Trump, Abortion, Conservatives, and Guns

Posted on Friday 8 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

(From two posts on Facebook over the past week, somewhat edited.)

31 March:
I confess a bit of bewilderment at the outrage over Donald Trump’s comments about abortion, not just from the pro-choice left, but also the anti-abortion (‘pro-life’) right. If conservatives really believe abortion is the moral equivalent of infanticide, then why shouldn’t the women who procure abortions be punished? Amanda Marcotte at Salon has this explanation:

The official stance that Republicans are supposed to take is that women are victims of abortion and therefore cannot be held responsible for it. Yes, it’s true that women pick up the phone, make the appointment, talk through their decisions with medical professionals, sign paperwork and then either take a pill or let the doctor perform an abortion, but none of this should be taken, in conservative eyes, as evidence that women are the people responsible for the abortion happening. Women are regarded by conservatives as fundamentally incapable of making grown-up decisions. If they choose abortion (and by implication, if they choose sex), it’s because the poor dears were misled.

Yes, the same people that conservatives treat as literally too stupid to understand what making a medical decision entails are then expected to raise children.”

Nicholas Kristoff makes some related points in NYT: Trump and Abortion

This penalizing approach has been tried before and failed. A dozen years ago, I went to Portugal to cover such an effort. The police staked out women’s health clinics, looking to arrest women who appeared likely to have just had abortions based on being pale or seeming upset. Some 48 women and a 16-year-old girl were prosecuted, along with accomplices such as husbands, boyfriends, parents and even a taxi driver who drove a woman to a clinic.

The women were humiliated on trial, their most intimate gynecological history revealed to the public. And the public was revolted. The women were all acquitted, and the public turned decisively in favor of abortion rights, by a majority of 79 percent to 14 percent.

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In the following days there there were many other commentaries I could have linked to, including this op-ed in the LA Times on April 1st, Trump doesn’t get it: Abortionists are criminals, women aren’t, by Clarke D. Forsyth, president of “Americans United for Life”, which makes precisely the point Amanda Marcotte illustrates above; but I didn’t get around to commenting again until later, 5 April:

Fb post:

Last week I commented about Donald Trump’s remarks about abortion and whether the women who procure them should be punished. He said yes; oddly, most conservatives reacted by claiming that women should *not* be punished, blaming the abortion providers instead, an idea I found peculiar considering that conservatives equate abortion with murder, e.g. infanticide. Many others have commented on the issue in the past week, nowhere more explicitly following conservative ‘logic’ to its ultimate conclusion than in this piece at Slate by William Saleton.

The Pro-Life Case for Murder, subtitled “Donald Trump suggested punishing women who get abortions. The response exposed the incoherence of the pro-life right.”

Another thought occurs to me, that the conservative rational about abortion is opposite their rational about gun control. To conservatives, guns, the instruments of many murders (of fully grown human beings), are not to be restricted in any way; the users of those weapons, the murderers, are to be held accountable. With abortions it’s the opposite: the abortion providers, clinics where procedures are conducted by medical professionals, are the villains, to be restricted by as many state laws as possible to make it inconvenient and expensive, if not effectively impossible, for women to procure abortions (of *embryos that are not the equivalent of fully grown human beings*, which anyone familiar with biology and embryology, who is not committed to the religious superstition that embryos are invested with ‘souls’ from the moment of conception, should understand), while the women themselves are absolved as ‘victims’ of the men controlling their lives, tender souls who can’t be held accountable for their own actions.

Similar illogical conservative thinking is exhibited by right-wingers in North Carolina who feel oppressed if they can’t oppress gays. Amanda Marcotte again:

Salon: This will make you even madder about North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law: Right-wing backers have the gall to say they’re the victims, subtitled, “Under fire for a pro-discrimination bill, North Carolina conservatives say they’re oppressed if they can’t oppress”

By similar logic, *any* laws could be ignored by virtue of ‘religious liberty’, if the devout object to any law. *Any* law. If not any law, then there must be something distinct about anti-LGBT laws that the religious right wants to be exempt from, and what would that be? That takes us back to simple bigotry.

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A bit more comment today on the contrast between conservative ‘thinking’ on abortion vs. guns. Current psychological research, as represented in Jonathan Haidt’s book, (e.g. discussion here) and Chris Mooney’s book, commented here, provide insights into the moral foundations that motivate conservatives vs. liberals.

Conservatives, more so than liberals, are motivated by sanctity — of e.g. childbirth — and its opposite, disgust, of the physical act of abortion. Conservatives are more often authoritarian, given to thinking in absolutes and less comfortable with gradations of truth; thus they are more prone to thinking in terms of black v white, e.g. the idea that embryos are fully human from day 0, resistant to the messy gradations of biology and embryology.

Similarly, some people are given to paranoia and fear of others that motivates them to an almost pathological need to arm themselves against every possible threat, and a parallel paranoia of government conspiracies to take their weapons away, despite the murders and suicides that result from the easy accessibility of firearms in all these homes… all of this is somehow acceptable collateral damage.

P.S. 9 April: A couple more.

Gail Collins’ April 2nd column, Trump, Truth and Abortion, has this frank admission from a Trump supporter:

“You never blame the woman, you paint her as a victim. … That conservative orthodoxy has been born out of political expediency rather than logic”

They admit their rationales make no sense.

The column touches on another area of conservative irrationality: if abortions are to be avoided by any means possible, why not fund sex education and contraception? The evidence shows abstinence-only curricula don’t work.

In reality, the anti-abortion movement is grounded on the idea that sex outside of marriage is a sin, and the only choice a woman should have is between abstinence and the possibility of imminent parenthood. It may be politically unwise to say that the sinner ought to pay, but she should at minimum have to carry an unwanted child to term.

Look at it this way and it’s easy to understand why abortion opponents have shown virtually no interest in working to make contraceptives and family planning universally available. It’s the sex, at bottom, that they oppose, and the politicians they support feel no pressure — or even any freedom — to try to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through anything but high school abstinence lectures. Contraception may not be illegal, but it’s certainly not something you want to treat with respect.

We’re back not to reason, but to religion.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Religion | Comments Off on Trump, Abortion, Conservatives, and Guns

Paul Kalanithi, WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

Posted on Wednesday 6 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

This is an almost unbearably sad, yet poignant and moving and thoughtful, memoir by a young Stanford neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36. His life changes from being the physician to being the patient, as he wrestles with how to plan the little time he has left, and what there is about life that means anything.

That last theme ties this to the two earlier books just reviewed. Kalanithi is an over-achiever, studying neuroscience and going to medical school but also well-read as a child (courtesy his concerned mother) and taking time for an MA in English literature. The first half of the book recounts his growing up in Kingman, Arizona, where his father was a surgeon and worked long hours. At Stanford he’s struck by the insight that the brain is an organ too:

…the mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world. Of course, it must be true–what were our brains doing, otherwise? Though we had free will, we were also biological organisms–the brain was an organ, subject to all the laws of physics, too! Literature provided a rich account of human meaning; the brain, then, was the machinery that somehow enabled it. It seemed like magic.

So here is, unexpectedly, begins a recurring theme that appeals to a science-fictional sensibility: how knowledge of the world informs the meaning of human existence. He pursues degrees in English lit and human biology:

I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values.

And he ponders Eliot and Nabokov and Conrad.

His English degree helps but,

I was also increasingly certain that I had little desire to continue in literary studies, whose main preoccupations had begun to strike me as overly political and averse to science. One of my thesis advisers remarked that finding a community for myself in the literary world would e difficult, because most English PhDs reacted to science, as he put it, “likes apes to fire, with sheer terror.”

Heh. (There is the special province of science fiction that traditional literature does not understand.)

The bulk of the first half of the book, then, recounts his lab work; his residency; the grind of long days of surgery; learning how to make medical decisions, where there are options, based on what each patient values most in life.

Part II picks up with the prologue left off, as the author and his wife confront the CT scans showing evidence of his cancer. He begins courses of treatment, rethinks the trajectory of his life, and revisits the struggle for what makes life worth living.

Remarkably, he and his wife decide to have a child — even though he can’t know how much longer he has to live.

It had been something we’d always wanted, and we were both impelled by the instinct to do it still, to add another chair to our family’s table.

Though not religious, he revisits his family’s rituals, visiting church, pondering whether without God there is any basis for meaning.

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human minds and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable…

He decides there will always be a gap between “core passions” and scientific theory. He finds compelling the central values of Christianity–“sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness”, and the tension in the Bible between justice and mercy. But he rejects any kind of revelation as a source of epistemic authority. His conclusion, for the moment, is that

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, …. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.

We know how the story will end, and at the end he is left with thoughts of his daughter Cady’s future, a final source of meaning for him.

Posted in Book Notes, Meaning, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Paul Kalanithi, WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

Oliver Sacks, GRATITUDE

Posted on Wednesday 6 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

An even shorter book than Rovelli’s, this is a collection of four short essays written by the neurologist and author after learning he had only a few months left to live, all of which originally appeared in the New York Times.

On learning how little time he has left (p18):

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people—even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

His valedictory (p20):

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

The last essay, “Sabbath”, describes his cultural and religious background and the value he places on the idea of a day of rest. P37:

I gradually became more indifferent to the beliefs and habits of my parents, thought there was no particular point of rupture until I was eighteen. It was then that my father, enquiring into my sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys.

“I have done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling—but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”

He did tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on her face, and shrieked at me:

“You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” …

The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.

Decades later he accepts an invitation to a family event in Israel, before he realizes what the trip entails, p43:

I had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover, Billy—my mother’s words still echoed in my mind—but Billy too was warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to join him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.

And he closes by comparing the Sabbath to his imminent rest from life.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

Posted in Atheism, Morality, Philosophy, Religion | Comments Off on Oliver Sacks, GRATITUDE

Carlo Rovelli, SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS

Posted on Wednesday 6 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Very slender book, drawn from a newspaper column and intended for readers who know nothing about science. I read it because it’s short and because a NYT review of the book, pointed out that its final chapter is about human meaning in the universe as discovered and described by physics—with a sobering conclusion.

(Also, there’s a chapter on ‘quantum loop gravity’, one way of resolving the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, something I hadn’t heard of, which happens to be Rovelli’s specialty.)

One point from early in the book is how scientists by their nature express caution and doubt:

Note the wonderful initial “It seems to me…,” which recalls the “I think…” with which Darwin introduces in his notebooks the great idea that species evolve, or the “hesitation” spoken of by Faraday when introducing for the first time the revolutionary idea of magnetic fields. Genius hesitates. (p15)

And a bit later, concluding a discussion about Einstein and Bohr: “To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.”

In the final chapter, “In Closing”, Rovelli asks,

What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh, and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics? If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of space and elementary particles, then what are we?

His answer, p66-67

We are also an integral part of the world that we perceive; we are not external observers. We are situated within it. Our view of it is from within its midst. We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.
…
We have learned that our being is only a part of the universe, and a small part at that. This has been increasingly apparent for centuries, but especially so during the last century. We believed that we were on a planet at the center of the universe, and we are not. We thought that we existed as unique beings, a race apart from the family of animals and plants, and discovered that we are descendants of the same parents as every living thing around us. We have great-grandparents in common with butterflies and larches. We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little. He must learn to be one among others. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.
…
If we are special, we are only special in the way that everyone feels themselves to be, like every mother is for her child. Certainly not for the rest of nature.

We gradually learn the nature of the real world, in ways that are different from the mythmaking of human history. “The confusion between these two diverse human activities—inventing stories and following traces in order to find something—is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture.” P69.

P75b “Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made.”

And Rovelli gradually moves toward startling existential pessimism, p77:

We are a species that is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct—some, like the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago.

And his conclusion:

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.
…
As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, among many others, already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral.

Yet he ends on an upbeat note.

It is part of our nature to love and to be honest. It is part of our nature to long to know more and to continue to learn. Our knowledge of the world continues to grow. … Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.

Posted in Book Notes, Science, Species Reset | Comments Off on Carlo Rovelli, SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS

Links and Comments: the mystery of monogamy; why people cannot live with doubt

Posted on Friday 1 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Los Angeles Times op-ed by [evolutionary psychologist] David P. Barash: Our biology wants us untethered. So why does society place so much emphasis on monogamy?

Monogamy is a mystery. A Martian zoologist, visiting Earth and noting our basic biology — not to mention our frequent philandering — would conclude that monogamy is not “natural” to the human species. So why is it so widely promulgated, especially in the modern Western world?

The (traditional) answer is that monogamy is a kind of social contract that limits individual freedom – the freedom of powerful men to maintain harems – in order to preserve a larger social harmony that is gained by avoiding the concomitant proportion of men who are thus deprived of female companionship. (An initial step toward *socialism* I might observe, and a case against libertarianism, wherein any alpha male would be allowed to accumulate as large as harem as he could.)

Also,

Monogamy may improve the survival rates of offspring because males will know which babies are theirs and will therefore be more likely to support them. There is much biological wisdom behind the saying “Mommy’s babies, Daddy’s maybes,” and monogamy diminishes the maybe.

Of course. This is elementary evolutionary psychology.

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Damon Linker, at The Week, on Why doubt is so difficult.

An existential consideration about why people believe certain narratives, vs understanding the real world, which entails provisional conclusions based on evidence and reason.

Nothing about human history or the present world gives us reason to conclude that most people are thoughtful, inclined toward standing back and judging their beliefs in a detached and dispassionate way, living in doubt, and affirming a life dominated by questions rather than answers. On the contrary, human history and the present world teach a far more muddled and troubling lesson, which is that the vast majority of people who have ever lived find it perfectly possible and even downright appealing to affirm certainty about a range of issues, including the divine.

The natural condition of humanity, you might say, is relatively passive, dogmatic belief in whatever the political, moral, and religious authorities teach in a given time and place about right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust — and about God or the gods.

Yes, very few people actively think things through and reach conclusions based on reason, let alone evidence. Most people’s beliefs, to the extent they recognize them *as* beliefs and not merely as assumptions, are drawn from their communities or tribes, absorbed without reflection, defended without doubt.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Links and Comments: the mystery of monogamy; why people cannot live with doubt

Reading Around the Bible, 4: Luke

Posted on Friday 1 April 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Just starting the fourth gospel, John, so let me write up impressions of Luke first, beginning with some broad observations and questions:

  • The whole idea of fulfilling prophecies, which the gospels variously emphasize, becomes considerably less impressive once you notice that Jesus himself knew of the prophecies he was supposedly fulfilling — to the point of quoting Isaiah.
  • How is it that though Jesus was supposedly fulfilling Jewish prophecies, most *Jews* remained unconvinced of his messianic status and never became Christians? Did the ‘miracles’ not persuade them? Jesus’ followers were apparently mostly Gentiles, so why would they have cared about Jewish prophecies? Part of the answer seems to be that the Jews who opposed Jesus were the Pharisees, the scribes, and so on — i.e. the *establishment*, obsessed with rules, rituals, and purity, and nervous about anyone upsetting their order. Jesus was preaching not to them but to the downtrodden… in a way that resembles the appeal of certain contemporary politicians, who rail against the establishment, who promise the return of lost glory (to some, Jesus as messiah heralded the re-establishment of the Jewish state against Roman rule), and who as a consequence find plenty of followers. No doubt there have been would-be leaders like this throughout history; they only become heroes, or messiahs, when their followers prevail.

And then comments about specifics in Luke, with references to Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament:

  • 1:28, 1:46, 1:67. Asimov describes how these phrases became common hymns.
  • Asimov, p265ff, explains the theological motives for placing Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, and the implausibility of the Romans conducting a census that would require entire families, including pregnant women, to travel to the town of their ancestors. p267.8: “It is hard to imagine a more complicated tissue of implausibilities and the Romans would certainly arrange no such census.”
  • Asimov spends several pages describing the historical circumstances for why Christians ended up celebrating Christmas on December 25th, including the usual idea of the appropriation of existing pagan holidays, the difference between lunar and solar calendars, and the schisms that resulted from rival methods of determining the date of Easter. The fact that Easter was determined on the lunar calendar (which is why it floats in our solar calendar), while Christmas is fixed in the solar calendar, indicates Easter was established as a holy day first, Christmas much later, after A.D. 300.
  • Asimov p275 also explains how year 1 came to be established — in part because Dionysius Exiguus, hundreds of years later, took Luke 3:23 — “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age…” — too literally.
  • 3:23 ff: the geneologies in Luke don’t match those in Matthew.
  • 4:31, 5:20, 5:24: Luke and people of the time believed that illness was the result either of possession by demons, or the result of sin. Do believers today believe in demons and that illness is a consequence of sin? I suppose some do. (Certainly there are occasionally those stories of parents who refuse their children medical attention in preference to prayer, with tragic results.)
  • 6:20, the beatitudes seem to be commonly thought inspired, revolutionary teachings of a gentle soul to downtrodden folks, but squint at these right and they are a kind of rabble-rousing, a reassurance to the weak and powerless that they will prevail and the rich establishment will be overthrown. Also, 6:27 and following, does anyone actually follow this advice?
  • 7:31, 32: a cliche of history: the current generation is always shiftless and spoiled (and life was so much better in the good old days!).
  • 8:10: Jesus speaks in parables deliberately to confuse people, and says so.
  • Asimov p280 emphasizes Luke’s point of view as a gentile, explaining some of the variations between this gospel and the earlier ones. Narrative!
  • 10:10 and following: If you don’t believe you will be destroyed!
  • 10:16: In this verse it’s not about the message, but about the messenger, who seems to be in effect saying, “it’s all about me”.
  • 16:25: the fires of hell just for being rich! Presumably this played to the poor, downtrodden crowds. Asimov, p285, describes how conceptions of hell, ideas of good and evil, rewards and punishment, changed over the centuries; earlier ideas of hell were more about a “gray nothingness”; it took the Christians to turn it into a place of eternal fire.
  • 18:17, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (As in Mark.) It strikes me that there’s a big difference between the kind of ‘truths’ best understood by children versus the kinds of ‘truths’ best understood by adults. The latter can be much more difficult, yet are more likely to be real. Beware anything best understood by a child.
  • Ch24, the resurrection: how much more detail Luke has discovered since the earlier gospels!

This last item reminds me of another general issue about ancient texts like these, especially the gospels and the life of Jesus. The gospel writers were not eye-witnesses. Who were their sources, even in principle? For every story about Jesus, if it actually happened, there would have to have been some eye-witness who later told the story to others, becoming one story among many later collected and recounted in the gospels. It’s plausible enough that each of the gospel writers might have gathered a somewhat different set of stories. But has anyone ever tried to figure out who the presumed original eyewitnesses even could have been? For the three wise men (did the wise men tell the story? Did Mary?) For the 12-year Jesus hanging out in the temple impressing the teachers there (the teachers? Who could have reported that it took Jesus’ parents 3 days to find him?) Who would have first passed on such stories? …Or are many or most of these passages in the gospels related more as parables or story-lessons than as historical incidents?

Posted in Bible | Comments Off on Reading Around the Bible, 4: Luke

Links and Comments: Historical Jesus; God’s Plan; Sagan on religion v science

Posted on Thursday 31 March 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Relevant to some of my current reading, and the recent Easter holiday:

Salon from last year, Valerie Tarico, 5 good reasons to think Jesus never existed.

Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are “mythologized history.”  In other words, they think that around the start of the first century a controversial Jewish rabbi named Yeshua ben Yosef gathered a following and his life and teachings provided the seed that grew into Christianity.

At the same time, these scholars acknowledge that many Bible stories like the virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and women at the tomb borrow and rework mythic themes that were common in the Ancient Near East, much the way that screenwriters base new movies on old familiar tropes or plot elements. In this view, a “historical Jesus” became mythologized.

Familiar ideas, some of which overlap my current reading and own thoughts about reading the New Testament. Her five points are: 1) No secular evidence; 2) earliest NT writers have least to say about Jesus’ life, later ones somehow have more; 3) NT stories aren’t first-hand accounts; 4) the gospels contradict each other; 5) modern scholars disagree with each other about the nature of the putative ‘historical’ Jesus.

On the second item, she makes this key point:

Liberal theologian Marcus Borg suggests that people read the books of the New Testament in chronological order to see how early Christianity unfolded.  “Placing the Gospels after Paul makes it clear that as written documents they are not the source of early Christianity but its product. The Gospel — the good news — of and about Jesus existed before the Gospels. They are the products of early Christian communities several decades after Jesus’ historical life and tell us how those communities saw his significance in their historical context.”

So when Paul and others were writing all those epistles that fill out the NT, the gospels hadn’t been written yet! (The NRSV and Miller volumes I have do mention presumed dates of authorship of all these books, but I haven’t seen either make this it-seems-to-me crucial point. But I am still working my way through the NT; have just finished Luke.)

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And a reminder that the Jesus story is hardly unique, just the best-known: All the Gods That Rose From the Dead in Spring Before Jesus Christ.

In the same way many ancient Mediterranean societies told tales of gods born to virgins (some on December 25) before the time of Christ, the archetype of gods rising from the dead is likewise older than Christianity, an uncomfortable historical fact for many religious people but not necessarily unforeseeable given the power of human imagination and the long stretch of human history before the Common Era (or Anno Domini, A.D., if you prefer). …

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Via Facebook, here is a Twitter post with an #Easter Quiz, with answers. Sample:

1. Who first came to the tomb on Sunday morning?
One woman (John 20:1)
Two women (Matt. 28:1)
Three women (Mark 16:1)
More than three women (Luke 23:55-56; 24:1,10)
Correct answer: A, B, C, and D.

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Also via Fb, yet another alternate Ten Commandments:

New Ten Commandments

Sample: “Prayer is for man. I don’t need your groveling. It’s supposed to make you feel better. If it doesn’t — stop doing it.”

And:

“You don’t know as much as you think you do. When in doubt forgive. When certain use reason or set example.”

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Latest Jesus and Mo comic, again one from a while back, but still pertinent: plan2: “Having created sinful man, I then contrive to get myself killed in order to save him from my wrath, for it is only the spilling of my own blood that can appease me, and cleanse man’s sin…”

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Again, from quite some time back — 1985 — a video with Carl Sagan being interviewed by Studs Terkel, about extraterrestrials, with these key points:

It’s inevitable that humans would project their hopes and fears upon the cosmos. ….
…
There is a tendency in both schools of thought [science and religion] that they have a corner on the truth. I mean, a way to look at it is, science and religion on some level are after the same thing. Take the questions of our origins. Both science and religion attempt to approach this question. But the religions all contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. The Judeo-Christian Islamic religion holds that the world is about 6,000 years old, you just count up the begats in the Old Testament. It’s very clear, 6,000 years old. The Hindus have an infinitely old universe, with an infinite number of creations and destructions of the whole universe. Now those two major religions can’t both be right. How do you tell which is right and which is wrong? Well, the only way is to appeal to the natural world around us, and the natural world around us show that the Earth, for example, is about 4.6 billion years old, and nothing like 6000 years old. So a literal reading of the Bible simply is a mistake. I mean it’s just wrong, it’s just wrong. As a work of science it’s flawed, it’s the science of the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. We’ve learned something since then.

Posted in Bible, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Historical Jesus; God’s Plan; Sagan on religion v science

Links and Comments: Terrorists and Threats

Posted on Thursday 24 March 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Cartoon by Mark Fiore: Thank You. Love, ISIS.

Why? A piece by Nicholas Kristof in today’s NY Times explains. It’s called Overreacting to Terrorism? online and “Terrorists, Tubs and Snakes” in the print paper.

The basic problem is this: The human brain evolved so that we systematically misjudge risks and how to respond to them.

We over-estimate the danger of rare, unusual threats, while we ignore common, everyday threats that we learn to live with. Terrorists vs. car crashes. And disregard potential threats so long-range we think they won’t happen in our lifetimes.

This has been long-recognized; e.g. in the 1999 book by Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, subtitled “Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things…”

Just another example of how human “common sense” — a result of millions of years of evolution in relatively stable, predictable environments — goes haywire in the modern world, with so many new experiences and unfamiliar forces.

The result is our current political climate, with the Republicans, the conservatives, playing off instinctive fears of terrorist threats, highlighted and drummed up by the media (if it bleeds, it leads). The Republican hysteria about terrorists is playing into their hands; to the extent we curtail ordinary human rights and cower in fear, the terrorists have won.

Kristof again:

On the same day as the attacks, a paper by James E. Hansen and other climate experts was released arguing that carbon emissions are transforming our world far more quickly than expected, in ways that may inundate coastal cities and cause storms more horrendous than any in modern history. The response? A yawn.

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Reading Around the Bible, 3: Mark

Posted on Wednesday 23 March 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Some of these comments apply, of course, to Matthew as well.

  • All maladies are due to spirits or demons. It’s been noted by critics that the Bible contains no knowledge that was not known to its writers; that is, though supposedly inspired by God, who is omniscient, nothing he communicated to its writers includes anything that might have benefited or informed humanity beyond their local observations, such as the germ theory of disease or the idea that the sun and planets are celestial bodies, not merely lights in the sky. One ironic exception is, in Mark 7:3, the Pharisees’ complaint that Jesus and his followers were not washing their hands before eating. This is ironic because medical science didn’t actually believe in the efficacy of washing one’s hands before surgery, in order to not pass on infections to patients, until the late 19th century (IIRC). However, Mark (and Matthew too, I think), mention this only so Jesus can make a point about following the Commandments rather than the Pharisees’ Talmudic rules: Jesus thinks following the commandment that children who do not honor their parents should be killed is more important than washing one’s hands.
  • It’s remarkable how many people there are everywhere who are sick or lame.
  • 3:15, the apostles are authorized to cast out demons too!
  • 5:9, ‘My name is Legion’, a turn of phrase that SAB takes too literally (as a demon named Legion) was the title of a 1976 Roger Zelazny collection of three inter-related novellas; just one of *many* phrases in the gospels and the Bible as whole, of course, familiar in contemporary culture and discourse and as literary references, and which I won’t bother to cite.
  • 5:26, Jesus heals a woman who “had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years” (!) and had “endured much under many physicians”. The granddaddy of all faith healing narratives? The justification for people who to this day deny their children medical treatment, and pray instead? (Of course, medicine was rather primitive all the way up to 100 years ago or so.)
  • 8:31, Jesus obviously knows the story, or prophecy, he is to play.
  • 9:31, and other places in which Jesus himself prophecies that he will be killed and arise after 3 days: Asimov points out that, given the time of the arrest to the time of the resurrection, it wasn’t actually 3 days; it was 2 nights and one day. Asimov p236
  • 9:42, the commentator in the Oxford NRSV for Mark is different than the one for Matthew, and they say some strikingly different things to parallel passages in the two gospels. The commentator for Mark suggests the lines about cutting off one’s hand and plucking out one’s eye are metaphors and euphemisms for sins of male sexuality! (That two commentators in what is surely one of the most intellectually exhaustive annotations of the Bible currently available differ in their interpretations… speaks volumes, of course.)
  • 10:10, this time Jesus says you can divorce, but remarrying is equivalent to adultery. In any event, more advice that most Christians ignore.
  • 10:15, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”. Get them while they’re young! (Children will believe anything.) Though again, the commentator thinks it’s not literal, but rather, as with so much Jesus says, a metaphor about the state of Israel under rule of the Romans.
  • Most remarkably, the end of Mark – the first gospel to be written – has none of the later sightings of the resurrected Jesus that we read about in Matthew; those passages, past 16:8, were added in the 2nd century CE (A.D.)!, according to the Oxford NRSV. Those later passages also include “signs” that “will accompany those who believe”, including speaking in tongues and picking up snakes with their hands, and how drinking deadly things will not hurt them. Sound advice for believers to this day who occasionally kill themselves as a result.

It’s been noted that Christianity is, among the general population (i.e. excluding the priests and the scholars), a tradition without much first-hand knowledge of the Bible. The atheists who seek to undermine religious fundamentalism (Sam Harris, Michael Shermer) are more familiar with the Bible than the vast majority of believers. Believers learn the traditions orally, through church sermons and Sunday School classes, and are never troubled by the grotesque, implausible passages of their holy book. So far, I find the Bible a fascinating artifact of primitive humanity, a storybook of discredited cosmologies and beliefs about how the world works, and, considering how long after the events most of its books were written, a prime example of how ‘history’ (of any kind, perhaps) is a result of the motivations of those who won and have an agenda to push.

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Allen Steele, ARKWRIGHT

Posted on Monday 21 March 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve read three recent 2016 novels in the past couple weeks, and am reading them faster than I take the time to key in notes and post summaries on my blog. But I will! First up is the last one I just read, Allen Steele’s Arkwright. Some of its content first appeared as a series of novelettes over the past couple years in Asimov’s magazine, and because of that, though its themes relate to those of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (review here; follow-up thoughts here), I don’t think it can be considered a *response* to KSR; rather, in a sort of equivalent to steam-engine time, both authors are rethinking standard assumptions about interstellar travel and colonization, and coming up with different solutions.

Steele imagines a famous science fiction writer named Nathan Arkwright, whom he describes as among the ‘big four’ along with Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, and known for his ‘Galaxy Patrol’ series beginning around 1950. The novel opens with his death in 2006, and his granddaughter’s attendance at his funeral, where she, Kate Morressy, meets three of his long-time associates: his agent Margaret Krough, fellow author Harry Skinner, and fellow traveler George Hallahan, a physicist. Kate learns that her grandfather established a foundation to invest his savings into a venture to build a starship within 100 years.

And because of problems with generation starships, and hibernation etc., (p100, which echoes KSR’s thinking), Arkwright’s scheme is to sent a starship full of eggs and sperm, to be combined into a set of infants to be raised by robots once the starship reaches its destination.

The book follows generations of Arkwright’s descendants as his idea for a starship is funded, built, and launched — it’s called Galactique, and its destination, a planet around star Gleise 667C-e, is dubbed Eos. This is a “generation starship” novel in the sense that it is about a starship whose launch involves generations — not because generations of passangers live on the starship.

The highlights of the book are the first part and the last part. (The middle parts are charming, though they involve many idealistic romances and little discussion of consequences, e.g. once the foundation’s ‘beamer’ saves the planet from the destruction, wouldn’t they become world heroes? No mention.)

The first part is an imaginary description of the first World Science Fiction Convention, in 1939, where there actually was a dispute (documented in real nonfiction books by Asimov and Knight) between the ‘Futurians’, who believed science fiction could be a force for social progress, and the leaders of the convention, notably Sam Moskowitz, who thought the Futurians communists. In Steele’s version, Arkwright and his friends — Krough, Skinner, and Hallahan — sit in a diner across the street from the convention, and invent their own league, the ‘Legion of Tomorrow’.

And the last section, which shifts perspective to a culture of 4-legged beings with a rigid religious society run by Disciples who believe in the unchanging ‘Gal’ in the sky, lore about the ‘chosen’ who came from Erf to Eos, and belief in the afterlife. This section completes the novel in a way that invokes the classic science fictional trope of the conceptual breakthrough, in this case, ‘everything you’ve been taught is wrong’, done here effectively and dramatically.

If I were to quibble about this book, it would be about the slightly too-easy dramatics of the middle sections, the generations of romances, and the predictable interference by religious zealots. But overall, I think this is a worthy epic that updates and reimagines science fiction’s ‘faith’ in the future in which humanity will expand beyond the physical scope of our planet, and the idea that human ‘faith’ in ancient stories can give way to acknowledgement and understanding of reality. This is what science fiction is all about.

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