Muslim religious extremism, and Soviet allegiance to ideology (Lysenkoism). And there are similar ominous trends in the US.

…the Bush Administration actively interfered with legitimate scientists, rewriting reports by federal scientists that disagree with their right-wing ideology, encouraging fringe scientists to testify as legitimate equals with well-regarded scientists in order to cancel out their politically inconvenient message, and generally ignoring the conclusions of scientists who don’t agree with them. As we saw in previous posts, the House “Science” Committees are run by creationists and climate deniers. The current Republican House majority asks global warming deniers and other fringe scientists to testify in front of Congress, and passes bills denying obvious scientific facts. Stem-cell research in the United States has been set back compared to that in other countries, as our best scientists go to countries with less political oppression.

On another topic, here he is on The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says that

ignorant or unskilled people tend to overestimate their level of competence and expertise, while those who are truly expert sometimes underestimate their true level of expertise

Or as he quotes Bertrand Russell,

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

It seems to be a common effect lately, what with

non-experts trying to shout down people with expertise, or demagogues using the label of “elitism” to push their policies as they ridicule the experts who challenge them

He gives examples: Deepak Chopra, creationists like Duane Gish, the Bush administration, purveyors of quack medicine, climate change deniers, and the author of Conservapedia — about whom Prothero has this post in which said author tries to discredit Einstein and relativity by… quoting Bible verses.

Posted in Science | Comments Off on Donald Prothero on science illiteracy, the Dunning-Kruger effect

Plinks: Steven Pinker, Carl Zimmer, Anti-Intellect, History Chart, Weigel on Card

Posted on Monday 19 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

A collection of quotes from what I thought were interesting articles and posts and tweets, over the past week or more (I should post more often). (And actually, I’m saving a few for later posts.) Perhaps I will call posts like this Plinks — Personal links, and in analogy with the Blinks I do on Locus Online.

*

The most important item recently is this provocative essay by Steven Pinker about the tension between science and the humanities — and those who accuse science of ‘scientism’.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities

(I know the eyes glaze over long quoted paragraphs. But I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think these long paragraphs were worth reading.)

The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person — one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism — requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.

To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans be4long to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.

And:

The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.”

*

Carl Zimmer, at National Geographic, takes on evolution denialists who keep changing the terms of what evidence they would acknowledge…

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/16/experimental-evolution-and-the-false-solace-of-theyre-still-bacteria/

Re: Darwin:

He pointed out, for instance, that natural selection was a logical — even inescapable — fact of life. Individuals varied in their traits. Some of those variations influenced how many offspring they had. And those traits could also be passed down to offspring. Under such conditions, natural selection just happens.

This captures a point not generally appreciated — never mind all the evidence or disputations thereof. The principles of natural selection only require what he describes, and it’s inevitable — which is why the principles apply not only to biological history, but in many other arenas, and why it’s been called perhaps the single greatest idea of all time.

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The Anti-Intellect Blog on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Anti-Intellect-Blog/346440785368116?ref=stream&hc_location=stream

Belief or disbelief in god is not about intelligence, though that factors. It’s about the serviceability of myths. Who needs them and why. Belief in god also has a lot to do with ignorance and indoctrination. A person is not necessarily dumb because they believe in god or intelligent because they do not. Some “smart” people believe in god. Some “dumb” people do not. The problem with belief in god is that it is a human idea, subject to whim. Or at least that is one of the problems. There’s also no evidence to back up the claim, but people love believing things without evidence.

Whoever this guy is, he seems to tweet constantly, about religious, gay, and feminist issues, and he has a book of essays coming out next February, under this alias. (Which alias is obviously some kind of irony.)

*

These I already posted on Facebook:

Cool chart:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/08/12/the_1931_histomap_the_entire_history_of_the_world_distilled_into_a_single.html

A 1931 chart of human history since 2000 BC. It’s remarkable for how slender the two centuries of the United States is, against 4000 years of history — not to mention the millions and billions of years of Earth history before that.

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David Weigel of Slate comments about Orson Scott Card’s “fascinating political paranoia” — in a long column Card presents as a “thought experiment” about “how American democracy ends”.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/08/14/orson_scott_card_worries_about_obama_turning_urban_gangs_into_his_personal.html

Card:
Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing “czars” who didn’t need Senate approval. His own party hasn’t passed a budget ever in the Senate.

In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt.

To which Weigel responds:
Here on Earth, Obama has actually signed off on a series of compromises that fell short of what he demanded—the health care law, the debt limit increases — and he’s only the latest president to appoint a series of advisers who are termed “czars.”

Weigel goes on. I can’t bring myself to read the entire Card piece.

Posted in Commonplace Book, Quote at Length, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Plinks: Steven Pinker, Carl Zimmer, Anti-Intellect, History Chart, Weigel on Card

Review of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls

Posted on Saturday 10 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly


Having just posted Gary K. Wolfe’s Locus review of The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, it’s timely for me to spend a few minutes adding my own reaction.

To summarize very briefly (since you can read Gary’s summary right there), the novel is about a serial killer, Harper Curtis, in Chicago who occupies a run-down house (‘The House‘) in a deserted part of the city. The house enables him to move back in forth in time — from 1931 to 1993, at least — and inside the house is a room with names of women on the wall. These are the ‘shining girls‘ that Curtis becomes compelled to seek out and murder. The novel alternates, roughly, between Curtis and a young woman, Kirby Mazrachi, who, unbeknownst to Curtis, survived one of his attacks. Kirby subsequently takes a job as an intern at the Chicago Sun Times to try to track him down.

As in any serial killer novel, I suppose, some descriptions of violence are pretty brutal. But Beukes can write tenderly and movingly too, in passages like this, in which she describes the consequences of one victim’s murder:

Her father will never recover. His weight drops away until he becomes a wan parody of the loud and opinionated estate agent who would pick a fight at the barbecue about the game. He loses all interest in selling houses. He tapers off mid-sales pitch, looking at the blank spaces on the wall between the perfect family portraits or worse, at the grouting between the tiles of the en-suite bathroom. He learns to fake it, to clamp the sadness down. At home, he starts cooking. He teaches himself French cuisine. But all food tastes bland to him.

Gary’s review sort of gives away what I might have thought would be a spoiler. No, not whether the bad guy is caught at the end — rather, what’s up with this House, why *these* girls and not others, say. But I’ll continue under the link…

[ show/hide spoiler discussion ]

It’s not a spoiler partly because of the comparison of this book to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Which is to say: there is no explanation for the time travel in this book, any more than there was in that one. It just is. No explanation for why those girls and not others. They just are, they’re victims.

However…. as Gary did not mention in his review… there are suggestions of a Heinleinian “By His Bootstraps” closed loop of causality. The first hint I saw was on page 188 — Curtis gives an old woman the same coat he takes from her later in time (but earlier in the book) — the coat in which he found the key to the House. And then at the very end, when Curtis has been vanquished, a by-passer finds the key that he has dropped, and uses it to enter the house — and this is Bartek, who Curtis earlier/later killed when *he* found the house. So.

Does this ‘explain’ anything, or is it just a bit of cleverness? I think these are nods to readers who might recognize such allusions — as Gary mentioned, Beukes is apparently genre-savvy — but aren’t actually intended as explanations in the Heinleinian sense, or any science fictional sense. So I guess the point is, and Gary’s point in his review is, that devices like time travel are so taken for granted in popular culture that they don’t need ‘explanation’ or justification anymore.

Unless you’re expecting hard-headed rational science fiction, which this book obviously isn’t. The result instead is, here we have a time travel novel that is not, as most time travel novels are, science fiction.

Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on Review of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls

Stories, Narratives, Facts

Posted on Friday 9 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon has an excerpt from a new book by David McRaney, You Are Now Less Dumb. I think I’ll quote from the excerpt, just because (at the moment) I can.

The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you believe in something, you rarely seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your assumptions. That’s the source of urban legends, folklore, superstitions, and all the rest. Skepticism is not your strong suit. In the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, people using science are fighting against your stupidity. No other human enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.

When you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in the randomness. You prefer easy-to-understand stories, and thus turn everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become easy. Scientists work to remove the narrative, to boil it away, leaving behind only the raw facts. Those data sit there naked and exposed so they can be reflected upon and rearranged by each new visitor.

Posted in Quote at Length, Science | Comments Off on Stories, Narratives, Facts

Review of McDevitt & Resnick’s The Cassandra Project

Posted on Thursday 8 August 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick’s The Cassandra Project (2012) is set in 2019 at a time when NASA funding is being cut and many worry that NASA may be disbanded altogether.

It begins with a routine release of old records from the 1960s that includes voice recordings from an early Apollo mission in which a LEM pilot is heard saying “approaching launch point” and Houston replying “go for launch”. Reporters pounce — does this mean someone landed on the moon before Apollo 11?

The central character is Jerry Culpepper, NASA public affairs director, who’s caught unprepared for this sudden controversy. Worse, circumstantial evidence keeps mounting to support the idea of an earlier landing [it’s clever how the authors deftly avoid naming by number those earlier missions; they never say Apollo 9 or Apollo 10], even as officials, all the way to the president, dismiss the idea.
Continue reading →

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Notes on Daniel Dennett, 1

Posted on Wednesday 24 July 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

I plan to post various kinds of responses to books I’ve read or am reading; some will be reviews, some will be notes with comments. This entry is one of the latter. (Note this only covers the first 60 pages or so of a 400+p book.)

Daniel Dennett is a well-known philosopher (Wikipedia) who’s applied his thinking to cutting edge issues of science – evolution, consciousness, free will — and has written numerous tomes on these subjects and others.  This book is something of a hodgepodge, but a useful one. It starts by describing various thinking tools, including ‘intuition pumps’, and then applies those tools to issues of meaning, mind, and free will. Some of the ‘tools’ are negative ones, to be avoided, since they are most often used to mislead and deflect critical thinking. Thus this book is of interest to me not just for its application to those studies, but as a compilation of thinking tools that can be applied in any area of daily life.

Following is a summary, with occasional comments by me in [brackets].

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Philosophy, Thinking | Comments Off on Notes on Daniel Dennett, 1

Twitter So Far

Posted on Monday 22 July 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

So I created a Twitter account a couple weeks ago, initially to track someone posting comments about Locus Online, but mostly just to come up to speed with this form of online social media, as a publisher of an [online] website myself. Yes, I’m a couple years behind the times; but I try not to be *more* than a couple years behind the times.

I’ve quickly ‘followed’ over the past couple weeks some 300 fellow tweeters, and have been followed by 69 folks currently.

Comment 1: At least half of those 69 are folks I’ve never heard of, and have no idea why they would have seen my account and chosen to follow me. [This is not that much different than Facebook, where I have some 260 friends whom I’ve approved, and at least another 200 friend requests that I’ve ignored, since I have no idea who they are.]

Comment 2: I have a correspondent, a contributor to Locus Online, say about Twitter, “It’s responsible for the ongoing downfall of our civilization. I pity the necessity for you to follow it.” Obviously he is not on Twitter.

Comment 3: I think Twitter is like being in a convention party room, with dozens of people standing around holding conversations, and being able to follow all those conversations at once, more or less. It’s fun to follow, but if you walk out of the room to go elsewhere, you will miss these conversations, just as ignoring Twitter for a while means you will miss analogous tweets. I.e., you’re not necessarily missing anything important. You can’t follow everyone all the time. Life is short.

Comment 4: The best thing about Twitter is that you can follow folks who don’t need to approve you as ‘friends’, as on Facebook; thus I can follow Barack Obama, Ricky Gervias, and Wil Wheaton. And discover, through re-tweets (RT), fascinating, provocative people like @Anti_Intellect.

I think I’ve figured out how to embed Twitter posts in a blog post like this. Here are a couple examples that struck me in the past couple days (posting these mostly to see if these work).

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Twitter So Far